Telenor to Offer Unified Communications Service

­After running trials within its own head office for the past few years, Norway's Telenor says that it is now ready to launch a commercial Unified Communications (UC) service. A total of 30,000 Telenor employees currently use Unified Communications services.

"Unified Communications is a mix of a number of forms of communication. It is a customer-tailored service where speech, data, text, video and conferencing solutions are linked up both from a functional and a technical point of view. The new element in this connection is that it is integrated, and that gives users much more flexibility to perform their duties irrespective of time and location," explains Abraham Foss, Head of Business Markets at Telenor and responsible for the company's efforts in the field of Unified Communications in the Norwegian market.

Unified Communications (UC) from Telenor enables a company's employees to have a single phone number for their PC client, landline and mobile phone. The same number is displayed, irrespective of whether the user calls from the PC client, the landline or the mobile.

In addition, with Unified Mobile Status, staff members can see from their own PC client whether colleagues are free or busy on their mobiles. This service obtains information from the Telenor mobile network about whether the colleague in question is busy or free, and this status information is then sent to the employee's PC (Unified Communications client). Mobile Status is delivered together with Blueposition.

Multi-phase launch

Unified Communications from Telenor will be delivered in three phases running up to 2011. Phase one covers a selected number of large companies. Telenor aims to be able to offer a customer-specific UC solution in the first quarter of 2010. A standardised UC solution will also be on the market for small and medium-sized companies in 2011.

Posted to the site on 9th October 2009