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.
Articles from the UCStrategies.com UC experts, providing insights and analysis on UC products, events, market trends, and the state of the UC industry.
The UC Summit is an unusual mix of education, networking, and wine. Here’s a brief recap of the past 24 hours. Lots of keynotes. Starting with Sonus, a vendor that few UC dealers and consultants heard of a year ago
This growth market for video introduces a major challenge – a confusing diversity of user experiences. It seems to me that all of us in the UC&C industry should do our best to keep things simple and effective for the users, rather than bombarding the users with a dizzying array of non-compatible user experiences and software clients.
Today was the first full day at the UC Summit in San Diego. The conference is aimed at Trusted Advisors or the combined groups of system integrators and industry consultants. This annual event is a fairly intimate conference – lots of food and wine (and wine). The sessions fall into two categories: industry updates and vendor product updates.
UC has opened up many new communications options for enterprises, but one area that has remained relatively untouched is the contact center. Things are changing. The explosion of mobile devices has changed consumer behavior and how they want to interact with companies. The popularity of social media is creating new communications preferences. Peer-to-peer connectivity, federated presence, and other UC-enabled tools offer ever-more powerful ways to link companies to their customers.
Several higher education institutions joined forces in 1996 to attack their technology needs. The result was Internet2, a member-owned consortium to better address common technology challenges. One of Internet2's key missions is to help members achieve their goals through collaboration. The Internet2 “NET+ SIP Program” team is creating a broad portfolio of hosted cloud services; including unified communications and trunking.
There's this thing called WebRTC, which is going to turn your world upside down. The simple thing you are probably already doing with it? Adding it as yet another interface to your Gateway/MCU/PBX (pick one). But guess what? It is the wrong move. Or more accurately – it isn't going to be enough.
Is Google Apps winning in the enterprise? It’s a hard question to answer, but it sure feels like Google Apps are becoming pervasive; albeit not necessarily at the cost of Microsoft Office. Gartner found that Google's cloud-based productivity suite is gaining market share. In terms of user counts, Google Apps went from about 10 percent of the cloud-office market in 2007 to about 50 percent in 2012 – that’s growing market share in a market that’s growing.
As we ramp up to the UC Summit next week, there has been a lot going on in mobility. However, the more interesting story is “What’s happening (or ‘not happening’) at Apple?” Rumors are that the company will post its first drop in profits in a decade when it releases its second quarter results later today; sales are still up.
The 2013 UC Summit is around the corner, and it’s a good time talk things up. I’ve been part of the UCStrategies group for a while now, and last year was my first UC Summit, held in a very Zen-like setting in La Jolla, CA. It’s an invitation-only event catering mainly to the channel community, but it’s not too late to be considered. The process is pretty simple – here’s the application form which will be quickly reviewed by UCStrategies, and if you’re in, we can compare notes at the Summit.
Jason Fried is the co-founder of 37 Signals and an outspoken critic of traditional approaches to business. His 2010 TEDx talk titled Work Doesn’t Happen at Work recently resurfaced in some LinkedIn discussions. He is a big proponent of remote work and distributed teams; even credits it as a competitive advantage. Therefore one might assume that this talk was about remote working, but it isn’t. It’s actually about making the office more productive.
I recently came across a few articles that hit some of the top issues among CIOs, and was disappointed to see how few were comms related. They were long and intimidating lists with broad scopes including development, big data, and compliance issues. I can list 25 trends impacting the office of the CIO, but why? Instead, let me focus on some key issues within the narrowly defined space of communications and collaboration.
A WebRTC topic that comes up fairly regularly is whether WebRTC is a threat to Skype. Publicly, Microsoft supports WebRTC, and is active with its development. Also, WebRTC is largely associated with Google, and these two firms often disagree about things. It isn’t surprising that there are some elements of this new standard that are contested between these firms.
At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALUE) analyst conference in Annapolis, MD, we got to hear about many of the changes ALUE is experiencing, and the company’s vision for the future. Two of the big changes I’ll cover here are the accelerated move to the cloud, and ALUE’s new contact center partner and products.
This week is the 2013 Open Networking Summit taking place at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The Summit is sponsored by the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which actively promotes OpenFlow and software-defined networking (SDN). It’s likely the biggest SDN event of the year.
I wear many hats; one that I wear with great pride is my “developer hat.” And so, it was with some surprise, but great interest, that several Enterprise Connect sessions and exhibitors appealed to my developer roots. Enterprise Connect is always a great source of product information. But for me this year, Enterprise Connect was also a great source of new product ideas.
Hosted voice continues to grow in subscribers and scope. Many hosted providers have already expanded from dialtone to robust UC solutions, but now there seems to be a frenzy around contact center offerings. Here’s a short roundup of announcements made in just the past few weeks.
Businesses always care about ROI and minimizing costs. But don’t look at the cloud as just a financial exercise. The goal of moving to the cloud (or not moving) should be around collaboration. Often, the cloud begets collaboration. The cloud, in terms of cloud communications, can help an organization realize collaboration.
I was fortunate enough to have some face time recently with Chris Hummel, Chairman of Siemens Enterprise Communications during Enterprise Connect 2013. Chris shared with me Siemens' new AmplifyTEAMS concept to dramatically improve performance.
Last week I got into some debates about the death or evolution of the PBX. The bigger point though is how complex things are becoming to define in communications. It is a far bigger issue than “PBX.” What is Unified Communications? What is Cloud? What is open? What’s the point of all this communications technology if we can’t agree on language and terminology? Add to the list the term “Server.” I am not sure what a server is any more. Are you?
One of the highlights of Enterprise Connect was getting an up close demo of SMART Technologies’ SMART Room System for Microsoft Lync. It bridges the gap between the desktop- and room-based collaboration experiences, making it easier for users to schedule and join Lync-based conferences.