unified communications - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Will Android users feel welcome in Facebook's Home?

  Unless you're a huge Facebook fanatic, will this really be something you use every day? Time will tell.

• Box CEO Aaron Levie: The post-PC era and our partnerships will help us win

  It's no surprise that Box, the content management and collaboration company born in the cloud, has met with so much success among small-to-medium businesses. The service provides SMBs with the kind of enterprise-class content capabilities that they didn't have the money and resources to deploy before.

• SIP trunking: The savings are there but the transition is complex

  The merits of SIP trunking have been talked about for years and now it looks like businesses are aggressively adopting the technology, lured by striking cost savings and the promise of new functionality that their old phone networks just couldn't support.

• The next big thing on Twitter: #TwitterChats

  Atul Jha likes to stay up-to-date on the latest and greatest in the tech world; after all, that's part of his job as a consultant and technology evangelist for CSS Corp., which is co-headquartered in Silicon Valley and India.

• Shrinking idle capacity: Corporate SIP trunks could equal T-1 links by 2015

  The percentage of North American companies using SIP or Session Initiation Protocol trunking and traditional T-1s will just about equalize in two years, marking a dramatic shift in technology used for external corporate communications.

• Avaya willing to share customers with Cisco, Microsoft in three-way networking battle

  Avaya unified communications products can get along with Microsoft's Lync Server, and many customers will probably choose to deploy both rather than just one, says Avaya's CEO.

• Avaya CEO talks competition, debt, innovation

  Avaya is pushing a new range of unified communications products, but is finding that managed services are becoming more popular among its customers who would rather turn over complex UC transitions to someone else for a predictable monthly fee, says the company's CEO Kevin Kennedy.

• Businesses need to explore Firefox, Chrome's WebRTC to bolster services and cut costs

  Businesses need to study up now on WebRTC - the browser-based voice and video support included in the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome but that seems destined for all browsers - if they want to jump on opportunities to enhance services and cut costs, according to experts at the Enterprise Connect conference.

• LinkedIn is down, then up, then down again Wednesday morning

  LinkedIn, the professional social media network, is suffering intermittent service disruptions Wednesday morning.

• This company ditched its landlines and iPhones in favor of iPad Minis

  Jim Pond is a techie and an Apple lover. He always needs the newest Apple product at his small suburban Boston creative agency, whether it's the latest iPad, MacBook, iPhone or iPod Touch. "If it's Apple, we've gotta have it," he proudly states.

• Telstra to deliver unified comms from the cloud

  Telstra is delivering integrated voice, video, presence and mobility applications as a cloud service, following a new agreement with networking equipment vendor Cisco.
  

• The five evils of enterprise social

  The history of enterprise collaboration technology is littered with abandoned platforms that were intended to "change everything." But many new social collaboration tools quickly end up on the shelf, collecting dust, unless there are compelling reasons to use it, and dramatic incentives for people to maintain it.

• Unified communications Battle Royale: Cisco, Avaya feel the heat from Microsoft Lync

  It seems Microsoft's unified communications system Lync is becoming so popular among businesses that it is the No.1 threat to the top vendors Cisco and Avaya. Cisco this week launched an online blogging campaign to point out Lync's shortcomings, and Avaya volunteered a nearly identical list of what it perceives as Lync limitations.

• Cisco declares war on Microsoft unified communications system

  Cisco chose the eve of Microsoft's first Lync conference to attack the Microsoft unified communications platform as incomplete when compared to Cisco's enterprise UC offerings.

• Unified comms market to hit $943.7 million by 2017: IDC

  Companies will need to invest heavily in unified communications (UC) over the next four years as more staff work from home or in remote locations, according to analyst firm IDC.