How do you know if you're a good fit for a hosted Unified Communications solution? Well, Michael Suby of Frost & Sullivan has half a dozen questions you can ask yourself about your company to find out.

Suby moderated last week's Sprint-sponsored webinar on hosted UC, which also featured Paul Seibert, who heads network operations for Snelling (the staffing people) and Intrepid USA Healthcare, and Craig Safir of Sprint. If you missed it, you can access the archived version. 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...

Although it's almost always cost savings that ends up in the leading role, sometimes it's a supporting player that steals the show.

That was the case for Paul Seibert, who heads network operations for Snelling (the staffing people) and Intrepid USA Healthcare. Even though executives almost always look first at what implementing Unified Communications might save the company, that's not a concern for Seibert. 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...

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...

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...

As wise old Ben Franklin said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Of course, a penny had a bit more buying power back in Ben’s day, but let’s not be too literal here. If you can leverage technology to save your company money, then the mere act of NOT spending it in the first place is the equivalent of generating additional revenue.

The technology in this case is SIP Trunking, and while it is a foundational building block for Unified Communications, the truth is, many companies really only look at SIP Trunking initially for the sake of potential savings. 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’re always interested in business case advice, especially as it relates to Unified Communications. So a recent Webtorials white paper that purported to offer advice about building a comprehensive UC business case, caught our eye.

Turns out that the white paper (free registration required) was less about a business case than it was about a strategic approach to bringing UC into the enterprise. But that’s OK, because it has some good and thoughtful material about how the author – veteran consultant Don Van Doren – segments UC into a couple of sub-categories. More...