In The Spotlight (What's This?)

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Don Brown, of Interactive Intelligence, discusses CBPA with Pam Avila of UCStrategies.com

Every now and then something in our industry has the potential to make customers sit up and have an “ah ha” moment. After talking with Dr. Don Brown, president and CEO of Interactive Intelligence , Inc. I believe that an “ah

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The Hard ROI to Unified Communications

Interactive Intelligence president and CEO, Don Brown, views the hard ROI of unified communications differently than most people. Watch more of Brown’s keynote address from ITEXPO Fall 2009 below.  

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UC, Mobility, and CEBP Integration Becoming Primary Purchase Factors For IP Telephony

The industry press has been filled with recent reports about Nortel customers being faced with the challenge of having their legacy Nortel phone systems converted to future Avaya systems. However, what Nortel user organizations are really facing reflects what all enterprise organizations are dealing with today. That is, the new role of “intelligent,” software-based IP Telephony as a foundational component of mobile, multimodal unified communications (UC) that integrate with enterprise applications to “optimize business process performance” and effectiveness. Leading telephony system providers recognize that the flexibility of communication interfaces is becoming critical, and they are converging their new IP Telephony offerings with other text-based communications. One example of this is NEC. 

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NET Delivers Valuable SIP Phone Options for Microsoft OCS

Network Equipment Technologies – NET – is adding even more value to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS). In addition to the enhancements now available with the NET VXe Series Voice Switches delivered last October, NET will formally announce its new SmartSIP module to support connection of a wide variety of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) phones to Microsoft OCS. Availability of SmartSIP is expected almost immediately, in April 2010.

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Actionable Intelligence Through UC

In today’s economic climate, information has never been more critical to business – information about customers, employees, and about how processes are working or not working. In fact, the very success of an organization can often be tied to how much information it collects and, more importantly, how well it analyzes this information for key trends to drive its business forward.

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Our Views on the Avaya-Nortel Roadmap

In a recent podcast, the UCStrategies team weighed in on the Avaya road map and what the Avaya acquisition of Nortel means for the end-user community, the Nortel customer base, and the Nortel channel partners.

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“No, It’s More!” - NEC UNIVERGE® Sphericall® for IBM Lotus Foundations: A different approach to Unified Communications

Today, NEC took a leap forward in Unified Communications for Small and Mid-sized Businesses (SMBs). In what may be the biggest announcement at one of the industry’s biggest shows, the annual IBM Lotusphere, NEC announced that its open, software-based Unified Communications (UC) platform, Sphericall, is fully integrated with IBM’s Lotus Foundations platform for SMB collaboration and business applications.

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The Five Key Questions About Session Border Controllers

After establishing their position in the consumer market, IP telephony services are poised to make the jump into the enterprise space. Certainly the growing use of IP-based PBX systems has paved the way for that migration, but the growing interest in SIP trunking services indicates that the shift to IP telephony is extending into network services as well. That change is bringing the session border controller (SBC) into the lexicon of telecom services, and it is a device that will play a critical role in the deployment of those services.

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Large Enterprise Deployments Full of Challenges

Whether a customer is looking for a way to make their mobile sales force more productive and hence generate more revenue, or reduce product development time and speed up time to market, there are cost-effective solutions available. But most customers have already made a significant investment in their voice and data infrastructure, not to mention the voice systems themselves. The good news is that many of the solutions available today rely on open architecture and industry standards to make them compatible with existing systems and infrastructure. 

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NET’s One Number Fax: The Gateway Between the Past and the Future

One oft-overlooked dimension of unified communications (UC) is unifying the past with the present. While enterprises are advancing their deployments of software-based, integrated communications capabilities that link voice, video, email, collaboration, and text, many area of the business world still depend on technologies that date from decades past. Facsimile clearly falls into that category.

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Simplicity – The IBM Sametime 8.5 Formula for Delivering Results

If your company is like most, when you spend money on something, you want results! This is a pretty basic concept that applies in every industry segment and every organization size. No expected results, no spending, right? The IBM Sametime team has taken this challenge to heart: “Simplicity,” but with rich functionality, is the central theme of their latest release, Sametime 8.5.

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NET Set to Simplify Microsoft OCS Deployments

UCStrategies.com got a preview of a new version of the new NET VX Series enhancements due out in early Q4 2009.  In summary, this is a real deployment simplification, with some total cost of ownership (TCO) savings thrown in.  It’s certainly worth a look for any company planning or expanding their Unified Communications (UC) deployment using Microsoft Office Communications Server.

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Talking About Expert Agents

Recapping the forum discussion on Expert Agents and UC - what are the issues, challenges, and how can companies overcome them.

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Do You Care About Business Process Automation? You Should!

It is UC-B that carries the potential for the strongest ROI because it has the greatest impact on the efficiencies of the business. 

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IPA Video

Jim Burton2009 07 02

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The US Market for Fixed Mobile Convergence and Mobile Unified Communications

The enterprise telecommunicationsmarket is in the midst of a fundamental restructuring in terms of technology,applications, and market participants. The technology shift has come about fromthe migration to IP based solutions for voice and video in combination with themerger of previously

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What to Look for in Intelligent Gateways

In their UC deployments, organizations are moving towards a centralized call processing model that leverages the converged IP network to reduce costs. However, careful planning and the right tools will be needed to consolidate infrastructure at the