Unified Communications

Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure.

Treasurer Wayne Swan's sixth budget may well be his last. But it certainly had some highlights although most analysts agree that it didn't offer a great deal to Australian economy. The following stories offer a broad-based, ICT-centric coverage of the budget.

ARN's Community Manager, Hafizah Osman, has disappeared under a flood of community picture stories and reports of company events, so we thought what better to do than put them all in a slideshow summing up the week in the channel. This week features company awards and partner events amongst others. Are you pictured?

NICTA has spun out a mobile video start-up company called Incoming, which has also scooped $1.1 million in funding from venture capital group, OneVentures, NICTA and US-based Citrix Startup Accelerator.

Telecommunications company, ShoreTel, has appointed Emma McCormack to lead its Asia-Pacific marketing operations from Sydney as director.

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.

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 unified communications concept has been floating around for several years now, but what does it mean today, and where are customers in terms of adoption? ARN recently brought together several industry experts to discuss collaboration and communication, the impact on infrastructure and local opportunities.

If you follow cloud computing, you're no doubt familiar with software-as a service, typically associated with Salesforce.com, or infrastructure as a service, which was pioneered by Amazon.com. But how about CaaS, SECaaS, DaaS, MaaS and BaaS?

Hendrickson International Corporation is a leading global supplier of truck, tractor, bus and recreational vehicle suspension and heavy-duty spring components to the commercial transportation industry.

A mixture of intense excitement and skepticism followed the launch a year ago of Office 365, as backers and critics debated whether the cloud collaboration, productivity and communication suite would succeed.

Unified communications (UC) technology has garnered a fair amount of attention, much of it due to vendors touting their UC offerings as the answer to problems workers have keeping in touch with colleagues, business partners and customers in a highly frenetic, increasingly mobile business world.

Technology firms wowed us in 2011, delivering tablets, ultrathin laptops, innovative cloud services, and voice command digital assistants. Not so long ago, the technology underlying these products was nothing more than research and development projects. So, in an effort to peek into our not-so-distant tech future, here's a glimpse at ten promising projects percolating in tech research labs.

Distributor IPL Communications held a thought leadership event earlier this year specifically targeting 170 dealers that were a mix between telco and system integrators. This was underscored by the need to change. Julia Talevski sat down with IPL general manager, Paul Scanlan, and managing director, Stead Denton.

Scott Frew is a veteran of the IT distribution space, making his mark as owner of LAN Systems, which was sold to Westcon Group in 2000. Five years after the acquisition of his latest venture, Firewall Systems, he talks to NADIA CAMERON about the parent company’s strategies, market challenges and what’s on the agenda.

Videoconferencing is available for desktops and even through specially designed rooms called telepresence systems, but on wireless handhelds? According to Robert Hagerty, who has been CEO of Polycom for 10 years, it could be widely available soon.

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.

What are some of the goals you’ve set your partners going forward?

Shaw reviews Roku's Roku 3 Internet streaming TV box and Jabra's Revo wireless headphones.

Cyberespionage is coming of age but the problem with weapons like Stuxnet is that they will be used against us

A few months ago I started writing about my saga of getting AT&T U-verse DSL service established at the new location of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker.

How do MySQL users feel about Oracle Corp.'s takeover of the open-source database through its acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc.? Judging by Twitter, anxious -- and snarky.

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.

Even the most high-end smartphones and tablets today still have less-than-stellar speakers. We test four mobile Bluetooth speakers to see how they can improve your sound.

We look at 7 online videoconferencing services that help colleagues and friends keep in touch, share screens and collaborate on presentations.

The Jabra Solemate is a portable Bluetooth speaker that produces great sound with a strong bass, but its $US200 price tag might make buyers hesitant.

Samsung's Galaxy S III is one of the most hotly anticipated Android phones ever. So does it actually live up to all the hype?

ShoreTel 8.1