I have actually been using the SpinVox service for over a year as a VIP customer. I can vouch for the reliability and accuracy of the service. More importantly the voice to text feature is a great time saver. I can read a message faster than calling my voicemail, stepping through the menus, and then listening. I can also read a message in circumstances when I can’t easily call my voicemail (perhaps while in a meeting for example). In short, I could never go back to listening to voicemails! (more…)
Mitel has announced desktop and mobile Unified Communications (UC) clients with some excellent features and their own flavour of telepresence which might compete with other HD solutions but wont compete with leading telepresence solutions.
The UC desktop client include some key features that immediately stand out; the ability to federate with public presence sources and integration with their mobile UC client. Better still the mobile UC client is available across Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry. These feature releases are essential to providing integrated UC solutions and from an industry perspective come hot on the heals of magic quadrant provider Cisco who has also only just released desktop to mobile integrated presence and the support for a Microsoft Mobile UC client. (more…)
Single Number Reach, single voicemail, presence and softphones… hopefully this presentation provides some stimulation when considering the feature requirements for your own organisation. The presentation is available for download as a PowerPoint document or viewing below together with audio.
One of the biggest criticisms leveled at UC provider sales pitches is their focus on ‘soft’ benefits, such as time saved for the average office worker and increased productivity. Of course, what most organisations need in order justify a UC purchase decision is reliable evidence of ‘hard’ benefits such as cost reduction and accelerated time to market. ShoreTel’s promotion of the energy efficiency of its solution provides an interesting example of a UC provider trying to address that need.
ShoreTel’s claims are based on a report it commissioned from the Tolly group to investigate the power consumption of its IP switches and IP phones relative to those from other suppliers. These tests were then used as the basis for projections of the typical energy consumption of ShoreTel’s UC solution in various deployment scenarios. These projections estimate that a ShoreTel UC system on a network made up of 350 users at a main site and 19 branch offices would use 45% less power than Cisco’s UC offering. At a single site with 65 users, the saving would be 44%, and that deployment at a main site with 1500 users plus one regional and one branch office site would produce savings of 37%. (more…)
Firstly, they are small but significant steps in Cisco’s evolution from hardware vendor to software and services provider. They also augment Cisco’s UC offering with improved e-mail, calendaring, IM and presence functionality. This will enable it to compete more directly with Microsoft for ownership of the
corporate desktop communications environment. However, these acquisitions also better enable Cisco to work with customers existing infrastructure. And this will make the transition to UC a lot less daunting for many IT decision-makers. (more…)
The variety of applications available to run directly on VoIP phones is quite amazing; world clocks, weather forecasts, stock tickers, room booking systems and even remote surveillance. These applications definitely provide a novalty value but do they actually provide any business benefits?
For those not familiar, Office Communications Server (OCS) is Microsoft’s Instant Messaging, voice and video communications product. In Microsoft’s own words OCS lets users find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications they use most.
Users can initiate communications with colleagues via a desktop client called Office Communicator or directly from Microsoft Office applications. For example using the desktop client users can Instant Message a colleague and then escalate into a voice or video call, or from Microsoft Outlook users can view an email together with the availability of the sender allowing them to choose to reply by email or reply via a voice call.
Cisco has been busy over the last month bolstering and adjusting it’s unified communications offerings. Their key announcements include:
On the 25th of September Version 7 of Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) IP Telephony platform was released. This release is key for companies also considering deployment of Microsoft Office Communicator as it brings a feature called SIP Forking which allows an inbound call to a CUCM endpoint to simultaneously ring an associated Microsoft Office Communicator endpoint… in effect unifying your Cisco and Microsoft voice capabilities.
On the same day as the above announcement, Cisco Webex Connect was launched (see image), providing a major enhancement on Webex to provide a Software As A Service model for web conferencing, document sharing, presence, chat, voice and video communications. The key selling points other than SAAS model is the ability to connect with users both inside and outside your organisation through the hosted infrastructure and the ability to integrate with business applications. Follow this link for a free trial… I will need to do a review on this product soon!
On the 19th of September Cisco announced the acquisition of Jabber an open standards based presence and Instant Messaging platform. Both these areas are not strong on the Cisco platform; for example Instant Messaging is not possible between Cisco mobile phone clients (Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator) and Cisco desktop clients (Cisco Unified Personal Communicator). Jabber may well be a strategy to plug existing gaps and enhance future functionality for the Cisco IP Telephony platform and perhaps the hosted Webex Connect platform too.
Just one day before the Jabber announcement Cisco completed the acquisition of PostPath a hosted email and calander product. The obvious extension of this acquisition is integration into the Cisco Webex Connect SAAS offering.
Rather than solely relying on partners and often competitors to assist in providing a unified communications suite Cisco appears to be acquiring the capabilities it does not have. The key differenentiator with the newly acquired capabilities is provision using Software As A Service model. Given these developments no doubt SAAS will become a more viable consideration for providing communications services… watch this space.
Nokia has announced in a recent press release that “Going forward, Nokia plans to form its enterprise solutions offering by combining Nokia devices and applications with software solutions from industry leading enterprise vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others“.
This announcement comes just over 2 weeks since declaring that Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync will be supported on all Nokia Symbian S60 devices, and nearly 3 years since Nokia acquired the Intellisync technology. Just one day later Nokia then announced the acquisition of OZ Communications a popular consumer email and IM provider.
