NEC Australia takes the lead as NEC launches global SaaS offering for SMEs

Stuart Corner
Monday, 17 November 2008 16:44

IT Industry - Development

NEC has entered the global SaaS market for small business with a service developed in Australia and launched first in Australia, today 18 November

According to Davide Iacovitti, product manager applications and content, NEC Australia "NEC is moving into this space globally and it has been decided Australia is an ideal place for it to be developed. It will be taken to other countries very soon after Australia. It is already being demonstrated in Europe and in other countries in Asia.

He added "The application framework comes from Japan and we have developed on top of that the customer interface portals on top of that. It is ready now, it is a live service."

In Australia NEC will be the sole provider of the service but Iacovitti said other NEC subsidiaries might choose to have a service provider partner fulfil this role.

Application Net provides a common portal to a range of business applications from other vendors together with NEC unified communications offerings. The main feature that sets it apart from other offerings such as Telstra's recently launched T-Suite  is that NEC has 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.

So, for example, a user would be able to configure his Applications Net portal by uploading existing contact information and using that to populate each available application. Then, from within each application those contact details could be used to initiate a phone call with a single click, send an SMS or an email.

Iacovitt said: "We're saying to companies - we can provide everything you need to run your business through one portal, simply and cheaply with complete integration across the lot. We're providing all the flexibility and cost effectiveness of the SaaS model, with telephony, collaboration and integration that hasn't been available before."
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