South Africa-based mobile network operator Vodacom yesterday became Africa’s first telephone company to receive Microsoft OCS and Lync’s SIP trunking Certification.
A SIP trunk is a direct connection between the customer’s voice infrastructure and the Vodacom VoIP Platform. It enables customers to extend Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony beyond their firewall, without the need for an IP-PSTN gateway.
Chris Lazarus, Managing Executive at Vodacom Business Services explained what the certification means for the business saying: “What this means is that we can enable new and existing Microsoft OCS and Lync’s customers to achieve call termination natively over our VoIP Platform without them having to buy expensive and complicated gateways.”
Other advantages of this certification is that it brings significant cost savings to enterprise customers across IP and PSTN networks and provides true unified communications to VoIP systems.
Microsoft Lync is a single, unified communications platform that integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Office and other existing tools and systems, and can enhance or replace existing IP PBX systems.
Enhanced IP PBX systems can lead to improved productivity, increased mobility, and faster responses for customers, partners and employees. Other benefits may include smoother deployment, easier management, and lower cost of ownership.
