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 key announcements at the VoiceCon show indicate where the presence-based, software application power in IP telephony is shifting to when Microsoft and IBM agree to interoperate. Future enterprise telephony moves will now have become part of "UC mashups," and "unified" marketing between the big players.
Aspect announced a corporate strategy to educate the market on the role the contact center must play in the an organization's unified communications strategy and is enhancing its products to support UC technologies.
At the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Forum in Paris last week, attendees had a chance to hear about Alcatel-Lucent’s UC products and strategy.
A new market study by In-Stat claims that business end users are not rushing to use new "converged" mobile commmunication devices. Yet, the report highlights new "smartphones' as successful examples of such devices.
UC will be very dependent on converged mobile devices for greater uptake. Yet, a recent survey claims that users are not ready to get those new "converged" devices. On the other hand, look at the interest in the iPhone!
Implementing UC capabilities is not so simple, because it involves more than different technologies that just replace older business forms of contact.
Over the past few years, Genesys has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider.
Let's start looking at UC from a productivity perspective, rather than just an IP infrastructure perspective.
Person-to-person phone calls can be made more efficient by captilalizing on the new power of presence management. Such new capabilities, such as that mentioned by Siemens recently, need to be recognized and identified as a particular form of business contact in order to differentiate it from the old ways of making a conversational voice connection. I am calling it an "ASAP call."
Although there have been a lot of technology developments in the industry in 2007, UC is still mostly about business concepts waiting to be implemented by the enterprise market. However, we do see some new moves that can better focus enterprise UC implementations in 2008.
Verizon Wireless big announcement about opening up its network to “any device and any application” that meets minimum standards was a headline-grabber for the world of mobile communications. It is a good sign that communication services are starting to change in a constructive way for enterprise needs.
Microsoft's goal is to dominate the unified communications market but it needs to have a "seat at the table" when enterprises are upgrading or acquiring a new IP PBX. It is unlikely Microsoft will have this opportunity until it offers all of the features enterprise customers expect from a PBX replacement. Or, it can get a "seat at the table" by acquiring a company that is always invited to the table -- a major PBX vendor.
During an analyst update last week, the company reiterated the progress it’s made in terms of delivering on what’s been announced in the past year and a half, as well as discussing its new products and solutions.
This week NEC held their global analyst symposium in Dallas. NEC describes their enterprise communication vision as a model consisting of three layers -- unified infrastructure (network), unified communications (applications) and unified business (role enabled)
The UCStrategies.com team has been having an interesting email thread discussion this past week about CEBP vis a vis Unified Communications.
The UCStrategies.com team has been having an interesting email thread discussion this past week about Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) vis a vis Unified Communications.
Google's announcement last week of its forthcoming open source mobile operating system software sets the stage for control of mobile devices and new network operator opportunities to support enterprise UC applications.
In a time of technology transitions, many enterprises will find it's better to opt for a service rather than CPE.
IBM made several UC announcements, including Sametime 8.0, three new product offerings to the Sametime family, a new product called Sametime Unified Telephony, and a new relationship with Siemens.
Microsoft's entry into the world of business telephony with the Launch of OCS 2007 was accompanied by testimonials from large enterprise customers who tried the software products. Here is a follow-up discussion with a large European customer on how UC migration can realistically take place.