If you’re looking for a brief, to-the-point summation of the benefits of Unified Communications and what they mean to enterprises, tune in to a webcast (Ready to Solve Your UC Challenges) starring Sprint’s own Mike McRoberts.More...

I attended my last VoiceCon event this week. Good riddance – the whole concept of a voice-centric, telephony show was so last decade. They actually had a general session titled “How many phones does your enterprise need?” With no disrespect to the panelists, they should have put a sign up on the stage that said “NONE” in big letters and saved everyone an hour. Of course, Eric Krapf and the VoiceCon gang will be back next year with the newly renamed Enterprise Connect event – and I’ll be there. Let’s hope that in the next year a whole bunch of other things, terms and traditions follow a similar path and disappear. More...

Ran across an interesting Gartner survey of CIOs the other day, regarding their technology priorities for the coming year. Coming in at the top three spots were virtualization, cloud computing, and Web 2.0. More...

Besides all of the cool technology and clever folks, HIMSS was quite an eye-opening event as the country’s healthcare discussion drags on ad infinitum. For those of you who think you know all the facts around the healthcare debate, check out the opening remarks of Barry Chaiken, MD, one of the head guys at HIMSS – scary! Interestingly, most of the problems and inefficiencies we continuously hear about had solutions on display at HIMSS. It would appear that integrated, ubiquitous solutions can in fact cure many of our major health care ills. More...

Ran across an interesting term the other day. “Return on Collaboration.” It’s something that Frost & Sullivan has coined, taking the usual ROI in a little different direction when it comes to assessing the value of Unified Communications. More...

It’s a bit of a long read by online standards, but this article on SIP trunking as a foundation of Unified Communications is well worth your time. Lisa Pierce, president of Strategic Networks Group, wrote it for No Jitter, and it really does capture the important role of SIP trunking en route to the Promised Land of UC. More...

We’ve talked on this blog about the difficulty of quantifying the ROI for Unified Communications, since it’s tough to sell the concept of vastly improved productivity to those decision-makers who see the world in dollars and cents. There’s a new and interesting white paper on the topic by Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research that offers advice on making a bottom-line business case for UC migration. More...

As you might expect, colleges and universities are among the leaders in the adoption and implementation of green technologies. They have always been more inclined to experimentation than their enterprise counterparts. So when it comes to reducing their environmental impact, through commitments such as the climate-neutral campus, Leeds building construction, and renewable energy, they are leading the way through research, development, and implementation. More...

UC or Unified Communications is all the buzz. By now, almost certainly someone in your enterprise has approached the topic of a unified communications strategy – even if you have not yet defined what that means for your organization. Whether you are at the strategic, conceptual, or deployment stage, one thing for sure is your UC experience will likely be better if it is a partnership. More...

Let me start off with the facts: I’m not really a big fan of keynote addresses; 8 a.m. is an awful early start time, particularly if you make 30 or so wrong turns in downtown Atlanta on the way to said keynote; and the views expressed here are entirely my own (no one else has any interest in taking credit for them). More...