MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA -- (Marketwire) -- 04/20/12 -- NextPlane, Inc., (www.nextplane.com) the market leader in cloud-based federation services for disparate unified communications (UC), today announced that Norton Rose Group is now using the NextPlane Federation Cloud Service. Norton Rose, one of the top 10 law firms in the word with 2,500 lawyers and 38 offices, has adopted NextPlane's Federation-as-a-Service (FaaS) to link UC platforms in London, Australia, Canada, and South Africa. By adopting NextPlane Federation Cloud Service, Norton Rose can maintain disparate UC platforms in regional offices and still support all common UC services including presence, instant messaging, file transfer, and multi-user chat.

As part of its global expansion, the UK-based Norton Rose LLC merged with Deacons, one of the largest law firms in Australia, to form the Norton Rose Group. To facilitate the new integrated law practice, Norton Rose Group had to find a means to connect the WebEx Connect UC service being used in the UK with the Microsoft OCS platform being used in Australia. Rather than forcing the different offices to change to a common platform, Norton Rose Group opted to license NextPlane's Federation Cloud to federate UC communications between the different systems. Within two weeks of signing NextPlane as a federation partner, Norton Rose had an integrated UC system up and running.

"When managing communications for a global law firm having integrated presence and IM is crucial, particularly given the time differences between offices," said Jason Berwick, Innovation Analyst for Norton Rose Group. "Adopting NextPlane as our federation partner eliminated having to find a common UC service. It was like starting with a blank sheet of paper. We made a couple of DNS changes and we were good to go, and the entire process took less than two weeks."

The NextPlane Federation Cloud Service enables disparate UC platforms to federate without any upfront capital expense. The Federation Cloud solution can federate users on Microsoft Lync 2010, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 R1, and LCS 2005 environments seamlessly and securely with colleagues on IBM Sametime, Cisco CUPS, WebEx Connect, and Jabber XCP, Jive OpenFire, and Google Apps. It also eliminates the need to maintain multiple address domains, since the Federation Cloud Service does the translation so all users appear to be on one UC platform.

"Norton Rose is the ideal proving ground for the benefits of our Federation Cloud solution," said Farzin Shahidi, CEO of NextPlane. "Our Federation Cloud Service is ideal for companies in transition, providing ongoing UC support during a merger or acquisition, and we support all the core UC capabilities across multiple platforms as though they were native services. Norton Rose has demonstrated that NextPlane's Federation Cloud is quick to deploy, seamless, reliable, and scalable to meet any requirement."

As the Norton Rose Group continues to expand, it relies on NextPlane to federate UC services. In addition to establishing Norton Rose Australia, the firm also has merged with Ogilvy Renault and Denysis Reitz to form Norton Rose Canada LLP and Norton Rose South Africa. Berwick's team is developing a flow chart for future mergers to make sure that partners can connect with their counterparts right away, either from UC connections in the office or from an iPad, iPhone, PC, or Web-connected device.

For more information, visit www.nextplane.net.

About NextPlane, Inc.

NextPlane offers enterprise-class Federation as a Service (FaaS) solutions for unified communications (UC) platforms, seamlessly federating Microsoft Lync 2010, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 and LCS 2005, IBM Sametime, Cisco Jabber XCP, Cisco Unified Presence Server 8.x, Cisco WebEx Connect, Jive OpenFire, and Google Apps. Using NextPlane Federation Cloud service, organizations can connect users from different companies regardless of underlying UC platforms -- with shared presence, instant messaging, multi-user chat, voice, video, and other features -- as if they are on the same platform.

NextPlane offers an ideal solution for companies migrating from one UC platform to another, or to integrate different legacy platforms following a company merger or a new contract or partnership. NextPlane even supports domain sharing, allowing two or more UC platforms to federate internally and externally using the same domain name.

For more information please visit www.nextplane.net, or contact sales at sales@nextplane.net.

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