Telecom Platform Deployment Featured Article

Aastra (News - Alert), a provider of telecom platform deployment and enterprise communications solutions, has signed an OEM partnership with VMware to enable businesses to easily reap the benefits of virtualization for voice and unified communications.

Under this partnership, the company has embedded VMware in the Aastra 700, an all-in-one communications manager that easily and rapidly delivers feature-rich Unified Communications (News - Alert) to small and medium businesses, according to a press release.

Embedding VMware vSphere in the Aastra 700 has consolidated the hardware into a simplified appliance, thereby reducing the costs of telecom platform deployment, according to company officials.

Aastra 700 features fully integrated mobility, unified communications (UC) and Solidus eCare for contact center functionality. The Aastra 700 productivity-enhancing applications come pre-installed on a single virtualized server environment, making it easy to deploy and manage and reducing the overall total cost of ownership (TCO).

“Embedding the VMware vSphere in the Aastra 700 has reduced costs by consolidating the hardware into a simplified appliance. With all the components and applications pre-installed, when the Aastra 700 is powered up, step-by-step instructions provided with the product will allow an easy and quick setup of this UC platform.” said Yves Laliberte, executive vice president, Aastra, in a statement.

VMware vSphere is also fully supported by the Aastra MX-ONE and 5000, both highly scalable enterprise call managers. The call manager software is delivered as a virtual appliance image for a customer’s existing VMware vSphere environment.

Using the VMware vSphere High Availability and Fault Tolerance options, Aastra supports Software-as-a-Service and ensures continuity of service in a large data center by providing the ability to shift operations to another data center without interruption.

The new virtualized telecom platform deployment solution has already been deployed by several Aastra customers including Edmonton Public Schools, the second largest school district in Alberta, Canada, which chose the Aastra MX-ONE to replace its aging telecommunications platform.

“As we build on our initiatives related to virtualization, VMware was a natural partner of choice, and we are very pleased to now formalize our partnership,” said Pierre-Alexandre Fuhrmann, vice president, Global Technology (News - Alert) and Development at Aastra. “We are committed to meet CIOs’ imperatives for lower OPEX and CAPEX, integration of voice and UC with the wider IT environment, and resilient architecture while offering ease of deployment and management.”