If you're among the thousands heading to Enterprise Connect in Orlando next week, there will be lots of opportunities to hear Sprint people offer their perspective, on everything from SIP Trunking to mobile Unified Communications.

During the course of the annual conference, five panels – four of them on Monday the 18th – will include Sprint representatives. As you're putting together your must-see Enterprise Connect schedule, here are the sessions that we recommend:

SIP Trunking: Who's Offering What? This 9 a.m. Monday roundtable discussion has a stageful of panelists, including Sprint's own Dimitrios Kioukis, Manager of Converged Solutions Engineering. The focus of this session is how an enterprise can procure the right SIP Trunking services and equipment to make a SIP technology initiative a success.More...

When it comes to picking a hotel for your business trip, if all your choices are similar in pricing and quality, but one has attentive concierge service, wouldn't it make sense to choose that one?

Maybe you'll need help picking the best nearby restaurant, or want to score tickets to a basketball game in town at the last minute. That's when you really appreciate the value of a concierge. More...

Call it the eight-step plan. Eight steps that move you from “that cloud sure sounds like a good idea” to true cloud readiness.

A new Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan paper available here (registration required) spells out the eight steps. The paper bills itself as a “practical guide” to a successful cloud strategy, and we have to say that the steps they describe definitely seem practical and sensible. More...

What can this year's Consumer Electronics Show tell us about the cloud, and most importantly, what does that mean to enterprises?

Full disclosure: I did not attend CES, and I’m fine with that. But I did keep my eyes open for coverage of news and developments that either weren’t entirely “consumer” or which offered insight into what such developments mean to the enterprise in the coming months.

By the way, Heidi Gigler’s latest post – she did attend CES – provides an overall look at the show and what it portends for enterprises since, as she points out, a lot of what IT departments deal with now is driven by outside, consumer-oriented advancements. More...

Sprint's cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 service offering has earned some well-deserved recognition, in the form of a North American Customer Value Enhancement Award in Mobile Communications and Collaboration from Frost & Sullivan.

This annual award recognizes excellence in products and services that create value for customers and enhance their ROI. In bestowing this award on Sprint, Frost & Sullivan emphasized that the "Microsoft Office 365 solution reflects a sharpened understanding" of smaller and mid-sized business needs. They went on to describe it as "the most attractive offering in a hotly contested field." More...

When your business depends on data and collaboration – and whose doesn't anymore? – it's understandable if you emphasize caution in how you change the way your people work with that data. That includes where it's kept, how you access it, and how you protect it.

So it's no surprise that a recent Forrester Wave white paper about cloud strategies found that even with online collaboration becoming much more appealing as business dynamics evolve, there is a certain amount of business customer uncertainty when it comes to committing to these collaboration solutions. More...

As the “cloud” concept arose, there was a lot of debate about whether cloud computing would really replace the client-server architectures of today’s enterprises. Now it’s clear that the answer is both “yes” and “no.”

Cloud computing isn’t an “either/or” proposition. What will happen at first is that CD and DVD-ROM drives on computers will start to disappear. “App stores” and the like are nothing more than cloud-based software management systems -- but they work really, really well. Few of the “apps” one downloads to a device or PC are actually cloud-based apps -- but as more and more applications are developed for cloud-based distribution, more and more cloud-based functionality is being written into these apps. More...

There is interest across most industries in hosted Unified Communications, but it is interesting that we at Cisco, as we work with Sprint in implementing these solutions, are seeing spikes of interest in certain vertical markets and sectors.

There is a high degree of interest in financial services and insurance, all professional services, manufacturing and packaged goods, and in every area of the public sector. Why these markets more than others? We think the answer is in a few key business and competitive pressures that seem to be more intense in these areas. Interest and activity will remain high here, while other verticals are quickly following this market transition. More...

Recently I told you about a positive cloud report from IDC Government Insights. The week this report was issued, a high profile technology professional came out that same time and "dissed" the cloud.

As reported by CNET, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak clearly isn't a fan. He used terms such as "horrendous" to describe the future of storing data in the cloud, and predicted "a lot of horrible problems in the next five years." More...

The cloud got some thumbs-ups ... and a thumbs-down ... in a couple of recent news items. Because we accentuate the positive here, we'll focus on the good news today and address the other news in my next post.

According to a new report from IDC Government Insights,  government agencies are opening their eyes to the possibilities that the cloud offers. They may not be doing an awful lot in the cloud yet, but they're at least thinking about it. More...