NEC (News - Alert) Corporation, a provider of information technology (IT) and network solutions,  announced the immediate availability of its communications as a service, UNIVERGE Sphericall, as a VMware software-based virtual appliance.

With the VMware status, the UNIVERGE Sphericall communications as a service makes it an ideal choice for a wide range of communication services. The service allows cloud service providers to deliver high-availability, scalable communications-as-a-service solutions as part of their private or hybrid clouds.

“We believe CIOs are looking to virtualization and cloud strategies to deliver business applications, which may include ERP, CRM and even unified communications, as a service in a very streamlined, efficient manner – all on fewer physical servers than was ever possible before,” said Taichiro Hashizawa, vice president and senior general manager of NEC, in a statement.

“As a pure software-based communications solution based on open standards, Sphericall is suited to fit squarely within virtualization and cloud strategies in a wide variety of configurations,” Hashizawa added.

Virtualized voice and data infrastructure provides a cost effective, flexible, and agile method of delivering new applications and services rapidly to market. NEC’s virtual appliances based on VMware vSphere enables customers to realize the additional benefits of pooling infrastructure resources. It provides the flexibility to meet capacity on demand, and more effective disaster recovery for business continuity.

The new communications as a service enables companies to deploy unified communications functions such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), conferencing, IM, and Presence. It can now be deployed alongside other virtualized business applications in the NEC and VMware software-based private or hybrid cloud.

“VMware and NEC share a common vision for delivering cloud computing solutions to customers,” said Gary Green, vice president of Global Strategic Alliances at VMware, in a statement. “NEC’s new communication-as-a-service solution based on VMware vSphere is designed to help customers virtualize additional datacenter resources for building enterprise hybrid clouds.”

Recently NEC Corporation announced the global launch of its ‘GreenGlobe Data Visualizer,’ a cloud based service that enables companies to gather and centralize the management of environmental load information, including CO2 emissions, from affiliated sites all over the world.

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