Telephony News

TechCrunch's Michael Arrington got his hands on a copy of the unreleased Google Voice desktop application, and demoes it here. He uses the accompanying piece to urge Google to release the application to the public. And the public apparently has responded with an online petition asking for the same.

We know we are running out of IPv4 addresses, the prediction calculator (see my May posting) says July 19, 2011 as of this writing. It may have changed by the time you read this. We know we need to move to IPv6, but how will this happen?

One of the big announcements at Cisco Live 2010 was Hosted Collaboration Services. In the first segment of this video, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior discusses the definition of Cloud Computing during her keynote, an important ingredient in Cisco's delivery of its collaboration solutions through service providers.

Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research knows Microsoft's OCS/Communications Server 14 as well as anyone out there. For several years, Brent led a VoiceCon tutorial on OCS and IBM Lotus SameTime. Now that the big news is Microsoft's third release of its flagship Unified Communications product--now just “Communications Server 14” or CS 14--many of you have already seen and had a chance to read our extended, in-depth look "under the hood" of CS 14 from Brent, who recently attended Microsoft's Tech Ed event and got the full picture.

When proposing to telework, an employee may encounter support or resistance. Some managers believe the teleworker will be less productive. Other managers who are control-oriented become anxious if they cannot observe their employees. It takes time, a well thought out plan and policy to create a successful teleworking environment.

When Allan Sulkin wrote: "The market for standalone communications systems less than 50 line stations accounts for about one fifth of all product revenues in North America, but closer to half on a global basis," he made my day.

Cisco's Cius tablet was the hot news last week, and it looks like just about everyone in the mobility space is going to have a tablet before long.

What an interesting announcement of the Cisco Cius this week. All at once, Cisco enters the cellular phone market, enters the tablet computer market, introduces another mobile WiFi video device, and ups the ante for high-end business telephones. Sets one to wondering just what the goals might be for all of this and why Cisco chose to make their own device?

Unified Communications (UC) is bringing a major shift to the communications systems and solutions industry. Whether you look at UC for User Productivity (UC-U) or UC for Business Process optimization (UC-B), communications is now integrated with the users' applications environments. This means that UC has become part of the Enterprise Architecture (more here). UC software is now expected to run on enterprise computing platforms, including virtual machines and cloud computers, and UC user interfaces must run on the devices most appropriate for the specific UC Use Cases.

Cisco followed up this week's announcement of its Cius business tablet at Cisco Live 2010 with a new partner offering called Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution. The offering will be based on the virtualized Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), a part of the Cisco Unified Services Delivery Solution, in support of a variety of existing Cisco collaboration applications currently available as customer premises solutions: Cisco Unified Communications Manager (UCM); Cisco Unified Contact Center; Cisco Unified Mobility; Cisco Unified Presence; and Cisco Unity Connection. Cisco Webex Meeting Center, hosted by Cisco, will also be available as part of the package. Additional Cisco applications will be added over time as they become available. Cisco partners who purchase the new bundled solution will license the use of specific software applications for resale to their customers though a subscription-based service.

When this series began, I believed it would have just two parts--based on information gathered at back-to-back Cisco and Avaya contact center analyst meetings. After those first two installments, it became clear that it made sense to add the views of one additional contact center solution vendor, Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys.

One of the most common network problems for voice and video conferencing is the duplex mismatch. This technical anomaly haunts our networks and refuses to go away. It has been the bane of many a network administrator and voice or video vendor when real-time traffic is first introduced to the network.

We've had several posts recently on the intersection of contact centers and social networking--Gary Audin and Brian Riggs both addressed the potential for using social media communications as one channel for inbound communications to the contact center. And when our team was in Indianapolis last week, we got a similar story from Interactive Intelligence.

At the core of social media is many-to-many communication. Enterprises struggle with many-to-many communication, because of organizational roles, processes, efficiencies, and control. On one hand, enterprises want to communicate more with customers and their marketplace along with collaborating with partners to get things done. On the other hand, the objective of an enterprise is to seem like a single entity so that all information and communication is accurate, consistent, relevant, and protected even though the organization is made up of many people.

As part of the Open Minds road show with Siemens Enterprise Communications, I've been stressing that with UC, we're in a place today where companies still have the opportunity for first-mover advantage. Since UC isn't a question of "if," but "when," those organizations that move now toward next-generation communications will get several years of competitive advantage over other companies in their industry that don't choose to deploy the new technology in a speedy fashion.

On Tuesday at the Cisco Live show, Cisco unveiled its latest collaboration device. The new Cisco device called the Cius (pronounced see-us and rhymes with Zeus) is a tablet that can dock into a base station and can act as video phone. When undocked the device operates as a tablet computer that can be carried around and shared between workers. From the demo itself, the details were relatively scarce but here’s what I've gathered and its implications to Cisco.

Avaya and HP today announced a new three-year agreement for HP's services arm to bring Avaya's complete product portfolio into the set of solutions they sell for Unified Communications and collaboration.

Today at its big CiscoLive event in Las Vegas, Cisco announced a tablet device running on the Android OS and targeted at business users.

I've been working in RADVISION for over a decade now. From my first day here, I've been hearing that video conferencing is "just around the corner", and that next year video is finally going to be BIG.

When you think of Siemens, what comes to mind? For most people, it isn't unified communications. Siemens conjures images of Appliances, medical equipment, even power plants. The firm is a European diversified giant.