BT and Cisco extend hosted unified communications service to U.S. market

BT today announced the expansion of its hosted Internet Protocol (IP) telephony service to business customers in the U.S. The service, initially launched in the UK in December 2009, allows businesses to bring converged voice, mobile and data services to every desktop in their organization, using BT and Cisco’s cloud computing-based technologies.

The hosted IP telephony service is a collaborative offer based on Cisco® Hosted Unified Communications Services platform and BT’s Onevoice UCC portfolio. The service allows businesses to dramatically reduce upfront investment costs while accelerating the adoption of unified communications on a global scale. BT can rapidly deploy services to both large and small sites, offering customers significant savings as well as operational predictability.

Robert F. Mason, principal research analyst at Gartner and author of Market Clock for Communications Services, 2010, said: “UC as a service (UCaaS) offers the opportunity to evaluate functionality and potential productivity benefits of a UC implementation without the upfront investment of an on-premises solution.”

Neil Sutton, vice president, global portfolio, BT Global Services, said: “BT and Cisco’s collaboration on this innovative, cloud-based unified communications system helps businesses reduce capital expenditure, enhance communication and introduce productivity enhancing tools. The extension of this service to the key U.S . market is an important milestone on the road to globalizing this offer for our customers. ”

Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice president, Voice Technology Group, Cisco, said: “We are delighted BT is expanding its hosted service into new global markets. We share the same vision of providing customers with flexible deployment models that can ultimately help customers reduce costs while enhancing communications across the enterprise.”

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