Maybe it's time to finally retire the term "dumb pipes" to describe the public network. In our business, as you can imagine, we aren't particularly fond of it.

But in the cloud era, it's such an inaccurate description that it's like calling something that you like "groovy." Unless you're Austin Powers, that just won't fly. More...

How does your enterprise compare? Here are a few highlights of what more than 1,000 companies had to say about their plans for, and experience with, Unified Communications solutions. The report may be accessed at ITworld. More...

Bad things are going to happen to your network. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but sometime. How you prepare for them will help determine just how much damage they do to the network, to your business, and to the way your organization is perceived in the market.

In the third in a series of convergence white papers, available here, Michael Suby of Frost & Sullivan looks at the role of convergence in terms of network reliability, security, and creation of an environment that he says is "designed to minimize operational risk."More...

Regular readers know I experiment with location-based technology quite often. Some time ago, I turned on Google Latitude in my Sprint EVO and started collecting data about my whereabouts. I looked at it all on a map and –  as opposed to being concerned about my privacy --  took solace in the fact that I would have a strong alibi if anyone needed to know my location on a certain date and time. That said, looking back over the past 30 days, I noticed some strange data on the map about places I had presumably been. More...

If you hear the word "convergence," the odds are you will think of network convergence. So would most people, certainly the average Seamless Enterprise reader. But that's only one aspect of convergence, particularly when you're talking about today's communications.

In a new white paper, Michael Suby of Frost & Sullivan denotes three types of convergence, and says it takes all three coming together to get the desired result. That result is a high degree of "information velocity," (watch the video) or information that is moving fast enough to get you what you need, when you need it, wherever you are. More...

I have spent a lot of time talking about Unified Communications presence in this blog. Recently, I have been looking at the interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft deployments. At a high level, there is interoperability between the two platforms, with more to come for sure. More...

Enterprises more than doubled their SIP trunking investments in 2011 compared with 2010, but the room for further growth is almost unlimited.

According to the industry analyst firm Infonetics Research, SIP spending was up 128 percent last year, making it one of the fastest-growing telecom services in North America. But even with that kind of growth, SIP Trunking accounted for only one of 10 trunks deployed here. More...

When it comes to leveraging the magic combination of Unified Communications and mobility – and you can't deny that UC isn't really unified until it is mobile, especially in today's environment – an enterprise does have to take a few things into consideration

The factors to consider are spelled out well in a recent Tech Notes article by Gary Audin. For instance, a typical IT organization is going to have to support four distinct mobile profiles. They are the road warrior, the person who's always on the road visiting customers, for example; the teleworker, the person who works most or all of the time at home; the campus roamer, who's always at a meeting somewhere or on his or her way to one; and the nomad, who works outside the office but typically at a specific location, such as a client site. More...

In David Hirschman’s post, “Why Do We Check In?,” he quotes the tweet of a social media professional: “I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” I have been trying to figure that out myself over the past year.

Last fall, I drafted a post about “checking in” that I never published here, as I just couldn't tie it in sufficiently.  But now I have a little better perspective on where the link is between “check-ins” and Unified Communications. Basically, a “check-in” is a piece of  presence information and is clearly part of the UC paradigm (yes, that is my smiling face on the Wikipedia page for “presence”). More...

Does it surprise you as much as it does us that nearly one-fifth of enterprises are not even considering Unified Communications and collaboration technology now, or planning to in the next three years?

That data point leaped out at us in a piece that Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan wrote over at NoJitter, based on a survey that her organization did of 200 top executives. Nineteen percent of the respondents said they aren’t considering UC at all and have no plans to deploy it in the next three years. More...