Telefónica takes NEC's Australian developed SaaS platform to South America

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 25 February 2010 20:46

IT Industry - Deals

Spanish telco Telefónica is rolling out NEC's Australian developed SaaS platform Applications Net in South America after deploying it in Spain last year.

Telefónica is the first overseas customer of the platform which now has several thousand small enterprise customers in Australia, according to Davide Iacovitti, product manager applications and content at NEC Australia. However, NEC is hoping to sell the platform to a number of other carriers.

NEC launched Applications Net in Australia in November 2008 saying it would deliver the service through its 240 strong channel community as well as its Nextep broadband service.

A key benefit claimed for the system was that it offered single sign on to all the offered applications and that NEC had developed technology to 'federate' contact information across all the available applications and to integrate the contact information within these applications with the unified communication offering.

NEC announced the sale of Applications Net to Telefónica for use in Spain last July and announced this week that, in partnership with Telefónica, the service would be offered to customers of Telefónica's South American subsidiaries. Applications offered wil include logistics, location, collaboration, virtual PC, CRM, ERP, health, games and media.

Iacovitti told iTWire that Telefónica had decided to move into South America on the strength of the uptake of the service in its home market, where it is known as Aplicateca.

"The first handover was in July last year but we only saw growth once the Telefónica sales team had been trained up, just before Xmas," he said. "I can't give you any stats but I can tell you it is doing very well.

"There are 14 application providers on board. And growth since Christmas has been great which is why they want to roll out the same model to their overseas subsidiaries."

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