Microsoft's Unified Communications team has leaped on the Cisco purchase of PostPath as a reversal of a previous position about the relative importance of email. I had a chance to talk with Zig Serafin, GM for the Unified Communications Group...

"Habits are things we do without thinking." My father would repeat those words endlessly to my sisters and me when we were kids. Good study habits at school would lead to productive behaviors in the workplace; regular exercise as a...

Yesterday, August 27, Cisco announced agreement to acquire PostPath, a startup in the e-mail and calendar server market. PostPath has produced a web-based messaging engine that reportedly includes emulation of Microsoft Exchange, apparently down to the level of the Exchange...

There’s been a fever in the industry to claim UC as the “thing” to do, hawk and implement. I’ve come to terms to accept UC in the eyes of the users and not the vendors. It seems that the biggest...

This acquisition by Cisco, of a company called PostPath, looks an awful lot like Cisco is gearing up to go head to head with Microsoft's Unified Communications strategy....

Our next VoiceCon webinar (register here) poses a question that has made me think. The Webinar is titled, "Taming the Nomad--How to Accomplish More by Moving Less," and its premise is that the ever-increasing desire for mobility may be tempered...

I was talking with Joe Frost of Psytechnics, about the quality-monitoring company's future directions, and Joe said that they're focusing on monitoring of video endpoints, and that they're not seeing much reason to get into the business of QOS monitoring...

A company called Covergence is out with a gateway that aims right at the problem that any enterprise will face as it plans its migration into Unified Communications: Getting all of the pieces to talk to each other....

As a followup to Building Your Own Power Plant, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned over the past year in our building and energy projects....

I’ve received a few emails about last week’s post on social software and unified communications, so I’d like to expand on some of my comments....

We’re in one of those times when the questions occupying the minds of executives undergo a radical change. Gone are questions like who will win what sporting event or maybe the next management golf tournament. In their place is “What’s...

I've been thinking a lot about social software lately. The UCStrategies.com team is in the process of adding a social software community to our website, and last month I joined the ranks of twitterers (or is it tweeters or twits?)...

For those that are wrestling with how to get more juice to their closets or somehow perform a juggling act with facilities, then supplementing your power with green sources may be the solution. According to Costco, "Green is Gold."...

I'm working on this unified theory of consolidation, about how vendors like Avaya and Nortel ought to be buying not each other, as the earlier rumors had it, but companies in cutting-edge communications like telepresence. Nortel obliged me today by...

Over the past couple of years we’ve seen a tremendous amount of companies merge, be acquired or turn private in our industry. Alcatel bought Lucent, Siemens went private and will be merged with Enterasys, NEC acquired Sphere, Mitel purchased Inter-Tel...

This year SpeechTek competed neither with VoiceCon San Francisco nor my annual trip to the Jersey Shore. Given my office location just 50 miles north of Manhattan, I took the opportunity to drive down to the Marriot Marquis on Monday...

I discussed the telepresence (and video conferencing) global connectivity problem and the solutions from IPV Gateways and Virtela Networks in my last 3 posts. Today let’s look at how Masergy has structured their MPLS network and the Masergy Video Exchange...

Come September, the FCC will decide if and on what basis they will allow use of TV white space for unlicensed or “lightly licensed” operation. The outcome of this decision can have a major impact on the entire wireless market,...

I’ll bet that when you think unified communications companies, Voxeo doesn’t immediately leap into your mind. Until this week they weren’t really positioned in my mind that way either....

In response to the several posts about Microsoft’s appearance in the Visionary section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony, a comment from “Bithead” asked a great question as to "What is visionary?" As a long-time business strategist, I...

From the comments to Brian's latest post, commenter AS147 offers up a really great portrait of an enterprise juggling the issues around implementing IP telephony, with its relatively mundane concerns like Message Waiting Indicators, while also preparing for UC. Read...

Gary Audin and I are doing a Webinar tomorrow with Teresa Dixon of Unimax on how to improve management. Register here....

Here's the complete Gartner Magic Quadrant spiel on Corporate Telephony, the one that Marty blogged about last week, you know, the one that Microsoft made its way into for the first time. I'm posting the link so that you can...

Via Fierce Telecom, we learn that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, may be the company that's been rumored to have approached Tandberg about acquiring the video vendor....

Unknown to me during our budgeting efforts last year for the buildout of our new offices was the cost of new “high tech” lighting. Lighting continues to be a major line item that sends utility bills soaring. Lighting is also...

There’s been a whole lotta analyst hatin’ over on this other NoJitter thread, so please forgive me for being a bit nervous about returning to the topic of Microsoft as a developer of telephony software. I’ll overlook all those disparaging...

For years we’ve heard that the age of ubiquitous video conferencing was just around the corner, but now a perfect storm has formed, driving demand for video conferencing within the enterprise, and causing potential for chaos for network managers....

For the past month, I've listened to the political positioning about energy and oil, so I decided to do some homework. What I found is startling and compelling: According to data published by the U.S. Energy Information Agency and the...

I believe that not soon, but eventually, the IP PBX will become the dominant PBX architecture--sometime after 2010. I am sure there is no single compelling factor that will make my opinion come true. There are many factors that all...

I appreciate Eric's kind words and support. My message on this subject is very simple – enterprise customers need to start thinking differently about communications. They have communications silos in their organizations with staff managing and supporting each of these...

I agree with Eric that PBXs and voice communications are already a major part of business processes. "Call the customer" requires some sort of telephonic voice device--desk, wireless, PC, home, hotel, etc.--and there are a lot of other cases where...

There’s always a besserwisser in the crowd and after receiving a couple of anonymous emails from one claiming to be an IEEE engineer, I brought together again, a collection of forces to help me better understand power factor correction....

Here’s some breaking news! As of last Friday, August 8, Microsoft has entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony. Based on the latest version of the Microsoft Unified Communications suite, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007), Gartner places...

Nortel announced this morning that it's buying Pingtel, which helped pioneer the concept of open source IP telephony. Nortel bought Pingtel from Bluesocket, a wireless LAN company that had, itself, acquired Pingtel last year. Terms were not disclosed....

Last week, Jim Burton wrote a piece entitled, "UC: It's Not About Buying a New IP-PBX." I agree with Jim, which is usually the smart thing to do, but at least to me--Jim may disagree--his mantra doesn't mean that you...

There have been a more than a few articles lately about the value of social networking tools like Facebook and My Space in the work place. One example is The Motley Fool’s July 23rd article, Facebook: Tool or Toy. A...

About a week ago, a member of my household who shall go nameless left both the sliding door and the screen door to the patio wide open for about 2 hours. When this individual returned and saw the doors open,...

While speaking with Polycom the other day about its recently released Converged Management Application, I learned it includes a desktop client that presents end users with the familiar “buddy list” interface so common to unified communications solutions these days. Status...

I’m still working through the issue of how to connect multiple WAN providers to get the best global connectivity for Telepresence. I described the problem in this post, and then last week discussed one solution in this post. A few...

Today, GIPS (Global IP Solutions), a leader in IP media processing, announced it is enabling VoIP for Apple's iPhone. Using the GIPS VoiceEngine Mobile, allows application developers to quickly integrate real-time VoIP applications....

I've observed lots of discussions about Unified Communications on the web this summer, and am convinced that the reason this dialogue continues after several years comes down to one thing: Positioning. To be perceived as thought leaders in the UC...

Via Moz@Work, some telephone art....

In yesterday's VoiceCon webinar with Hardy Myers of AVST and Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion, the focus was on implementation of Unified Messaging as a way to gain some quick productivity benefits. UM isn't the same thing as UC (Unified Communications),...

This article discusses an Aberdeen research report whose key finding is that almost a quarter of contact centers already use Unified Communications. According to the article, Aberdeen defines UC as "the convergence of such technologies as instant messaging, e-mail ,...

When you talk to the CEO of a company that makes PBX, IVR, ACD and similar kinds of software, and you talk about their competitors, you expect names like Avaya or Nortel or Cisco to come up. But when I...

For any enterprise users who have the misfortune of dealing with the cellular carriers, our headline should come as no surprise. In their ongoing effort to pump every dime out of their customers while making no attempt to deliver any...

An article in the print version of Telecom Reseller (couldn’t find it online) caught my attention, on NEC’s reported 64% growth in hospitality sales. Kevin Ruhman is NEC’s Director of Hospitality Market and he was kind enough to speak to...

Toshiba has always had a strong position in the small-business market for PBXs and now IP telephony, but the company today announced a new product release that scales into a higher tier....

Jay Brandstadter on UC definitions at UCStrategies.com Our sister site, ChannelWeb, with an excellent, detailed look at VOIP Security....

For August, I’ll be reporting on energy and what we’ve done at Telecomworx to trim our energy consumption and improve our energy efficiency....

Connecting telepresence across the globe may require the services of more than one WAN service provider. I discussed this in detail in last week’s post, and talked about the problems that this presents. Today I want to take a look...

Earlier this week Alcatel-Lucent announced that CEO Pat Russo and chairman, Serge the Merge Tchuruk would be leaving the organization. The departures of these executives were no real surprise to people that have followed “Lucatel” since the two companies merged....

There’s a lot of undefined and multiply-defined things in our industry, so picking on unified communications for lack of definitional rigor might be considered unfair. On the other hand, everyone seems to be waiting for UC to “take off” and...

Last week's post on human latency got things cooking here, because my description of the concept of human latency really didn't do justice to the concept the way that (as it turns out) most people see it. Brent Kelly, Marty...

For some of the most storied names in telecommunications, yesterday was both an end and a beginning. The spin-off of Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN) and a leadership shake-up at Alcatel-Lucent, both a long-time coming, are finally under way, and the...