The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.
UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.
This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.
This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.
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UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.
A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.
Hosted VoIP has been with us for years, so we do have proof-of-concept in terms of handling real-time communications. Recently we’ve been seeing cloud plans escalate to more comprehensive UC deployments, along with niche solutions such as the contact center. Clearly, the cloud has gained a new level of currency for communications applications.
One of the main differences between our solution and some others is that applications can be migrated from our data centers to premise environments if and when a business’ needs change, which gives our customers long-term investment protection. We believe this is why our cloud business is growing significantly faster than the market as a whole. For the full year 2011, Interactive Intelligence cloud revenues were up 96% and cloud orders grew 179%, year-over-year.
This In the Spotlight interview features Paul Weber, who is the Vice President of North American Sales for Interactive Intelligence Group, and today we are going to talk about Partner Recruitment.
Customer interaction analytics, or “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) analytics as it is more commonly being referred to in an age where customer centricity is almost synonymous with viability, is the framework that provides real tangible facts about the customer experience. VoC analytics looks at the entire customer experience.
While the big vendors have been making the biggest noise, the most interesting developments seem to be coming out of the smaller vendors. A good case in point is Mitel, which has a mobility line up that is as deep as the majors and includes some capabilities that really separate them from the pack.
We can see two solutions moving fast towards each other like two storms, while actually enabling one another to create new innovative solutions: cloud technology and mobile technology. Cloud evolution is enabled by mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets that need something that connects them to the enterprise. Mobile technology, led by smartphones and tablets, makes the business case for enterprises who are investigating cloud services such as Google Apps and others more interesting as they enable the mobile users to become truly efficient.
With the cloud being one of the leading trends now in communications, it’s little surprise to see this extending to contact centers. Hosted contact center solutions are not really new, but where things get interesting is when Unified Communications is added to the mix. There are several intriguing story lines around this, and enterprises need to carefully navigate their options when evaluating cloud-based solutions. Part 1 in a series.
OpenScape UC Suite 2011 moves Siemens from being a UC vendor to a UC and collaboration (UCC) vendor, so one of the core themes was the addition of new collaboration offerings, with the intent of making rich, enterprise-grade, multimedia collaboration solutions as simple to use as sending an email.
Real-time communications is undergoing a transformation from siloed dedicated solutions to become key anchor components within Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) solutions from many vendors, deployed across enterprises and their business networks. To facilitate this performance-sensitive transformation, NET has extended its 20+ years of successful delivery of high-quality mediation platforms into its next generation – the Universal Exchange.
Recently, Verint added to its UC Analytics offerings with the introduction of “Customer Interaction Analytics,” which speaks to the combination of speech, text, and data analytics and customer feedback surveys. As an element of UC Analytics, Customer Interaction Analytics helps organizations identify and address sales, service, and operational issues based on analysis and intelligence derived from all customer touch points (voice, email, blogs, social media, etc.) across the enterprise.
When you see all the mergers and acquisitions taking place in the telecommunications industry, do you ever get the impression that some of these companies are playing “Fantasy UC?”
Recapping the forum discussion on Expert Agents and UC - what are the issues, challenges, and how can companies overcome them.
Jim Burton2009 07 02
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jamie Ryan, CIO of Aspect, about Aspect’s experiences with unified communications, particularly Microsoft OCS. As you probably know, Aspect has made a major push into the world of UC both as a