Unified comms companies bring US government into the 21st century

Momentum limits public sector adoption of new technologies

A newly-announced partnership between two US-based unified communications (UC) companies - Applied Voice & Speech Technologies (AVST) and Collab9 - will target government authorities.

AVST and Collab9 will work together to develop and deploy UCaaS services for local, federal and state government requirements. The joint solution combines AVST's UC platform, CX-E, with Collab9's secure, hosted UC solutions. The companies expect the service to accelerate cloud transformation for government entities.

Steve Boberski, VP of business development at Collab9, said that a multi-vendor solution "is essential to an organisation's transformation to a secure cloud environment." He added, "For too long, the introduction of new technology in the public sector has been hampered by the limited availability of proprietary, OEM-driven solutions. Collab9's partnership with AVST enables us to offer an accelerated migration path through a secure integration to legacy TDM, hybrid and VoIP telephony solutions. By removing proprietary application instances from the cloud, we are introducing a new level of agility, flexibility and scalability that has, until now, been unavailable to the public sector."

Like any large, public sector organisation, it is difficult for government to adapt to changing technology; the cloud is one way for it to increase its agility, with tools like Office 365, Google for Government and the integration of legacy application sets into an ‘as a service' model. These and similar products can improve data collection, improve flexibility and help the public sector to cut costs. Phil Jackman, formerly head of IT at Durham County Council, spoke to us about the difficulties of public sector momentum last month.

Use of cloud is now a necessity in business - and why not? The scalability, flexibility and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing has begun to attract users from a range of industries. However, despite now being an established concept, challenges remain. To find out more, join Computing for our annual FREE Cloud & Infrastructure Summit at the Hilton Tower Bridge on the 20^th September, followed by the Cloud Excellence Awards - for the leaders of the cloud industry.