Next week during  Enterprise Connect, Frank Grillo, Executive Vice President of Implementation and Product Marketing, will represent Broadvox and Cypress in discussing if a multinational enterprise wanted to eliminate all or most of its premises-based communications equipment and deploy a fully loaded Unified Communications (UC) solution from a hosted and managed cloud services provider, could it do so today? If so, what would such an implementation look like? Who could deliver it? What would it cost?

To address these questions, Brent Kelly, a leading analyst with Wainhouse Research, created a hosted UC RFP as an exercise to reveal what’s available from cloud-based service providers. The RFP describes a 20,000 person company with headquarters in the US, manufacturing in the US and the Philippines, call centers in Utah and India, and 16 sales offices in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and South America. The company is planning to move 5,000 employees to the hosted UC solution and the other 15,000 over the next couple of years.

 The session Cloud-Based UC Services: Real Responses to a Real RFP will run from 2:30 PM–5:30 PM on March 2 in Osceola A at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando, Florida.

Also, participating will be representatives from BT Global Services, Thinking Phone Networks, Verizon Business and BroadSoft. Cypress has always had an industry leading cloud-based product to support hosted enterprise UC solution requirements, C4 IP. However, since the merger, Broadvox and Cypress, have a complementary offering to supplement enterprise requirements called GO!VBX. The re-launch of GO!VBX positions Broadvox and Cypress to better serve SMBs, and domestic and international branch offices with a UC solution.

During the course of this session the audience will enjoy a thorough review of the solutions proposed by the participating companies. I am looking forward to the session as it is the first opportunity to listen to a discussion of the evolution of the Cypress product offerings since the merger. For those of you that are not attending Enterprise Connect, please plan to attend the 2011 Broadvox Partner Summit where GO!VBX will be highlighted with updates provided for C4 IP.

The 2011 Partner Summit (May 3-5) is open to our entire IP ecosystem (VARS, OEMs, technology providers, service providers, distributors, Master Agents and Agents. We have arranged for an exciting learning and networking event with the legendary quarterback and entrepreneur Roger Staubach as one of our keynote speakers. Details for attending the event are available with online registration.

I hope to see you there. In the meantime, come back on Monday for another unique recipe and thoughts on the IP community.