This week in UC: Smartphone Strongmen Challenged

Statistically, Nokia (News - Alert) and Research In Motion Limited still rule over the smartphone OS market, but that may be changing soon. New platforms marketed aggressively by giants such as Google and Apple (News - Alert) are rapidly becoming more popular among end-users.

Apple. Google. They are bellwether players in the tech market - and they are pitted against one another for dominance of the increasingly lucrative smartphone market.

According to Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Stamford, Conn.-based market research firm Gartner (News - Alert), the first quarter of 2010 saw RIM, a pure smartphone player, make its debut in the top five mobile devices manufacturers, and saw Apple increase its market share by 1.2 percentage points.

UCIF to Do More Than Come Up With UC Infrastructure Standards

Citing the need to fully leverage customers' investments in communications systems and unite their global organizations, five global technology companies today joined to form the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), an alliance dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor unified communications (UC) interoperability. HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech, LifeSize (News - Alert), and Polycom, seek to unify the vibrant but fragmented UC ecosystem through this shared mission.

Unified Communications is complex because it represents a variety of different ways to make timely contact and communicate with people. Although, UC functionality is very software based, the multiplicity of UC-related technologies can't all be provided by a single software developer. From an interoperability perspective, the number of technology standards needed to cover all the flexibility that UC interactions require are too many and too complex to define or implement easily. 

Google Makes $68.2M Offer for Global IP Solutions

Google is poised to purchase Global IP Solutions for $68.2 million, which is based on the currently issued and outstanding share capital of GIPS.

'The Web is evolving quickly as a development platform, and real-time video and audio communication over the Internet are becoming important new tools for users,' said Rian Liebenberg, engineering director at Google, in a release. 'GIPS's technology provides high quality, real-time audio and video over an IP network, and we're looking forward to working with the GIPS team at Google to continue innovating for the Web platform.'

As part of the deal Google Acquisition Holdings Inc, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google will make a public cash offer to acquire all the issued and to be issued shares of GIPS for $2.12 per share.

Nortel (News - Alert) CVAS Adds New UC Application Collaboration to Hosted IP Communications Solution

Nortel Carrier VoIP and Application Solutions (CVAS) has announced the addition of a new Web-based UC collaboration application to Hosted IP Communications Solution.

The company said the new application will enable service providers to increase subscriber productivity and generate incremental revenues by allowing users to instantly shift from conference calls to full, rich-media Web collaboration when needed.

Samih Elhage, president at CVAS, Nortel, said that Nortel CVAS' Hosted IP Communications solution is unlocking new modes of communication and collaboration by eliminating the need for users to work with disparate and disconnected tools and services.