News

LOUISVILLE, Ky.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–West IP Communications, a subsidiary of West Corporation and a leading provider of cloud-based communication applications and services, announced today the release of MediaCloud, a completely new approach for the deployment of enterprise-wide Microsoft Lync environments.
MediaCloud challenges the traditional choices of on-premises deployments versus hosted deployments by creating a hybrid environment where core Lync infrastructure and applications remain in the enterprise under the management of enterprise IT staff, while the media, edge and federation portions of the Lync environment are hosted in globally distributed West IP Communications datacenters.
“Deploying an enterprise wide unified communications platform remains a top priority for large-scale enterprises, and Lync is the platform of choice for many,” said Jeff Wellemeyer, Executive Vice President and CTO at West IP Communications. “But moving Lync out of the pilot phase and into full-scale production is a huge challenge, requiring an enterprise IT group to deploy and manage complex application, network, PSTN, and federation infrastructures and services. For many enterprises, this is a challenge beyond the capabilities and resources of their IT groups. MediaCloud provides a hybrid approach to the on-premises and hosted Lync options, empowering an enterprise Lync deployment by offering the speed, performance, reliability and scalability of a cloud-based solution while simultaneously delivering the command, control and integration capabilities demanded by today’s enterprise IT organizations.”
MediaCloud comprises three key elements:

• Edge services, taking the direct Global Internet connectivity for the Lync enterprise clusters into a highly sophisticated, route optimized network, designed specifically for real-time inter-carrier communications, dramatically enhancing security and quality of end-user experiences
• Mediation services, extending RTAudio utilization to the service provider network, allowing the enhanced quality of RTAudio to be delivered without transcoding or the need to hairpin calls through a centralized corporate datacenter, increasing efficiency in network utilization and significantly reducing voice latency
• Federation services, providing the public federation services associated with the enterprise Lync platform in a secure, QoS-enabled environment with preferred premium peering to Global Internet providers and many MPLS network service platforms to enable high performance, low latency, QoS-enhanced connectivity to organizations, applications and services both within and external to the MediaCloud

“West IP Communications has taken an exciting and logical step forward in the hybrid cloud space, expanding the traditional model for Lync deployments,” said Bill Haskins, Senior Analyst for UC at Wainhouse Research. “By moving the media processing, edge, and federation services into the cloud, they are creating an optimal environment in regards to latency and performance. MediaCloud leverages West’s strengths as an IP Communications company, shortening Lync deployment cycles, improving the end user’s experience, and removing administrative overhead from the enterprise IT staff.”
MediaCloud deployments will commence in the third quarter of 2012 for clients requiring large-scale enterprise Lync deployments on a regional or global basis.
More at http://www.westipc.com/products-and-services/mediacloud/.