Tokyo, February 6, 2008 — NEC Corporation, a global leader in enterprise business communications, today announced UNIVERGE360 that enables businesses to fully integrate employee roles with automated business processes, resulting in a unified organization. NEC will combine new and existing infrastructure, applications, software, services and partnerships to implement the UNIVERGE360 to enterprise and small/medium sized business customers throughout the world.

According to The Gartner/Forbes Executive Survey1, the top business issues facing executives today include maintaining a competitive advantage, attracting/retaining customers, and improving productivity.

“Unified communications is one of the first steps companies will undertake to address these business challenges,” said Bob Hafner, Managing Vice President at Gartner.  “This will be followed by integrating communications into the business process to improve productivity, information availability, reduced work delays and create dramatic business advantages.”

In a major shift from other approaches, NEC’s UNIVERGE360 places people at the center of business communications, identifies the roles people play in an organization, and then unifies the technology and business processes needed to make employees’ jobs more efficient and effective. NEC’s leadership in the convergence of IT and communications and its open approach to fitting communications into the software future are key differentiators in making this model a reality for enterprise customers.

“NEC helps companies evaluate what they want to accomplish, then builds a comprehensive approach to unify business processes and communications in order to achieve their objectives,” said Saburo Takizawa, Executive Vice President and Member of the Board at NEC Corporation.  “Many companies suggest that business is about the network or the desktop, but NEC believes it is actually about the individuals and empowering them to communicate in a ubiquitous manner.”

Role-enabled Communications
By placing people at the center of business communications and identifying the employee’s role, NEC helps organizations build a unified infrastructure, which is enabled by unified communications, integrated with business processes, and supported by partnerships and services.  This is what creates a true unified business.

Global Leadership
NEC is uniquely positioned to work with companies on unifying business communications through its leadership in the convergence of IT and Communications.  NEC breaks down communication silos through the convergence of networks, systems, devices and applications to facilitate unified and coherent communications in the enterprise.

Business, Communications, and Infrastructure
The UNIVERGE360 approach also provides a path for businesses to take the software future into consideration as they plan their communications approach.  NEC’s software solution is based on industry standard Web interfaces and APIs that are not reliant on any specific vendor’s hardware.  NEC’s approach supports a multi-vendor environment, speeds up application development, and allows organizations to surround employees with the communications applications they need to fulfill their role.

NEC has already announced several solutions for unified infrastructure, unified communications, and partnerships over the past several months.  NEC will continue to develop and bring to market solutions this year to enable companies to unify business communications.