Editor's note: This is the first in an ongoing series of brief company profiles.
For the past several weeks, I've reviewed NEC's UC solutions for a detailed TalkingPointz.com research report (now available).
NEC started as a telecommunications company 112 years ago. NEC built the initial Japanese telecommunications infrastructure via a joint venture with Western Electric. From a telephony perspective, NEC is the third largest vendor, according to some market research. The company offers four business telephony platforms: DSX, UX5000, SV8000, and Sphericall.
The US NEC Executive Briefing Center (EBC) is located in Dallas. There, in addition to state-of-the-art conference facilities, one will find a mock hotel room and a mock hospital room filled with NEC technologies including digital signage, thin client desktop terminals, televisions, room controls, and telecommunications products including wearable wireless phones.
In addition to hospitality and healthcare, NEC claims significant telephony penetration in higher education. Each of these markets includes impressive references: Some of the largest hotels in the world, well known and prestigious hospitals, and highly regarded universities. The customer list is an impressive global collection of names.
NEC designs and engineers its products for a worldwide market. Sphericall development is taking place primarily in Illinois and the Netherlands. Its core UC business solution, available on Sphericall and on its SV8000 products, is developed by a partner in New Zealand.
That's an important point--NEC heavily uses partners to build-out its solutions. The company does not feel obligated to invent everything itself. However, the finished solution is predominately NEC branded and supported regardless of the source.
Of NEC's four telephony platforms, the SV8000 and Sphericall platforms offer broad UC capabilities. Both have been around for a while, but it is Sphericall where the company is focusing its research and development. NEC acquired the Sphericall platform in 2007 when it acquired the start-up of the same name. The SV8000 appliance family comes in three models to meet the needs of small, medium, and large organizations. All of these platforms share many design elements including the ability to network into a single virtual system--the systems also share applications and endpoints.
Sphericall represents a radical shift for NEC, as it previously leveraged its hardware and manufacturing competencies to compete; Sphericall is a pure software based solution. Sphericall Release 8, expected later this year, will likely represent a change in the company's UC batting order. Sphericall is expected to ascend to NEC’s primary strategic UC solution.
What sets Sphericall apart from both the SV8000 and a large portion of its competitors is its approach to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). NEC sees the worlds of telecom and IT rapidly converging, so it optimized Sphericall to address these two compelling CIO initiatives: SOA and UC. Sphericall approaches PBX functionality more as a feature than as an identity.
Describing Sphericall is reminiscent of the blind men and elephant parable, because it is different things to different people. To the telecom types, Sphericall is a modern VoIP platform with broad support for SIP and rich telephony features including feature endpoints and with 8.0, a revamped contact center solution. To UC enthusiasts, Sphericall offers rich communications including support for IM, video, conferencing, mobility and an aggressive road map for collaboration. To IT staff, Sphericall offers its clients via Rich Internet Architecture (RIA) and uses Flash and HTML5. IT Architects will leverage the platform’s SOA compliance, and IT developers will value the comprehensive SDK and APIs.
There is very little NEC hardware associated with the solution, and the components that are available are optional. NEC hardware includes NEC-branded IP phones, servers, and gateways, but third party options exist for all of these. Sphericall even directly loads the firmware into some third party IP phones.
With Sphericall, NEC balanced several key considerations. Sphericall fully supports SIP, and uses XML instead of proprietary protocols to deliver phone-top-displayed content. The company encourages the use of industry standard servers or virtual machines (MS and VMware), but still offers an appliance-like solution with NEC-branded server bundles. The product meets stringent JITC security compliance while adhering to open standards. Sphericall overlaps the sizing demographics associated with all three of the SV8000 appliances.
NEC does not charge for additional servers, yet additional servers add failover and load balancing features. This makes high availability both simple and cost effective--an area where many solutions become overly complex. Sphericall also integrates into a Microsoft Windows environment--including using Exchange as a single message store.
But Sphericall is no cake walk. NEC will have some major challenges in getting both prospects and dealers to buy-in. Sphericall has been around since 2003, but release 8 will offer a lot. Sphericall is a complex product to understand. It takes a village--to fully appreciate what it brings to an IT organization. Lastly, NEC’s SV8000 products remain strong. It is not like the dealers are clamoring for a replacement--NEC saw market share gains last year largely due to its SV8000 appliances.
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Included in the TalkingPointz report is a full SWOT (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats analysis) and discussion around keys to success. The reports are available for immediate purchase and download at www.TalkingPointz.com. Additional reports will be added throughout the year.
Dave Michels is a frequent contributor and blogs about telecom at PinDropSoup. The NEC research is available here.
