Bell adds more services to its collaboration portfolio to help customers maximize their current IT investments in unified communications. Bell announces the successful development of the first live demo in Canada showcasing the interoperability of the Cisco(R) Unified Communications system with Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007.

Such interoperability can be extremely challenging but is important because it allows customers to unify their desktop and infrastructure environment, resulting in increased productivity, improved customer experience and reduced capital costs.

"Bell works with our customers to build scalable communication strategies that can grow with their business priorities. Bell is demonstrating its strong expertise in integrating the technology of two of the leaders in the unified communications market and enabling their respective solutions to work flawlessly together," said Paul Rowe, Vice President, Marketing, Enterprise Group, Bell.

Bell is one of a select number of Cisco partners worldwide to achieve Cisco Master Unified Communications and Security Specializations. The depth and breadth across the Cisco portfolio allows our teams to support our customers through communication-enabled business transformation to make enterprises more productive and therefore more competitive.

"We very much look forward to continuing to collaborate with Cisco to deliver more applications that will further leverage our customers’ investments in unified communications," said Mr. Stéphane Boisvert, President, Enterprise Group, Bell. The interoperability value proposition is in response to customers’ requests to create a homogenous user experience across their heterogeneous ICT environment. Other solutions, like Bell’s recently launched VMS (Voice Managed services), helps customers better manage their IP-PBX environments and drive more productivity out of their investments by ensuring customers’ systems are performing at their peak with maximum uptime, and at a cost that is both predictable and, with no need to build their own support staff.

"Collaboration is the next phase of the Internet and businesses are increasingly looking to collaboration tools to enhance communications and productivity," said Olaf Krahmer, vice president, Service Provider for Cisco Canada. "The Cisco Unified Communications system is designed to integrate with business applications, existing IT infrastructures and Web services, to enable forward-thinking partners like Bell to create customized applications and network-based services."

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