Siemens Enterprise Communications And NextPlane Partner To Provide Federation Services For OpenScape UC Suite

NextPlane's UC Exchange Enables Siemens Enterprise Communications to Extend UC Federation Services, Enhancing Team Collaboration, Decision-Making and Productivity

Munich, Germany and Reston, VA and Sunnyvale, CA (Marketwired) - Siemens Enterprise Communications, a leading global provider of unified communications (UC) solutions, and NextPlane, the market leader in cloud-based federation services for unified communications, announced today that the NextPlane UC Exchange service will provide extended federation services for Siemens Enterprise Communications' OpenScape UC platform. Siemens Enterprise Communications customers who join NextPlane's UC Exchange will be able to seamlessly connect and instantly collaborate with the widest array of partner organizations across a range of other UC platforms, including Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Google, Open-Fire, Isode, eZuce, and eJabberd.

Over the past few years, UC and collaboration solutions have seen a continual progression and growth, both across the internal enterprise and now externally with business partners UC enables real-time communication, introducing faster and improved levels of team interaction, decision-making, innovation, and productivity among workers, partners and customers. A 2012 global study titled "State of Enterprise Communications" and sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications found that 80% of user end-points are now outside of corporate headquarters, underscoring the trend toward distributed and mobile workforces.

The Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape UC solution provides leading scalability, mobility and communications, improving public and private cloud capabilities for exceptional user experience. The OpenScape UC Suite also provides a single UC domain for organizations ranging from 100 to 500,000 users, enabling the highest level of productivity and collaboration for workers across the campus or around the world. Delivering economies of scale in public and private cloud deployments, the OpenScape UC Suite creates a unified user experience for presence, messaging, contacts and directories in large multi-site, multi-vendor organizations.

The NextPlane UC Exchange federation service -- the fastest-growing, cloud-based community of federation-ready organizations -- is powered by a secure any-to-any UC federation service. In its selection of NextPlane and its UC Exchange service, Siemens Enterprise Communications is able to extend the value of its OpenScape Suite by enabling its customers to participate in secure, federated and collaborative business communities.

In addition to enabling Siemens Enterprise Communications customers to federate with their business partners using other UC platforms, NextPlane's UC Exchange also facilitates UC-to-social media federation, including Skype and Yahoo!, as well as with enterprise social media networks, such as Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft Yammer, and public social media networks such as Twitter.

By joining UC Exchange, Siemens Enterprise Communications customers can enable their end-users to readily share presence and exchange instant messages with their colleagues' business partners, supply chain vendors, third-party suppliers and customers as if they are all on the same platform. With today's globally dispersed workforce and business ecosystems, these different parties increasingly operate in various regions spread across multiple time zones, making real-time communications, collaboration and rapid access to information and decision-making all the more critical.

Siemens Enterprise customers can also leverage UC Exchange's secure federation management portal to provision and manage their UC domains, send, receive and track federation requests, centrally manage all of their federated communications, including security and federation policies, plus access usage reports to analyze the impact of each federation on their employees' productivity.

"This partnership with NextPlane gives Siemens Enterprise Communications the opportunity to expand OpenScape UC Suite's federation services, driving forward our leadership in the market. This partnership further underscores our commitment to openness and supporting our customers' evolving communications business requirements," noted Rick Puskar, Senior Vice President, Global Portfolio Management at Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Founder and CEO of NextPlane, Farzin Shahidi commented, "We're delighted to partner with Siemens Enterprise Communications. Their decision to select NextPlane's UC Exchange federation service reflects their commitment to providing inter-enterprise communication solutions to their customers. It also demonstrates their commitment to openness for the benefit of their customers."

About Siemens Enterprise Communications
Siemens Enterprise Communications is a leading global provider of unified communications (UC) solutions and network infrastructure for enterprises of all sizes. Leveraging 160 years of experience, we deliver innovation and quality to the world's most successful companies, backed by a world-class services portfolio which includes international multi-vendor managed and outsourcing capabilities. Our OpenScape communications solutions provide a seamless and efficient collaboration experience -- on any device -- which amplifies collective effort and dramatically improves business performance. Together, our global team of UC experts and service professionals set the standards for a rich communications experience that empowers teams to deliver better results.

Siemens Enterprise Communications is a joint venture of The Gores Group and Siemens AG, and includes Enterasys Networks, a provider of network infrastructure and security solutions, creating a complementary and complete enterprise communications solutions portfolio.
For more information, please visit: www.siemens-enterprise.com or www.enterasys.comSiemens Enterprise Communications GmbH & Co. KG is a Trademark Licensee of Siemens AG.

About NextPlane's UC Exchange
Leading companies and organizations worldwide in financial services, energy, automotive, pharmaceutical, hi-tech, legal, media, manufacturing, construction and education are building global, real-time collaborative business communities using UC Exchange federation services. Member organizations can find, connect, and collaborate with business partners across the broadest range of unified communication (UC), public IM, and social media platforms. UC Exchange supports Microsoft Lync 2013, Lync 2010, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 R1, LCS 2005; IBM Sametime; Cisco Jabber XCP, Unified Presence Server (CUPS) and WebEx Messenger (formerly Cisco WebEx Connect); Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape; Google Apps, Jive OpenFire, Ezuce Open UC, and Isode M-link.

About NextPlane
Based in Sunnyvale, CA, NextPlane is the global leader in UC Federation-as-a-Service. NextPlane helps companies and organizations extend and fully leverage UC and social media communications internally or across corporate boundaries, connecting users, partners, customers and suppliers in real-time collaborative business communities for enhanced decision-making, productivity, and competitive advantage. NextPlane is the provider of UC Exchange, the fastest-growing, cloud-based community of federation-ready organizations in the world. For more information, please visit www.nextplane.net or contact sales@nextplane.net.