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.
The Unified Communications industry changes daily. We keep track of it for you.
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.
The latest press releases and announcements relevant to the UC industry.
Cloud MSP, Unified Office, has unveiled Total Connect Now, an integrated open systems, virtual office communications solution, which is suitable for use within SMB environments. It is designed to assist organizations and businesses in embracing BYOD.
Ingram Micro’s North America Services Division rolls out Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) to qualified Cisco partners based in Canada and the United States. The HCS addition is sold though the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. Ingram Micro is also partnering with the Advanced Services unit of Cisco to help partners during their HCS provisioning and deployment, as well as to provide management and technical support.
ADTRAN, Inc. announces the addition of four new IP phones to its technology portfolio. The IP phone models are all powered by Polycom and rely on ADTRAN’s NetVanta UC call controls. Resellers can deploy the business phones either on hosted or on-premises communications networks.
A week ago, Google Drive, a free online storage venue, reported an outage. The malfunction occurred at 7:17 a.m. Eastern time. The company stated, around an hour afterwards, that a “significant subset of users” was experiencing access issues.
According to Gartner Inc., the economic recession and a low number of resources are causing the number of customers migrating to the public cloud as a service to rise.
AT&T announces that it is adding Microsoft Lync to its enterprise unified communications (UC) portfolio. AT&T says that its business customers can use Lync in three ways: through their on-premise data center, as part of AT&T’s Office 365 cloud-based services, or directly hosted by AT&T’s network. IT integration and support are also provided by the cellular giant.
A number of updates have been made by snom technology AG to its snom UC edition 7xx and 821 business phones. The updates are set to assist in simplifying enterprise deployments for organizations, and include an auto-configuration feature for Microsoft Lync.
A new agreement for deployment has been created by Vancouver, B.C.-based CounterPath with Arrow S3, announcing the former’s entrance into the broad reseller channel.
Unified communications-as-a-service, contact center-as-a-service, and video-as-a-service offerings are being offered by Basking Ridge, New Jersey-based Avaya, who has enhanced its Collaborate Cloud portfolio of hosted services.
An add on feature called “Call Bursting” has been released by Broadvox, and is available with the company’s SIP Trunking feature which allows customers to make use of extra call sessions outside the amount purchased for peak calling times.
Last week, Dropbox broadened the reach of its business, extending it from cloud file sharing and synchronisation to email. This has been made possible through the acquisition of Mailbox, an iOS mobile app which is able to manage emails on iPhones and iPads.
Infonetics Research released a report assessing the performance of the video conferencing market in 2012 and the future of the enterprise video sector. What is labeled by Channelnomics’ Doug Woodburn as a horrible year for video conferencing is deemed an “aberration” by an analyst from Infonetics Research. The market for video conferencing is expected to be “gearing up for comeback.”
Last week, Oracle announced the acquisition of Mountain View, California-based Nimbula, echoing the increase in cloud adoption within the channel. Nimbula is a cloud operating system company specializing in infrastructure-as-a-service software for the development of private, hybrid, or public clouds, and was co-founded by Chris Pinkham and others involved in the creation of Amazon’s EC2 service.
VMware last week announced its public cloud infrastructure as a service which, the company says, is the next step in its development and planning to support customers.
Content sharing, HD video and hosting meetings from mobile devices are all now enabled via Mountain View, California-based Blue Jeans Network, which is broadening its cloud-based videoconferencing solutions.
Yorktel, a provider of video managed services, announces that its new hosted video conferencing service now supports integration with Microsoft Lync and Office 365. VideoCloud, Yorktel’s recently unveiled cloud-based portfolio of hosted video conferencing services, can be used by anyone who is on a Microsoft Lync client in order to connect to various video conferencing systems from vendors such as Avaya’s Radvision, Cisco, LifeSize, Polycom, and Vidyo.
Last week, users of Microsoft’s Hotmail, Outlook.com and SkyDrive experienced interruptions to the service. It was last Tuesday at 4:35 p.m. Eastern time that the outage began, and problems were not solved until 8.45 a.m. Eastern time the next morning.
BlackBerry introduces a technology that allows users to securely handle business and personal data on smartphones and tablets. To be marketed as an update to the BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10, the new Secure Work Space for Android and iOS approximates what the Balance software does for BlackBerry’s line of Z10 and Q10 smartphones.
Avaya announces the release of the new version of its session border controller for enterprise (SBCE), which works with the Avaya Aura platform. The new SBC features upgraded security for collaboration that is targeted to businesses employing remote and mobile workers, as well as companies that institute BYOD programs.
Small and midsize businesses will be able to access Digium’s unified communications solutions in the cloud as a result of the company’s release of a hosted version of its Asterisk-based VoIP system, Switchvox.