VoiceCon: NEC Showcases Bold Moves

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My short meeting with Paul Lopez, GM Marketing for NEC Unified Solutions, at VoiceCon centered on the enterprise mobility story, which had been over a year in the making. Paul and I have a shared history in Richardson. While at the show, I saw demos of mobile capabilities, extending far beyond the Microsoft Mobile problems that I was familiar with from my FirstHand days.

NEC - Mobility

It's a really useful application now. My favorite feature was the internal call transfer - with a call on the mobile Wi-Fi side of dual mode, I could push a button and move the call to my desk phone. Similarly, a call on the deskphone could be seamless moved to the mobile device. Nice touch. Windows Mobile 6 is a marked improvement over 5.

NEC - Applications

NEC partnered with IPcelerate, one of the unified communications forerunners to integrate their NIPA framework with the NEC line of IP phones and call processors. This is a great win for IPcelerate, since it greatly expands their channel capabilities to include a second, leading IP PBX brand, and by extension includes Phillips, the Dutch electronics conglomerate which OEMs one of the NEC platforms for their resale in selected markets, primarily in Europe. IPcelerate's capabilities enabled new kinds of security, business applications and customer interactions that are increasingly important to facilitating the development of something I like to call UC for me. Experience in specific vertical market applications is the answer for the SMB market segment, and with NEC's channel prowess in that space, IPcelerate-NEC have a really hot opportunity here.

NEC - Unified Communications

Wow! What a slick looking IM and Presence client (left). It copies many of the slick features and control elements just like my Mac OS X Leopard, but this application runs on a PC. Nice job on the UI here. This is very slick, very impresive.

NEC - SOA

In August 2007, NEC acquired Sphere Communications and more recently integrated the sales of the product line into NEC Unified Solutions. The Sphericall IP PBX is compliant with the Services Oriented Architecture and can be integrated with business applications using Web Services. The idea is to enable new kinds of human communications and applications interactions that are created from the reformulating of common telephony structures and their integration with other applications.

These elements are the most interesting (to me) and are only part of NEC's new Univerge360 vision that places people in the center of the business. The employee role defines the communications services and infrastructure requirements, communications applications and business processes they need to be productive.