Mobile solutions and devices are bursting at the seams and creating more opportunities to share, communicate, engage, and conduct business. Mobility is one of the great enablers of video, a medium that is wildly popular with consumers and becoming a preferred communication method for marketers, educators, and other business groups. With 2013 being the Year of Video, as some are prophesizing, enterprises can begin taking advantage now. More...

The materialization of cost savings along with platform simplification and improved communication and collaboration experiences have all validated Unified Communications (UC) within the enterprise. UC is, after all, a multi-billion-dollar industry. The cost of equipment and service delivery is declining as technology progresses, while networks are increasing in sophistication and capabilities.

Overall, businesses are lassoing the power of UC and are discovering how to be more responsive, productive, and collaborative. So what’s next? More...

There really isn't much debate about whether videoconferencing can save an enterprise money, paying for itself through travel replacement and increased productivity. Sure, there are people in the organization who resist video meetings, such as salespersons who insist on meeting in person with a key customer (and if that's the customer's preference, it trumps everything else) or some old-school types who doubt video's effectiveness, or those who feel self-conscious with a camera pointed at them. But video's march continues on. More...

It used to be that web videos were short. Many believed that was because of shorter attention spans. But we are finding that just isn't true. The truth is that short videos were just a technology and financial limitation. I personally no longer have a TV and my kids watch only web-based video content (a TV dial would be as foreign to them as a rotary dial telephone). All this has implications for the enterprise network. More...

Here at Seamless Enterprise, we don’t usually bother with following the “markets” for various goods and services and solutions. For the most part, we know that isn’t your biggest concern.

If you’ve found a UC solution that really works for you, it isn’t important whether the vendor you bought it from has a 10 percent share of the particular market or a 40 percent share. As long as you can be sure the vendor will be around for a while to provide service and support – and we presume you vetted that pretty well before making the purchase – the details of who sells how much to whom this year or next year are secondary. More...

There may not be any such thing as a free lunch, but there just may be such a thing as free bandwidth.

Sound too good to be true? We can’t blame you for being suspicious, but Marty Parker over at NoJitter makes his case for leveraging Unified Communications to modify your mix of traffic in order to accommodate video with no need to add capacity. More...

We talked the other day about how we disagreed with an analyst’s blog headline that suggested Unified Communications was “failing.” Now we offer Exhibit B, a survey of enterprise IT organizations that reveals some pretty ambitious plans to implement various UC applications not only on desktop and notebook computers, but on mobile devices as well. More...

OK, we’ve all had those dreams right? I still remember my nightmares as a six-year-old about getting on the school bus only to realize that I was still wearing my pajamas. This week, a host of companies in Silicon Valley hosted a series of events that I have dubbed “National Wear Your Pajamas to Work Week.”More...

I have a new IP deskphone connected to a cloud-based PBX. It’s been years since I have had a deskphone. The device is not (and likely will never be) fully unified with instant messaging and presence information. As I stare at this thing, my brain struggles with how and why I would use it. In a UC world, using a deskphone (even an IP one) is not like riding a bike.  More...

Andy McLoughlin at GigaOm recently asked the question, “Are Workers Really Not Ready for Desktop Videoconferencing?” In his blog, he cited a recent Forrester report that concluded that a majority of workers don’t want to use desktop videoconferencing tools and don’t have access to them. That will soon change. More...