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...

While the New York Times has a trademark on the term “All The News That’s Fit To Print,” getting a story printed will be less than half the battle going forward. In the future, getting a story read will be the focus of media outlets. The Washington Post recently released a Facebook application it calls a “social reader.” After using it for a while, it is pretty clear that social reading is the wave of the future. More...

Videoconferencing on an everyday basis has been something that has been “just around the corner” for close to four decades now, and an interesting piece on why it isn’t more common can be found over at InformationWeek.

Writer Kurt Marko poses the question of “why aren’t we all saying ‘can you see me now?’” and comes up with two answers as to why videoconferencing is still a niche technology. One answer is technological, the other cultural. More...

Five years ago, Time Magazine named “You” as its Person of the Year. Shortly thereafter, I started writing an internal blog at Sprint called “CG’s Soapbox.” The blog’s title paid homage to the days when a person would literally grab a wooden box, plop it down on a local street corner and start speaking freely.More...

The first post I wrote when Seamless Enterprise  began was entitled “I’m Done with Web 2.0.” That wasn’t literal; what I was saying is that I felt like I had finally found the missing pieces to understand the impact of social media as a whole, despite the fact that I had scratched my head trying to understand the value of many of the individual pieces. But now I really am done with Web 2.0, meaning my focus now is on the elusive future-state that I assume someone else has already coined “Web 3.0.” More...

The changing role of video in the enterprise is reflected in a recent white paper that shows how conferencing technology has evolved, and fairly quickly, from an option primarily for travel cost avoidance to a real collaborative tool.

The Aberdeen Group white paper, titled From Niche to Mainstream: The Evolution of Video Collaboration, is available through Webtorials (registration required). It looks at how some companies are taking the lead on leveraging video in a Unified Communications and collaboration environment, as well as how other enterprises stack up against these leaders and the “best practices” standards they are setting. More...