NEC hits mobile worker sweet spot

Univerge package leverages NEC's telephony roots; delivers slick, unified view of all communications out to mobile clients

NEC's Univerge Unified Communications Solution package marks the intersection of stylish endpoints coveted by mobile workers with the high level of performance that arises out of the company's long history in telephony.

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NEC's Univerge Unified Communications Solution package marks the intersection of stylish endpoints coveted by mobile workers with the high level of performance that arises out of the company's long history in telephony.

In this Clear Choice Test -- one in a series of tests conducted using the same test methodology and has included products from Avaya and 3Com -- NEC's UC platform showed itself to be well-fashioned (owing to the sleek appearance of its endpoints), well designed, feature-packed, secure and resilient.

This hands-on evaluation included an example of each of NEC's top-of-the-line UC endpoints (almost a dozen in total) including hard phones and softphone clients. These clients were connected to redundantly deployed SV7000 IP PBX communications servers running a hardened version of Windows 2003 Server.

These SV7000 servers, which handle call routing and provide the basic PBX telephony functionality, came bundled with NEC's SV7000T (Call Telephony server) and SV7000S (Session Initiation Protocol [SIP] Server) software. The underlying servers support SIP trunks, are XML and Java compliant, can scale from 300 to 6,000 ports for IP terminals, and work in conjunction with LDAP-based directory services for secure user access. Presence intelligence is supplied by NEC's OW5000 Presence Engine, which maintains records of users' communication availability and device preferences.

Click to see: Scorecard

Performance: Very strong

We verified NEC's advertised traffic load handling, voice quality statistics and other traditional IP PBX type tests for the SV7000 as the core communication platform. The product satisfied our base level performance metrics for a modern IP PBX, achieving 32,369 busy-hour calls with 1,000-user loads without dropping any calls. For load test, a combination of call-generation tools were used, including the EMPIRIX Hammer which sent calls directly to the UC system (see How we did it).

Voice quality tests achieved 4.4 or higher (out of 5) in the mean opinion score (MOS) tests even when transitioning between H.323 and SIP calls. NEC's excellent voice quality was confirmed by ClearSight Analyzer and TouchStone WinSIP.

A second load test we conducted – one that stressed the underlying IP-PBX performance and the system's ability to track user presence changes -- required a multi-session version of NEC’s UC700 softphone application that ran on several workstations. Three-hundred virtual sessions were created on each of five servers and 150 each on 17 workstations, making available a maximum of 4050 sessions. We observed that without server performance degradation we were able to support a total of 3883 virtual sessions with the NEC platform, requiring 81% of CPU utilization and 2 GB of memory of the SQL database server running inside the OW5000 presence server.

Endpoints: Slick

NEC has a consolidated message center interface – used across all of its supported endpoints – which clearly showed all voice messages, e-mails, instant messages and faxes received in all of our testing. Menus on various devices were nearly identical and endpoints show user presence information and changes in the same fashion.