Enterprise VoIP Featured Article

Welcome to the newest edition of TMCnet's Unified Communications Week in Review on this Freaky Friday the 13th.
 

There has never been another time where the saying “time is money” has been more prevalent. Although Unified Communications (UC) are often referred to as a “trend in business” with all the cost-cutting and streamlining going in behind many business walls today, UC could be here to stay.

 

This week, Sagem-Interstar, a global innovator in advanced fax solutions for IP networks, announced it will be hosting a joint Webinar with Cisco next Wednesday to discuss how to enhance your Unified Communications (UC) strategy with the Cisco AXP-XMediusFAX solution, while optimizing enterprise branch performance in vertical markets.

 

Event attendees will also learn how to reduce their environmental footprint, and total cost of ownership.

 

During the Webcast, see how Cisco (News - Alert) routers support retail, government, financial services and healthcare communications with the Cisco AXP-XMediusFAX solution. Learn more about this integrated approach and how it addresses faxing as part of a complete UC strategy.

 

Also this week, Interactive Intelligence’s Messaging Interaction Center (MIC) proved to be a valuable solution for UNC Charlotte. As the fourth largest campus among the 17 institutions of the University of North Carolina system, and the largest institution of higher education in the Charlotte region, UNC required a reliable unified messaging solution that would streamline their voice mail services for approximately 3,300 faculty and staff.

  

“When our users lose access to e-mail or voice mail, they go into panic mode. So reliability was very important,” explained UNC.

  

UNC Charlotte selected Interactive Intelligence’s (News - Alert) MIC based on its open, software-based architecture which made it compatible with the university’s third-party e-mail, PBX (News - Alert) and phone systems.

 

Mobile and broadband Internet communications providerEricsson is preparing to launch its Connected Home Gateway (News - Alert) software at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

 

This latest offering from Ericsson (News - Alert) acts as a central multimedia outlet in the home, and serves as a single service-delivery platform. Officials said that Connected Home Gateway allows remote management for service provisioning and maintenance.

 

Brough Turner, who serves as the chief strategy officer of Dialogic, a provider of world-class multimedia and signaling technologies and platforms, shared his insight on Thursday regarding the rise of Unified Communications. He explained that although UC is gaining lots of recognition in the technology space for its ability to reduce energy costs and streamline operations, most businesses still rely on numerous devices to get things done.

 

He writes:

 

“We’ve been hearing about unified communications for more than a decade and today there are some unified and/or converged services I actually use. If nothing else, I receive the occasional fax via email. But I also run three different instant messenger programs at all times, two social networking applications intermittently and other communications applications on occasion. And I still have a home phone, an office phone and two mobile phones plus I travel with a laptop and a digital camera.”

 

In the near future, he believes that mobile communications diversity will outpace mobile unified communications.

 

To learn more about the latest news in Unified Communications, visit TMCnet’s UC community. Next week, we will take a deeper look at how UC is helping businesses survive the current economic recession.