Unified Communications Buzz Grows
The VAR Guy has spotted a rather interesting trend in his email inbox. In recent days, he's received a flood of email about the unified communications market. Seems like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and several other companies are now using online and face-to-face events to educate target customers about unified communications.
Here's a sampling of updates.
Here's a sampling of updates.
The VAR Guy has spotted a rather interesting trend in his email inbox. In recent days, he’s received a flood of email about the unified communications market. Seems like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and several other companies are now using online and face-to-face events to educate target customers about unified communications.
Here’s a sampling of updates.
- F5 Networks says its latest network application acceleration technology supports Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft’s flagship unified communications platform. F5 says its technology directs network traffic among servers running Office Communications Server 2007 to provide high availability and scalability.
- Unified communications is transforming communications at Indiana University, allowing students, faculty and staff to easily connect and interact with one another, across a myriad devices and locations.
- Campus Technology Magazine on November 1 is hosting a Webinar to explore how Indiana University has moved to a unified communications network. The event, sponsored by Nortel, reinforces the fact that higher education networks are among the first to embrace unified infrastructure. (Full disclosure: The VAR Guy has written for Campus Technology from time to time.)
- Separately, IBM and Nortel on November 14 are hosting a unified communications seminar in New York. It’s interesting to see Nortel hitting the road with IBM. In recent months, Nortel has worked most closely with Microsoft on unified communications.
- And Cisco, as The VAR Guy expected, is pushing harder to promote its unified reach to mobile devices. The networking giant will discuss its mobile device strategy during a video webcast on November 5. Watch for HP, Nokia and Intermec to make appearances on the videocast.
The biggest challenge facing the emerging Unified Communications market is the pace of adoption, and the biggest risk is that the market is nothing more than a chaos of pilot projects, with no plans adn no metrics. Unless an enterprise creates a plan and can measure the progress and results against a baseline, UC will be seen as just another techno-surge in the IT budget. However, if the customers, with support from their consultants, create plans and demand supplier alignment with those plans, UC could deliver process improvement breakthroughs to rival those of call centers in the early 90’s and Web portals in the late 90’s. Thus, the challenge is planning for, attaining and measuring the results.
[…] This useful blog post at TechIQ points to several news items related to UC. The bottom line, the writer says, is that companies such as Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and others are pushing the new approach using live and Web-based events. This may be related to the difficulty in explaining UC. The news items: F5 says its network acceleration technology supports Microsoft#8217;s main UC gambit, Office Communications Server 2007; Indiana University was the subject of a UC Webinar at Campus Technology Magazine (a replay is available here) and a UC seminar by IBM and Nortel is slated for New York City on November 14. […]