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Industry Veteran to Lead Adoption of Unified Communications Federation

NextPlane Names Nick Sears SVP of Sales and Business Development

Mountain View, California March 26, 2011 – NextPlane, the leading provider of enterprise class federation cloud services for unified communication platforms, names industry veteran Nick Sears to be Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development.

Nick Sears will be responsible for global sales operations as well as channel and strategic partner strategy. Sears has worked more than 20 years in technology including 5 years helping enterprise customers deploy unified communications solutions. Sears knows unified communications. He knows its potential and its limitations. He also knows the next leap forward for the industry when he sees it.

Until now, individual unified communications (UC) platform deployments have been limited by the inability to federate easily and seamlessly with other UC platforms. Sears sees great potential in NextPlane federation technology ? technology that finally makes it possible for people, regardless of which UC platform they use, to collaborate in real time. He will be responsible for aggressively expanding NextPlane’s global business, including the development of channel and strategic partner strategy.

Nick was previously VP Sales EMEA at unified communications security and compliance provider, Actiance (Formerly FaceTime Communications). Prior to that, Nick was President of Finjan Inc, a leading provider of secure web gateway solutions (later acquired by M86 Security) where, during his 5 year tenure, he was responsible for direct and indirect sales operations in USA and Europe.

“Sears brings years of experience with global sales operations and strategy to NextPlane, “says Farzin Shahidi, CEO of NextPlane. “With so many companies in need of unified communications federation, NextPlane is poised for growth and Sears has the experience and the vision we need to help us reach our goals.”

“It is time to break down the barriers to true unified communications,” says Nick Sears, Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Development for NextPlane. “NextPlane offers the solution that enterprises and service providers need to make their UC investments deliver more value. Real-time cross-platform communications to external customers and partners is now accessible. With NextPlane, unified communications can finally become a true foundation for business to business collaboration.”

About NextPlane

NextPlane is the leading provider of enterprise class federation solutions for unified communication (UC) platforms, including Microsoft Lync, OCS 2007 R2, OCS 2007 and LCS 2005, IBM Sametime, Cisco WebEx Connect, Cisco Unified Presence Server 8.x, Cisco Jabber, Jive OpenFire, and Google Apps.

With NextPlane, Global 1000 companies are enabling end-users from different organizations – even different companies – to work together as if they were served by the same UC platform. As a result, they can share presence, exchange instant messages and participate in multi-party chat sessions and easily make voice calls from one platform to another. In the near future they will also be able to make video calls. For more information please visit www.nextplane.net.

For further information, please contact:

Farzin Shahidi
Telephone: (650) 305-7404
E-mail: Farzin@nextplane.net