Siemens Enterprise Communications Group is partnering with Shared Technologies to help businesses make the move to a unified communications environment.
The five-year partnership is aimed at offering customers best practices for taking advantage of what business communications technologies they have in place now, and also to provide them a road map for migrating to a UC platform in the future.
Giving businesses a path to a UC environment make sense at a time when the global economy is still battering IT budgets, according to Shared Technologies President and CEO Tony Parella.
“In today’s economic climate, organizations are watching their spending more closely than ever, and very few can afford the costs and upheaval of a rip-and-replace strategy to reap the benefits of UC,” Parella said in a statement. “Customers should have multiple options to choose from and should be able to upgrade their business communications at their own pace.”
As part of the partnership, which was announced Jan. 12, Shared Technologies will sell Siemens’ OpenScape UC Server, application suite and supporting services. The Siemens technology is part of its larger OpenPath practice of offering customers the most efficient and cost-effective strategies for migrating to a UC environment.
The OpenScape voice and UC services can be used with existing IT and telephony environments, giving businesses a way of migrating to a unified communications platform at their own speed.
Shared Technologies designs and supports enterprise communications solutions from multiple vendors, including Nortel Networks.