Uncrossed wires

A day in the life of... UC/NGIN Business Unit

Call To Interactions — Apr 2020 by Soraia Silva Monteiro

On the 3rd floor of Vodafone Portugal’s building (south-end) are Novabase futsal champions (fact!), Aquarists (fact!), a few coca-cola addicts (perception!) and an entire team that unifies our communications (fact!).

I had questioned myself many times, what UC/NGIN colleagues do? So…I took this opportunity to discovery it!

Meet UC/NGIN Business Unit

There are about 100 people between Lisbon, Porto, UK, Italy, Netherlands (“the” person who works remotely and for whom the current way of working is his BAU) and Spain.

The UC organization is Product oriented, with development cycles triggered by Internal Initiatives or by Development Programs contracted by Vodafone.

Over the years they have developed all the skills internally to be able to ensure their entire E2E offer:

  • Product Management
  • Development
  • Quality Assurance
  • Project Management
  • Delivery (Operations and Support)
  • Customer Engagement


Let’s rewind and start over… What is Unified Communications?

Unified Communications is an integration in a single enterprise platform that covers all communication and collaboration needs, including: voice, contact centre, conferencing, collaboration tools (such as instant messaging, desktop sharing, data sharing) among others.

UC/NGIN Offer

UC/NGIN business unit develops and delivers products and services that support Service Providers Unified Communications business strategy. UC/NGIN offer supports businesses that are looking for UC suites to support their employees' needs to collaborate from anywhere, at any time and from any device furthermore, making it easier to communicate with other employees, customers, and suppliers and ultimately streamlining their business processes.

UC/NGIN solutions also help Service Providers support their consumer clients by providing individuals the most convenient way to contact and be contacted, at any time and promote the migration to new network technologies such as VoLTE.

And all of UC/NGIN products are intellectual property of Celfocus!

Celfocus’ One Net solution provides all the voice features to enterprise

Celfocus One Net is a UC product for enterprise market providing functions as voice solution that fully integrates landlines, mobiles and software-based phones together, providing its users a truly seamless experience across all devices.

Features go from the most basic voice services, such as diverting calls to voicemail when the user is busy, to location-aware number presentation or highly configurable call queuing and routing mechanisms, ensuring calls are never again missed.

One Net can also work as a Call Centre solution, providing advanced call queuing, real-time wallboards to monitor agents and service levels, agent productivity reports and a WebRTC agent console, among others.

UC/NGIN Core Business is voice services! Celfocus provides communication to all of us…

On top of enterprise solutions, UC/NGIN also provides voice communication to all of us. Meaning that whenever we make a voice call (fixed or mobile) that call runs over a UC / NGIN service that controls, manages, charges (online and CDRs), redirects (FWDs), plays ads (call ring).

(They are not only on the 3rd floor South of Vodafone Portugal, after all...)

And now…about UC/NGIN teamwork (and not only!)?

There is a clear union between people that has been materialized in many activities outside the work environment.

They have instituted an almost religious ritual of getting together every Friday afternoon to drink a beer. Nowadays, they have their drink remotely, but keep the tradition!

They have a long-standing practice: playing football! Who are the Greatest Football Legends when compared to UC/NGIN players? They train regularly, play every week, are very competitive, study tactics and they have football blogs!

And a final curiosity that I hope will take you to the 3rd floor…They take care of an aquarium with big and beautiful fishes. Despite having started only at the insistence of one person, today it is maintained and treated by everyone – like any asset of UC/NGIN solution.

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