InformationWeek Unified Communications Weblog

Lines Blur Between Voice and Social Networking

Andrew Conry-Murray — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:05:12 -0500

Siemens Communications will integrate Twitter with its Unified Communications (UC) platform, and PBworks announces plans to offer voice alongside its collaboration and social software services.

Avaya-Nortel: The Pushback

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 16:47:38 -0500

As we count down to the September 11 bankruptcy court auction that will determine the buyer of Nortel Enterprise Solutions, No Jitter recently ran a compelling and controversial writeup from an industry observer arguing against the likelihood of a successful combination should Avaya capture Nortel in the auction. The piece drew quite a few detailed and insightful comments, as well as at least one point-by-point rebuttal on another blog.

Halfway Through A Bad Year

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:47:52 -0500

Allan Sulkin is out with his mid-year numbers for enterprise communications shipments, and as he previewed in a No Jitter blog a week or so back, the second quarter was a pleasant surprise, as revenues rose from 1Q09. However, the full report shows that we're a long way from done with these bad times.

UC for Free

Eric Krapf, Editor — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:57:43 -0500

You have to wonder if Unified Communications is ever going to be a moneymaker. Before the economic crisis hit, the technology was a bit too immature, with too uncertain a value proposition even in flush times. Then when the money was gone, UC applications and interfaces mostly started to look like a luxury that enterprises weren't in a mood to splurge on.

Will You Change Vendors?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:05:49 -0500

It might have got lost in all the Avaya-Nortel reporting last week, but we had a No Jitter post that may have as much to say about the future of enterprise communications as anything the rest of us wrote about the big acquisition. Tom Nolle wrote a piece called, "How Light is the End of the Tunnel for Enterprise Spending?" in which he suggested that buying paradigms and the resulting customer-vendor relationships may be undergoing a fundamental shift as we work our way through and (hopefully) out of the recession.

How Big Will Avaya Go?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:33:46 -0500

This week's big UC news, of course, is the announcement that Avaya is bidding $475 million to acquire Nortel Enterprise Solutions out of bankruptcy. You can follow all the latest news on No Jitter; but there's another couple of No Jitter posts, not directly related to Nortel, that I want to call your attention to. These have to do with purported interest on the part of Silver Lake partners, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, in potentially acquiring Tandberg, the video solutions company (Sulkin here; me here).

How Secure Are SIP Trunks?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:03:15 -0500

We've had a very lively discussion going on over at No Jitter, in response to a post by Matt Brunk about security of SIP trunks. We've also got a Webinar coming up with Acme Packet on technical obstacles to SIP trunking, in which security is sure to be one topic of discussion (register here). We also got a brief discussion of security in SIP Trunking from Richard Shockey of the SIP Forum, as part of our Virtual VoiceCon session on SIP Trunking last week (go here if you missed that session or any other part of the event).

Another Way To Kill The Desk Phone

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 27 May 2009 10:45:12 -0500

In her latest blog at No Jitter, Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan gives a synopsis of some recent research on IP endpoints that shows IP phones-hard and soft-both proliferating in the enterprise, with the obvious caveat that current economic conditions are taking something of a toll.

UC Market Looks Wide Open

Eric Krapf, Editor — Thu, 21 May 2009 11:41:06 -0500

Our newest feature on No Jitter summarizes Synergy Research's findings about the size and shape of the Unified Communications market. The authors, Jeremy Duke and Ken Landoline, spend the first portion of the article laying out their taxonomy of the market and explaining why this particular classification makes sense. They include a helpful "organizational chart" showing how they consider the pieces to be put together.

Interop: HP Entering IP Desk Phone Market, Kind Of

J. Nicholas Hoover — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:53:42 -0500

This morning, HP announced that it would soon begin selling IP desk phones, a potentially lucrative way to inch up competition with Cisco in networking and communication. However, it's already uncertain just how much HP really cares about phones.

Whose Fault Is The IP Phone?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 13 May 2009 14:34:21 -0500

One of the best recent additions to our family of contributors over at No Jitter is Dave Michels. Dave has a background in the end user and reseller world, and he also has his own blog, Pin Drop Soup; he's just written a feature for No Jitter on the idea of the "Dumb PBX" (you can find the feature here.

How Many Virtual Machines Is Too Many? Yesterday's Gains Will Be Trumped

Charles Babcock — Fri, 01 May 2009 20:32:58 -0500

Greg Scherer, CTO of the I/O device maker Neterion, explains a weakness buried in virtualization's hypervisor. When it comes to virtual machine I/O, the hypervisor has to deal with it through a software switch, and lots of I/O means frequent interruption of the hypervisor's main job, processing guest application needs.

The Mystery Of SIP Trunking

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:05:04 -0500

I've gotten accustomed to the hot issues in our industry being about things other than, strictly speaking, technology: What's the future of Nortel? What's the future of Unified Communications? Will Microsoft beat out Cisco? Are the "legacy" vendors doomed?

Some Highlights Next Week

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:22:54 -0500

When I interviewed Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy last week (transcript here), I was particularly struck by this comment: "My first day at work [at Avaya] was the first of January, and in January we had a bankruptcy of one of the competitors in the marketplace. We had another competitor sort of up the ante in the way they're playing and declare their intentions in the server world. And so the competitive environment actually changed quite a bit."

Ask Not What IPT Can Do For You...

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:34:26 -0500

We're getting to the point in the VoiceCon Orlando cycle when I start thinking about what I'm likely to see and hear during the event, what themes I expect to hear repeated over and over during the week. Clearly, a lot of the focus this year is going to be on cost savings, business cases, ROIs, and the like. How could it not be?

Future Of The Phone, Again

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:00:41 -0500

A couple of interesting developments have come up recently when it comes to desk phones. A recent blog by Steve Slattery, VP and general manager of Cisco's IP Communications Business Unit, made reference to two market research studies that offered up conflicting projections on the future of the desk phone:

UC Integration, ROI, And Direction

Eric Krapf, Editor — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:16:17 -0500

I've been reviewing slides for VoiceCon Orlando, which is always intense. One that's just loaded with great information is the Nemertes Research tutorial on business cases for IP telephony and UC.

UC: All About Predictability

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:12:45 -0500

I had a chance to chat recently with Henry Dewing of Forrester Research about Forrester's latest UC report, and the conversation quickly turned to ROI.

So What Is The Value Of Video?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 12:04:35 -0500

Over at No Jitter, John Bartlett of NetForecast has a blog post that asks a question I expect will be on the minds of an increasing number of enterprise decision makers in the months and years ahead: "Is videoconferencing a second-class citizen on the network?"

The Mobile UC Endpoint

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 14:25:43 -0500

Will the smartphone become your only computer, and if so, what are the implications for the enterprise-in terms of cost and security, among other issues?

Incremental Improvements

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 10:28:22 -0500

When I wrote on No Jitter last week about cell phones being invisible to presence, I characterized this state of affairs as a bug. But maybe it's really a feature. In any event, is it a critical issue?

The IBM Desktop

Eric Krapf, Editor — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 09:37:28 -0500

At the opening of this week's Lotusphere, a lot of the talk was about LotusLive, which is IBM Lotus' new offering in the cloud/software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, and Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Lotus software, talked this solution up as an extranet service -- i.e., one that could connect an enterprise's CPE-based Lotus systems with cloud-based systems used by partners.

The Cisco Desktop

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:56:55 -0500

I don't know if Cisco is going to make it as a consumer electronics company, but it's making some really important moves to reposition itself in the enterprise. And it's all about the desktop.

Will UC Save Enterprise VOIP?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 09:59:14 -0500

The voice-over-IP visionaries have always hung out in the consumer space, for the most part; after all, VoIP started out as a subversive, disruptive application whose advocates more or less explicitly predicted that they'd kill the big telcos. A noble goal, and one that proved well beyond their means. Even the wildly successful (and free) Skype didn't come close to killing the carriers.

Who's Doing UC Now?

Eric Krapf, Editor — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:57:42 -0500

Allan Sulkin's latest No Jitter feature details the results of Allan's third annual survey of North American consultants, and the results I found most intriguing had to do with the consultants' experiences and opinions regarding Unified Communications.