Orange Business Services has been selected by Japan Tobacco International (JTI) to transform its digital working environment by moving its existing communications landscape to a fully managed unified solution. 

According to a press statement the five year contract will see Orange Business Services deploy and manage a unified communications solution to a 104 JTI sites in 40 countries initially.

Orange Business Services works with JTI in South Africa and other countries like Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. And all four sites of JTI in South Africa will be migrated in June 2015.

The Lync-based solution will unify communications for 20,000 users with instant messaging (IM), presence and web conferencing services while 12,000 users will be enabled with Lync Enterprise voice and desktop video services, integrated with videoconferencing rooms, the statement reads.

An additional 3,000 mobile devices, tablets and smartphones will be Lync enabled, the statement continues.

JTI Global Technical Center vice president, Guilain Rogg said, “To ensure the success of this major initiative, we selected Orange because of their expertise and knowledge about the existing environment to create a long-term strategy and associated roadmap. Their global capabilities support our geographical footprint and they have the ability to deliver end-to-end services, from transformation to operation, including management of all underlying service blocks.”

Dr. Helmut Reisinger, senior vice president for Europe, Russia and CIS, Orange Business Services added, “We are very pleased to help JTI transform and provide its employees with new smart and mobile ways of working, facilitating and optimising their day-to-day activities with a business-critical unified communications solution based on Lync.”

“Unified communications and collaborative solutions are a key pillar of the workspace transformation that is ongoing within companies. We are committed to support them in this evolution and in this specific case with JTI - at the global level.”