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.
On Monday, July 30, 2007, Aastra Intecom announced Clearspan as a new Unified Communications solutionfor large enterprises. I received a briefing on the solution last week from Charles Henderson, Senior Director of Marketing, and Robyn Thompson, Aastra USA Inc. Marketing Manager.
We're still dealing with the lack of a single, unified definition of Unified Communications.
Unified communications, or UC, is a major portion of Microsoft's most aggressive and extensive launch of new software products in its 30-year history.
The Cisco-IBM relationship is still moving forward, albeit with a couple changes. I spoke with Rick McConnell of Cisco and Bruce Morse of IBM to get a better understanding of the Cisco-IBM partnership.
There is an emerging win-win story, one that will reward vendors for doing the Right Thing, while giving buyers what they seek. Here’s the situation.
The shape of UC applications became increasingly clear at VoiceCon Spring 2007, capping a wave of supplier announcements during the first quarter of the year. Four top themes are being supported across the board—Enhanced Conferencing, Team Collaboration, Professional Mobility and Business Process Integration.
The VoiceCon Wednesday Keynotes from Cisco and Microsoft both added energy and direction to UC industry momentum.
Attendees at VoiceCon Spring 2007 had access to seven Unified Communications sessions—two breakouts per day on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday plus the UC Executive Summit on Thursday morning.
Last week’s Interop in Las Vegas created another opportunity to gauge the current state of the UC marketplace. Unlike VoiceCon, UC was not Interop’s main-tent attraction, because the show attracts a lot of network architects and engineers who are focused on architecture design, security, performance, SOA, applications to use network capacity and other topics.
Avaya announced that “it has entered into a definitive merger agreement with Silver Lake” a private equity firm. Given Avaya’s role in enterprise communications, this move raises many questions, some of which are discussed below.
The Enterprise 2.0 conference held in Boston last week explored how emerging social networking tools will transform the way business is conducted in the future.
One subject that causes a lot of interest was the idea of contact center reps interacting with “expert agents” elsewhere in the company to provide information to customers.
For the past month or so, it seems that every day there’s another announcement from a vendor about new products or services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Here’s a brief run down...
Unified Communications is increasingly in the conversation and news at VoiceCon Spring 2007. This year there are six UC breakout sessions as well as an Executive Summit in the main conference on Thursday morning.
Most of you are probably delighted that the 2006 election season is finally over, but as I watched it unfold, I couldn’t help but notice some parallels with Unified Communications. Bear with me, this might be a stretch.
As the UC suppliers jockey for position with their product offerings, many potential enterprise buyers are scratching their heads and wondering what UC will do for them—in these days of carefully watched budget priorities, benefits have to be clearly demonstrable.
Avaya’s Unified Communications announcement provides a perfect illustration of what’s right and what’s wrong with today’s UC marketplace.
Apple's iPhone certainly got everyone's attention. It seems like everyone has had something to say about it--positive and negative. But while there's consensus that its user interface is quite exciting and the combination of a cell phone and iPod makes it an ideal recreational device, the iPhone is miles off the mark for the business market.
The race to deliver Unified Communications (UC) is on. PBX vendors—both old and new guard—are working hard to integrate their communication silos, while software vendors are enhancing current offerings by adding call control (aka PBX features).
Q: How can you get optimal results from your communications investment budget? A: Easy—Focus your spending on the investments with the highest returns!