Technologies and business processes are changing rapidly, thus the potential for IT to deliver real value to the enterprise has never been greater. Mark McDonald, in his blog at Gartner,  calls it Amplifying the Enterprise. 

According to McDonald, “Amplification, which involves taking a signal adding energy to it and sending it externally, provides an apt metaphor for the role of technologies like mobility and cloud. These technologies create new channels and platforms for reaching new customers, engaging existing customers and supporting revenue growth. More...

In focusing on the enterprise, it is becoming increasingly apparent that consumer technology drives the enterprise. The BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement was forced upon enterprises as a result of the popularity of the widely copied Apple iPhone. Now, I am spotting a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) movement, which is destined to have a similar impact. More...

Whatever the root cause of our fascination with “Top 10” lists, we can’t seem to get away from them these days. Frankly, we’ve come to ignore most of them … until, that is, we saw one about the “Top 10 Reasons Why Unified Communications Implementations Fail.”

Well, you can imagine that one caught our attention. The “list” is somewhat more than a list, frankly. It’s in the form of a white paper that tops 2,000 words, and you can go here (registration required) if you want to read the whole thing. The white paper is produced by a maker of enterprise UC equipment, and is probably worth your time to read end-to-end. More...

No, this blog isn’t about me, or something brewing deep within my soul. Yet it’s about something deeply personal. Ringing in 2012, one is deluged with projections for the year as well as reflections on the past. January, too, brings the excitement of CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) and the discovery of many anticipated new products. Yet, no matter how far technology advances, there is a constant yearning for personal connections. They drive business. More...

I feel UC technology will be crossing a threshold of intuition in 2012. Tablet computers, spacious touch-screen smartphones and deskphones with dynamic color displays will help users understand how to use their new technology on a just-in-time basis. Given how busy everyone is today, technology will fail if everyone has to read a user’s manual just to use the basic features of a virtual phone—no matter how integrated and functional the phone may actually be for a well-trained user. More...

We’re calling this meeting of the technology-of-the-year skeptics to order, and our first item of new business is what to call 2012. We need to fill in the blank on “2012: Year of _____” in order to allow for lots of heavy marketing throughout the remaining 49 weeks of the year.

Now, some of you attendees have made a good case for not declaring the technology of the year until the year is over. You say that only by reflecting on what was hot in, say, 2011, can we really make the judgment. But this is a January tradition, and the marketers depend on it. So can we just proceed?More...

As I visit with customers about convergence technology, the conversation often pivots around the “capital cost” versus “operating cost” dilemma. Should a company make a large capital investment in Unified Communications or should it work entirely from operating funds by subscribing to UC?  My answer often surprises them: There is no right or wrong answer from a technology perspective, as it all depends on a company’s financial situation. More...

In the cloud computing space, Salesforce.com is once again showing that it has vision about how the workplace of tomorrow will change. At the end of 2009, Salesforce.com acquired a company to bolster the site’s social capabilities. The social fabric now known as Salesforce Chatter was a result of that acquisition. Now, Salesforce.com has just purchased another company known as Rypple. As a result of this and similar moves by enterprise application providers, I suspect Fortune 500 executives will flock rapidly to a new buzzword: “gamification.” More...

One of the biggest drivers of bandwidth on the network today is multimedia. While the consumer market often moves first to take advantage of new technologies in this space, there are key learnings that we can take away as we think about enterprise strategy. Web media guru Liz Shannon Miller recently asked her GigaOm audience “Is Facebook the way to go for new web originals?” My vote is yes, as the Facebook API allows content creators to know more about who their audience is than they have ever been able to before. In fact, the power of video entertainment will help those who never understood “this Facebook thing” to have their “eureka” moment. More...

Delivered right before Christmas, the gift that will keep on giving for businesses  in this new year is SIP Toll Free Service, designed to control costs, boost capacity, and enhance control over inbound toll-free calls.

Sprint announced this latest tool in the SIP Trunking toolbox on December 20. It lets organizations leverage their SIP trunks and existing communication system to make their own routing decisions, as well as to share capacity across the enterprise and aggressively control costs. More...