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...

For Paul Seibert, the cost savings that Sprint Complete Collaboration yields are welcome, but what matters to him most are the flexibility, scalability, and management capabilities that this hosted Unified Communications solution brings.

Seibert is Director of Network Operations for Intrepid USA Healthcare Services and Snelling Staffing, both based in Dallas. The companies are owned by Patriarch Partners and share a data center along with the network infrastructure support team headed by Seibert. Collectively, the two companies have more than 200 offices across the contiguous United States, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. 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...

As much as I try to keep my blogs positive, I think I am entitled to a periodic rant once in a while. Today’s frustration is on the poor quality of what most online learning companies try to pass off as “computer-based training (CBT).”

I did a CCNA (Cisco-Certified Network Associate) self-study using CBT 10 years ago that was absolutely awesome. When I look at most of the CCNA self-study courses available today, they do not come close to the one I took a decade ago.  It is amazing that there are not more high-quality CBT programs for technology folks. While I understand that having an “expert” teaching in front of a whiteboard is the cheapest way to create CBT, the opportunity to massively increase the productivity of learning is totally missed by this approach.  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...

Before you can make an informed decision about return on investment (ROI) for a Unified Communications implementation, it is essential to know the scope of that investment. Obviously, it is more than just the up-front cost of the equipment you buy for a premises-based solution, or the ongoing cost of a hosted solution. More...

I have spent a lot of time talking about Unified Communications presence in this blog. Recently, I have been looking at the interoperability between Cisco and Microsoft deployments. At a high level, there is interoperability between the two platforms, with more to come for sure. 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...

In David Hirschman’s post, “Why Do We Check In?,” he quotes the tweet of a social media professional: “I did not want to be mayor of my dentist’s office. Why did I even check in?” I have been trying to figure that out myself over the past year.

Last fall, I drafted a post about “checking in” that I never published here, as I just couldn't tie it in sufficiently.  But now I have a little better perspective on where the link is between “check-ins” and Unified Communications. Basically, a “check-in” is a piece of  presence information and is clearly part of the UC paradigm (yes, that is my smiling face on the Wikipedia page for “presence”). 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...