InterCall and NextPlane Partnership Show the Direction of Unified Communications Federation

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

Cross-platform connectivity is good when it comes to communications.

With that in mind, conferencing and collaboration giant, InterCall (News - Alert), this week announced that it is partnering with B2B Unified Communications (UC) Collaboration and Federation services provider NextPlane. The partnership will have InterCall market and resell NextPlane’s UC Exchange service to complement their UC offerings.

The partnership means that InterCall customers that use Microsoft Lync or Cisco (News - Alert) solutions now will be able to seamlessly connect, communicate, and collaborate with more than 250 federation-ready organizations and greater than 600 UC domains around the world.

The NextPlane UC Exchange is a cloud-based community of federation-ready organizations. InterCall customers can readily share presence and exchange instant messages with anyone as if they are all on the same platform thanks to the partnership with NextPlane.

The cloud-based UC federation platform works with a wide range of UC platforms, according to the company, including Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365, Lync 2013 and 2010, OCS 2007 R1 and R2, LCS 2005; IBM Sametime; Cisco WebEx Messenger, Unified Presence Server (CUPS) and Jabber XCP; Unify OpenScape; Google (News - Alert) Apps, Broadsoft UC One, OpenFire and most other UC platforms.

“We are very pleased to have NextPlane join us as a strategic partner,” said Rob Bellmar in a statement, executive vice president of conferencing and collaboration at InterCall. “The NextPlane UC Exchange service aligns with our collaboration philosophy. Our goal is to connect anyone anywhere in order to enhance productivity and improve performance.”

UC solutions such as Microsoft Lync become more valuable with federation, since it enables more universal UC collaboration. While Lync already makes it easy for organizations to blend together communications among different teams and partner businesses, federation with other systems extend the range even further.

Cross-platform federation such as that offered by NextPlane is the wave of the future. It delivers on the ultimate promise of UC to bring together the various communications options such as voice, chat, videoconference and presence into a single communications stream that can connect with anyone else.

The migration to interconnected UC systems federation does put increasing pressure on session border controllers (SBCs), however, since federation requires reliable connectivity among different systems and geographic locations.

(source: http://www.lyncvoiceuc.com/topics/lyncvoiceuc/articles/378075-intercall-nextplane-partnership-show-direction-unified-communications-federation.htm)