Wow, if you want to see 2 people cover a lot of territory in 6 minutes--check out this video with Fritz Nelson of TechWeb TV and Alan Cohen, VP of Mobility Solutions, Cisco. Alan definitely came prepared with plenty of provocative ideas to toss out. Some reaction in the jump:
First quarter 2008 started off with a big bang about UC--UC this, UC that, UC everywhere except for the budget. Then, folks got a taste of two big gas guzzling heroes that tried to come across as green machines- yes, Mr. Chambers and Mr. Gore, your high-falutin’ ways won’t get you any green awards. Each of you do not drive hybrids as a primary vehicle, and private jets and mansions don’t count for you even if you buy a couple of renewable energy certificates.
The VoiceCon discussion that led up to Microsoft and IBM's handshake deal, promising interoperability testing was really pretty significant even before the two vendors made their commitment. For the first time I could remember, industry leaders talked pretty openly and honestly about what was and wasn't interoperable in the SIP world, and why. The discussion echoed a conversation I'd had the previous afternoon with Jamie Stark, a technical product manager at Microsoft.
Right after Lou D'Ambrosio's Tuesday VoiceCon keynote wrapped up, I had a chance to sit down with some Avaya execs who are working on an initiative that D'Ambrosio didn't get much of a chance to touch on in his speech: The effort to expand Avaya's consulting business.
Fritz Nelson of TechWeb TV interviews Mark Collier, CTO of SecureLogix, about the state of VOIP Security. Mark pegs denial-of-service attacks aimed at the underlying IP infrastructure as the greatest security threat to enterprise IP telephony at this point.
Let's go to the video:
Ever since installing our first IP-PBX in 1996, we’ve found more ways to install them using existing cable plants. IP-PBXs often work better by themselves on their own cabling infrastructure than those that are converged using just one cable to the desktop. I’ve claimed before--years before QoS, VLANs, network monitoring and assessments and other tools were typical--that by using available resources and installing the IP-PBX as a “phone system” is better for some customers.
VoiceCon Orlando 2008 was held last week--and it did not disappoint. The discussions and interactions between and among speakers, exhibitors and attendees clearly showed that Unified Communications is on everyone's mind, and that the industry is moving from defining UC to evaluating and implementing UC solutions.
In a move that was not entirely a surprise, Motorola announced plans to split into two separate companies, effectively spinning off their cellular handset division. Some type of realignment had been anticipated given Motorola’s declining fortunes and the well-publicized displeasure of investor Carl Icahn who holds 6% of Motorola’s stock. Icahn has been highly critical of thecompany’s management and has been angling for representation on the board.
This guest post was written by Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company, a high tech marketing consulting company.
The John Chambers – Al Gore demonstration of telepresence was truly exciting to the 2,500 attendees in the big auditorium at VoiceCon last week. Yet, their impassioned and indirect plea to use telepresence instead of travel will suffer from the practicalities of deploying 30 Mbps IP WAN services between meeting rooms, let alone forking out two-thirds of a million dollars for a pair of rooms. For most organizations, that’s a lot of travel to avoid!
Fritz Nelson of our sister site Information Week/TechWeb brought his TechWeb TV crew to Orlando. In this interview, Bill Miller of Digium talks about the role of open source in communications. If you haven't followed Digium or Asterisk or open source, it's a good introduction:
Kevin DiLallo, a partner at Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby law firm, has posted a detailed look at the pitfalls you want to avoid in procurements. I want to highlight a couple of points Kevin makes, and suggest that they're important today but may be critical in a Unified Communications future.
With Amazon’s recent fumble with their EC2 services I think it’s fair to say that “cloud” computing is still in Beta. The network service providers have pending legislation hanging over them and there are many opportunities to blend and merge service offerings together to provide a strengthened hosted platform for users seeking to adopt Unified Communications. In this next evolution of technology, hosted providers have an opportunity to do more than razzle dazzle customers with features while using fewer resources. Isn’t “good management” about utilizing and maximizing your available resources?
One of the big worries with carrying voice or video on an IP network is packet loss. When packets don’t make it to the destination, voice and video quality is compromised. But why is this a big deal when our networks have been running fine for years? Network teams are often surprised about how much packet loss there is in a normal data network. Lets look first at why this is a big deal for voice and video, but not a big deal for data applications.
Who pays for IT and communications power? How much power is used? Can anyone do something about conserving IT and communications Power?
I recently asked these questions of my audience at the Voicecon conference in Orlando in March 20, 2008. No one could answer the questions.
I've been communicating with Allan Sulkin on the ongoing topic of vendor consolidation/spinoffs (inspired by but not directly related to today's Motorola announcement). Here are his latest thoughts:
I read with interest about the Swift-Galvin handshake to test interoperability between Microsoft and IBM’s instant messaging unified communications software at VoiceCon Fall in November. It’s a topic I’ve droned on a bit about before and am glad to see others are taking it seriously as well. Curiously enough, just before VoiceCon, IBM’s Bruce Morse touched on the topic of federation between currently non-interoperable corporate IM platforms, in a conference call to industry analysts like myself. Here’s what he said:
Recently, Cisco added their new iPhone Wireless-G IP310 that hits the consumer and very small business market by extending voice mobility with an 802.11 b/g/n WiFi infrastructure.
There’s something for everyone to love in today’s notion of videoconferencing, now renamed “telepresence”. You get rid of travel, which reduces energy consumption and global warming. You cut out all that time lost by key people sitting in airports. You create instant team communications for your far-flung enterprise. If you’re a vendor, you sell equipment, and if you’re a service provider you generate revenue from traffic. Some of these benefits may even be true (particularly the last two). But chances are that your own enterprise telepresence plans need a clear strategy today or you’ll need a good excuse tomorrow.
I think right now we’ve got two different definitions of unified communications. The vendor definition is unifying all the communications tools from one particular vendor. From the user perspective, it’s very important to unify the collaboration tools across multiple vendor platforms. This year’s VoiceCon in Orlando highlighted a number of vendors that are making concerted efforts to interoperate with other vendor systems, which are a good thing for everyone in the UC ecosystem. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel with Cisco, Avaya, IBM and Microsoft, and during it, Eric Rossman from Avaya said something to the effect of “When I look at my peers on this stage, I don’t see competition, I see money. The more we work together, the more interoperable our systems will be and that will help adoption of all of our solutions. The opportunity here is huge and we can all benefit from it”. (Paraphrased so my apologies to Eric if this isn’t exactly right).
Power to the people, democratization, UC for the masses – these were some of the key themes of this spring’s VoiceCon Orlando keynotes. I think the phrase “UC By and For the People” sums up what we see happening in UC today.
One of the best methods to observe human behavior is to go to a flea market. Unless you probe, look, inspect and really get into searching all the treasures that flea markets have to offer, then you will miss opportunities.
VoiceCon 2008 was no flea market but there were plenty of treasures and an ample supply of human behavior- only the best being described.
When Allan Sulkin sent me the NYT link below, he added a note that I asked if I could reprint. Quoth Allan:
Customer service or the lack thereof is always an issue with hardware, software and communications companies. Louis D’Ambrosio, the President and CEO of Avaya, presented the first keynote at Voiceon in March at Orlando. I enjoyed the speech and his humor.
In my post on the conclusion of the 700 MHz auctions last week I reported the rumor that Google was not among the winners. When the winners were announced two days later, that rumor was indeed confirmed. Now that we've had a couple of days to wade through the results, a few interesting patterns have emerged.
We've posted another podcast, with Simon Gwatkin of Mitel. Among the topics discussed: Unified Communications and Mitel's integration of its Inter-Tel acquisition.
Allan Sulkin sent along this link to a NYT article on "survivor technologies," the chief case in point being the mainframe. It's become a stock comparison, at VoiceCon, to liken the PBX to the mainframe--especially since a certain big software company jumped into the market recently. So the question is, is this as bad a thing as it sounds or as it could be? For that matter, is it even true?
This article, part 1 of a 3-part series, was written by Kevin DiLallo, a partner at Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby, LLP.
Enterprise IT buyers face a number of legal and operational challenges when negotiating equipment purchase and maintenance/support agreements with the leading original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) – like Cisco Systems, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, and Lucent-Alcatel – and their resellers, such as Getronics, Dimension Data, AT&T, and Verizon Business. Many enterprises choose to buy through resellers because they can get larger discounts that way than they can negotiate directly with the manufacturers; but buying through a reseller introduces a host of issues that might be avoided in direct sales. This article offers a sampling of the problems that our clients have found particularly vexing. The next two installments will discuss other issues that commonly arise in enterprise equipment purchase and maintenance/support agreements.
Lost (at least by me, to be frank) in all the VoiceCon hoopla last week was the anti-climactic death of the 3Com-Bain Capital-Huawei buyout. The deal apparently died last Thursday, and the next day, 3Com's shareholders approved it. That's not quite as crazy as it sounds.
We just posted a new podcast, featuring Mark Slaga, CTO and CIO of Dimension Data Americas. I'll also be doing a webinar with Mark this Wednesday, on the topic of "How IT Leaders Overcome Technical and Organizational UC Challenges." As you'll hear if you listen to the podcast, Mark is a terrific expert who's got a wealth of experience dealing with these issues from an SI's point of view.
We had a session at VoiceCon on Quality of Experience. Now you probably know that the whole VoiceCon show is a quality experience. But in particular here we are talking about measuring the experience of users of a voice or video conferencing service to judge how well we are delivering good communications. Most of the existing tools available in the industry are measuring how well the network is delivering packets, which we know is important, but it does not tell the whole story on voice or video quality.
Unified Communications was the main theme here at VoiceCon 2008 in Orlando, but there were a few underlying themes that were tightly related to UC, one of which was videoconferencing. Avaya, Microsoft and Cisco all made various forms of videoconferencing part of their keynotes, and both Polycom and Tandberg announced a number of partnerships.
Well, we actually made some real news on the last day of VoiceCon. Microsoft and IBM agreed to do interoperability testing of their UC systems and to demo or report on or replicate the results at VoiceCon San Francisco, which takes place next November. What exactly that will entail--which products, features, etc.--will have to be hashed out in the coming weeks. But hopefully the handshake between Microsoft's Eric Swift and IBM's Pat Galvin that we saw in today's opening session will represent the beginning of a new era in Unified Communications.
I have almost no details for you, because it literally just happened, but representatives of Microsoft and IBM, on the VoiceCon stage this morning, committed to interoperability testing among their respective Unified Communications packages.
Irwin Lazar and Melanie Turek have several posts on VoiceCon at the Enterprise 2.0 blog. There's a nice counterpoint to Melanie's comments about the "democratization of UC" that Lou D'Ambrosio of Avaya spoke about, posed against the perils of social networking in the enterprise that Irwin blogs about.
Fred Knight, VoiceCon conference co-chair, introduced this morning's Telepresence-based keynote session with Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers by noting what a remarkable panel it was. Fred told the audience: "They didn't choose VoiceCon. They chose you."
It’s clear to me as we move along the VoIP path- that not only is it complex, but it becomes more so, and then to think that the vendors want to add UC/UM to the fold. What are they thinking?
Unified Communications continued as a central theme at VoiceCon Orlando 2008 on Wednesday. The Early bird session on “Enhancing VoIP for Unified Communications” was packed at 8 AM (wow!) and an excellent panel comprising Avaya, Nortel, Microsoft and Mitel provided recommendations to the attendees on the incremental investments they could make and the costs and risks of those investments. Suggestions ranged from innovative suggestions on integrating communications into business processes for major ROI, to effectively and simply deploying the standard UC desktop features (e.g. IM and presence) and telephony features (e.g. mobility and audio conferencing).
For his VoiceCon keynote this morning, Mike Rhodin, GM of IBM Lotus Software, introduced the company's new Sametime Unified Telephony.
The big star-studded Cisco keynote, featuring Al Gore and John Chambers appearing via TelePresence, served to drive home the message that technology has a role to play in reducing carbon emissions and helping mitigate the effects of global warming. Gore offered lavish praise for the quality of the Cisco system, and he offered advice for how the world can work together to reduce greenhouse gases and curb global warming.
Here at VoiceCon 2008 is Mr. Green reporting in. After meeting with Tony Leger at the Nortel booth I got the feeling and could see the evidence that Nortel sees green. The evidence isn’t just the Tolly Group report showing that Nortel costs less to own than Cisco switches- but they are certainly 41-56% less power consuming than Cisco too.
On Tuesday March 18, the FCC announced that the much-ballyhooed 700 MHz frequency auction had come to a close, having raised roughly $20 billion for the US Treasury. While the winning bidders have not yet been announced and the bidders themselves are forbidden from making public comments for several weeks, the rumor mill has been running overtime.
On the show floor here, situated right beside the huge Cisco booth, a Sarasota, Florida-based start-up is making their first appearance here at VoiceCon. They offer a unique solution that blends hosted service with on-site capabilities for the SMB market.
It's been an exciting week here at VoiceCon, and I've been amazed by the parade of marvelous capabilities I've seen. Unfortunately, I do not see myself finding value from any of those capabilities anytime in the foreseeable future. I'm sorry if this frank assessment bruises the feelings of the dedicated but fundamentally misguided purveyors of these solutions (most of whom don't use these capabilities either), but might I suggest that it's time we got back to basics.
I had breakfast this morning with Scott Hilton and Mike Leo of 3Com, who steadfastly refused to tell what's going to happen when the company reconvenes its shareholders' meeting this Friday to figure out whether and how to go ahead with the private equity buyout of 3Com (assuming they can go ahead). But we did discuss 3Com's global strategy, which will continue to be very China-centric regardless of whether the U.S. government freezes Huawei out of the 3Com deal.
Today, the opening of the conference sessions at VoiceCon, featured a couple of major vendor keynotes--Lou D'Ambrosio, CEO of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President, Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. But I want to start with the type of keynote that's become something of a calling card for VoiceCon and a perennial audience favorite: The end user keynote.
VoiceCon Orlando 2008 is showing some great advances in UC and Convergence solutions. In the UC sessions, customers are clearly in the buying mode. Not only were the UC sessions in Monday and Tuesday well attended, but the questions were very much on the theme of how to implement the solutions. Only a year ago, the questions were still clarifying questions about what is UC and who sells it; here in Orlando in 2008, the questions were about how to proceed and what to buy.
I just read Eric’s report on the Avaya keynote, where he discusses the emphasis that Lou D'Ambrosio placed on customer service during his talk. Eric closed by saying that he was off to see what Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft had to say in the second keynote of the day.
The big news here from Microsoft is the announcement of a strategic alliance with Aspect Software to integrate Aspect's contact center server with Microsoft OCS 2007.
Lou D'Ambrosio just finished his keynote, and his emphasis was on customer service as a key to helping enterprises overcome the fact that, as D'Ambrosio put it bluntly, "We are in an economic slump." And when you get into the nitty-gritty, this has a lot to do with the contact center.
NoJitter reader “Gas bag” commented on news that Cisco will use its TelePresence technology to conference in Al Gore as a keynote speaker at VoiceCon:
OK, I am a bit off my usual topic. But I am also not in my office digging through test files from a clients network or patching up a router’s QoS configuration. Instead I am in a nice room at the Gaylord Palms in Orlando attending the VoiceCon conference. It’s just the first day but it promises to be an exciting week. My most interesting conversation today was with Norman Worthington, who is the CEO of Star2Star communications. They build a distributed PBX. Really!
As usual, I spent my first morning here at VoiceCon doing podcast interviews (they’ll be posted on the VoiceCon website shortly). I got some interesting perspectives on presence from Paul Lopez of NEC (details at this No Jitter blog post), and I also got some more data on contact center attitudes from Tom Chamberlain of Aspect (info about their announcement is here here and here).
If you happen to be skeptical about this whole idea of using enterprise employees as ad hoc contact center agents, you're not the only one.
I had a chance to spend a few minutes with Chris Thompson, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing at Cisco. We crammed a wide range of topics into a half-hour chat, of which I'll talk more as we go along, But the topic that made the deepest impression on me was Chris's discussion of how the state of the economy may affect the industry.
Here's an interesting issue that came up in a podcast interview I did this morning with Paul Lopez, who's GM, Marketing at NEC Unified Solutions. NEC recently made its Univerge 360 announcement around Unified Communications, and in the course of a UC-focused conversation, Paul and I eventually got around to the topic of presence.
Are quality concerns about VoIP a thing of the past? According to a paper from Converge! – “The technological advantages of VoIP are therefore clear. The start of the VoIP takeover has already begun.”
Inter-Tel was a terrific company, but who knew it was almost 3X more valuable than Bear Stearns?
My buddies are funny. They actually do relate to music, art, and better than the generations before them. Then, they bring up good points and arguments about telephony that even I find to be true or truer than most of what today’s generation states what they believe to be as factual.
There’s a difference.
This article about Lou Reed's complaints regarding MP3 sounds quality reminded me of one of the first posts I wrote for this site, about the whole issue of voice quality and sound quality.
Aspect Software has long been a leader in the contact center market, and is now moving into the world of Unified Communications. The company has been busy putting together a plan and strategy “to educate the market on the critical role the contact center must play in the development of an organization's overall unified communications strategy.” As someone who follows both the UC and contact center markets, I’m very happy to hear that companies like Aspect are moving in this direction. Tying in the contact center with UC is practically a no-brainer. The UCStrategies.com team has long been saying that UC is built on many of the fundamentals found in the contact center (i.e.; presence status and awareness – otherwise known as “agent state,” has long been one of the cornerstones of the contact center). It makes sense that a company like Aspect, with such a long history in contact centers, would expand to the UC world.
It looks like US travelers will once again get a chance to WiFi in the sky. Since the demise of Boeing’s “barely available” Connexion service in 2006, when travelers leave the ground they leave their network access behind. The exception is that jerk sitting by the window with his Blackberry who feels his email access is more important than the potential safety of everyone else on the plane.
Back in February, I read Confessions of a Caller-ID Spoofer by Paul McNamara over at Network World.
Caller-ID spoofing is a “feature” in many telephony platforms.
Let me explain further. Showing the main billing number or master directory number listing on digital trunks for outbound calls is an old practice but substituting the number for someone else isn’t. This is what McNamara points out in his article and this substitution is perfectly legal today, probably because it wasn’t given any thought.
Nortel and Microsoft’s Innovative Communications Alliance is a never-ending source of fascination to me. Not so much for the various solutions they introduce, though these are of course interesting in their own right, but for the direction they are clearly trying to move the industry. This direction was crystallized in a few words this week by Ruchi Prasad, Nortel’s VP and GM of the ICA. She drew a line between the current state of business communications affairs, in which a PBX plays such a central role, and the next state where Microsoft is trying to move things by transforming the way voice systems are implemented. It’s something Ruchi called “the transformed state:”
The transformed state is a PBX-less environment. … We are providing a bridge to this transformed environment.
Fifty-three percent of IT executives who participated in the Nemertes benchmark entitled Advanced Communications Services 2008 told us that their organization was already using, or planned to use SIP trunking services in the next 1-3 years, with 26% noting that they were planning for deployment in the 2008-2009 timeframe. For a technology in relative infancy, this was a pretty astounding number.
A few weeks back, I moderated a VoiceCon Webinar sponsored by Mitel, on the topic of "Unified Communications for the Real World." These webinars have a Q&A period, and there are always tons of questions that we don't have time for. The session participants are usually good enough to follow up off-line with the attendees who posed these questions, but the folks at Mitel were kind enough to suggest that we share their answers to some of the webinar questions with our No Jitter audience. You can go to the webinar link above to see and hear a replay of the entire session, and here's some "after the show" Q&A.
Obviously, next week's VoiceCon is a major event for No Jitter. There's a big overlap between the people who run and contribute their expertise to both the conference and the website, so we're all in VoiceCon mode these days. More fundamentally, VoiceCon is the largest event in North America devoted solely to the marketplace that No Jitter covers, so it's one of the major news events of the year for this website.
So if you can’t make it down to Orlando, or if you’re there but can only be in one place at a time, check in on No Jitter frequently throughout the week of March 17 for all of the news on product announcements, keynotes, breakout sessions and exhibits. Most of the No Jitter bloggers will be at the show, and they’ll be offering their insights and experiences throughout the week.
Fred Knight and I were sitting around, enjoying some milk and cookies, and we were trying to figure out why next week's VoiceCon has an unusually large percentage of first-time attendees registered. We're happy about it, of course, but now, one of our major tasks next week is to try and figure out what these newcomers are hoping to find out at the show.
IBM says it'll increase its investments in Unified Communications to $1 billion over the next 3 years, according to several reports. This seems to be a prelude to some important announcements that IBM will be making next week at VoiceCon, where the company will debut Sametime Unified Telephony. IBM won't release details on Sametime Unified Telephony until next week, but if you want to get an idea of where it fits in IBM's larger vision of UC, check out Brent Kelly's No Jitter feature comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM/Lotus Sametime 8.0 here.
Microsoft and Nortel today announced a series of UC integrations between Nortel products and Microsoft OCS; some of these announcements had already dribbled out, or preludes had been announced, but the two vendors have now pulled it all together into a single release. I had a chance to talk with the two companies to get an update on this release and on the progress of the Microsoft-Nortel Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA), their partnership for UC.
Per my Costa Rica post below, Cisco is highlighting a survey indicating a growing demand for IT professionals in Latin America. Cisco worked with IDC to develop the data.
Back on February 19th I posted a note about real-time monitoring and why it is so necessary for supporting voice and video on the enterprise network. Today I want to look at some of the tools and vendors that provide this monitoring, and look at the tradeoffs for using the different methodologies they employ.
Warren Buffet recently stated that the US is likely in a recession. Job elimination is always unpleasant and unfortunately it’s also viewed as the easiest way to shed costs.
Sheila covers the Aspect "UC in the Contact Center" announcement below. Here's a few more thoughts, based on my own briefing with Tom Chamberlain, director of business process marketing at Aspect.
Aspect Software issued a press release today in conjunction with its North American User Group meeting that it is re-positioning the company’s solutions as unified communications for the contact center. A bold statement and, at least for the time being, one that is as much about marketing as it is about delivered solutions.
It must be an off month in mobility, because the biggest thing we have to talk about is money. In particular, it’s the new spate of $99 per month unlimited use cellular plans. Verizon started the ball rolling but AT&T Wireless responded in about a day, and soon thereafter Sprint, T-Mobile, and even regional operator US Cellular jumped in.
I caught up with Jim Milton, the recently named new President and Chief Operating Officer of Intervoice, to talk about his vision of where Intervoice is headed and what has been happening in the past year. Actually, Jim isn’t new; he has been the Executive Vice President and COO since his arrival about two years ago. During his time with the company, Intervoice merged with Edify and acquired the assets of Nuasis. These two events provided the backdrop of our conversation.
Like every website, we at No Jitter track the relevant statistics about ours: Things like number of page views, which pages are viewed, how many visitors we get, and where the traffic is coming from. It's this last one that's got me a bit puzzled.
Not surprisingly, the vast bulk of our traffic comes from the U.S.A. What is surprising is the country that represents our second-largest traffic generator, by a very wide margin: Costa Rica.
We all interpret things differently, and sometimes that’s partially the reason for the pickles we find ourselves in. If you missed Allan Sulkins post on Enterprise Communications Market Enters New Competitive Order then take a moment to review it.
Tis the season – no, not Christmas – VoiceCon! This is the time of year when many vendors contact press and analysts to set up briefings, pre-briefings, and pre-pre-briefings about their VoiceCon announcements. I’ve been involved in several of these pre-briefings over the past couple weeks, and one of the more interesting companies I’ve heard from is Zeacom. I’ve been following Zeacom for several years and was always impressed with some of the unique features of their products. I especially like the personalized call greetings functionality – when I call a particular contact there, the system knows it’s me calling based on my phone number and plays a greeting recorded by that person just for me, and provides me with the option of having the system try to find that person, leave a voice message, or be transferred to someone else. It’s very slick.
We've just posted a new feature from Miercom, which took a close look at two Unified Communications offerings, from Avaya and Alcatel-Lucent. Rob Smithers of Miercom promises similar examinations of additional products in the weeks ahead. Lots of great detail--take a look.
Our latest No Jitter podcast is available here, and on iTunes.
Some highlights:
3Com announced that they'll once again push back their shareholders' meeting, from tomorrow to March 21, to try and salvage the company's private equity buyout by Bain Capital and Huawei Technologies.
Matt's got a really interesting post below about yet another rising fixed cost: Copper's getting more expensive, meaning the cost to wire (or re-wire) will continue rising. The thing that naturally pops into your head when you read this is: Wireless. Of course, that's not an ideal solution either.
The world’s copper supply isn’t meeting the rising demands. In 2006, we were very concerned about the escalating costs and remembering in Save Your Pennies, I brought up that the construction process must change to counter these rising costs and to enhance energy and conservation of natural resources.
Who is going to pick up Siemens Enterprise Communications? It’s a question that’s been asked for nearly two years, but the recent workforce reduction announcement has brought it back to the forefront of my mind. Eric Krapf ran through a list of some of the usual (and not so usual) suspects: Microsoft, Juniper, HP, Oracle, SAP. Possible buyers (or partners if things go the route of joint venture á la Siemens Nokia Networks) are a regularly changing cast of characters. Alcatel-Lucent and Cerberus Capital are the rumored suitors du jour. Two weeks ago it was IBM and HP. Two months ago, Avaya owner Silver Lake. And two years ago, Avaya itself. Nortel is a name that occasionally crops up as well, though they seem to have recently fallen out of the offing.
C-Span’s new weekly half hour interview with people that shape the digital world is “The Communicators.”
On Friday, February 29th- an interview with Walter McCormick, President and CEO of the US Telecom Association was featured.
McCormick stated:
“Hey, you got your PBX in my UC server.”
“No, you got your UC server in my PBX!”
There’s a certain Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup quality to this week’s product announcement from Siemens Enterprise Communications. The company’s new OpenScape Unified Communications Server takes the session control capabilities of its HiPath 8000 software-based SIP communications platform and the presence management of the OpenScape unified communications middleware and sticks them on the same server.
Inventory Slapstick- the life and times of an SMB/E. Who takes care of what?
There are arguments for and against cloud computing. Every one fares differently and I think you too will find similarities in where your eggs reside and in their relationships.
With Siemens' announcement today about the introduction of the new UC Server (blogged by Sheila here), and repositioning/rebranding of HiPath 8000 as OpenScape Voice, I hurried back to review the post I did about six weeks ago, to see if I could read, in reverse, the tea leaves that Mark Straton might have been offering up at the time. I headlined that post, "Is Siemens Conceding the Desktop?" I'm not sure today's announcement answers that question, but some of the hints that Mark dropped a few weeks ago seem relevant today.
Today, at the annual CeBit trade show in Hannover, Germany, Siemens Enterprise Communications announced an architectural transformation, branding changes, and new video capabilities for its unified communications portfolio. OpenScape, a brand previously associated with Siemens’ UC and collaboration application, now becomes the brand associated with all of the company’s software applications (including voice) for the large and medium enterprise market.
Moves, Adds, Changes--for the industry, not individual stations in your network--seem to be full blown for 2008. The tide may turn into a flood of paradigms for the industry that is indeed shaking up.
It can be done--that is, saving 25% on your VoIP energy bill from desktop to data center. That is the conclusion of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Implementing VLANs to separate real-time traffic (voice and video) from data traffic is a good idea. It prevents broadcast storms from impacting voice or video endpoints and provides some security isolation for these components. But it doesn’t provide QoS unless you implement IEEE 802.1p prioirty as well.
JUNE 2008 MAY 2008 APRIL 2008 MARCH 2008 FEBRUARY 2008 JANUARY 2008 DECEMBER 2007
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
SIP trunks could save money and deliver better feature/functionality to IP telephony. But there have been obstacles to overcome. READ MORE »
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