UCStrategies Spotlight – August 6, 2010

UCStrategies.com is an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing Unified Communications arena. Each week, UCStrategies provides review and analysis of breaking news and significant trends in unified communications (UC). UCStrategies is pleased to provide weekly summaries of its coverage to the Focus community. For more information, visit UCStrategies.com.

Channel Implications: The SuperVAR

By Dave Michels

Unified Communications represent numerous changes in technologies, practices, tools, and processes; and the channel implications are significant. The survivors of past transitions know that change creates an opportunity; voice mail, analog to digital, digital to VoIP, voice mail to unified messaging all created demand for upgrades or system replacements. New dealers and vendors emerge with every transition. Also, such disruptions mean the end for some. Read the rest of this article on UCStrategies.com.

 

My Take on the Importance of Social Media in Contact Centers and Unified Communications

By Nancy Jamison

My colleagues at UCStrategies and I have often talked about how unified communications came from the contact center as both “markets” share common functionality, such as presence capability, reporting, chat, etc. We also have talked about the drivers behind getting companies to adopt unified communications with discussions about ROI, business benefits, end-user benefits, and infrastructure upgrades, for example. Social media/networking has now provided us with more fodder for these discussions because of the potential to be applied in contact centers and UC, because:

• Adoption of social media by the general population is soaring
• Usage of social media is spilling over into the workplace, just as it did with instant messaging
• Most users are passively, if unknowingly pushing social media as a customer service channel for businesses
• Savvy users are beginning to understand how to influence companies by what they say (post, tweet, etc.) on social media sites

Read the rest of this article on UCStrategies.com.

 

Exploring the Many Flavors of UC Federation

By Andy Zmolek

As federation concepts have entered the unified communications landscape over the past few years, the notion of what is actually meant by the term has been hard to pin down. Within the Instant Messaging world (now dominated by XMPP, which has specific standards for federation among XMPP servers), federation is synonymous with multi-vendor interoperability while federation in the Microsoft OCS realm is typically associated with connecting one enterprise OCS deployment to another. Peering providers like to associate federation with brokered communications while some enterprises expect all federated relationships to be direct to their peers. Sometimes it can feel like federation is everything to everyone, like the term “cloud computing” these days (or the term “soft switch” back in the early days of VoIP). Read the rest of this article on UCStrategies.com.

Be Careful What You Wish For: Thoughts on the FCC’s Net Neutrality - Framework for Broadband Internet Service

By Lisa Pierce

In reviewing the FCC’s NPRM on Net Neutrality, several items caught my attention. That FCC is trying to find a legal justification to clarify and expand its control over broadband access and Internet services. I’m not going to comment on that - there are many experts who spend their whole professional lives on telecom regulation and are much better qualified to weigh in, bless their hearts.

I’m going to comment on two things:

• The FCC’s focus on finding a ‘third way’ to do this.
• Should this occur, the likelihood of success.

Read the rest of this article on UCStrategies.com.

The Tablets’ Wider Impact on Enterprise IT

By Michael Finneran

With the introduction of the Apple iPad, Cisco’s announcement of the Cius (pronounced “Me-too”), and plans for similar tablet devices from HP, Avaya, and others, it is clear that the industry is catching on to the idea of a new, intermediate size mobile computing platform. Based on that we are now seeing the beginning of a second wave of developments, as Juniper Networks announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Columbus, Ohio-based SMobile Systems, Inc., a privately held software company focused on smart phone and tablet security solutions. The total transaction will be approximately $70 million in cash. Read the rest of this article on UCStrategies.com.

To read the full articles summarized here, and for more UC intelligence and analysis, please visit UCStrategies.com.