Verizon today unveiled major enhancements to its Virtual Communications Express (VCE) cloud calling service, including a partnership with Cisco Webex to enable collaboration across private MPLS connections.

Verizon is now delivering VCE over the company's global voice-over-IP (VoIP) service via a hosted or premises-based SD-WAN connection.

The approach has several benefits according to Verizon, not the least of which are significant cost savings made possible by allowing customers to share trunk capacity across their sites. Additionally, VCE customers will now be able to make long-distance calls to other Verizon VoIP customers at no additional charge.

"By leveraging Verizon’s global network strength and market-leading VoIP portfolio, we have developed an enhanced collaboration solution that delivers powerful hosted UC&C [unified communications and collaboration] features underpinned by superior network connectivity and performance," said Alla Reznik, executive director of customer experience, global products, and services, at Verizon, in a statement.

On top of its own offerings, Verizon is also offering VCE via Cisco's Webex suite. This means Verizon can now offer Webex calling across private MPLS networks for improved security.

A recent report from Ovum, cited in Verizon's release, found that 52% of organizations plan to invest in team collaboration over the next 18 to 24 months.

“The convergence of UC and collaboration means today’s workforce expects to communicate and collaborate within one platform versus using single services like conferencing," said Tim Banting, principal analyst, workspace services within Ovum’s Enterprise Services team, in a statement.

VCE is now available in the Asian, European and U.S. markets.