NextPlane Enables Federated UC for Microsoft Office 365

NextPlane has announced that its UC Exchange service now supports Microsoft Office 365. Through NextPlane's UC Exchange service, collaboration across business organizations and customers that have deployed Office 365 can now be done on other UC systems.

A UC federation or B2B UC collaboration allows users to communicate and interact in real-time through instant messaging and presence, chat, voice, and video conferencing and across different unified communications platforms. Essentially, a federated platform enables users on different UC brands to collaborate as if they were using the same platform

NextPlane, which sells through channel partners, has created a technology that circumvents Microsoft's refusal to allow an encrypted connection to occur for a brand, except for another Microsoft product like Lync 2010. Without federation options, users of the hosted UC service, Microsoft Office 365, cannot collaborate with business partners and customers through an XMPP-based platform, such as Cisco WebEx Messenger or OpenFire. With NextPlane's UC Exchange service, however, Office 365 users can then collaborate with those who are on Google Apps, IBM Sametime, Unify OpenScape, and any other UC platform.

"Microsoft Office 365 is one of the fastest-growing UC-as-a-Service (UCaaS) in the enterprise. We are now enabling the Office 365 customers to benefit from and/or join collaborative ecosystems that are forming across their industry segments," said Farzin Shahidi, CEO of NextPlane. "Through the NextPlane UC Exchange service, we enable partner organizations to overcome the technical challenges of Office 365." (KOM) Link. Link.