TMCnet Unified Communications Week in Review

From new channel partners to SMB spending, this edition of Unified Communications week in review brings many exciting new developments in the UC space.

Kicking off the week, Polycom (News - Alert) Inc. released its earnings for the third quarter ended September 30, 2011.

According to the company officials, the third quarter has been significant with revenue growth in the emerging geographies and the U.S. federal market, with consolidated net revenues of $379 million, compared to $308 million for the third quarter of 2010.

The Unified Communications (News - Alert) sector is poised to get a boost from small to medium-sized businesses over the next few years, TMCnet reported.

U.S. SMB spending on Unified Communications solutions is expected to double by 2015, according to new figures released by AMI Partners.

As there is a significant growth in the number of employees who access business information and communicate via multiple devices and platforms, American SMBs are adopting collaboration. The other reason for growth in unified communications is the creation of virtual workspaces.

“In particular, Unified Communications that allow for interoperability between, and/or bundling of, a range of solutions such as email, instant messaging, presence and document sharing along with audio, web and video conferencing into an integrated interface are a natural fit,” said Antara Jaitly senior consultant at AMI-Partners.

In other UC news this week, Mitel (News - Alert) announced the release of Mitel Communications Director (MCD) 5.0 software. The foundation of Mitel’s Freedom architecture, MCD will now provide companies with the ability to access an advanced set of communications applications through just one, single cloud-ready software stream that can be immediately deployed on industry standard servers, including virtualized server environments.

The release has a number of new features that have been specifically customized to make managing its software even easier than it already is. The new features that MCD 5.0 incorporates will be of significant benefit to medium-to-large sized enterprises as well as to a number of different industries.

Finally, Telmar (News - Alert) Network Technology recently announced that they have been named as the Channel Partner (News - Alert) as well as certified reseller of Polycom’s interoperable UC solutions. This also includes Wireless Mobility Solutions and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) based products.

As Polycom’s reseller, Telmar will make available some prize-winning VoIP platforms that include SoundPoint IP Desktop phones as well as SoundStation IP Conference phones.Polycom’s Wireless Mobility Solutions and its Spectralink Series Wireless phones will also be resold by Polycom. Also on the list are Kirk handsets as well as wireless servers. Polycom currently holds the lion share of conferencing as well as open SIP wired and wireless endpoints.