HP's new solutions leverage partnerships with Microsoft, Polycom and others, and are designed to make it easier for enterprises to adopt UC strategies.
Hewlett-Packard
officials are looking to help businesses enhance their unified communications
environment, which will play an increasingly important role as more of their
employees work mobile and remotely.
HP is rolling
out a host of new solutions and consulting services designed to give
enterprises the tools to enable their workforces to better collaborate and to
better respond to businesses demands. In addition, HP is bringing to bear a
wide range of partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Polycom, Avaya and
Alcatel-Lucent to this issue.
A key goal of
the new HP offerings, announced July 25, is to help businesses look at their UC
deployments in a holistic way-encompassing everything from presence and voice,
to video and messaging-rather than as siloed, point-by-point projects,
according to David Cook, strategy and operations lead for the Global UC
Portfolio at HP Technology Consulting.
"While many
companies...have been developing a UC strategy and have implemented UC for
four or five years, they still separate the strategy along these lines," Cook
said in an interview with
eWEEK.
"Relatively few are viewing it in a holistic way."
Through these
consulting services, HP is hoping to enable businesses to leverage the UC
opportunity and better integrate telephony services with their communications
applications, which will increase collaboration among employees and improve
business responsiveness, he said. HP is introducing three new offerings: Voice
Transformation Solutions, Virtual Workplace Solutions and Network Readiness
Services for UC.
Through the
Voice Transformation Solutions, HP is looking to help businesses create a
streamlined collaboration environment with centralized VOIP (voice over IP) and
by extending traditional phone systems through Internet Protocol; this will
create a single avenue for not only voice, but also data and video. This will
increase productivity via better collaboration while driving down costs,
according to HP.
Through the
Virtual Workplace Solutions, businesses can further the holistic approach by
building a single platform for everything from unified messaging and video to
Web collaboration and document management, Cook said. Such a virtual platform
also enables businesses to deliver the right UC solutions to whatever device
the employee is using based on the computing and accessibility needs.
HP's Network
Readiness Services enables the vendor to help customers ensure that their
network is able to handle the UC roadmap the business is laying out, Cook said.
The new
offerings are building off UC services that HP unveiled about 18 months ago,
Cook said. Those services were aimed at such areas as helping businesses
determine if UC can help them and building a UC roadmap. These new services
take the next step by helping businesses take action.
These services
will be important as businesses deal with the challenge of a growing virtual
workforce, aging telephony and network infrastructures, and a wide range of
communications systems. Cook noted a Gartner study that predicts that by the
end of 2015, 60 percent of organizations will offer employees at least four
parallel, overlapping, voice/telephony options.
HP's
partnerships with Microsoft, Polycom, Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent are a key
differentiator for the company, he said.
"Our approach
is built on a multi-vendor approach" that's open and interoperable, Cook said.
"Many of our customers will continue to have multiple vendors in UC for many
years to come."
HP last month
tightened its partnership with Polycom, which in June
bought HP's video collaboration business,
including its Halo telepresence products. In addition, Polycom will become HP's
exclusive partner for telepresence and video collaboration products.
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