Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 8082736

At VoIP Planet, I published an article this week looking at Verizon Business' launch of a new managed service which offers a hosted version of Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) R2.

As Michael Marcellin, Verizon's vice president of global managed solutions, explains, the aim is simply to free customers from having to manage OCS themselves. "We can provision users, we can do all of the software patching that may be required on an ongoing basis - and we can monitor the application, making sure that the performance is what the customer expects, and making sure that it's available for their users," he says.

"The company's managed services include comprehensive infrastructure support, including provisioning, patching, monitoring, and ongoing administration to maintain continuous uptime," writes TMCnet's Jyothi Shanbhag. "
The new offering from Verizon can be incorporated with... existing communication systems so businesses can deploy and integrate advanced VoIP and conferencing without removing their legacy phone networks, and they can leverage existing technical and network investments."

More here from Computerworld ... more here from Network World ... and the press release is here.