By Audrey William
Overview
NEC announced an agreement to acquire Australia ICT company CSG Limited's Technology Solutions Business on May 30th. The acquisition will strengthen NEC's position as an integrator, and is a timely development at a time when vendors and channels are looking to build stronger services capabilities and grow their services revenues in the areas of implementation, managed, hosted and cloud services. This trend is expected to continue and we expect to see more consolidation of channels and integrators in the coming months.
NEC's move to position itself as an end to end integrator beyond Enterprise Communications is vital
NEC is a well known systems integrator in the Australia market, particularly in the contact centre segment, where it is one of the leading integrators for Genesys contact centre applications. Whilst NEC also offers its own solutions or partners with vendors such as Zeacom to offer contact centre solutions in Australia, NEC also has a strong understanding of integration in the contact centre space. This is a very specialised area and many systems integrators have struggled to build a successful contact centre practice. There are only a handful of providers in the market with this specialism, and NEC is unique in being both a vendor and an integrator in the contact centre market.
NEC is particularly strong in the areas of hosted voice and managed voice services, and their hosted voice business witnessed good growth in 2011. We are now entering a phase where hosted and managed voice services are growing strongly for many vendors and integrators, and hence the acquisition is very timely in enabling NEC to position itself as a large end to end integrator in the Australia market. NEC recently launched its Cloud Telephony offering for the SMB market. This offering is available through its channels. Delivered over broadband, NEC Cloud Telephony is available as a bundled service on a single monthly bill and removes the need for SMB's to invest in on-site PBX and PSTN services.
