BT Global Services: BT launches new Unified Communications solutions to improve operational efficiency

Today’s global business environment puts more pressure than ever on large organisations. In this connected, real-time world, the productivity and efficiency of an enterprise depends on its ability to do business with globally-distributed customers, prospects, partners and employees. And that’s what unified communications is all about: agile, real-time, connected business, and new levels of operational efficiency.

Unified communications: the key to operational efficiency

Used effectively, unified communications helps organisations add value to a wide range of business processes, generate significant improvements in productivity and efficiency, and achieve quantifiable bottom-line savings. But how does that work in practice?

BT has launched three new unified communications solutions for voice, video and collaboration in large enterprises. They each depend on having the right IP infrastructure in place to enable seamless ‘any time, anywhere’ communication, and this is the starting point for any unified communications project.

Multiple, un-integrated networks are a barrier to effective communications in a global operating environment. With BT you can plan and implement the right infrastructure for the unified communications of tomorrow, taking advantage of BT’s global IP MPLS network and assured application performance with BT’s AAI services. We can provide end-to-end managed services with a single SLA, giving you the right platform to roll out unified communications applications.

BT Unified Communications Voice

BT Onevoice is a new unified communications solution from BT. It’s designed to offer new levels of simplicity, flexibility and future-proofing for a large organisation’s essential voice services. BT Onevoice is an end-to-end service for voice communications that covers your global voice networks under a single contract, whether you use traditional circuit-switched voice, a hybrid estate with traditional voice plus Voice over IP, or pure IP telephony. By covering traditional TDM and IP telephony (IPT) in a single service, we can provide the right solution for your organisation today and help you establish a straightforward, flexible migration route to fully unified voice communications in the future.

BT Unified Communications Video

BT’s Unified Communications Video solutions can transform the way you work with remote colleagues and customers. Using ultra-high-quality immersive video and audio, you can reproduce that crucial ‘in-person’ experience, even when you’re talking with people on the other side of the world. You can have meetings with life-size representations of remote colleagues and customers, making eye contact and talking with each person as if they were on the other side of the table. The intelligence built into BT’s networks maintains the quality of your meeting experience. It’s one of a range of video communication solutions we offer in conjunction with our dedicated BT conferencing division.

BT Unified Communications and Collaboration

BT’s partnership with Microsoft is enabling the development of a complete unified communication and collaboration proposition for the enterprise. We aim to provide an integrated package of communications applications that deliver content-

rich, network-oriented services to the desktop –combining Microsoft’s application expertise with our network, managed services and systems integration capabilities. We’re currently working with a number of pilot customers in Europe and the US, developing powerful solution building blocks that will benefit all of our enterprise customers. The ultimate aim is to embed Microsoft applications such as Exchange 2007, LiveMeeting, Live Communications Server, and SharePoint within the network fabric itself.

This network-centric approach to unified communications is a perfect illustration of what we mean by ‘networked IT services’. For example, by embedding Microsoft federation technology into the network, we can offer business-to-business messaging and presence management for customers across multiple platforms.

Whether you consider voice services, presence awareness or video collaboration, increasingly it is BT networks that will provide the key communication and collaboration services that enterprises need to do business as efficiently as possible. We have published a new whitepaper that explores the unified communications and collaboration in depth. Download your free copy, talk to your account manager or contact us to learn more.

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