Aastra, a global provider of enterprise communication products, systems and solutions, has joined the HP ProCurve Alliance, ensuring that ProCurve can provide a secure, reliable and adaptive open-standard foundation to Aastra's Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications (UC) products.

HP ProCurve is a leading networking vendor, enabling customers to adapt to changing needs by giving them the choice of the best available products, solutions, customer care and product support.

The nature of this agreement is global, and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), where Aastra has a leading presence, will be the first region of focus. Aastra's NeXspan range of Internet Protocol Private Branch exchanges (IP PBX), open source-based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) telephony terminals and Aastra mobility solutions are the first of the company's products to become available via the HP ProCurve Alliance.

All partners joining the HP ProCurve Alliance go through a rigorous process that includes technology certification to ensure solution interoperability, simplified deployment and optimised performance. End users can enjoy the confidence that they will be served by a trained, competent and certified channel.

Aastra MENA President Peter Hofman said that Alliance customers could now benefit from a complete offering of network and enterprise communication solutions, especially on the Large Enterprise market which is a focus market for Aastra.

"HP ProCurve's approach includes flexible, fully secure, open standards-based solutions which offer interoperability and support Aastra's VoIP and UC technology," he said. "This means customers can ultimately enjoy higher return of investment and lower total cost of ownership." Alberto Soto Garcia, Vice President and General Manager of ProCurve Networking's operations in EMEA said: "Both HP ProCurve and Aastra share a common vision on the importance of how best open standards-based solutions can meet customer needs. With the addition of Aastra's enterprise communications technologies we can give even further choice of convergence solutions to our customers and resellers. They can rely on getting pre-qualified, open architecture solutions that have been thoroughly tested and certified for interoperability."

Aastra expects other products to be approved by HP ProCurve in the coming months.

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About Aastra
Aastra Technologies Limited, ("Aastra"), a global company at the forefront of the Enterprise Communication market. Headquartered in Concord, Ontario, Canada, Aastra develops and delivers innovative and integrated solutions that address the communication needs of businesses small and large around the world. Aastra enables Enterprises to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and effectively by offering customers a full range of open standard IP-based and traditional communications networking products, including terminals, systems, and applications.

About HP ProCurve
HP ProCurve is the Network of Choice for best-in-class solutions, products and services for wired and wireless networks. ProCurve's Adaptive Networks vision enables customers to implement an open, standards-based network infrastructure that adapts to the changing needs of users, applications and organizations.
ProCurve was positioned in the Leaders quadrant in research and advisory firm Gartner Inc.'s 2008 Magic Quadrant Report for Global Campus LANs and is No. 2 worldwide in Ethernet switch market revenue and ports according to Dell'Oro Group. www.procurve.com

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Roger Hage
Vice President
Business Development & Marketing
Aastra Middle East & North Africa
Mobile: +971 50 458 7264
Email: roger.hage@aastra.com
Website: www.aastra-mena.com

© Press Release 2008 from Promoseven