Unified Communications

Avaya has slashed its Australian and New Zealand distribution line-up from five to three following a review of its Avaya and Nortel channel partnerships.

Cisco Systems plans to extend unified communications beyond individual enterprises, introducing a new appliance and a protocol that the company hopes will become an industry standard.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday introduced its next-generation Internet core router, the CRS-3, with about three times the capacity of its current platform.

Skype and Nokia have released a new Skype client for the Symbian mobile OS.

The cornerstone of a successful UC implementation is having up-to-date user information. DiData’s Brian Walshe said integrators often took for granted that identity information within a customer’s organisation was accurate and managed properly.

The UC market is full of a range of vendors promoting tools that allow organisations to communicate and collaborate more effectively. But according to roundtable attendees, third-party offerings have to integrate successfully if UC is really going to take-off with customers.

For years, IT and business have heard the sexy promise of "IP convergence," which would allow all sorts of voice- and video-enabled applications to appear in business. However, for most organizations, this Jetsons-like vision has yet to occur.

When we tested the DiVitas Mobile Convergence Appliance in May 2007, the value proposition was straightforward. By leveraging VoIP, wireless LAN connections, and dual-mode Windows Mobile phones, the DiVitas solution allowed mobile users to save precious minutes on their voice plans and even turn long distance into local calls. It was all about the mobile phone bill.

IP contact centers are proliferating, but they still pose a set of potential gotchas that businesses need to beware of as they consider upgrading from the TDM world, experts say.

Innovation is not just about cool new products. In technology, the best ideas require a) really smart people and b) lots of funding. For the past 33 years, Microsoft has had both in spades.

Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors. Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CTO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.

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As the dust settles from the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, here are four trends worth looking at based on some products that were announced at the show. On my radar screen for the year:

Whether fixed-mobile convergence is for you in the near-term depends in part on how you define it, but for most, there's no rush.

There's no doubt about it - the way we communicate is changing. The advent of the Internet and the proliferation of mobile phones has left us all with at least three different phone numbers (work, home and mobile), multiple email addresses, online profiles and instant messenger clients.

While it's still early days, Australian companies are quickly warming to UC. In fact, Gartner research vice-president, Geoff Johnson, believes we are just as advanced as any economy in Europe or North America. However, as no one vendor is able to provide a complete UC solution - and are not expected to do so for the next three years - there is a vital need for partnering and cooperation between suppliers over the coming years.

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NEC UCC