The explosion of new hosted and cloud communications offerings can be confounding. With the potential for cost savings and productivity enhancements, adopting the right Hosted PBX solution can make a dramatic impact on your business performance. But Buyer Beware: not all hosted services are created equal. In this webinar, you will learn how to make sense of the array of Hosted PBX offerings and hone in on the key elements to look for in an enterprise-grade hosted solution. Takeaways include: why enterprise communications is undergoing a revolutionary shift to hosted solutions, understanding the pros and cons of hosted versus premise-based PBXs and not all hosted PBX solutions are created equal—how to define your enterprise’s requirements and find a provider who can deliver what you need. After attending this webinar, you’ll be able to make sense of hosted PBX offerings and be ready to make the strategic move to Hosted PBX. Sponsored by XO Communications.

SIP Trunking and unified communications strategies are important components of enterprise telecommunication strategies. Enterprise Session Border Controllers (E-SBCs) play a critical role in maximizing the return on an SIP Trunk project and enabling the vision of unified communications within the enterprise. They protect enterprise networks from security threats, manage incompatibilities between UC systems and network services and ensure service quality and reliability. Join this webinar sponsored by Acme Packet for a discussion of the direct and indirect economic contributions E-SBCs delivery to the enterprise. Forrester Research principal analyst Art Schoeller will provide an overview of trends in enterprise SIP Trunking and unified communications adoption as well as exploring the role SBCs play in realizing the benefits of all IP communications within the enterprise. Sponsored by Acme Packet.

Unified Communications (UC) is becoming mainstream in the enterprise, enabling real-time, collaborative communications via a host of new media and applications. But this transition will bring challenges for securing these new communications. Among the key challenges are SIP Trunks and the enablement of remote workers. By connecting their UC networks to service providers and untrusted public networks via Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks, enterprises are exposing their networks, users and sensitive data to a new class of security threats. These can allow remote hackers to eavesdrop on enterprise communications, launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, and take over mobile devices to steal and alter confidential data. Further challenging UC in the enterprise is the escalating trend of the consumerization of IT, with staff using personal smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices for work communications (BYOD). In this webinar, two leading subject matter experts, representing the end user and technology provider communities, will help you understand the threats in detail, and will offer specific recommendations for how you can mitigate these threats. You’ll come away from this session with a to-do list of items that will help you harden your next-generation communications environment against potential security threats. Sponsored by Avaya.

In a world of touch 'n swipe interfaces brought about by the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, personal video is likely to have significant impact in the enterprise in the not too distant future. How should organizations plan for personal video? Will it need to interoperate with group or telepresence video? How should organizations prepare in terms of infrastructure, scale, management, and integration into their overall communications fabric and their daily business? How will the end users be impacted, and what can they look forward to? Industry analyst and UC expert Brent Kelly from Constellation Research will join Terry Robinson, Global Video Collaboration Marketing Manager at Avaya on Wednesday, April 11 at 2:00 p.m. ET to discuss these issues and to interact to interested participants through a Q&A format. Sponsored by Avaya.

By some estimates, HALF of customers experiencing problems or frustrations will not contact you for help--and 60% of them will not do business with you again. Yet, over 80% of customers with even major problems become loyal if their problems are resolved quickly. No matter your business or business model, reaching out to customers is critical. The challenge: how to blend outbound calling, web chat, mobile/texting apps and other out-reach media into your contact center. In this webinar, contact center expert Sheila McGee Smith brings you up to date on best practices for the outbound or blended contact center. Sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications.

As the benefits of social business become clear and the case for social business grows more compelling, enterprises are looking for approaches that allow them to cost-effectively roll out these systems, so as to capture these benefits quickly, and rapidly gain positive ROI and productivity benefits. Join this Webinar to see how other companies are approaching social business and embracing the spirit of collaboration and community . internally and externally . to deliver unprecedented return for the time invested. You'll hear about how IBM is leading the way with its SmartCloud for Social Business services, and you'll gain insight into the keys to becoming a social business and the advantages of moving to the cloud. Sponsored by IBM.

For employees away from the office - whether on the go, at a remote location, or telecommuting from home - success depends on connecting the right people with the right information anywhere to accelerate business. In this webinar you will see how Avaya provides employees with tools that mirror the office work environment, with all of the features they need to communicate faster, smarter, and cost-effectively. Avaya mobile collaboration solutions help ensure employees stay available and productive, no matter where they work. To help you understand the challenges and how you can solve them, Avaya's Lawrence Byrd is joined in this session by well-known enterprise mobility expert Michael Finneran of dBm Associates and UCStrategies.com.

Have your video implementation projects fallen short of your expectations in user satisfaction or utilization? Reaping the benefits depends on not only on selecting the technology, but on careful planning, management and adoption programs that fit your unique business. In this webinar, Ira Weinstein, Wainhouse Research and David Danto, Dimension Data will reveal the keys to a successful video rollout. You’ll discover reasons organizations fail to achieve desired results, industry trends that affect your investment decisions, how to overcome typical video deployment challenges, methods for improving the user experience and adoption and proven strategies for maximizing return on investment.

As your enterprise moves into its Unified Communications migration, you’ll need to meet short-, medium- and long-term goals that provide investment protection, return on investment, and real business value. In this Enterprise Connect webinar, two industry veterans with a wealth of real-world experience will share their tales from the trenches, offering real-world lessons from actual deployments that they’ve been involved in. They’ll use these examples to draw conclusions that you can apply in your own enterprise, on everything from network planning to security to company organizational issues, and lots more. Sponsored by Black Box Network Services.

Industry is ramping up to build private and public cloud infrastructures in an effort to realize the operational efficiencies and cost savings achieved through server consolidation. However, server virtualization is not without its risks. Traffic and I/O requests driven by an increasing number of virtual servers places tremendous stress and higher performance requirements across the end-to-end data center network. Careful planning and pre-deployment risk assessment are necessary to understand how to squeeze the most out of server resources without compromising the reliability and performance of supported applications and services. Enterprise IT also needs comparative performance information to assist them in product differentiation and critical purchase decisions. Today’s data center Ethernet fabric network design implementations require low latency and power consumption and the ability to scale both north-south and east-west flows, all with a minimum number of network tiers. This presentation reviews best practices and tools for implementing data center clouds, including how to pin-point and resolve problems, and minimize cost while maximizing performance and usability. We will discuss new performance benchmarks for evaluating data center switches and adapters functioning in converged and virtualized data centers. Industry expert Nick Lippis will share new test results from multiple vendors for core and edge 10GbE and 40GbE switches. The session includes a 15-minute live question and answer period with experts from Extreme Networks, Ixia, Infonetics and the Lippis Report. Sponsored by Extreme Networks.

Cutting expenses and doing more with less is the mantra of the day. Telecom and IT departments are looking toward self-service management and automation strategies as a solution. Telecom equipment vendors offer some self-service capabilities but often times give end-users too many options with little direction. This creates confusion and causes the system administrator to trouble-shoot even more problems. What is needed is a solution that allows an organization to define exactly what an end-user can self-manage and user friendly tools to make it possible. This webinar will focus on the strategies, best practices, and technology surrounding self-service telecom management. The webinar will feature a live enterprise case study presented by Steve Mifsud, Automation and Support Manager, Royal Bank of Canada. Sponsored by Unimax.

Most organizations today cannot tolerate a slow network and know that business and employee productivity plummets when the end users experience slow application delivery, dropped VoIP calls, connectivity bottlenecks and overall poor performance! But slow networks don’t happen by accident. In this webinar we will review the three top reasons why the network is slow and provide insight into why the problem is occurring and how to resolve it. This webinar will also discuss how the networking team can more effectively demonstrate when the performance problems are not occurring because of the network, but another issue. Join AppNeta CTO Matt Stevens and Terry Slattery, principal consultant at Chesapeake NetCraftsmen, to learn how to ensure that your network is prepared to handle business critical applications, your end users are happy, and you have an answer to why “The Network is Slow!”

As more enterprises look to take advantage of hosted or “cloud ” communications services, they realize that up-front planning is essential to ensure a seamless and smooth implementation. IT and network managers who have made this transition for their companies realize the importance of planning and identifying the network infrastructure, functional and feature requirements before they made the transition from a premise-based PBX to a hosted IP-PBX solution. In this webinar, you’ll hear from experts with deep real-world experience, who will walk you through the steps you’ll need to take in order to ensure that a successful migration to a hosted IP-PBX infrastructure. Sponsored by XO Communications and Polycom.

Cloud-based contact center solutions can provide significant savings when compared to the TCO of premise-based contact center solutions. In this webinar, call center expert Sheila McGee-Smith will bring you up to date on the state of cloud-based contact centers; and Donald Greco, Director of Siemens Enterprise Communications’ Customer Interaction Practice, will compare the TCO of cloud- and premise-based contact center solutions. You’ll leave with a clear view of what’s possible via the cloud and how to evaluate the financial effects for your contact center. This Webinar is sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications.

Enterprises face a number of opportunities and diverse challenges as they try to streamline communication/collaboration and be fiscally responsible to management and shareholders by efficiently controlling costs, while also managing major technology change. These challenges plus the need to accelerate innovation and improve agility are driving major changes to the IT and telecommunication environment of the organization. Microsoft Lync 2010 is the next generation of Unified Communications solutions helping people connect in new ways. A Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Lync Server shows that an organization with 5,000 information workers can realize benefits totaling more than $18M in three years with a ROI of 337% by implementing Lync. Microsoft solution is in the Leaders quadrant of the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. Lync brings together an ecosystem of partners from systems integrators, ISVs, hardware and infrastructure partners, and key members of these communities will take part in the next Enterprise Connect webinar, on Lync implementation. Attend this webinar to hear leaders from Microsoft and two of its leading Lync partners, Unify Square and NET, discuss how Lync is helping large enterprise companies transform their businesses. You also will learn about the new Solutions and Deployment best practices, for successful large scale global enterprise deployments. Sponsored by NET.

Businesses are always interested in improving the way customers can contact them, especially if this can be achieved cost-effectively. One contact channel that holds much potential is the ability to direct calls from the growing Skype community to your SIP-based PBX or UC platform. Given that Skype has over 145 million average monthly connected users, tapping into this channel promises major business benefits to the enterprise. Attend this webinar to hear about the latest trends in cloud communications and how businesses can connect to the Skype community without having to replace their existing infrastructure.

The latest generation of video conferencing solutions is leading to unparalleled productivity and richer communications, helping to explain the explosion of real-time video-based services on enterprise networks today. Performance sensitive applications such as video conferencing are critically dependent on the health of the network--and if you can't see how it is performing, how do you ensure that your calls and video conferences won't degrade, or get dropped completely? But the interaction between video-conferencing and your network is a two-way street. While key network performance and quality metrics must be measured and managed in order to deliver consistent and predictable call quality from your designated video conference rooms, understanding the use and associated network impact of impromptu desktop-to-desktop video calls on your network (video sprawl...) is also important for overall successful service delivery. This webinar will cover best practices for ensuring your network is up to the task of supporting your video-conference deployments. The webinar will discuss the challenges faced when managing network performance specifically for video-conferencing and how to resolve these issues. AppNeta CTO Matt Stevens and John Bartlett of NetForecast will be your hosts for this session.

In this webinar, you will get an understanding of all the factors you need to consider in order to ensure interoperability of all your network elements over a SIP Trunk-based wide area network. A leading consultant with extensive real-world deployment experience will provide a catalogue of the issues and pitfalls, and will spell out the elements that must be integrated as part of a SIP Trunk implementation, describing the challenges and offering solutions. He'll be joined by a leading service provider's representative, who will provide in-depth description and illustration of what a successful, truly integrated SIP Trunk deployment looks like. They'll also answer your questions. You'll walk away from this webinar with a clear idea of the steps you need to take in order to ensure that your SIP Trunking deployment succeeds. Sponsored by XO Communications.

The business case for SIP and Unified Communications is increasingly compelling, with high expectations for significant cost reductions and increased productivity. But once deployed, turning these expectations into reality is often the biggest challenge. SIP, UC, and VoIP networks often add complexity with an array of different elements from different vendors, as well as increasing demand for voice quality, performance, capacity, support, and service level compliance. To tackle these challenges, enterprises need end-to-end management and unified visibility over every location in the network to isolate and troubleshoot issues with QoS, performance, faults, and SLAs. Deep visibility is also needed throughout the entire "stack," from the network and session layers right up through the application-from SIP at the core to the softphone at the edge. In this webinar, Nemertes Research Principal Research Analyst John Burke is joined by Tone Software Director of Strategic Technology Advancement Amit Kapoor, to detail what it takes to actually implement this level of unified visibility and management, the standards and tools required, and how to make the business case for deploying these tools. You'll come away from the webinar with an action plan for specifying and deploying holistic end-to-end management that helps ensure you can deliver the expected ROI from SIP and UC based communications.

What's the true state of real-time communications security in 2011? Which are the most serious threats to your enterprise and customers, and which are still, at this stage, more distant prospects?Several industry reports have emerged since the late 1990s detailing real-world, measured security issues and threat levels associated with traditional data networks and IP-based communications. These reports play an important role in profiling and measuring IP and data network threats and incident levels to help guide corporate security decision making, while educating the public at large. Interestingly, a dearth of attack and threat data for voice/UC communications exists, even though voice technologies pre-date IP systems by more than 100 years. A new industry report and webinar from SecureLogix changes this. In this webinar, we will discuss the current, real-world state of security in the realms of enterprise Voice and Unified Communications (UC). Leading security experts from SecureLogix will present real-world findings drawn from documented and observed operational attacks against U.S. corporations over the past year, and compare them with data observed over the past 10 years where relevant.

Today's leading applications are more performance sensitive than ever before. Performance sensitive applications such as VoIP, Video and other UC services are critically dependent on the health of the network - and if you can't see how it is performing, how do you ensure that your calls and video conferences won't degrade, or get dropped completely? As organizations transition from traditional network infrastructure to remotely distributed applications and cloud-based communications services, they are at risk of serious performance problems like latency, loss and jitter. When these parameters are not carefully managed, VoIP & videoconference calls experience serious problems and often fail abruptly. This webinar will cover the challenges of successfully preparing for and rolling out performance sensitive communication services like VoIP, Video and other internet based applications. Apparent Networks CTO Matt Stevens will discuss best practices for ensuring successful deployments, and remotely managing the performance of Unified Communication services at and from remote locations.

Much has been discussed regarding the integration of IP-PBX and Unified Communication features with mobile phones, and how a seamless mobility solution can drive increased productivity. Features such as single number, single voicemail, PBX feature extension, and abbreviated dialing are often most touted as productivity enhancers. However, while those benefits are real, it's often difficult for IT managers to justify investing in them, as the cost benefits are often "soft" - i.e., they do not result in a direct benefit to the bottom line. This webinar will not focus on those soft benefits - rather, it will examine a number of customer scenarios where mobile integration solved a vexing business problem, enabled the customer to clearly reduce their operational costs, or both! Discussion will hit on a number of verticals, such as healthcare, professional services, manufacturing, and service industries, where features such as call recording, call tracking, and call masking all led to a clear ROI. Presenters will also review how to cost effectively eliminate desk phones and move on-the-go employees to a mobile-only environment with no loss of functionality or connectivity. Please join Al Leo, Vice President - Sales and Business Development, Tango Networks, and Brian Gregory, General Manager, Convergence Marketing, Sprint, on Wednesday, February 16, for an informative discussion on the flexibility, new utilities and solid business benefits of mobile integration.

Unified Communications (UC) is new to many organizations and deployments are complex. Nemertes Research has surveyed over 1,000 companies and found that capital costs account for only 38% of the total first-year expenditure, and only 19% when looking at total cost of ownership over 5 years. Yet, despite this relatively small portion of the total costs, IT staffs tend to focus on capital rather than deployment and operational costs. Nemertes has also found that one of the biggest keys to success is having specialist management tools in place from scratch. Not only do specialty management tools help improve performance; their use correlates with significantly lower implementation and operational costs for both single- and multi-vendor implementations throughout the entire communications platform lifecycle. In this webinar, Nemertes and VOSS Solutions discuss how organizations can achieve a greater return on their VoIP and UC investment by using specialty management tools. Robin Gareiss, EVP and cofounder at Nemertes will present her research findings, and Christopher May of VOSS Solutions will provide real life examples of how organizations have saved over $500 per end unit, per year.

Unified Communications (UC) is a requirement for most large enterprises looking to deploy new communications solutions. But is UC applicable for smaller organizations as well? Do they need it, and, more importantly, can they afford it? Historically, many SMBs assumed a UC solution was infeasible for their business due to lack of resources, both financial and personnel. This is no longer the case as vendors are developing UC offerings that are targeted for SMBs with functionality and pricing that can be implemented and scaled as a business grows. Now, UC can be an evolutionary process, allowing companies to start with a solution that meets their basic needs and add capabilities over time. In this webinar, Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst from COMMfusion, and Gary Mading, Senior Product Manager from Aastra, will focus on what SMBs are looking for from UC applications and how these applications can help them meet their business challenges including: Doing "more with less" - improving productivity, support for a mobile workforce, limited IT staff and budgets, empowering workers with increased access to information and improving customer responsiveness. Join us for this informative webinar to learn how to build a UC Business Case for your small or mid-sized business.

It's a challenge keeping up with all the ways we can "connect" with someone, via: desk phone, cell phone, email, IM, Facebook or a tweet. With all the different devices, contact directories, user interfaces and underlying technologies, it is time-consuming just managing it all. New classes of enterprise devices are emerging to help users integrate all of these media, connectivity options and user interfaces, and bring together all of these communications channels in an easy-to-use format. Portable devices with wireless connectivity and desktop-docking options are leading the way, by offering exceptionally high-quality audio and video, along with touch-screen interfaces that offer a consistent user experience no matter where the user is, and what network he or she connects over. In this webinar, leading industry technologists and analysts will help you understand the technology and business case that underlie these new devices. You'll learn how the new generation of computing devices provide higher-quality communications while sharply reducing the bandwidth requirements that traditional devices imposed for applications like videoconferencing. You'll also get an understanding of how to make the business case for deploying this new generation of devices within your enterprise. Sponsored by Intel.

In this webinar, Mark Collier, CTO and Vice President of Engineering for SecureLogix Corp. and long-time Enterprise Connect voice security expert presenter will help you understand how to recognize, profile, and protect against TDOS attacks and fraud schemes inside your business. You'll come away from the webinar with the very latest in TDOS attack profiles and growth trends, an understanding of why TDOS attacks are expanding so rapidly and the implications for your business, very recent real-world examples of TDOS based fraud schemes and other attacks that can be used to identify TDOS activity in your network and an awareness of best practices and TDOS prevention solutions to help ensure the integrity of your business operations.

In the current economy, IT departments must ensure that all new projects align with business goals. So how do you prove that your proposed IPT/UC project delivers true business value? The best way to successfully present the benefits of IP telephony and Unified Communications to management decision makers is with a business case that demonstrates how IPT and UC offer both immediate cost savings, as well as longer-term total cost of ownership and business process benefits. The areas of potential savings with IPT and UC are so numerous and diverse, that you risk not capturing the full cost benefits and strengths in your business case. In this webinar, Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner of Nemertes Research and Kevin Gavin, Vice President of Marketing at ShoreTel will help you frame the business case equation and identify all the ways in which your enterprise can benefit from IPT/UC.