On Monday HP unveiled three new consulting services to hasten the introduction of unified communications (UC) technology into the enterprise. The services focus on delivering multiple voice communication systems; accommodating the modern workplace, where employees work remotely and from multiple locations; and making sure the network has the capacity to deliver UC, particularly videoconferencing.
HP also announced partnerships with several UC vendors, although noticeable by its absence from the list is Cisco Systems, now HP’s top rival in networking as well as in the UC space.
Unified communications is a term for bringing together different forms of workplace communications, such as land-line voice, voice over IP (VoIP), mobile, email, instant messaging, videoconferencing and document sharing. It is a growing enterprise market as companies try to accommodate teleworkers, people who work from the road and teams working from multiple locations collaborating on the same project.
The first of HP's UC consulting services is HP Voice Transformation Solutions, which seeks to integrate traditional land-line phone service with VoIP technology, in which calls go over the Internet. The integration technology is known as SIP (for session initiation protocol) trunking. Unified voice is a foundational technology for unified communications, says David Cook, strategy and operations lead of the Global UC Portfolio in the Technology Consulting business unit of HP.
The second consulting offering is HP Virtual Workplace Solutions, which helps companies organize and accommodate all the ways that the workplace has changed in recent years, such as employees working in multiple locations and bringing their own personal devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, into the workplace. It also addresses the habits of "millennials," people entering the workforce for the first time in the 21st century who are familiar with using videoconferencing and social media in their jobs, Cook says.
"[We] bring all that together in an approach to enable a customer to achieve the UC benefits with all of those drivers," he says.
