Vampire Loads are also known as Phantom loads that are caused by equipment that while turned off, still draw current that you are paying for. A few months ago we put to task measuring and documenting our internal phantom loads- an inventory of our gear to determine what energy savings we could identify and then achieve.
This guest post was written by Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company, a high tech marketing consulting company.
Telepresence has really improved the video communications experience. High definition (HD) video conferencing has really improved the video communications experience. The life-sized, blur-free and crystal clear presentation of remote meeting participants, the directionally-synchronized artifact-free audio quality, excellent and flattering lighting placement, the clever mind-tricks of the curved furniture and simple session engagement mechanisms all make for an awesome, technology-transparent business meeting.
We've written a fair amount this year around the topic of operational expenses (opex) of IP Telephony. I say written "around" the topic because we've mostly discussed whether the potential for opex savings could be what's driving the market to continue investing in IPT despite the overall economic slowdown. But we haven't really taken a systematic look at the opex picture. That's why I was so glad to get Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research on a VoiceCon webinar on this topic (go here to get the replay, and here for the archive of recent webinars).
This could be big news in Unified Communications: HP is acquiring EDS at a cost of almost $14 billion.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
We see end user companies continuing to streamline investments in communications technology and vendor relationships. This often manifests itself in the form of a decision to standardize on an enterprise communications suite, including a common IP PBX/ACD infrastructure. On the other hand, we also see contact center management (often referred to as “the Business”) defending their territory, or staking new claims, by investing in a standalone contact center suite to liberate themselves from the rest of the enterprise.
Some large enterprise executives, staff, and economists are among those who doubt that implementing energy efficient network and telephony gear today will have a positive benefit. A theory that came alive during the oil crisis of the 1970s known as the Khazzoom-Brookes Postulate that states, “reductions in energy intensity of output that are not damaging to the economy are associated with increases, not decreases, in energy demand.” This theory goes on to state that “improvements in energy efficiency lead to ever and ever-greater levels of energy usage.”
In a triple announcement this week, Interactive Intelligence scored a hit on three fronts, adding survey functionality and speech analytics to the contact center, and integration with Microsoft OCS. Today, I’m going to focus on the first two as they are what had me nodding in agreement when I was briefed on them. They also, unlike the OCS integration, fall under the umbrella of what Interactive Intelligence is calling Customer Feedback Management.
We had a fantastic webinar last week in which we basically turned the hour over to Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research, who delivered a really useful talk on opex in IP telephony (watch it here). I'll post this week's VoiceCon eNews here tomorrow, in which I discuss Robin's main findings. In the meantime, some side points were noteworthy.
Cisco today announced its next iteration of telepresence, moving both up and down in scale from its initial table-based system. As you can see in the photos with the release, the new designs are "personal", i.e., one-to-one; and double-rows for bigger groups.
Back in the early 80’s before adoption of any Category-X standards for wiring, we were faced with a decision that couldn’t wait. At the time, we spoke with and visited AT&T (Atlanta Works Wire Division) Dupont, Belden, and Mowhawk Cable companies. The decision to begin the cabling project was pending as was the effort to begin selection of a product for the cable plant. We were about to wire a national landmark and everyone agreed it needed to last.
In my postings I have addressed a series of the design issues associated with deploying QoS and getting clean voice or video traffic across the IP network. I lump those topics into the ‘design’ category, meaning that you structure the network according to those principals (classification, forwarding behavior, bandwith demand and management, etc). But many of us have a set of problems in the network I call ‘implementation problems’ which are basically bugs that go unnoticed until we introduce real-time traffic.
WebMessenger, announced WebMessenger Mobile for Microsoft OCS, enabling enterprises to extend their investments in the Microsoft UC platform out to BlackBerry and other mobile devices. WebMessenger provides mobile real-time presence, IM, VoIP, and collaboration products for enterprises and mobile professionals. It also targets persistent group chat users who have alerts set up so they can act on new information or requests quickly and efficiently, and it provides other communications management solutions. For example, the company developed Message Alerts Enterprise Edition in conjunction with a large and very well-known financial services firm, using rules to trigger alerts and notify users when they get an important message or messages with specific words, for example.
Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to accomplish a task--to create and calculate spreadsheets. Everyone who needed to do these sorts of calculations immediately understood the benefit once they saw it in operation.
One of our favorite network troubleshooting gurus, Terry Slattery, has put together a very cool-looking network diagram showing the 25 Biggest Network Problems. Not surprisingly, virtually all of them are either directly or indirectly relevant to real-time/voice traffic. I talked with Terry about some of the high- (or low-) lights.
One last observation to wrap up my musings on the Microsoft-Aspect alliance. Tucked into the press release announcing the whole shebang was this curious line:
At Interop last week, I had a chance to sit down with Manfred Arndt, who's Distinguished Technologist with HP ProCurve Networking, which has been aggressively going after market share in the switch/routing business. Manfred is co-author of a standard that's going to be increasingly important as enterprises deploy IP telephony and unified communications: Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discovery, or LLDP-MED, which is standardized as ANSI/TIA-1057-2006.
The never-ending saga that is WiMAX has thrown us yet another surprise.This morning’s papers bring news that Sprint and Clearwire will be combining (or “re-combining”) their WiMAX offerings still using the name Xohm. The combined company will take Clearwire’s name , though it will be headed up by Sprint’s CTO and long-time WiMAX booster, Barry West. More importantly, Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google, Bright House Networks, and Trilogy Equity Partners will jointly invest $3.2 billion in the new venture. The investments still falls far short of what will be needed to deploy ubiquitous nationwide coverage, and the target deployment date for the first major rollout has slipped from 2008 to 2010.
If you're in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.
The WAN optimizer is hardware designed to reduce bandwidth consumption. WAN optimizers are designed for TCP traffic, which dominates the IP network. TCP traffic has a lot of redundancy and can be compressed; it does not have the network performance requirements of VoIP traffic.
During last week’s Interop convention in Las Vegas, Cisco and Nokia announced a number of trials for their mobile unified communications solution, but the news included little in the way of new capabilities. The problem is that while most of the other fixed mobile convergence (FMC) solutions on the market can deliver an automatic hand-off; Cisco still must depend on the user to manually transfer the call. That automatic hand-off function is critical, because without it, there is no way of ensuring the users’ calls are being sent over the less costly WLAN option when they are within range.
Over the last two months or so we’ve had the opportunity to interview about 100 IT executives from end-user organizations of varying size and scope about their organization’s approach to unified communications. We’re asking IT executives about their UC plans, experiences, business drivers, and concerns. In most interviews one key concern emerges: Interoperability.
Here's a WSJ blog that says, among other things, that IT datacenters are responsible for half as much pollution as the airline industry. Green was a big topic at Interop last week, and I'll have more on it in tomorrow's VoiceCon eNews, which will be posted here as well. But for now, some random facts and comments.
At Interop last week, I heard a variation on Marty Parker's taxonomy of IT/communications organizational structures that I blogged about recently.
Response Point is Microsoft’s software based IP PBX. Its initial offering is for the S in SMB. It does not fit the medium and large enterprise location, but could satisfy the requirement of the small office of 5 to 50 phones. The retail branch, insurance office and remote government offices are all candidates, if the organization does not plan to interconnect these offices by an IP or legacy T1 network. In some companies, the remote offices are locally managed and independent, making them candidates for a key system replacement. Response Point may satisfy these situations.
Header compression is always mentioned in the same breath as QoS when we discuss supporting voice on an IP network. But it is not about QoS, it is about reducing bandwidth consumption. Header compression is most important on the WAN because that is where bandwidth is constrained and expensive. Let’s take a look at why header compression helps for voice.
Whenever economic issues threaten budgets, management looks at outsourcing to cover budget shortfalls. Networking in the US has long been dependent on in-house technology while in Europe, managed services have dominated. Given this, US executives are already looking harder at managed services, and network operators here are expanding their programs. The question is whether managed services are a good idea, and if so, where optimum value could be obtained.
The UCStrategies.com team has been differentiating between the two types of Unified Communications: UC User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC Business Process (UC BP).
What's another word for "features," as in "PBX features" (the infamous list of 500-800)? Well, the word that one of the audience questioners used in my SIP session this morning was: Value. As in, "People I talk to are concerned about the danger of losing value in the system" if they migrate to a SIP-based system that provides fewer functions.
Of course: "Functions" = "Value"
NoJitter reader Kevin noted that Aspect is by no means the first to integrate Microsoft Live/Office Communications Server with its contact center solution. Mitel has in fact been doing this for a while. It’s a great point, so I spoke with both Mitel and Aspect about what contact center integration with OCS means to them.
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