Aspect joins Unified Communications Interoperability Forum

Aspect has announced its membership in the newly formed Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a non-profit alliance of worldwide technology leaders working together to fully realize the potential of unified communications. The UCIF is focused on enabling standards-based, cross-vendor interoperability of unified communications hardware and software across enterprises, service providers and is designed to help global organizations be more productive.

Seamless interoperability based on open standards is one of the key requirements to drive unified communications further into today’s enterprises. UCIF members will collaborate to overcome existing interoperability barriers to widespread unified communications adoption and deliver a reliable and rich unified communications experience, with the goal of making it easier for worldwide enterprise unified communications adoption.

“Aspect has a long-standing, fundamental philosophy of developing solutions that are built using standard-based technology,” said Andy Bezaitis, senior vice president of product management at Aspect. “Joining the UCIF helps further solidify and underscore our ongoing emphasis on helping our customers leverage unified communications solutions that enable them to easily integrate with other solutions. We understand the value of helping organizations maximize existing technology investments, allowing them to focus their efforts on deploying new technology that will deliver the greatest benefits and not spending precious budget and resources to make technology interoperate.”

Aspect joins founding members HP, Juniper Networks, Logitech/LifeSize Communications, Microsoft and Polycom, as well as AudioCodes, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION and Teliris.

“Interoperability is not only critical to customer success for deploying unified communications, but intrinsic to the delivery of legacy, current and next-generation UC tools, services and infrastructure from multiple vendors. Until now, efforts to achieve interoperability have appeared ad-hoc, which has given customers little assurance that their existing and planned investments are protected and will deliver the value promised,” said Jonathan Edwards, research analyst, Unified Communications, IDC. “I’m delighted to see Aspect take a leading role by joining the UCIF. Together, these companies will help drive industry-wide adoption of open standards and develop programs that put accountability on the vendors and provide peace of mind and investment protection for end customers – something that will surely accelerate adoption of UC technologies.”

The UCIF will work with existing industry standards, identifying and filling the gaps between current protocols and interoperability issues that have stalled broad adoption and deployment of valuable communications methods. UCIF membership is open to hardware and software solution providers, service providers and network operators. For more information or to join the UCIF, visit www.ucif.org.