Appliance Deployment Featured Article

Siemens Enterprise Communications (News - Alert) recently deployed a new platform designed to make adopting and deploying unified communications technology easier and more cost-effective for SMBs. Called Openscape Business, this all-in-one appliance offers the communications capabilities — full VoIP and data, DECT (News - Alert) features — available from the company's HiPath 3000 and OpenScape Office portfolios.

The creation of this new platform is timely as many SMBs are in fact demanding greater unified communications capabilities to promote a more mobile workforce, improved employee productivity and reduced costs.

"It's been perceived in the past that unified communications has been for larger enterprises, but that's not true," Susan Ericke, senior manager of Global Segment Marketing at Siemens (News - Alert), told eWEEK. "SMBs also want unified communications."

"We have done significant business in the SMB space, and it's been a foothold for us for some time. We've come out with a solution that will be the foundation of our strategy going forward," added Ericke.

OpenScape Business features all of the features SMBs want — voice and UC, Web collaboration, mobility, presence, integration with office applications like CRM – that can be deployed at a single site or across multiple offices. It can also be delivered in one of two ways, either as a UC appliance or as virtualized software that can run in a VMware environment, both of which scale up to 500 users.

Of course, many companies may run into issues trying to support a number of environments or a mix of technologies from various vendors. This is an issue faced even in telecommunications, where keeping pace with emerging technologies is key. As such, many companies and telecommunication equipment manufacturers (TEMs) seek support in the form of a robust platform such as NEI's (News - Alert) LEAD (Lifecycle Engine for Application Deployment) system.

The LEAD system aims to solve all challenges involved in getting an application to market, covering its entire lifecycle.