Unified communications continues to grow strongly and steadily, and this week was no exception. Here’s a look at some of the major developments.

 

On Monday, Shoretel--one of the leading providers of pure IP unified communications solutions—announced that Hitachi (News - Alert) Consulting has benefited from its Shoretel UC system. Hitachi has deployed the Shoretel solution at all of its offices in both the U.S. and Europe, creating a single, integrated phone system complete with five-digit dialing, centralized management and toll bypass. According to Hitachi, Shoretel’s UC system has made the company a more collaborative and productive organization while saving more than $10,000 every month.

 

In more Shoretel news from Monday, Stratus Technologies (News - Alert) declared that it has been certified through the company’s Technology Partner Program, making it the only server vendor to have earned the designation. Customers of Shoretel’s pure IP UC systems may now support their business-critical applications with the industry’s most reliable industry-standard server platform.

 

The following day, CommuniGate Systems (News - Alert) announced it has added new features to its latest version of Pronto!, a powerful, yet lightweight Adobe Flash-based unified communications user interface framework. The new features are designed to drive web 2.0 delivered UC and the mashup framework for development of media and entertainment applications.

 

Also on Tuesday, NEC Corporation announced the release of UNIVERGE360, which enables businesses to fully integrate employee roles with automated business processes, resulting in a unified organization. NEC will combine new and existing infrastructure, applications, software, services and partnerships to deliver UNIVERGE360 to enterprise and small/medium sized business customers throughout the world.

 

ePlus announced on Tuesday that its subsidiary ePlus Technology has achieved both the Master Unified Communications (News - Alert) Specialization and the Master Security Specialization from Cisco. The designations recognize ePlus as having fulfilled the training requirements and programming prerequisites to sell, deploy and support Cisco (News - Alert) unified communications and security solutions.

 

A new report issued yesterday by independent market analyst Datamonitor discusses the key trends in the unified communications market in 2008. It reveals that although uptake of such solutions has been relatively slow, environmental, social and economic factors will help drive growth going forward. The report analyzes important developments that will be impacting the market over the next year. Datamonitor believes that unified communications will soon become a compelling business proposition for enterprises.