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.
Mitel will begin distributing some of its U.S. products through Tech Data. It has taken several years, but finally I get to say, “I told you so.”
Technology is now moving at a rapid pace which is great news for late bloomers. “It is too late” are four words I hear far too frequently. It’s as if people actually believe the phrase, even though we keep witnessing it is rarely true. It is very rarely too late to make a significant impact to the market.
If you follow what I or a number of other UCStrategies Experts have been writing about ShoreTel, you’ll know that the company is on a solid growth curve – profits notwithstanding. Despite the fact that they’ve reached critical mass – on track for $300 million in revenues – and continue to gain share, they’re not a household name. The challenge is getting a seat at the table, and a key strategic focus continues to be raising the consideration rate for RFPs, along with building brand recognition.
It is time to recognize the need for UC-enabled “dual persona” applications for all types of mobile device interfaces, including built-in car dashboards.
Cisco has been in the news lately: leadership changes, video interoperability (and Skype), and California State University (CSU) loss.
Tigerpaw Software Inc., announced its new Ambassador program. It is a collection of product evangelists. If you are not familiar with Tigerpaw, the company makes CRM software optimized for VARs. The company officially targets IT, telephony, security, Audio/video, and POS dealer organizations.
Today is the start of ShoreTel’s Industry Analyst and Consultant Conference. It should be very interesting. Last year, I took away two very clear messages about ShoreTel. This year, I will be looking for clarity in their messaging. Whatever they are doing, though, seems to be working. The company just reported its quarterly results which grew revenue 39 percent from last year.
Rumors are flying that Alcatel-Lucent may be looking to sell some assets, including its Enterprise division. The company reported decent sales, but its EBIT was sharply lower than expected. Alcatel-Lucent will potentially need more asset sales or some other means of improving its balance sheet.
As the East Coast recovers from the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, all utilities are being pushed to their limits. However, the response of the mobile operators has been such that we might see some regulatory changes come about that would require better steps to increase reliability and ensure accountability. We’re now eight days after the storm, and areas of Manhattan are still suffering service outages.
Market share reports provide us this information. Most share reports have to do with vendor sales performance. Some look more to the installed base and show what’s actually out there. These reports are valuable, but don’t put too much credence into them and don’t allow them to dictate a strategy.
A few months ago, I read an article in the Economist that highlighted the fact that Huawei had just surpassed Ericsson to become the world’s largest telecom equipment manufacturer. These gains were attributed to the provision of high quality equipment at a low price. However, the article also highlighted the various concerns related to cyber-warfare exploits being propagated by Chinese actors. On October 8, the U.S. House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HSCI) published a report recommending that Huawei and ZTE (H&Z) equipment be boycotted in the U.S.
Increasingly I am convinced that the road to unified communications does not follow a straight line from your current voice implementation. In the end, no matter how it is labeled, a voice system is not a unified communications system and it is somewhere between impractical and impossible to upgrade a voice system to be a UC system.
Lync 2013, the upcoming new release of Microsoft Lync 2010, has added feature/functionality in four key areas, says Microsoft, that combined drive deeper connections among diverse and distributed workforces.
If you have been reading the reviews of Cisco’s recent big conference of analysts, channel partners, and consultants in L.A., you will see the marketing emphasis is focused on “end user experiences,” rather than just technology cost savings. Although Cisco highlights “collaboration” as the epitome of their technology benefits, they really are going after all types of business interactions that UC enablement supports. That includes both people contacts as well as automated business applications.
Several UCStrategies colleagues attended ITExpo in Austin and offered their comments post-conference (Blair Pleasant, Jon Arnold, and Phil Edholm).
Cisco brought together analysts, consultants, and channel partners in Los Angeles to present an update of its Collaboration products and strategy. One of the best sessions was led by Richard McLeod and featured several of Cisco’s channel partners. Three of Cisco’s channel partners shared insights as to what they’re seeing in the market, and how to help drive adoption of UC and collaboration.
Innovation is sexy and noble, but it’s not really Cisco’s problem if you fail to get there. Collaboration is important but the end game is market leadership, and Cisco made some subtle but clear references to their true intentions – “win the workspace.” Most of us would read that as code for owning the desktop and knocking Microsoft off their perch. To defend that position, Cisco talked a lot about having the right architecture and networking expertise to get the most out of empower and engage.
Will WebRTC be the next big thing? Will it disrupt the industry? Come to the WebRTC Conference and Expo to find out. This event, marking the "coming of age" of WebRTC will happen in South San Francisco on November 27-29. It is being delivered by TMC and has sponsorship by Google, Plantronics and Thrupoint.
Two partner summits ago, in 2011, Cisco first articulated its go-to-market (G2M) strategy in the cloud, what roles they saw partners playing there, and what can Cisco do to help partners evolve their business models and capture market share from the competition. In the intervening period the program has gained significant traction within the partner community.
Following the Tigerpaw National Conference 2012 during the last week of September, we caught up with Brian Metherell, VP & GM of Toshiba America Information Systems Inc., Telecommunication Systems Division to discuss Toshiba’s VIPedge go-to-market (G2M) cloud strategy and channel experiences. Toshiba announced general availability (GA) of the VIPedge cloud-based business VoIP solution this past July and made its public debut at the Tigerpaw 2012.