Author: Kevin Gulley
In a recent article discussing Virtual SBC and SBCaaS options, we promised that we would take a closer look how media processing (transcoding and interworking of various communication codecs and protocols), which has traditionally been one of the liabilities of cloud-based SBCs, is being enhanced. To start, it is important to note that the software that handles the signaling in a Unified Communications environment, things like setting up sessions, session management and GUI presentation, is different than the software handling the media processing. The signaling component of UC (basically what you see as your UC software) can easily be virtualized and…
Customer Experience Management (CEM) is quickly becoming a strategic imperative for brands in a multitude of industries. And it’s no wonder, with a recent report stating that within two years CEM will be more important to a customer’s perception of a brand than their product or the price of the product. To learn more about this critical topic and how innovative companies are looking to deploy the right technology in their contact centers and throughout the enterprise, take a listen to this interview with David Jodoin, the Chief Technology Officer at CafeX. We dig into the trends impacting the market, the role mobile technologies…
“This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes.” This ubiquitous contact center recording greets us when we call into our favorite retailer (or any other business) to make us aware that supervisors are working in the background to mentor and coach agents, identify reasons for positive and negative outcomes, escalate calls as necessary and improve overall service levels and customer satisfaction. It’s part of every well run call center. But what about when companies have multiple contact centers in different regions around the globe or have grown through acquisition and find themselves supporting multiple call center solutions…
Have you ever considered what your collaboration style is? What about your colleagues or your boss? In this podcast interview with Leo Tucker, Global Vice President of Marketing at PGi, we dig into the findings of their recent survey that looks to answer this question. They interviewed business people from a thousand companies and gathered information on one hundred different factors that influence collaboration to get a baseline understanding of the various ways in which business people collaborate and how businesses can benefit by applying this understanding to their own companies. Dig Deeper: Download the report overview now! We review the findings in…
I think we can all agree that when we think of Skype for Business, our thoughts don’t immediately rush to how great the video experience is. I’ve participated in scores of Skype for Business meetings as an invited participant (we don’t use S4B internally at Buyer Media) and can count on one hand the number of times the video capability has been used at all. There are several reasons for this, not the least of which is that making S4B have great video capability – especially for external constituents – is complex, time consuming and expensive. So it was great…
Open Source UC is consistently one of the most searched for terms on The UC Buyer. We dig in deeper in this information packed interview with Jerry Stabile, CEO and Founder of Commercial Open Source UC vendor, eZuce. We discuss the benefits and challenges of Open Source UC, the types of companies that it is right for, and virutalization, cloud and UCaaS implications. We also look at how the SipXCom open source project community is working to keep up with the breakneck speed of change in the communications industry. If your business is considering UC and looking at Open Source as an option,…
It’s just about 6 months since CafeX was awarded Best in Show at Enterprise Connect for their new product, Chime, so I thought I would check in to see how things are coming along. I recently caught up with Kevin Glass, the UK-based Chief Innovation Officer at CafeX to get the lowdown. Since WebRTC is what CafeX is known for, it was somewhat surprising that the shortcomings of WebRTC played a significant role in defining the opportunity around Chime. “We’ve been on the cutting edge of WebRTC work from the very beginning and due to a number of issues, the promise of pervasive,…
Here at The UC Buyer we’ve talked about SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) and SIP Trunking many times. We covered the basics, the fact that the SIP Market is growing like mad and expected to exceed 50% penetration in the U.S. this year, and even the challenges multinational businesses face when deploying SIP. But what about smaller businesses? As the market continues to mature, SMBs are looking to SIP and hoping to see the same types of benefits that their larger brethren have realized from deploying SIP Trunking. To gain more insight into what SMBs can expect, I recently caught up with Gary WIilson,…
Some brain candy to kick off your weekend. Ummmm, You’re Missing Something Onalytica published a cool article with connection webs featuring the Top 100 Unified Communications Influencers and Brands. One problem…I’m not on there and neither is The UC Buyer. Whaaaaaaaaat? Where’s the love?? Freemium UCaaS UCaaS provider OnSIP just announced the industry’s first Freemium Unified Communications as a Service offering allowing organizations to, “organizations to voice call, video chat, message, extension dial, view presence, and share web call links with external parties for free.” That is certainly one way to get people’s attention in a crowded marketplace. A Little Late on This…
Over and over at The UC Buyer we have heard that one of the biggest risks to Cloud-based UC is a corporate network that is not up for the job. In this detailed podcast with Stephen Farkouh, the Executive Vice President of Information Systems at UCaaS solution provider Broadview Networks, we discuss the network challenges that businesses face when deploying UCaaS and what they can do to prevent them. We talk about jitter and latency and their causes including router configurations, firewall setup and bandwidth. We also dive into their new solution allows their channel partners to perform an in-depth, long-term pre-test of…
Companies are moving towards Network Function Virtualization (NFV) in a big way. NFV is an initiative undertaken by companies and communications service providers (CSPs) to virtualize the network services that are now being carried out by proprietary, dedicated hardware. As businesses successfully adopt NFV they will decrease the amount of proprietary hardware that’s needed to launch and operate network services. Businesses are looking to NFV to deliver a number of benefits, including operational savings, lower CapEx costs, increased agility and flexibility to scale. When it comes to the communications stack there are a number of capabilities that are moving towards…
In this insightful discussion with Derek Yoo, CTO of Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) we get into the details on the trends impacting the enterprise communications space and what is driving the movement towards Unified Communications in the cloud and UCaaS in particular. We discuss the impact of consumerization of IT, the various freemium collaboration solutions in the market and how UC and UCaaS vendors are adapting to continue delivering a high level of value and service to their enterprise customers. >>Dig Deeper: Download this Whitepaper for UC&C Deployment Best Practices If you’re considering UCaaS or are interested in where the market is headed, this is a…
Over the past year, we’ve covered the accelerating trend around businesses embedding communications capabilities in existing web and business applications. Historically the communications layer of technology had been a walled garden and business application developers and managers didn’t have the know-how or desire to mess around with telephony or video….that was for the comms guys. This has changed rapidly over the last several years as business managers realize the benefits of embedding these capabilities directly into web pages, mobile apps, contact center applications or even CRM platforms, bringing advanced communications ever closer to the customer. There are a number of…
Gartner’s recently released Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications report is great reading, and contains the usual breakdown of major players in the UC space and how they perform against certain key metrics. They break down vendor performance in four key categories, including those offering: Full UC with Strong Telephony, Full UC with Strong Collaboration Capabilities, Full UC for Midsize Organizations and the Ability to Offer Hybrid Solutions. Kudos to Cisco…they come out on top in all four categories against significant competitors including Microsoft, Avaya, Mitel, ALE, ShoreTel, Interactive Intelligence, Huawei and NEC. I would definitely suggest taking a read through the details. However,…
As seems to be the case every month, there’s lots going on in the communications space and summer hasn’t slowed things down. Almost too much. To help you keep up, here’s a quick rundown on things you need to know about from the last few weeks. Cisco Launches Cisco Meeting Server, Leveraging Acano and Partnership With Microsoft Cisco just announced their new product, Cisco Meeting Server, a solution designed to make it simple for customers to use Cisco video room technology with third-party solutions such as Skype for Business, Avaya, Polycom, WebRTC and mobile clients. A couple of interesting aspects of this…
Businesses are on an unstoppable march towards efficient, open floor plan office spaces. The first iteration of this was the Open Space design. This movement began to accelerate rapidly during the economic downturn in 2008 and was supported by several simultaneous technology and business trends. These included enhanced mobility and BYOD, the rapid increase in the number of remote and at home workers and the increasing ubiquity of unified communications and collaboration solutions, like web and video communication tools, to tie everything together. From a business perspective maximizing the use of costly office space make good sense as it saves companies a…
I’ve been on vacation for the last few weeks on Cape Cod. Beautiful location, incredible weather, serious quality time with my family. But it’s not like vacation used to be. This may because I’ve run my own company for 19 years and an entrepreneur’s job never stops, but a big portion is due to the way that communications technology has evolved over the last 20 years. I thought it would be fun to take a stroll down the vacation memory lane. 1996 I had bought my first cell phone in 1995 and you could make calls on it in many…
In case you haven’t checked it out yet, Gartner’s 2016 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications came out recently and we wanted to give you a quick overview. The focus of this report is enterprise unified communications (UC) solutions that are intended for on-premises deployment. MIdsize Enterprises, UCaaS and critical UC capabilities are covered in different reports. For those of you looking for the bottom line, there are no new additions or exits from the ‘leaders’ quadrant. The leaders hold steady with Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel and Avaya staying in place due to their completeness of vision and ability to execute. One major takeaway…
Here’s a crazy stat for you: 76% of the 5.3 million small and medium businesses in the U.S. say they are moving their telephony to the cloud (or 86% if you believe this recent report) within the next few years. The majority of these businesses are still a year away from pulling the trigger and are currently in fact finding mode, but if you believe what people are saying, the tidal wave is cresting. As we’ve covered here in the past, one approach that holds a lot of appeal for SMBs is going all in on Skype for Business and Microsoft’s…
Was taking a few planned days off when I realized that everywhere I looked there was video conferencing news. Gartner’s new Magic Quadrant for group video systems just came out, there was a big acquistion in the business meeting / video conferencing space and leading business publications were pushing stories about how to make video work for your business. Let’s dig in. 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Group Video Systems The group video market is changing quickly (no surprise) and according to Gartner is in a slow decline phase (contracting by 1.3% annually through 2020). Software video infrastructure, innovative form…