Business communications company Avaya is planning to launch a virtualised version of IP Office, its unified communications phone system for the SMB sector.
Nigel Moulton, CTO EMEA for Avaya, told TRPro that it should be available in the late summer.
IP Office is the company's flagship product for smaller businesses, and makes it possible to pull office phones, smartphones, home phones, laptops and tablets into a collaboration network.
The move will make it possible for service providers to run unified communications systems for a number of customers from a single platform. It will remove the need to provide a dedicated server on which to run the system.
"Companies will be able to share the same resource," Moulton said.
He added: "It comes from a couple of angles. One is to appeal to the service providers who want to develop a lower cost platform that will address the true SMB market, the sub-20 number of users.
"As for the SMBs themselves, they want to invest in a platform that they can see has some longevity and a roadmap that allows them to grow with the platform.
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"So what we've been doing with IP Office is to add a significant amount of capability, such as video, and allowed it grow and scale. A year or so ago it was seen very much as 50-200 user platform, but it's now north of 1,000 users."
Users of IP Office can bring together IP, digital, analogue and session initiation protocol in one system, and add video if it's required.