I'm always keeping an eye out for new stuff from Covergence. They're a company I've been keeping a close watch on for about a year. I'm not nearly as familiar with Aastra Intecom, but this announcement caught my eye and brought them on to my radar.

Today Covergence announced that Aastra Intecom is now using the Covergence Session Manager (CSM) to deliver unified communications to enterprise customers. Aastra is an industry leader in the production IP-based technology and network solutions and will resell the CSM as part of the ClearspanTM Unified Communications solution.

Aastra Intecom and Covergence Team to Bring Unified Communications to Enterprise Customers

Enterprises can now leverage the full security and management capabilities of the Covergence Session Manager with Aastra’s Clearspan™ platform

MAYNARD, Mass., October 30, 2007 – Covergence®, the leading provider of next-generation Session Border Controller solutions, today announced it has entered into a reseller agreement with Aastra Intecom, in which Aastra will resell the Covergence Session Manager (CSM) as part of the ClearspanTM Unified Communications solution.

Enterprises now recognize the potential cost-savings and productivity enhancements offered by VoIP and unified communications. However, until organizations can control, manage and secure these services, the benefits remain elusive. Aastra’s Clearspan VoIP network platform, combined with the Covergence Session Manager (CSM), removes these barriers by ensuring that all real-time services – regardless of device or physical location – meet the customer’s security, compliance and business requirements. Aastra, which supports hundreds of thousands of end users, and Covergence, the creator of next-generation session-border-control solutions, can now deliver a VoIP network platform that gives customers the policy-based security, control and management required to deploy unified communications more broadly.

The CSM’s flexible, distributed deployment model supports Clearspan’s requirement to provide multiple deployment options, from single-site to geographically-dispersed multi-site, to best meet the needs of the customer. In addition, CSM’s high-availability capability, combined with its intelligent application-level routing, ensures continuous communications through outages and disruptions – a requirement for enterprise customers.

“More and more enterprises are looking to transition to unified communications to remain competitive in today’s marketplace,” said Bob O’Neil, President and CEO, Covergence. “With Clearspan and the Covergence Session Manager, enterprises now have a carrier-grade solution that can be deployed broadly. The Aastra-Covergence partnership gives enterprises the security, reliability and manageability that their organizations mandate.”

“One of the primary benefits of Clearspan is reliable communication between employees anywhere and anytime on any device, and the CSM enables this seamless connectivity in a way that is both secure and manageable,” said Dana Call, executive vice president and general manager, Aastra USA, Inc. “We have a proven commitment to delivering high-value solutions to some of the world’s largest and most demanding customers, and we are excited about the CSM’s ability to deliver immediate benefits to our customers in terms of quality and reliability.”

Clearspan provides access to advanced Unified Communications capabilities for improved employee productivity, without requiring immediate replacement of existing telephones and systems. Clearspan’s data-centric architecture and simplified system management significantly reduce administrative overhead for the lowest total cost of ownership available. The Covergence Session Manager is designed to meet the needs of small to medium-sized businesses (SMB) and scales its offerings all the way up to the world’s largest service providers, with recently-announced support for the IBM BladeCenter. It also feeds critical performance and quality metrics to the management frameworks from IBM, HP and others to provide operations teams with the complete visibility and span-of-control they need. All CSM models are available from Covergence today and can be purchased by contacting sales@covergence.com or (+1) 978.823.5200.

About Covergence
Covergence is the leader in scaling, securing and controlling VoIP and other real-time services. The award-winning Covergence Session Manager combines traditional session-border-control functionality with comprehensive security features and management tools. The Covergence Session Manager is purpose-built to securely and reliably connect users to VoIP and multi-media services while giving organizations the complete control and visibility they require. www.covergence.com.

About Aastra Intecom
Aastra Intecom, a North American business unit of Aastra Technologies Limited, is a leader in IP communications products including IP-PBX systems, standards based telephones, unified communications and contact center applications. Our network solutions meet the needs of customers who require performance, reliability scalability, business continuity, and interoperability. With over 28 years of experience delivering PBX and contact center systems to some of the largest and most demanding companies in the world Aastra is now bringing that expertise to companies of all sizes. Aastra Intecom has been responsible for many key milestones in the industry, including the first commercial IP-PBX for Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP), later sold to a larger technology company. This type of vision is still very much alive at Aastra today.

Aastra and Aastra Intecom are registered trademarks of Aastra Technologies Limited and Clearspan is a trademark of Aastra Technologies Limited.

Covergence and Covergence Session Manager are registered trademarks of Covergence. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.

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