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.
Answers to some questions from my Unified Communications market overview at VoiceCon San Francisco.
The value of UC to the enterprise is very dependent on improving business results (UC-B), which heavily involves effective customer contacts. First contact resolution of customer needs will therefore benefit from UC flexibility.
In their November 4 meeting, the FCC deferred a decision on the major issue at hand but did move forward on a few wireless initiatives. The big issue was an overhaul of the Universal Services Fund and
As a leadiing global provider of business telephone systems with a large installed base, Avaya is being carefully watched to see how it moves organizationally and productwise into the world of business UC. A year after being privatized, Avaya's Analyst Conference last month was an opportunity to meet its new executive team and get a look at how it is refocusing its IP telephony offerings from a UC perspective.
Microsoft announced OCS 2007 R2, which fills in the gaps of enterprise voice requirements, bringing forth the power of software-based communications and unified communications.
UC has dominated the business communications spotlight because it is catchall for different modes of communications. However, unified messaging (UM) is s big player that will dominate usage activity in the real world and be a key gateway for real-time communications and contacts from automated business process applications. (Read Blair Pleasant's new report on UM Solutions for an update.)
Mobility is very key to the value of UC to users. But information access for mobile business applications requires high enterprise security management. With "smartphones" being adopted by end users for both business and personal UC applications, this convergence is a challenge for enterprise IT control. "Virtualized" applications are a potential solution that also fits into the coming world of SaaS and SOA. Some comments!
I recently updated a UM market study I wrote a year and a half ago. The new study, "Evaluating Unified Messaging Solutions 2008" provides insights for evaluating UM vendors, while providing useful tips on moving to UM.
I just spent two and a half days at the Cisco UC and Collaboration Analyst conference in San Diego, and my brain is overloaded from all the announcements and new releases.
Citrix is practicing what it preaches and setting an example for virtualizing enterprise desktops by offering its employees the option to buy their own laptops of choice for both business and personal usage - just like mobile 'smartphones" are being used. This approach will be good for UC usage.
UC is not just about business users. With new mobile "smart phones," consumers" will be using UC services too. Planning for enteprise implementation of UC capabilities, however, must focus on the needs of both business processes and the different end users involved.
And you thought "smart phones" was only about voice and data! Those multimodal devices, coupled with 3G networks, will open up UC to video communications and information exchange for both consumers and business communications. Dialogic's acquisition of NMS will help make that migration happen faster.
had the opportunity to be a judge in Interactive Intelligence’s “Outrageous Interactions” contest. Here are some of the entries.
Now that the acquisition of Intervoice by Convergys is complete, the company is free to discuss its plans to move forward.
Enterrprise UC has become accepted as a practical step forward for person-to-person business contacts, but with the acquisition of multimodal self-service provider, Intervoice, Convergsys extends its outsourcing market to all of "Customer UC."
Customer contacts play an important role any enterprise business and UC will affect how customers interact with both enterprise personnel, third-party support, and automated business process applications. For this reason, hard issues surrounding the implementation of "Customer UC" will be discussed by a panel of UC technology providers at an upcoming conference in L.A. this month.
Cisco announced its intent to acquire PostPath, which provides email and calendaring software and is seen as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.
The topic of social software (or social networking) and its relationship with unified communications is becoming a hot topic.
New financial services for consumers with mobile smart phones will become a major driver for both "Consumer UC" and enterprise "Customer UC," as end users end up using them as a "Smart Wallet" for business communications as well as for personal contacts.
UC implementation planning is going to be evolutionary and complex, since it involves both old and communication applications and devices. In addition, UC needs will be different for individual end users, depending on their job responsibilities, work environments, and the needs of their different business contacts. So "UC" can mean everything or nothing to an end user.