Verizon expands Cloud offering

“Many of our clients have transformed their workplaces and expanded into new markets to accelerate growth and optimize performance,” said Anthony Recine, chief marketing officer for Verizon Enterprise Solutions. “In today’s digital and global economy, it’s essential that mobile and remote employees communicate and collaborate virtually with colleagues, clients and partners as if they were in the same room together. We’ve seen strong adoption of our existing UCCaaS offering particularly from manufacturers, financial and professional services firms, retailers and the public sector which is a trend we anticipate will continue as we expand our offering globally.”

The new capabilities include:
· Global expansion of UCCaaS to Europe and Asia Pacific including in-country support for major commercial hubs such as Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United Kingdom, Taiwan, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Verizon provides in-region geographic redundancy of its UCCaaS services via its data centers in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong. (Editor’s Note: See below for complete list of countries.)
· Cisco Collaboration Meeting Rooms Cloud provides simple, easy-to-use collaboration capabilities for intra-business, B2B and B2C applications from any standards-based video device. The new offering, which allows attendees to collaborate using voice, video, content share, white boarding and more, is expected to be commercially available in July and will integrate with Verizon UCCaaS or can be purchased as a stand-alone service. Attendees can join a collaboration room from virtually any video device — laptop, tablet, smartphone, desktop, video room system or Telepresence room system.
· Integrated global contact centers, expected to be available in the second half of 2015, deliver cloud-based contact center capabilities for improving the customer experience and can be integrated with UCCaaS. Cloud-based contact centers allow enterprises to serve their customers in a more powerful, flexible and cost-effective manner, with the ability to easily scale resources up or down based on business needs.
· Mobile integration will allow customers to leverage Verizon UCCaaS over wireless networks with no VPN connections required. U.S. customers can leverage Verizon’s expansive 4G LTE network, while global customers can use their local mobile broadband network.
· Self-service management portals allow customers to quickly and easily implement provisioning changes to their service, including service moves, adds and changes, helping control management costs, increase business agility and improve customer responsiveness.

“The market requirements for cloud-based unified communications have changed greatly in recent years,” said Amy Lind, research manager with IDC. “Cloud UC is no longer just for the small business; today, large enterprises and multinational corporations are embracing the strategic value of cloud UC and they require global reach, a broad array of collaboration functionality and perhaps most of all, a strategic partner who can complement their own operational teams as they drive business transformation. Verizon’s expansion of its UC&C capabilities, paired with its worldwide support and professional services reach, make them a compelling partner for enterprises to consider.”

Initially introduced to U.S.-based customers as one of the industry’s first cloud-based commercial UC&C offerings, Verizon UCCaaS, a Cisco Powered solution, built on Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS), allows enterprises and government agencies to integrate Unified Communications (UC) capabilities into fixed or mobile environments with predictable per-seat pricing. In addition, Verizon UCCaaS is built with layered security and natively integrates into Verizon’s Conferencing, global MPLS network (Verizon Private IP) and Verizon IP Trunking services.

“Verizon has been a key strategic partner focused on delivering cloud collaboration solutions to our mutual customers and has shown strong market leadership in North America,” said Pat Romzek, vice president, Worldwide Sales Cloud Strategy and Enablement at Cisco. “Today’s announcement about their global expansion of UC&C is a great proof point that shows the customer demand for simple, scalable collaboration to increase workplace productivity from any device, via the cloud.”