BroadSoft Adds Two New Mobile-First Offerings

BroadSoft has announced a pair of mobile-first unified communications applications designed for the dispersed, millennial workforce. UC-One Connect is one of them. It’s a messaging application with call settings like Forwarding and DND, individual and group chat, integration with the enterprise directory, presence, and voice calling.

that enables business users to find and connect with colleagues. UC-One Communicator for Chrome is a client providing user access to all UC-One Services. It extends this solution’s reach to Chromebooks with WebRTC access to voice and video, chat, and collaboration tools like desktop and application sharing. 

AT&T (News - Alert) Launches Collaborate

Speaking of BroadSoft, AT&T has introduced a new cloud-based hosted voice and collaboration solution called AT&T Collaborate based on the company’s UC solution. That includes instant messaging and presence, audio, video and web conferencing, and content sharing.

DSCI Bought By TelePacific

TelePacific Communications plans to acquire DSCI. The aims to put together what they say are two highly successful regional companies to create a nationwide managed services provider with local presence.

Enterprise Cloud Gets Broader

NTT Communications has enhanced its Enterprise Cloud, which is now available in Japan, and which will be available Australia, Hong Kong, Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and Singapore this year. The service’s hosted private cloud now consists of dedicated bare-metal servers with the automation, pay-as-you-go flexibility and options of a multi-hypervisor environment, including VMware vSphere and Microsoft (News - Alert) Hyper-V. It also now features a multi-tenant cloud based on the OpenStack architecture. Both of the above are connected at Layer 2 with SDN. Enterprise Cloud is connected with a 10Gbps best-effort closed network, which is free of charge. NTT Com also is launching CMP for the management and unified control of both Enterprise Cloud and third-party providers' clouds, including Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

ZeroStack Introduces Zero-Touch Cloud

The ZeroStack Cloud Platform is a new zero-touch private cloud, which the company says eliminates the hassles of IT operations. Ajay Gulati, co-founder and CEO of ZeroStack, says: “Enterprises have long been frustrated with the challenges of building and operating private clouds. The complexity inherent in existing solutions delays time-to-value, while introducing high costs for deployment and maintenance. Our modern and automated approach takes users from bare metal to running applications in the cloud in literally minutes, while eliminating the day-to-day headaches for IT administrators. This is an industry game-changer.”

Sangoma Unveils UC Solution

Sangoma has announced its PBXact Unified Communications solutions. It goes above and beyond traditional PBX functionality, offering users web conferencing/collaboration, CRM/help desk integration, mobility/remote user integration as well as FoIP, IVR, and a contact center feature set.

The system can be up and running in as little as 10 minutes, and Sangoma offers a guided installation wizard and web interface for installation. It is capable of supporting anywhere from 10 to 5,000 users, and also offers a high availability cluster option to ensure high performance.

Yealink (News - Alert) a Perfect Fit for Blue Jeans

Blue Jeans has added to its portfolio with Yealink’s VC110 and T49G IP phone. Yealink Vice President Stone Lu commented: “The joint solution enables SMBs and SMEs to enjoy convenient cloud video service and also reap the benefits of our reliable hardware. In doing so, they can maximize the benefits of business collaboration, thus improving productivity and profitability.” The Yealink VC110, designed for huddle rooms, provides dual-screen support, full HD 1080p, video recording as well as dynamic bandwidth adjustment. The T49G IP phone touts a two mega-pixel HD camera, eight-inch touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity as well as full HD 1080p video.

Remote Desktop Helps Users Move Faster

Cloud services provider dinCloud now offers remote desktop services based on its secure virtual private data center infrastructure. The service, called dinRDS, allows organizations to roll out applications and desktop workspaces rapidly and at scale. “No matter the industry, many businesses face uncertain growth trajectory and budgetary constraints. While certain cloud models may seem overly complex or cost-prohibitive, remote desktop services present a simpler, cost-effective alternative for virtual desktop delivery,” said CTO Mike Chase. “With dinRDS, companies can easily deploy multiple, session-based desktops on demand to a group of users without dedicating resources as you typically would for desktop as a service. This reduces the overall cost for the organization.”

Riverbed Improves Upon SteelCentral

Riverbed Technology has enhanced its SteelCentral solution, which does monitoring of application performance and user experience. What’s new is the expanded Command Center for Application Performance, which now more widely addresses real-time communications, through its new support for Microsoft’s Skype (News - Alert) for Business, and its new multivendor multitenant user interface. (It had previously supported Avaya and Cisco only.) The company also has created many new dashboards and diagnostics to make troubleshooting faster. That includes a dashboard for network hotspots. And refreshing Command Center dashboards is now 20 times faster. Also new now is extended visibility into the cloud, containers, and PaaS. Last year the company announced support for Azure IaaS; now it is adding support for Azure PaaS as well as support for AWS. It has also introduced the AppInternals Performance Graph, which it says is a way of visualizing application mapping that decouples the app representation from the physical infrastructure to hide complexity from users. SteelCentral can also now provide large scale virtualized network performance monitoring, and it makes it easier for IT teams to do troubleshooting and root cause analysis.

That means there is no longer a limit to the number of NetSharks that SteelCentral can support. The NetShark is a network troubleshooting tool that captures, indexes, and stores data packets data without the need for large file transfers.