UK carrier BT and enterprise IP communications vendor Siemens have teamed up to provide large enterprises a ‘one-stop converged communications solution’.

The global sales agreement aims to help enterprises, “Reduce costs, remove complexity and risk, improve collaboration and enhance business processes” the firms said.

Firms wanting to move to a converged data and voice system could roll out the partnered system, which Siemens explained, “Offers a single service level agreement as well as a flexible pricing model with a single point of contact for end-to-end managed services.”

The system uses Siemens OpenScape communications suite and OpenScale services with BT's carrier class multi-protocol label switched (MPLS) network.

BT’s systems integrators and channel partners vice president Chris Ainslie said that many of its customers had, “Accumulated complex, usually multi-vendor voice and data infrastructures, which our agreement with Siemens offers them a way of to leveraging their significant legacy investments."

Separately, Unison Technologies has announced a VMware appliance version of its Linux-based unified communications software, Unison.

The virtual appliance includes a preconfigured Linux server with Unison Server already installed. Unison said, “Integrating telephony, email, IM and groupware into a single Linux unified communications server, Unison Server, increases a company’s productivity, while also reducing IT costs.”

Unison is also offering firms to download and managed demo servers, allowing people to use a free test account.