They say "good things come to those who wait," but for the impatient – at least those who register for Sprint's 2012 Open Solutions Conference by August 31 – there's a good discount to be had.

It's that time again, and even though the 12th annual conference itself is two months away (October 24-25 at the San Jose Convention Center), the deadline for an early registration, with significant savings, is coming up in just a few days. The registration fee is $175 until August 31, and $350 afterward. More...

When you've been talking about SIP Trunking as long as we have around here, it's hard to think of the technology and the adoption of it as being in the "early stages." But that is the assessment contained in a new report on the state of the SIP union.

The Webtorials report, authored primarily by Steven Taylor, is based on a survey of 300 enterprise IT professionals, who were queried about their perspective and deployment status of SIP Trunking and SBCs, session border controllers. More...

Like the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, Sprint is racking up the titles year after year in the Nemertes Research Pilothouse Award for MPLS Services competition. We may not be able to claim our own Michael Jordan, but we can attribute our success to our skill at three-pointers (in this case, the three points being customer service, technology, and value).

For 2012, Nemertes named us the Top Provider among Market Challengers, thanks to superior scores in the customer service and value categories. This is the fourth year for this award, which is based solely on the judgment of some 1,500 IT decision makers surveyed by Nemertes, and Sprint has now taken the top honor for MPLS services for three of those years. More...

Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) is one of the few IT technologies with a "multifaceted" value proposition, in that it not only can lower costs, but can help streamline processes and form new ones. You may start out with cost reduction in mind, but along the way, you find ways to change and improve how you do business.

That was a key point made by analyst Zeus Kerravala of ZK Consulting, during a recent webinar on the subject of hosted UC&C. Also participating were Sprint's own Joseph Martin and Mike Velder of Cisco. If you missed it, you can replay it here. More...

There’s change, and then there’s progress. One just means that something is new and different, but the other means that something has gotten better. It’s in that second category that Compass, our online portal for IP/MPLS VPN service, fits in the wake of a number of enhancements that will help you monitor your network. More...

Two sizable obstacles get in the way of Unified Communications & Collaboration deployments, despite the undeniable benefits UC&C can bring in the form of lower costs, streamlined processes, and greater productivity.

One is the capital investment necessary for a premises-centric solution, which puts it out of reach for many organizations even in good economic times. The other is the deployment time involved and the associated challenges for organizations with limited IT resources. More...

Used to be, in telecom, there was a distinct “consumer” side and a “business” side. That hasn’t gone away entirely, but the apparently unstoppable BYOD movement has pretty well blurred those distinctions.

What brought this to mind was the American Customer Satisfaction survey of wireless service providers, in which Sprint came out solidly on top. In the old way of thinking, this would be pigeonholed as “consumer” news, and we wouldn’t be inclined to mention it over here in Seamless Enterprise. More...

Like a gathering storm, the cloud keeps getting fuller, more robust, and more capable with every passing week.

Back in March, we unveiled Sprint Complete Collaboration, the hosted, Unified-Communications-as-a-Service offering. Earlier this week, we announced a relationship with CSC that enables Sprint to offer CSC's Infrastructure-as-a-Service solutions to mid-sized and enterprise business customers throughout the U.S. More...

Coming at business, and life, from a technology perspective, we often fail to consider some of the non-technology issues surrounding adoption of any new way of doing business. Yes, if it was all just a matter of attaching connector A to port B and inserting tab C into slot D, it would be a piece of cake.

But as we all know, and as Gary Audin writes in a new Webtorials entry, it just isn't that neat and clean. Those pesky people always get in the way. Audin's latest thoughts look at some non-technical barriers to UC implementation, and while his original piece isn't all that long, we're going to brief it down even further, almost Tweet-like, for you. More...

How much could an enterprise save by implementing a SIP-based Unified Communications system? How about tens of millions of dollars? Sound enticing?

That kind of savings is not only possible, but likely, according to a new Webtorials paper titled Enterprises Stand to Recoup Millions Using UC. The same people behind this paper did a similar report a year ago, but where the original report focused on smaller businesses and projected savings for enterprises based on that, this one is targeted strictly at larger enterprises. More...