Unified Communications Week in Review: Hytera, Centrify, Shelter Products, OneCloud, More

By Dominick Sorrentino
Editor

Thanks to Unified Communications (UC), workers of the world can communicate with one another over sea and mountain without ever leaving their desks and conference rooms. As always, we spent the week tracking the newest developments in a technology that continues to improve work efficiency for a wide array of industries. Here’s what we came up with.

Earlier in the week, we saw Hytera heighten their UC for Public Security. The company, which more than two decades ago set out with the lofty vision of becoming the top provider of professional communications equipment and services worldwide, launched the Hytera SmartOne April, 20. TMC’s (News - Alert) Maurice Nagle delves into what this means for public security professionals, and more, in the full story—without giving too much away, it would seem that Hytera is one step closer to achieving its long-held objective.

Meanwhile, unified identity management maestros, Centrify, announced the launch of its Centrify Privilege Service (CPS), which is to become the industry’s first cloud-based identity management solution. It will be geared toward making sure the gap in online security can be narrowed. TMC’s Oliver VanDervoort has the details. 

Let’s meander from UC innovators for a moment and focus on companies that are using the technology effectively. This week, Shelter Products—a national distributor of building materials—showed off how it put TrueConf videoconferencing to work. As TMC’s Steve Anderson points out in the article, “Shelter Products is a widely distributed operation; with five offices in California, Oregon, Texas, Iowa and Alabama, it's clear that the company has a lot of ground to cover. With three different time zones involved, it's not surprising that Shelter Products wanted an easier, simpler way to improve communications among branches.” The answer for them was videoconferencing. Read the full article to learn about how this technology is once again being put to use in a practical way.

Other noteworthy news of the week came from OneCloud Networks, a provider of business UC solutions, which is upgrading its virtual Public Branch eXchange (PBX (News - Alert)) and UC offerings by migrating to BroadSoft’s BroadCloud fully-managed service. OneCloud has been a customer of BroadSoft’s for a few years now. They saw a window of opportunity to bring customers new UC features, and they jumped through it with the help of BroadSoft’s (News - Alert) services. TMC’s Clayton Hamshar explains more in the full story.  

These were some of the big stories this week for Unified Communications (News - Alert), but not all of them. Be sure to browse through the site and to stop by early and often for UC news that matters.