OREANDA-NEWS. June 23, 2011. NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE:6701) announced today the immediate availability of UNIVERGE Sphericall as a VMware software-based virtual appliance, enabling organizations to directly implement communication-as-a service delivery models as part of their private or hybrid clouds.

Virtualized voice and data infrastructure provide a cost effective, flexible, and agile method of delivering new applications and services rapidly to market. With virtual appliances based on VMware vSphere, customers also realize the additional benefits of pooling infrastructure resources, elasticity to meet capacity on demand, and more effective disaster recovery for business continuity.
Highlights:

 - UNIVERGE Sphericall is now adapted to a VMware software-based virtual appliance making it an ideal choice for a wide range of communication services,
- Cloud Service providers can now deliver high-availability, scalable communication-as-a-service solutions in the cloud, and
- Unified communications functions such as VOIP, conferencing, IM, and Presence, can now be deployed alongside other virtualized business applications in your NEC and VMware software-based private or hybrid cloud.
Supporting Quotes:

 "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, NEC. "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."

"VMware and NEC share a common vision for delivering cloud computing solutions to customers," said Gary Green, vice president, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware. "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."