Paul Osborne has been managing director of the business which it called O2 Unify. Its dawn and pick the idea was to move into the joined-up business market. He told the computer weekly that O2 had already moved from doing purely mobile to offering fixed services as well, yet the idea was to move into IT and communications overall. They proclaim a joint venture with the 2e2 to gather the best of telco and system integration together for customers, however the tie-up also brought the powerful global scale and buying power of O2 to 2e2 and the technical nous of the systems integrator to them.

The two firms had been working together for almost nine years on a number of projects which Osborne says led to culturally very well-aligned people in the workforce it is a partnership that is very dependent on each other and he think that is the best way. R=The first focus for the joint venture was on what Osborne terms, the bottom end of the IT stack, focusing on wide area networks, layering IP solutions over and starting to integrate fixed and mobile solutions. They tried to take an agnostic route when it came to suppliers and be customer-led.

All the suppliers have various strengths to go down commercial route, despite of all not necessarily having the great technology. If a customer has a lot of Avaya installed to take them down the Cisco route would have to show huge cost savings and improvements and the time of the product differentiation is very short in this market. The majority of the deployments by O2 Unify used equipment from avaya and Cisco or used Microsoft Lync software. Then they moved more towards flexible working offerings and with the growth of cloud services. Having the system integrator datacenter on hand, they could offer utility billing and other products and reduce the number of suppliers customers have to take telecoms.

By the end of the month Osborne is proud of the customer numbers set to reach a total of 40 and contracts worth £150m rolling in. He adds that he can’t say if that was the exact expectations however it was there or thereabouts and they think that is great, espcially in the current  economic climate. Civica is the public sector outsourcing firm, it is one of the customer which has uased O2 Unify to deliver its own unified communications systems such as desktop-to-desktop video conferencing. But, one of the customer has signed up and had a high profile.

Osborne stated that they also provide WAN to all of G4S, they are going through difficult times right now in a very public and they need to be able to rely on the support chain more than ever. They have to be there to support them in both the good times and at the same time at the bad.

REFERENCE:

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240162352/Is-O2-Unify-winning-customers-over