Unified Communications

Bringing video communications, rich media conferencing and mobility together

Ever get the feeling that you and your organisation are being overwhelmed by the sheer range of incoming communications? You know, phones, email, instant messaging, mobile phones, voicemail and conferencing applications; often resulting in overflowing inboxes (when someone’s away). That’s when things start to clog up, and decision making gets tough.

The good news

With Unified Communications solutions from us, the benefits of IP Telephony and IP Convergence extend even further. Instead of simply connecting products, unified communications applications are integrated within a single IP network infrastructure that helps you align your communications more closely with business processes. Put simply, it ensures that the right information reaches the right people through the right medium, quickly and efficiently. And that can only be a good thing.

Key Features

• Make capital and operational savings through the deployment of a single voice, data and video network.
• We’ve a terrific track record in providing IP Telephony and Unified Communications solutions from our experience with over 600 LAN projects.
• Improve productivity through the use of collaborative tools and telephony features, such as presence status and messaging.
• Reduce travel (and costs) through the use of rich media conferencing.

IP convergence: the benefits

So many organisations have simplified their local network by cutting out the need to maintain separate voice and data networks, not to mention costs of ownership.

Here are just a few examples of how the convergence of voice and data applications can improve productivity:

• Improve customer contact management by integrating Customer Relationship Management systems with IP Telephony.
• IP Video can be used to introduce video conferencing from desks rather than dedicated rooms, thereby improving efficiency and reducing staff travel.
• The use of IP CCTV can lead to greater flexibility and cost savings as the need to provide dedicated cabling is no longer required.

Unified Communications: joined up networking

With Unified Communications solutions, the benefits of IP Telephony and IP Convergence extend even further. Instead of simply connecting products, unified communications applications are integrated within a single IP network infrastructure that helps you align your communications more closely with business processes. This ensures that the right information reaches the right people through the right medium, quickly and efficiently.
 
Unified communications solutions integrate voice and video along with collaborative working, conferencing, messaging and mobility applications, to meet the video and communications needs of today's offices and workplaces. Businesses can collaborate in real time using all of these applications from an integrated, easy-to-use interface.
 
We’re also an ARC Solutions Premium Plus partner, enabling us to install and support their Unified Communications suite. And we’re mighty good at it.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

Features & benefits

Features

• End to end solution - our position as both a Wide Area and Local Area service provider allows us to take a true end-to-end view of your network requirement, ensuring that risk is removed when introducing new IP technologies. Single point of contact - for ongoing support for management of LAN and WAN environments.
  
• Managed services - we can either support your own teams or offer managed solutions, depending on your needs.
  
• Capital & operational savings - through the deployment of a single voice, data and video network across our LAN, WAN and structured cabling portfolios.
  
• Cisco certified - we’re a certified Cisco Gold partner, proving that we’ve achieved and maintained the highest level of technical capability and support..
  
• Infrastructure integration - means that each new application video is just another media type rather than an entirely different communications system.
  
• Professional services - our solutions are all backed up with a comprehensive package of professional services: from a detailed audit of your needs, design and project managed implementation to network installation and ongoing support.

Benefits

• Extensive experience - we’ve a long track record in designing, supplying and supporting wireless LAN solutions, with experience in a range of environments.
  
• Single solution - the use of a single environment to support voice, data and video for current and future applications reduces the total cost of ownership and enhances return on investment.
  
• Faster changes - and easier management of the telephony environment.
  • Reduced travel - through use of rich media conferencing with full mobility and virtual team working.
  
• Improved productivity - through use of collaborative tools and telephony features such as presence server and messaging.
  
• Collaborate across any workspace - advanced collaboration tools make it possible to create high quality, secure, adaptive workspaces throughout your organisation. When co-workers, partners, vendors, and customers can collaborate more effectively, organisations can quickly adapt to market changes and build competitive advantage.
  
• Accelerate decision making - sophisticated unified communications capabilities such as presence, instant messaging, and rich media services help ensure that information reaches the right person right away. This dramatically improves end user and enterprise productivity.
  
•  Save on costly phone bills - using an IP platform could help save you money on calls.
  
• Be more responsive - to customers through caller ID and access to their data.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

Detailed Info

Unified Communications Manager

Cisco Unified Communications Manager is an enterprise class IP telephony call processing system that provides traditional telephony features as well as advanced capabilities. These include mobility, presence, preference and rich conferencing services. It’s an incredibly powerful call processing solution that can help:

• Simplify your voice systems by replacing old PBX (private branch exchange) and key systems with unified communications; you’ll cut costs and dramatically streamline provisioning and maintenance.
  
• Build productivity with feature-rich unified communications that help workers spend less time chasing people, and more time being productive.
  
• Enable mobility with software that has embedded unified mobility capabilities so mobile workers can remain productive wherever they are.
  
• Improve collaboration with a click; start an IM session, initiate a phone call, and establish a video conferencing call more easily.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager creates a unified workspace that supports a full range of communications features and applications with a solution that’s highly:

• Scalable: Each Cisco Unified Communications Manager cluster can support up to a defined number of users, dependent on the model selected.
  
• Distributable: For scalability, redundancy, and load balancing.
  
• Available: Support business continuity and improve collaboration with high availability that provides a foundation for multiple levels of server redundancy and survivability.

IP Phones

Cisco IP phones are available in wired and wireless versions and provide handset functionality for the different Cisco Unified Communications Manager models. Softphones, such as Cisco IP Communicator and Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, are also available to extend voice and multimedia functionality to clients who run Windows or Mac. Cisco IP telephony products support a wide range of Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based capabilities including:

• Support for presence based applications
• Support for Cisco IP phones with enhanced SIP feature support
• Support for third party SIP based phones
• SIP trunkin
• Session Border Control
• Simplified administration and maintenance, including introduction of an appliance model implementation for Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
   

Presence & Messaging

• Cisco Unity
• Cisco Unity Express
• Cisco Unity Connection
• Cisco Unified Presence

Presence & messaging detailed info

Conferencing

• Cisco Unified Meeting Place
• Cisco Unified Meeting Place Express
• Cisco Unified Videoconferencing Videoconferencing 

Conferencing detailed info

Communications Clients

• Cisco IP Communicator
• Cisco Unified Video Advantage
• Cisco Unified Personal Communicator 

Unified communicatiosn clients detailed info

Contact centre solutions

• Cisco Unified Contact Centre Express 

Contact centre solutions detailed info

Arc Solutions Unified Attendant Console Solutions

We’ve also recently become an Arc Solutions Premium Plus partner, which means we can now offer integrated voice applications that further enhance the Cisco Unified Communications platforms. Just another string to our bow.

Attendant console detailed info

Cisco Unified Operations Manager

This provides a unified view of the entire Cisco Unified Communications infrastructure and presents the current status of each element of the Cisco Unified Communications network, allowing for diagnostic capabilities and faster problem resolution.

Cisco Unified Service Monitor

This continuously monitors calls supported by Cisco Unified Communications elements and provides real-time notification if the voice quality fails to meet user defined quality metrics.

Got a question? Call us on 0800 953 0180

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