Norton Rose Group Selects NextPlane Federation Cloud Service

Legal firm Norton Rose Group has selected NextPlane Federation Cloud Service to help link the company’s 38 offices located around the world. Norton Rose, one of the largest law firms in the world 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.

Company officials said by adopting NextPlane’s Federation Cloud Service, the U.K.-based law firm 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, Norton Rose recently merged with Deacons, one of the largest law firms in Australia, to form the Norton Rose Group. To better integrate both companies, Norton Rose Group needed to be able to connect the WebEx Connect UC service being used in the U.K. with the Microsoft (News - Alert) OCS platform being used in Australia.

“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.”

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, company officials said.

NextPlane’s Federation Cloud service can federate users on Microsoft Lync 2010, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 R1 and LCS 2005 environments with colleagues on IBM (News - Alert) 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.”