I am hearing some cross-talk between a couple of my recent blogs. In "Single Number Reach," I was speculating as to what word we will use in the future for a Unified Communications identifier when phone numbers become obsolete. In "Perfect Storm of Security Threats," I speculated about the problems with today's common two-factor authentication approaches and how vulnerable they are. As social media changes the way we use the net, it looks like the two issues discussed in those articles will become more inter-twined. More...

In a previous post, we took a close look at the mechanics of the MPLS network, offering an under-the-hood exploration of the versatility of Multiprotocol Label Switching. This time, we want to focus on what all those mechanics make possible. More...

What comes to mind when you hear "Unified Communications?" For many people, the image is fuzzy at best--and that's the problem. Technologies like UC have become a magnet for definitions and buzz words; the result is a lack of clarity. More...

Mobile application developers are gearing up for Sprint’s 10th annual Developer Conference. This year’s event is October 26-28 in Santa Clara, California. If you haven’t registered yet, you can do it here. More...

MPLS is a most interesting technology, and we’re going to be talking about it in depth in a couple of upcoming blog posts. But what matters most about any technology is what it can do for the enterprises and the people who use it. What does it enable that either wasn’t possible before, or wasn’t as easy before? More...

Juliana Kenny at TMCnet posted an interesting blog with the term Cloud Telephony in the title. While somewhat akin to what some used to call Hosted IP Telephony, the concept of cloud telephony is a little broader, implying a somewhat end-user-device-agnostic approach as part of a Hosted IP Telephony model. More...

In Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications, one comment of note was that "service providers (such as the telcos, Google, et al.), were not included ... because they do not offer an on-premises solution." Gartner does not consider UC solutions in the cloud as "Unified Communications" per se, rather they consider those to be "UC-as-a-service (UCaaS)” solutions and publish a separate Magic Quadrant for them. More...

Trend stories are often pretty predictable, but we were impressed with a recent post on Unified Communications by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research over at No Jitter and FierceVoIP. More...

The following blog is by guest blogger, Lisa Pierce. Pierce is president of Strategic Networks Group, an independent analyst firm specializing in emerging business-class network services. More...

Gartner calls it Data Deluge. McKinsey calls it Big Data. No matter the name, the flood of incoming data to an organization, and data captured from the Web, is doubling every 18 months says McKinsey in its August 2010 Quarterly Report. Web communities, and technologies for capturing and analyzing information, give organizations access to customer data as never before. More...