NEC's assault on unified comms market

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 12:56

Business IT - Technology

NEC sells direct and through 138 channel partners and Stenton said that, since January, the company had been running a programme providing more and richer tools to both channel and in house sales force. "We are ramping up our internal sales force significantly in this ara."

According to David Cannon, program manager, telecommunications, IDC Australia NEC's entry into the UC market is tardy, "but there is still time as UC is in its infancy in terms of adoption within the mass business market (excluding call centres and executive personnel)."

He added that "NEC have been performing very well over the last 12 - 24 months with some very large wins (VIC & SA Government for example). The integration of the services group to the wider NEC group has proven to be a good strategic move and does win them business as a result of the combined hardware / services sell."

Gartner regularly ranks vendors according to its 'Magic Quadrant'. Its most recent one for corporate IP telephony in Asia Pacific ranked NEC in the leaders quadrant along with Nortel, Avaya, Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent. A global Magic Quadrant for unified comms released at the same time rated NEC only as a 'niche player' but Gartner did note that ' Many [NEC] non-telephony and newer functions, such as some included in the Univerge OW5000 product, are new to market and have had limited time to mature." Research vice president, enterprise communications applications, Geoff Johnson said the company would shortly release a new Magic Quadrant for IP telephony.

In the enterprise market, NEC recently announced the Australian launch of its Univerge 360 platform - a complete set of servers, desktop applications, middleware and services "designed to take UC beyond simple communications integration to provide embedded roles-based functionality to increase employee productivity."

According to Stenton, "Univerge 360 is very much the underpinning of our view of the UC marketplace going forward. We are very different to the likes of Cisco in that we are very [vendor] agnostic in meeting the customer's needs."

Cannon described the Univerge 360 approach as being "not dissimilar to the other key players in the market and in reality soundboards the key components of the UC messaging we have been hearing from the other key players for the last year."