Categories: Healthcare

Calling All Resellers: 8 Great Reasons to Become a UNIVERGE BLUE® Channel Partner

Posted by Jeremy Dunegan on Posted in Contact Center, Education, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Uncategorized, Unified Communications Tagged , , , ,

Earlier this year, NEC introduced the new generation UNIVERGE BLUE® cloud unified communications, collaboration, and contact center portfolio for our Channel Partners in the US and Canada. As a company that has always prided itself on building strong relationships with our channel partner community and delivering true innovation, the launch of UNIVERGE BLUE was an exciting move to deepen our roots in the cloud market and provide new revenue streams for our channel partner community.

There has never been a better time to become a UNIVERGE BLUE Channel Partner. For starters, the demand for flexible, adaptable Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS), web based Collaboration, and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) is stronger than ever. NEC’s award-winning UNIVERGE BLUE features a full suite of cloud services ranging from integrated phone system, video conferencing and collaboration, webinar, chat, file sharing, and omni-channel contact center to backup & disaster recovery.

In addition, NEC recognizes that a successful partnership needs to positively impact our channel partner’s bottom line. NEC’s unique, award-winning channel partner model is designed to enhance our channel partners’ profitability and provide enough flexibility to win against your competitors.

Here are 8 great reasons to become an NEC UNIVERGE BLUE Channel Partner today:

  1. On-premise, cloud, or hybrid – the choice is yours. NEC is committed to providing the best solutions for our end users and channel partner resellers. With on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solutions, we make sure it is always the best fit for our channel partners and their customers.
  2. Your success is our success. NEC provides channel partners with a dedicated UNIVERGE BLUE team whose sole purpose is to seek out opportunities to pass along to you. NEC’s large on-premises customer base provides a ready-made market for transition to UNIVERGE BLUE.
  3. Choose the partner business model that works for you. With three different go-to-market models (Customer Ownership, Revenue Share, and Agency), UNIVERGE BLUE channel partners can choose the model that fits best for their business. Unlike other vendors, you can choose to control your branding, your billing, and your pricing. You can maintain ownership of your customers.
  4. Own your relationships, maximize your profits and increase the value of your business: By owning the customer relationship, you create real business value (5x) over getting commissions alone. By building a monthly recurring revenue stream, while owning the customer relationship, the value of your revenues could increase by up to 30x over an on-premise model.
  5. Gain access to one of the broadest cloud services platforms globally. With over 10 cloud service offerings, UNIVERGE BLUE is a simple, reliable, and cost-effective solution. In addition to UCaaS, UNIVERGE BLUE offers CCaaS, BaaS, UCaaS with file sync, chat, video collaboration, webinar, CRM integrations, BACKUP & RECOVER as a service, and more.
  6. Ensure your customers are safe and secure: NEC provides transparent, up-to-date information on network operations, security, privacy, and compliance. Our 99.999% uptime guaranteed SLA offers a 100X better uptime commitment than most other providers.
  7. NEC makes it easy – from quote to cash. NEC’s specialized, cloud and vertical industry subject-matter experts actively assist channel partners across the entire customer lifecycle: marketing, sales, support, deployment, integrations, migration, + more.
  8. When you partner with NEC, we have your back. As a trusted global technology leader, NEC Channel Partners have access to our expertise and world-class technology solutions. Our channel partners’ success is always our priority – NEC works for you.

NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE® CLOUD SERVICES are tailor-made for Channel Partners to sell, install, and support. UNIVERGE BLUE was designed from the ground up with input from Channel Partners and with the goal of making it easy for Channel Partners to sell cloud services and become more profitable.

With UNIVERGE BLUE our channel partners can control their prices, own their customer relationships, and maximize their recurring revenue. To learn more about becoming a NEC UNIVERGE BLUE Channel Partner, visit https://www.univergeblue.com/partners.

What’s New with BLUE? Introducing UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP for Salesforce

Posted by Mike Mitsch on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Education, Enterprise, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Retail, Servers and Storage, Uncategorized Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Earlier this year, Salesforce announced the retirement of its Data Recovery Services, stating that “the data recovery process does not meet [its] high standards for customer experience due to the length of time and reliability of the process.” Now, many organizations are left without a solution to protect their valuable data against the ever-growing risk of a cyberattack.

To address this need, NEC recently introduced UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER for Salesforce. With UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER for Salesforce, organizations can consolidate and protect all data at the enterprise level. The solution provides reliable backup and protection of all Salesforce data, including standard and custom objects, documents and attachments, and Salesforce CRM content, files and metadata.

Salesforce identified two primary reasons for retiring its Data Recovery Services: restoration time and data integrity. The company stated that the restoration would take at least 6-8 weeks, and they were experiencing difficulty restoring data; therefore, it could not guarantee 100% data recovery.

NEC understands there are immense liability issues if the provider cannot guarantee the restoration and accuracy of data. Additionally, compliance standards, such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) of 2018, requires that the proper compliance protocols are in place, including where data is located, who has access to the equipment and data, and the chain of custody of who has accessed the data.

UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER for Salesforce ensures consistent corporate compliance through standardization and simplifies the overall backup and recovery processes. The solution ensures that all Salesforce data is backed up in accordance with the organization’s overall backup policy and reported through standardized corporate policies that ensure compliance. It also consolidates all server, application, client and Salesforce data into a unified environment – providing a better, more secure way to work.

UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER is built on award-winning NEC HYDRAstor® Storage technology, industry-leading CommVault® BACKUP Software, Iron Mountain® Data Centers, and is complemented with daily reports and always-on monitoring. The solution is highly scalable and flexible, delivering backup strategies that can scale with an organization’s evolving needs.

Interested in learning how NEC can protect your Salesforce Data?

Fill out the form below and speak to an expert today!

Enabling Long-Term Continuity with Feature Rich On-Line Meeting Solution

Posted by Jennifer Elting on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Customer Experience, Enterprise, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Servers and Storage, Unified Communications Tagged , , , , , , , ,

In March 2020, many began working from home and relying on remote meeting tools to communicate and collaborate. During this time, most organizations’ focus was just to keep their business up and running until employees were permitted to go back into the office. Organizations kicked into survival mode, some quickly implementing solutions that were intended to be a temporary fix until things went back to normal.

As time goes on, it is clear the business world will likely not “go back to normal” for the foreseeable future, and possibly never will. Now for some, the swift adaptions implemented because of the crisis have proven only to be effective for a short period of time, and not sustainable as long-term solutions.

The spread of COVID-19 has led to a rapid shift in how employees and customers communicate. Now, organizations must start thinking purposefully about redesigning their business operations with the right collaboration tools that will help to enable a sustained future. The future now depends on an organization’s ability to adapt their business by rethinking business continuity and resiliency plans.

Rethinking Business Continuity

Before the pandemic, many organizations associated business continuity with operations and services in the wake of a disruptive event, such as disaster recovery. Now, we realize that business continuity and resiliency go beyond just disaster recovery and disaster planning. Now, business continuity means that employees have the tools and resources to do their jobs from anywhere at any time.

To ensure that productivity happens from anywhere, the tools must be easy to use, always available, highly secure, mobile-ready, tightly integrated, and well supported. NEC UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES makes this possible.

Embracing Digital Collaboration Tools to Enable Business Continuity

"Business as usual” may have changed. What we consider “an office” may have changed. But what hasn’t changed is the need to keep doing what we’ve always been doing, and that means keeping employees connected and engaged, providing great customer support, and winning new business.

Feature rich online meeting tools allow employees to collaborate with their colleagues as effectively as they would in a physical office and meet with prospective customers to pitch their products and services – from anywhere.

While video collaboration and/or voice is a great start, businesses cannot sustain by only utilizing video collaboration and phone calls as their primary communication method. Other features are necessary such as team chat, webinar, file share and sync, co-editing, phone calls, screen share, and more.

Introducing UNIVERGE BLUE® MEET WEBINAR

UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR is an online virtual event service that provides a complete set of tools and capabilities to help grow business virtually and reach more people, wherever they are located.

Presenters can use video, audio, and screen share to effectively communicate with customers and prospects no matter their location. MEET WEBINAR helps to build personal connections, engagement, and trust by allowing attendees to see the presenter in real-time and engage through Q&A, Emoji’s, live Polls and more. Organizations can reach a broader audience and grow their business with an easy-to-use service that connects and engages anyone, on any device, from anywhere.

Streamlining communication complexity is the key to improving remote collaboration, enhancing security and productivity, as well as saving time, finances, and resources. It’s important that employees and customers don’t lose the power of face-to-face meetings while remote. The good news is they don’t have to! With NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR, employees have access to powerful online meeting and virtual collaboration tools to help keep business moving forward, no matter their location.

With UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR you can:

  • Promote webinars with customizable invitations, registration pages, and email reminders
  • Host webinars with up to 12 HD video presenters and up to 1,000 attendees
  • Record sessions and report on who viewed the recording
  • Generate detailed reports on attendance, performance, chat, polls, Q&A, and surveys; follow up with emails and surveys to push attendees down the purchasing funnel
  • Integrate with 1,000 + business apps via Zapier to track your leads, registrations, and more!

NEC’S UNIVERGE BLUE CLOUD SERVICES incorporate a variety of cloud-based communications, collaboration, and backup solutions. Whatever kind of challenge has been imposed on your business; NEC can help you figure out the solution.

If you are interested in learning more about NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE MEET WEBINAR On-line Meeting solution, visit https://www.univergeblue.com/cloud-services/webinar/ or get in touch with a UNIVERGE BLUE expert today.

NEC Visionary Week: Insights from Global Problem Solvers and Tech Influencers

Posted by Mark Ikeno, President & CEO on Posted in Biometrics, Cloud, Conference, Customer Experience, Education, Enterprise, Events, Finance, Government, Healthcare Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

For 20 years, NEC’s iEXPO showcased solutions for society, attracting more than 30,000 attendees from around the globe.

This year, NEC is reimagining the iEXPO and introducing NEC Visionary Week as a virtual event, Tuesday, December 1 – Friday, December 4, 2020. In addition, NEC is making the highly relevant conference free to attend as a gift to clients and industry colleagues. With greater access, safety and convenience, the flagship forum is expected to draw a record number of attendees worldwide.

Agenda Highlights: December 1 and 4, 2020
Packed with powerful insights that will fuel future decisions, registration is open now for NEC Visionary Week. Be inspired by ideas for conquering COVID-19 and carving out a new normal, harnessing AI, 5G and digital transformation to improve economies, business operations and our societies.

Key sessions featuring solutions from NEC Corporation of America, include:

How Star Alliance Biometrics Will Significantly Improve the Travel Experience
December 1, 4:50 – 5:25 p.m. CST
This fireside chat spotlights the newest technologies elevating customer experience, while focusing on safety and security to rekindle the love of travel and restore travelers’ confidence in the post-COVID 19 world. Learn how Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, and NEC are working together to speed airport transit touchpoints, including seamless, touchless airline check-ins.

Join an enlightening discussion about the latest facial recognition technology and encrypted personal identification. Find out how the biometrics solutions protect personal data and maintain compliance as the customer journey becomes more enjoyable and hassle-free.

Speakers:
Jeffrey Goh, Chief Executive Officer, Star Alliance
Raffie Beroukhim, SVP & Chief Experience Officer, NEC Corporation of America
Jason Van Sice, Vice President, NEC Corporation of America

Cloud Communications Helps U.S. Major League Soccer Club Bring Fans Back to the Stands- VIRTUALLY
December 4, 12:40 – 1:15 p.m. CST

Despite the pandemic, one Major League Soccer team has been able to stay connected with fans. How? Using advanced cloud communications solutions.

NEC and Intermedia Cloud Communications have partnered to bring cloud communications and collaboration solutions. From business phone and chat to video conferencing and file management, the solutions are flexible and scalable in bringing teams and people together.

Join the lively panel discussion about keeping fans engaged and excited! Experience the cloud services and how the tools empower communications and remote collaborations.

Speakers:
Michael Gold, Chief Executive Officer, Intermedia Cloud Communications
Ram Menghani, President, NEC Enterprise Communication Technologies Inc.

The robust speaker lineup also includes:

How Artificial Intelligence Will Conquer the Coronavirus, And Beyond
December 1, 11:35 a.m. – 12:10 p.m. CST

Keynote speaker, Dr. Michi Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at City College of New York, says AI will conquer the coronavirus. Analyzing vast quantities of raw data from social media, cell phones, drones and search engines, AI will detect super-spreaders and stop the virus in its tracks. Dr. Kaku will describe the Fourth Stage in technology with artificial intelligence and biotechnology. Join us to find out why Dr. Kaku is promising a brighter and more prosperous economy and way of life!

5G Open vRAN: Delivering Innovative Digital Services & Sustainable Social Life
December 1, 3:30 – 4:20 p.m. CST

As 5G networks become more widely deployed, operators are looking at the Open & Virtualized RAN architecture to better support next-generation networks. Learn how Telefónica is creating social values based on Open RAN that will increase automation, bring services to market faster, improve security and enable business efficiencies.

Speakers:
Enrique Blanco, Chief Technology & Information Officer, Telefónica
Akihiko (Kiko) Kumagai, Senior Executive Vice President, NEC Corporation
Nozomu Watanabe, Senior Vice President, NEC Corporation
Mayuko Tatewaki, Service Provider Solutions General Manager, NEC Corporation

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NEC Future Creation Forum: New Commons – New Values Towards a Sustainable Future
December 1, 5:30 – 6:25 p.m. CST

Mr. Jeremy Rifkin, American economic and social theorist and author of The Zero Marginal Cost Society, presents the “NEC Future Creation Forum.” Join an eye-opening discussion on the new value standards. Envision a future that achieves a prosperous human society, while maintaining a sustainable planet—beyond the next normal.

NEC Visionary Week will offer insights from global problem solvers, technology innovators and thought leaders. Join us to propel our world and industries forward!

For more information and to register, visit https://global-event.nec.com/nvw2020

Who’s Protecting Your Data?

Posted by Mike Mitsch on Posted in Cloud, Contact Center, Education, Enterprise, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Legal Articles, Retail, Servers and Storage Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Data is an organization’s most valuable asset. However, many organizations lack the critical software, infrastructure, and security processes needed to mitigate potential loss or access.

A recent Commvault survey shows that nearly half (43%) of IT managers do not have a comprehensive backup solution in place. Of those who do, less than half of ransomware victims were able to fully recover their data after an attack. Even more surprising is the increasing threat by insiders taking malicious action against their firms, with 72% of organizations stating that insider attacks have become more frequent over the last 12 months.

One thing is clear: it’s no longer a question of if a cyber-attack will take place, but when.

Cost of Data Breaches and Ransomware

The price companies pay for data breaches and ransomware attacks is not only the potential data loss or the cryptocurrency ransom that they may pay, but also the cost of recovering from the attack. A prime example is the ransomware attack on the city of Baltimore. While the perpetrators of the attack only demanded $76,000 in Bitcoin which the city refused to pay, Baltimore city officials estimated the recovery from this attack will cost taxpayers over $18.2M.

Losses can come from stoppages in manufacturing, inability to receive payments, employees unable to work, inability to service customers, cost of recovery specialists and implementation of new security protocols, and sadly, even death of a patient in a healthcare setting. This is why it is critical for businesses and organizations ensure that they have the right data protection in place.

UNIVERGE BLUE® BACKUP and RECOVER

NEC’s UNIVERGE BLUE® BACKUP and RECOVER offers a broad set of fully integrated services to manage and protect critical proprietary information and data. It is a powerful, cost-effective, and reliable managed Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution that delivers always-on data protection.

Key features of UNIVERGE BLUE BACKUP and RECOVER include:

  • Optimized and secure backup and disaster recovery architecture: Industry leading BaaS software from CommVault detects Ransomware, while NEC’s award winning HYDRAstor® optimizes and protects data with built-in deduplication, compression and data verification.
  • Risk mitigation and reliability: Iron Mountain’s datacenters – some of the most secure, compliant and energy efficient datacenters in the world – safely and securely store at-rest data. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) ensures data remains safe whether in-transit or at rest.
  • Regulatory compliance: Iron Mountain’s national datacenter Level 4 Security offers broad coverage and high levels of compliance ideal for healthcare and federal organizations.
  • Dynamic delivery models: Flexibility to backup between datacenters with an on-premises solution or straight to the cloud, virtual or physical environments.
  • Service and support: 7x24x365 management and support from a fully staffed Network Operations Center (NOC), as well as regular status and performance reports.
  • Simple & predictable cost effective billing options: Pay-as-you-go pricing ensures organizations only pay for storage that is consumed

Let’s Get Started!

Schedule a demo and start protecting your organization’s data today!