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...

What's a mobile UC solution worth to your company? How about $5,500 per year per mobile employee?

That's the "conservative" estimate put forth by a new Webtorials white paper, titled Mobile Unified Communications: The Emergence of 4D Convergence. The "4D" reference threw us at first, but the point there is that this represents the fourth dimension, defined as independence of time and space (cue the Twilight Zone music). In other words, the session isn't determined by the factors of connectivity method, location, or device, and hence the value of a UC solution is enhanced. 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...

You should have been there. Or maybe you were one of the 1,200-plus attendees who were there, in which case you know that the just-concluded 2012 annual Sprint Open Solutions conference was a big success. It was all that we told you it would be in some of our pre-conference posts.

We talked M2M, for example, whether it was in transportation, insurance, retail, or in the environmental "greening" of various aspects of business. For instance: in one session we focused on connected transportation solutions from Sprint, combining the latest in wireless telematics and location technology to enable valuable real-time vehicle status and driver performance information.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...

Business professionals and IT see things differently. Some say they each speak their own language. Priorities are often different. 

Here’s an example. In Gartner’s CIO Survey 2012, the technology priorities of CIOs were revealed. In order, they are:
1. Analytics and Business Intelligence
2. Mobile Technologies
3. Cloud Computing
4. Collaboration
5. Virtualization More...

There may be more in common than one thinks between enterprise IT and Facebook. And it has everything and nothing to do with social media. To start, consumers upload 300 million pictures each day to Facebook, and this number is only growing. In addition, this rate is seasonal says Facebook as the company anticipates up to 2 billion photos on Halloween alone.  

Enterprise organizations, like Facebook, understand the demand for network and storage requirements. Traffic spikes, usage of network collaboration tools, and availability of critical data on the spot – all increase the need for more bandwidth and network intelligence. There may be a lesson in the way the company addresses these challenges: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...

The Open Solutions conference is coming up in just a couple of weeks, and the full conference agenda is set, with 31 sessions and workshops, two prominent keynote presentations, and even a pre-conference hackathon for early birds.

Details are here, but we can tell you that there won't be a minute of boredom to be found in the San Jose Convention Center during the 12th annual conference, October 24 and 25.More...