NEC Partners With Infovista to Deliver Affordable, Customizable Connectivity For UC-SDN With Ipanema SD-WAN Solution

Irving, Texas - September 12, 2019 - NEC Corporation of America (NEC), a leading provider and integrator of advanced IT, communications, networking and biometric solutions, today announced its global partnership with modern network and application performance leader Infovista. Through this partnership, NEC is enhancing its Smart Enterprise Suite by offering Infovista Ipanema SD-WAN with NEC's Software-Defined Network based Unified Communication (UC-SDN) solution. The new offering allows customers to reduce costs related to WAN connectivity and enable prioritization of specific unified communication (UC) sessions across both LAN and WAN. "As the need for comprehensive connectivity continues to rise, it becomes critical for businesses and organizations to ensure that their UC solutions deliver value and flexibility while remaining conscious of cost," said Ram Menghani, Senior Vice President, Product Management for NEC "By partnering with Infovista and positioning Ipanema SD-WAN alongside NEC's Smart Enterprise Suite, we are confident that we can provide application-intelligent SD-WAN solutions to a vast array of businesses in a manner that delivers positive ROI and prioritizes quality of experience for users." NEC's on-premise UC customers will have access to an SD-WAN and SDN package that is suitable to support NEC's UNIVERGE® call flows. The Ipanema SD-WAN solution also provides application intelligence to a vast array of application suites including biometrics, video flows and more. As the customer transitions through their hybrid WAN/SD-WAN transformation, this solution will allow customers to replace expensive hardware, maintain Quality of Experience for voice and mission-critical business applications, and give them the ability to prioritize specific applications on finite bandwidth. In addition, this partnership will create value for both the NEC and Infovista partner ecosystems, providing a new revenue stream and opportunities for channel partners. "UC-using enterprises are adopting SD-WAN due to its capability to steer high-priority voice traffic over the most cost-effective WAN links, with good voice quality," said Joshua Bancroft, senior research analyst at IHS Markit | Technology, now a part of Informa Tech. "This functionality is an important deployment driver for UC-using enterprises as they can increase the reliability of voice communications by having WAN links bonded from multiple service providers. Integrating SD-WAN technology into a UC offering addresses an important requirement for UC enterprise customers for high-quality voice communications." "Due to its existing innovation around UC-SDN, which already prioritizes UC flows within LAN and DC networks, we found it complementary to partner with NEC," said Mike Wilkinson, chief product officer at Infovista. "NEC's leadership in other application domains, such as biometrics, allows Infovista to offer application acceleration and prioritization to specific markets." NEC's enhanced offering is generally available. For more information on this solution and partnership, please visit  www.necam.com/sdn/Hardware/SD-WAN/. More at www.necam.com and https://www.infovista.com/.