UC Expert Views

To help you make informed decisions about Unified Communications technologies, UCStrategies provides articles, viewpoints, and a cornucopia of information from the industry's leading analysts and consultants, chosen for expertise in their selected areas to help you better understand the dynamic UC arena.



Putting Technology to Work

By Dave Michels January 25, 2012

Technology evaluations are inherently an internal process and evaluation for fit and ROI. However, the evaluation or conversation can benefit others. Interactive Intelligence is taking the initiative to make the conversation more meaningful. It’s a a bold idea, and so much more meaningful than a logo’d trinket.

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

How Goats Could Help Make Contact Centers More Productive

By Jon Arnold January 19, 2012

Interactive Intelligence has been running a very interesting program that brings the worlds of technology and charity closer together in a unique way

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

AVST Debuts AVST Mobile

By Michael F. Finneran November 14, 2011

Unified Messaging/Unified Communications vendor AVST has introduced mobile clients for the Apple iOS and Android smartphone platforms called AVST Mobile along with the new CallXpress Release 8.2. 

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Related UC Vendors: AVST, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Mitel, Alcatel-Lucent, ShoreTel, Microsoft

NET UX1000 - Preview Podcast

By Russell Bennett November 3, 2011

The UX1000 solves a range of problems being presented to the IT Architect when faced with building a branch office network for the UC era.

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Related UC Vendors: NET

How To Go Social With Your Contact Center

By Jason Andersson October 25, 2011

Your company meets the criteria for adding social media to your customer service operations. So how do you do it? What steps do you need to take to successfully implement a customer-winning social media customer service entry?

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

Back to Basics Before Going Social

By Blair Pleasant October 17, 2011

As social media gets all of the attention these days, it’s important to understand why customers are turning to social media for customer service and support. If you’re not servicing customers properly through the channels they are more likely to use today, adding social media won’t be enough.

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

Social Media in the Contact Center: Hype or Strategy?

By Nancy Jamison October 11, 2011

Now is the time to determine if the use of social media as a contact center channel is hype or the right strategy for your company.

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

New NET UX1000 Is Purpose-Built For Small and Midsize Branches Offices and Small Businesses

By Marty Parker July 11, 2011

The NET UX1000 continues NET’s commitment to delivering effective networking and connectivity solutions for enterprises of all sizes, and especially for small and midsized business and branches. The UX1000 combination of packaging and functionality should be an appealing choice for business locations with as few as 10 to as many as 400 employees.

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Related UC Vendors: NET

Solution Review: Siemens Enterprise Communications OpenScape Session Border Controller

By Russell Bennett June 13, 2011

Siemens OpenScape Voice, which was launched in 2003, was the first end-to-end UC system to become available and is designed to match the pace of work and the dynamic nature of modern organizational structures. However, these organizational dynamics are not limited to single sites or single networks: A UC system that can only operate within the corporate network significantly limits the ROI that can be achieved with UC, and since UC is not ubiquitous, a UC system must provide access to the PSTN. Nevertheless, the well understood risks of malicious attack from the public Internet make the extension of collaboration beyond the corporate firewalls a risky and difficult undertaking. For these reasons, Siemens Enterprise Communications (Siemens) has just announced the OpenScape Session Border Controller (SBC).

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Related UC Vendors: Siemens Enterprise Communications

Lessons from Large Scale UC Deployments: The Role of Enterprise SBCs in Hybrid UC Networks

By Lisa Pierce June 2, 2011

When considering a migration to Unified Communications (UC), businesses encounter many problems that they must work through. Since most companies have some amount of legacy voice technology in place, they often want to maximize their current investment, and express great interest in using solutions that meld legacy and UC technology. But creating these kind of hybrid environments to interwork properly, at scale, can be challenging. This brief examines how the prudent implementation of Session Border Controllers in the enterprise (E-SBCs) can be used to ameliorate two common types of problems that exist in hybrid UC environments

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Related UC Vendors: Acme Packet

SIP Trunking: How the NET UX2000 Helps Balance Risk and Reward

By Russell Bennett May 23, 2011

Dealing with the world of SIP Trunking as we find it means that the UC Architect should consider deploying a SIP Trunking gateway with an embedded E-SBC such as the innovative, highly scalable and highly adaptable NET UX2000. This device enables the enterprise to facilitate interoperability with various SIP Trunk services; to leverage least cost routing across a range of service providers as well as to defend the corporate network against unauthorized intrusion.

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Related UC Vendors: NET

CaaS – Predictability Brings Peace of Mind to Contact Center Deployments

By Nancy Jamison May 5, 2011

With many attractive attributes in a hosted model, it’s no wonder that there is so much talk, innovation, and growth in cloud deployments. In this series Lisa Pierce, talked about flexibility as an attribute of a hosted solution, and Andy Zmolek discussed security. I believe that predictability cannot be undersold.

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

Achieving Greater Flexibility in Contact Center Operations

By Lisa Pierce April 28, 2011

Given the recent state of the economy, few contact centers can afford big system upgrades—there are simply too many pressing demands on available cash. The good news is that cloud-based solutions provide functionality on a “lease” (versus purchase) model, so contact centers can migrate to state of the art technology and preserve cash to support other important company objectives.  

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

Securing Cloud-Based Contact Center Solutions

By Andy Zmolek April 21, 2011

Now that UC contact center services are increasingly moving into the cloud, I thought it might be a good idea to investigate how one cloud-based contact center solution provider is tackling these security challenges with their customers. Interactive Intelligence offers a broad range of security capabilities across their solution offerings, and the deployment flexibility of their cloud-based solutions enables customers to keep sensitive databases local or even terminate calls and store recordings locally. Part 2 in a series.

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Related UC Vendors: Interactive Intelligence

AudioCodes Meets the Complex Needs of Connecting UC Solutions

By David Yedwab March 2, 2011

AudioCodes provides important “glue” to make UC deployments successful. Its rich technology heritage and commitment to channel sales as well as becoming part of leading edge new solutions such as Microsoft Lync and Skype Connect show a smart company well positioned to assist the UC market grow in size, success, breadth and depth.

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Related UC Vendors: AudioCodes

Solution Review: Network Equipment Technologies UX2000

By Russell Bennett February 24, 2011

Most IP-Telephony Gateways are based on generations of architecture that were designed before production UC systems became available, so they are based on outdated assumptions of the requirements of ‘IP telephony.’ Starting in early 2006, Network Equipment Technologies (NET) provided the gateways for the pre-production versions of Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 being deployed in Microsoft’s own corporate network. The NET engineers took that experience and started designing a new gateway architecture on a blank sheet of paper: the output of that work is the UX platform. A cornerstone of this approach is the ability to remotely monitor and manage a vast array of gateways via a web interface. 

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Related UC Vendors: NET

It's Time to Take UC Off Hold

By Dave Michels February 21, 2011

Although we still largely speak the way we did 100 years ago, communications have evolved way past voice. Communication vendors, and their customers alike, now consider voice communications only part of the communications puzzle. At first, it was up to the customer to bolt together various components such as IM and presence into a broader communications strategy. Individual employees smuggled consumer tools into the office, which introduced support and security concerns. Then the vendors offered extended suites with optional feature components, creating a UC menu. Finally, vendors now are offering UC as a base solution. Case in point,  the recently announced OpenScape UC Server Enterprise offering from Siemens Enterprise Communications.

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Related UC Vendors: Siemens Enterprise Communications

SEN: Can you See Me Now?

By Dave Michels February 16, 2011

There are organizations that seize the simultaneous revolutions in mobility, broadband, cloud, and the web as an opportunity to create a new communications reality - one where communication and productivity are not limited to offices or office hours, where teams are frequently geographically distributed, and where conversations involve more than just voice.

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Related UC Vendors: Siemens Enterprise Communications

Siemens OpenScape UC Suite 2011 – the Customer Speaks

By Jon Arnold February 2, 2011

The key takeaway is to show that the value proposition of Unified Communications is as wide as the uses customers find for it. These case studies provide three very different examples as to how businesses are getting value from various aspects of OpenScape UC Suite 2011.

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Related UC Vendors: Siemens Enterprise Communications

A Drilldown on Data Analytics as a Key Contributor to Customer Analytics

By Nancy Jamison January 10, 2011

Data analytics makes use of structured analytics that is numeric in nature, and when used in combination with other UC analytics solutions such as speech analytics, which is more unstructured, and customer feedback, Impact 360 Data Analytics becomes a critical component of a multi-channel analytics strategy that can help surface the root cause of performance issues.

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Related UC Vendors: Verint