OREANDA-NEWS. August 08, 2012. NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) is enhancing its lineup of cloud services for telecommunications carriers by adopting the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business service to help its small and mid-sized clients improve internal communication. Services are scheduled to begin in the EMEA, LATAM and APAC regions in the first half of the 2012 fiscal year, reported the press-centre of NEC.

The IBM SmartCloud for Social Business offers a comprehensive menu of features, including social networking, instant messaging, e-meetings, e-mail and calendaring, to enhance the productivity and efficiency of business. Since the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business is priced per user and does not require clients to make a large initial investment, it is an ideal service for small and mid-sized organizations. In combination with NEC's carrier cloud services, IBM SmartCloud for Social Business enables carriers to quickly prepare Software as a Service (SaaS) collaboration solutions for their business users.

"Small and mid-sized businesses have a lot to gain from social collaboration in the cloud," said Bethann Cregg, vice president, IBM Social Business Cloud. "The combination of highly reliable business applications with the flexibility of cloud delivery models makes it easy to work seamlessly with people inside and outside of the organization."

"NEC's carrier cloud services have pioneered the provision of customized SaaS, Desktop as a Service (DaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms for leading carriers all over the world," said Ken Sugata, General Manager, Carrier Cloud Division, NEC. "We expect the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business to further improve the convenience of our business users."

NEC's accomplished history of providing systems, building data centers and providing services  for communications carriers throughout the world enables it to capitalize on valuable know-how of integrated IT and Network technologies in order to globally expand its cloud service business with communications carriers.