Fujitsu and Cisco have expanded their strategic alliance to deliver unified communications in the Japanese market. The companies have agreed to work together to develop unified communications solutions and collaborate on services and marketing activities.
The companies said the following elements will be implemented in this new unified communications alliance agreement.
1. Migration from legacy systems to more effective Unified Communications solutions. Fujitsu and Cisco will implement collaborative go-to-market strategies to support the delivery of combined unified communications solutions. Fujitsu and Cisco will provide unified communications and mobile groupware solutions that help mobile users check their e-mail and their schedules from mobile terminals. The two companies will also promote linking unified communications tools to business and industry-specific applications, and develop products for connecting to various carriers’ IP telephony services to support migration from existing telephony networks to more effective unified communications solutions. These solutions will be delivered by Fujitsu with Cisco Services support.
2. Development and release of comprehensive unified communications solutions. Fujitsu and Cisco will work together to share product road maps and collaborate to support Fujitsu’s development of solutions that meet the needs of the Japanese market. As part of this collaboration, Fujitsu and Cisco have combined the Fujitsu VJ-110 series access unit with Cisco Unified Communications Manager.
The Fujitsu VJ-110 connects diverse mobile terminals (e.g. smart phone, PHS cordless phones) in Japan with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. Fujitsu will also develop middleware to help customers to link existing customer relationship management (CRM) applications to Cisco Unified Communications Manager to deploy next-generation call centers. Using Cisco Unified Communications technology, Fujitsu will integrate customer communications with Microsoft Exchange Server, and IBM Notes/Domino. Fujitsu will also provide software for linking Fujitsu’s TeamWARE groupware and Cisco Unified Communications Manager (available from July 2009) with various business and industry-specific applications.
3. Strengthened support and services framework for unified communications in business. The two companies will work together to increase the adoption of unified communications in Japan. Together, the companies will deliver solutions that respond to customer needs for collaboration, that help increase the efficiency of the customers’ business and speed delivery of solutions to the Japanese market. To improve customer support, Fujitsu will also train 300 unified communications technical support personnel in the first year, mainly made up of system engineers. This will create one of the largest UC service organizations in Japan.
Since 2004, Fujitsu and Cisco have built a strategic alliance in the networking field including routers and switches, such as the collaboration towards the joint development of the Cisco IOS XR operating system for high-end routers.
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