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...

Well hey, it's 2013! The 20th anniversary year of Intel's Pentium chips and the first recorded incident of spamming. We've come a long way since then.

Now that everybody's all eager to get back to business after the holiday interlude, we want to take a second and anticipate what we'll be talking about this year in convergence, networking, and IT. More...

Taking a quick look at a summary of the latest Frost & Sullivan annual Unified Communications and collaboration survey among C-level executives, one paragraph smacked us in the face. It appears that these executives have surprisingly little faith in their IT departments.

You can check out the summary yourself at NoJitter, but here’s the bottom line: Most of these executives say their infrastructure and IT operations are “relatively inefficient and unable to fully address broader business objectives.” 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...

Many things contribute to a successful Unified Communications deployment. Engaging end users and business leaders up front in the planning process is important. So is following through with these same people post-deployment, to ensure users know how to use and maximize the solution. Considering the dynamics between legacy and new equipment is yet another element. 

When it comes to UC, however, it is easy to forget that it is the network that makes it all possible. More...

Unified Communications is a reality in more than half of companies with annual revenues of $100M to over $1 billion, says the 2012 survey by IDG Enterprise. What is interesting, however, is that the employees or end users don’t know it. By this I mean, in the IT world, UC is a known factor – it has been talked about, tried, and proven true for years now. Ask an end user what UC means to them, and you are likely to receive a silent response with a furrowed brow. 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...

In case you missed it – hey, you're busy people and you can't get around to reading everything – Sprint's own Mike Fitz sat down for an in-depth interview with the good folks at Business Solutions magazine. The topic was Unified Communications, and Mike, our wireline VP, had interesting things to say, as always.

You can check out the entire article, but to summarize, Mike pointed to three significant trends, all converging in such a way as to drive interest and investment in UC. More...

There are three major trends currently shaping Unified Communications, according to our own Mike Fitz. Mike recently shared these trends with Brian Albright, editor of Business Solutions Magazine.

These trends are user demands for more mobility and portability, CIOs becoming more focused on finding ways to support line of business activities (not just tech enablement), and the expansion and improvement of UC technology. 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...