CSC Offers Canada's First Comprehensive, Cloud-based Unified Communications System

By Kerry Doyle, Contributing Writer

CSC (News - Alert), a global systems integration and outsourcing company, recently announced the first Unified Communications (News - Alert) as a Service (UCaaS) cloud offering in the Canadian market.

It’s become an accepted fact that bringing your own device to work (BYOD) has its advantages; user comfort, social media access for business tasks and near 24/7 responsiveness all translates to increased user productivity. As the consumerization of IT takes hold and companies implement BYOD policies, they are grappling with a number of new issues: questions regarding smart device purchasing, mobile application development and extending legacy communications functionality to mobile and remote devices, to name a few.

Successful companies have found that Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) via the cloud offers an effective means for integrating the mix of smart devices and ensuring workforce productivity. In general, UCC is an Internet-telephony technology architecture capable of integrating legacy and existing communication systems with newer, innovative productivity tools to deliver communication capabilities across multiple applications and devices.

CSC’s UCC solutions suite is deployed on top of Cisco’s (News - Alert) VCE Vblock cloud infrastructure. The Vblock platform combines virtualization software from VMware; unified networking, security and computing from Cisco – and storage, security and management technologies from EMC (News - Alert). Such a diverse mixture of sponsored components for a UCC solution is significant. These diverse products are unified through the CSC offering as a single solution for all kinds of communications, from fax, video and email systems to mobile and smart devices.

Using the same cloud fabric, architecture, rate structure, service level and management options in all CSC cloud models provides multiple options supporting customers’ evolving cloud strategies. When a company adopts a UCC system, the organization generally sees improvements in three key areas: communications, operational efficiency and collaborative abilities. CSC offers its strategy of creating cloud architectures that can underline its outsourcing business, as well as deliver multiple service configurations to respond to a multiplicity of client problems.

The company combines its BizCloud offering with the same CloudCompute architecture/infrastructure for a private cloud installation at a client’s premises within 10 weeks and billed as a service from a standard rate card.