There’s a new player in the unified communications sector and, to many folks, it’s a familiar name.
Networking equipment vendor AdTran entered the UC business by expanding its NetVanta product line with gear that it acquired when it bought ObjectWorld earlier this autumn. The strategic move and product announcements were made yesterday.
Jeff Wissing, AdTran’s Senior Product Manager for Unified Communications, told me that the four new Session Initiation Protocol-based products in the NetVanta UC Solutions Suite flesh out the existing NetVanta line with end-user focused UC tools.
The additions are the NetVanta UC Server, the NetVanta Business Communications System, the NetVanta Enterprise Communications Server and the NetVanta Business Application Server. The products, Wissing said, extend the NetVanta line that, until this point, featured IP PBXes that integrated a number of functions and capabilities, including routing, network termination and Power over Ethernet. The strength of the emerging UC market makes it a natural for a vendor that already does much of the heavy lifting on the network side.
“With a standalone [IP] PBX, all we did was deliver telephony,” Wissing said. “By adding to that we can do interesting things. It’s also something that our VAR channel needs.”
Wissing said that AdTran now will compete with the likes of Cisco, Avaya and ShoreTel. The sweet spot, he said, is the small and mid-sized business market. “Under 2,000 users is what we want to be aiming at. Several hundred users is a very good target for us.”
