New on-demand services help UK businesses take back control of communication costs while boosting employee productivity
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM – 27 OCTOBER 2010 – Star, a provider of on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses today announces new managed services for business IM (Instant Messaging) and Business Conference. The new services are key components of the WorkLife™ Productivity Suite that gives customers a new way to access collaboration tools that enhance employee productivity and cut costs on travel and expensive conferencing tools. Like other services in Star’s WorkLife™ Productivity Suite, they are fully managed and require no on-premise hardware. The services are priced at a predictable monthly cost starting from £7.99 per user per month.
Optimising Microsoft technology for Office Communicator® 2007 and in conjunction with LiveMeeting®, the WorkLife™ IM and Conference services mean users can now take advantage of instant messaging as well as powerful online meeting tools. Employees have the ability to organise impromptu or scheduled online meetings with colleagues, customers, suppliers or prospects straight from their familiar Microsoft Outlook application. This saves time and cuts travel costs while users have the option to add video and record meetings for future reference, training or replay purposes.
To further enhance meeting interactivity, users receive “presence” information showing the availability of colleagues and have the ability to share their applications with participants as required.
Andrew Lund, Communications Sector Business Channel Director, Microsoft said, “The market for unified communications and cloud is at a tipping point. Microsoft has worked closely with Star over the past few years to help them help their customers grasp the very real and tangible benefits of unified communications. With WorkLife, Star is in a unique position to provide a suite of on-demand communications services that will be game changing for UK businesses."
According to Hugo Harber, Director of Convergence and Network Strategy for Star, “WorkLife IM is the perfect way for an organisation to take back control away from consumer IM applications. Consumer IM is an inherent security risk but so easy to use that they have sprung up around companies everywhere. Now, with WorkLife™ you can give users the benefits of quick real-time communications in a secure, cost and bandwidth efficient manner”.
He adds, “The benefits of unified communications and collaboration has been long understood but integration difficulties have made it difficult to achieve for most of the UK’s small and medium sized organisations. Star’s pre-integrated on-demand solution makes all of the long-promised benefits of this new way of working fully available, but without any of the integration hassle. This means the latest collaboration technology is now accessible for any size of company at a monthly cost that is affordable and delivers tangible returns in saved travel costs and improved productivity.”
The IM and Conference services are part of Star’s WorkLife™ Productivity Suite of on-demand services that also includes business email, IP telephony, voice mail, audio, and video modules which have been fully pre-integrated and come as a single easy-to-use managed communications service for a fixed per user per month price.