The NEC 2000 IPS PBX has been close to Netco’s beating heart for almost a decade. Netco were one of the very first business telephony dealers in the UK who were able to offer expertise, sale and support for the NEC 2000 IPS in across the UK and eventually the entire world.

Netco quickly became NEC’s biggest UK dealer, focusing on medium-sized businesses in London and later the entire country. Despite various upgrades and iterations the 2000 IPS has remained backward compatible throughout meaning a card from a 1983 IVS PBX should work in a 2009 2000 or Sopho IPS system!

The NEC 2000 IPS is possibly the system’s most universal moniker but has evolved through many incarnations since it’s initial release in 1983. The system was first known as the NEAX 7400 IVS (Integrated Voice System) and came in grey system chassis, with a maximum system capacity of 512 end points.

The NEAX 7400 IVS was truely revolutionary in it’s rack-mounted, modular design and durable and feature-rich telephones. From the very outset, the NEAX IVS supported ISDN30 (Primary Rate), ISDN2 and ISDN2e (Basic Rate) and Analogue POTS (Plain Old Telephone) trunks, and eventually including Q-SIG, H.323 and SIP technologies.

When the integration between Telephony systems and Data/IP Networks began to come to the forefront of telecommunications, NEC were quick to re-release this system as the NEC 2000 IPS (Internet Protocol Server). This worldwide release became the most common incarnation of the system, which arrived in a (prettier) blue NEC badged chassis.

This was no minor upgrade – the 2000 IPS – as it was now known, was built on IP technology and around VoIP communications. It supported dual CPUs for redundancy, 512 VoIP telephones, H323 signalling and distributed chassis configurations (this meant you could put cabinets in different countries and run them as one single PBX, via IP communications over a Wide Area Network.

In Addition, NEC were one of the first PBX manufacturers to develop a ‘soft phone’ in the form of SP20 and SP30, which VoIP enabled your laptop or PDA and brought very early free telephony to the small business.

By the turn of the Century, NEC had proven to be at the forefront of business VoIP telephony, having released a pure VoIP system when nearly everyone else were bolting on complex and featureless third-party VoIP gateways to their systems in order to claim their systems were VoIP enabled. The 2000 IPS also supported a range of Quality Of Service measures to ensure that voice services and call quality remained the same as over traditional digital / copper infrastructure.

Not only were all the DTP and DTR telephones upgradable into full VoIP handsets, but they supported Power Over Ethernet (PoE), full duplex handsfree and a complete 768 feature-set, matching that of the traditional TDM DTP and DTR handsets.

The last iteration of the NEC 2000 IPS was, in Europe and the UK to become the Philips Sopho IPS. Philips and NEC joined forces across Europe and re-released the system as their own. This version came with white Philips badged chassis and a variety of firmware upgrades offering improved multi-site networking, and VoIP services along with the support for SIP trunking and SIP endpoints.

The 2000 IPS has always been considered an ‘engineers’ telephone system – despite the fact that in the latter years, the end-user management has evolved into something where the IT or Office Manager can make system changes themselves – from the name of a phone, to a ring or pickup group of telephones and even DDI routing. Having said that, it remains a very skilful PBX to work with and remains possibly the most stable and reliable systems available in the UK.

Alongside both Sales, Support and Maintenance for the 2000 IPS, Netco have always found that alongside backwards compatibility and stability, the strongest reason to buy an NEC 2000 IPS was the accompanying Zeacom Communication Centre system you could attach to it.

NEC 2000 IPS and the Zeacom Solution

Zeacom have been closely developing integrated call and contact centre software, computer telephony integration (CTI) packages, unified messaging and true mobility for the 2000 IPS also for over a decade. Netco were the first in the UK to install Zeacom Q-Master and Corus systems, which has now evolved in the the ZCC (Zeacom Commmunications Centre) and continue to support a wide range of small, medium and large businesses and organisations who operate this solution as part of their business.

Netco continue to work closely with Zeacom, which is now grown for integration into other business telephone systems and continue to be only winner of their UK dealer of the year award! Zeacom is a fantastic investment because it starts small, but is entirely modular, meaning it can very easily transition into an enterprise-class call centre or CTI and unified messaging platform for thousands of agents, supervisors and ordinary telephone users.

Zeacom runs within the Windows Server environment, either as a physical machine or within a virtualised environment, and is closely linked to the CPU of the 2000 IPS via an IP data connection called the Open Application Interface (OAI). This gives both the PBX and the Zeacom Server control over one another and become one unified system.