Orange Business provides cloud-based unified communications solution to 3M

Telecom Lead Europe: Orange Business Services will provide a cloud-based unified communications solution to 3M to increase productivity.

Targeting 3M’s 20,000 employees at 75 sites in 25 countries in Europe, Middle East and Africa, deployment of the solution will be done on a site-by-site basis with 16,000 seats being rolled out by the end of 2014 and the remaining in the following three years.

3M is planning to extend the scope to Asia Pacific and Latin America as well.

Orange Business Services already provides Business Together as a Service, a suite of on-demand collaboration solutions, to 3M in 60 countries and mobile services in Europe.

Ernie Park, CIO, 3M, said: “The cloud-based solution minimizes costs without any up-front investment, and provides 3M the necessary scalability that allows us to adjust our IT services to reflect our business needs in a fast-changing economic environment.”

Business Together as a Service will make it easier for the five business groups of 3M to collaborate through a unified solution integrating services such as telephony, unified messaging, IM/presence, audio and Web conferencing, contact center service, video and mobility.

To fit with 3M requirements, Orange Business Services integrated IBM Sametime instant messaging, presence, telephony, IBM Lotus Notes and voicemail services into the solution.

The pay-as-you-grow financial model of Business Together as a Service means that each business group will be invoiced monthly for the profiles it uses and will be able to easily scale the profiles up or down through the Web portal depending on changing organizational needs.

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