A survey finds that IT leaders are accelerating their plans to invest in unified communications and collaboration technologies. But the systems aren't cheap.

IBM says a study it did of some 1700 Chief Executive Officers worldwide found that many indeed - or should be - grasping social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation.

Jabra A/NZ has appointed Unity Systems to distribute the company’s complete range of Call Centre and Office products.

As Avaya continues its transition from a hardware company into a communications and collaboration software provider, it is going through some growing pains, including a shakeup of executives and uncertainty around a potential initial public offering that's been rumored for months.

Former Cisco head of businesss and market innovation, Ian Ross, has left the networking vendor to join IT solutions and managed services provider, Logicalis, as strategic solutions director.

Felix Ehm, a member of CERN's beams control group, has always had a curious and scientific bent.

Doctors are being cautioned by hospitals they work with to avoid interacting with patients on social media, and that they reject any overtures by patients to interact on the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

Social media - Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth - has become a way of life for companies and their employees to interact with the public, but beating back the fraudsters that try to prey on customers, not to mention keeping employees from spilling sensitive data, is becoming a full-time job for many.

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.

Much has changed since we examined the ongoing war between Facebook and Twitter in the autumn of 2010. The stakes are higher, the competition has increased, and we see LinkedIn and Google roaring into the social networking arena like never before.

Wikipedia and its users are planning more than 300 celebration events across six continents for the 10th anniversary of the free, online encyclopedia that has become an Internet juggernaut by spreading access to information with a model that lets anyone edit its articles.

Last week, I wrote about the possible implications of the new lineup of FCC commissioners. They certainly haven't wasted any time: On Aug. 3, the FCC launched a full-scale investigation into the decision by Apple and AT&T to reject Google's voice application for the iPhone. As Sanford Bernstein telecom analyst Craig Moffatt notes, "The issue of application suppression affords the Administration a back door route to Wireless Net Neutrality, something that has been openly espoused by new FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski."

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.

Buyers of IP PBXs need to look beyond simple voice capabilities to unified communications and make sure the gear they buy will be compatible with applications they will want in the future, experts say.

Unified communications opens up your VoIP network to new avenues of collaboration, including instant messaging, video, business applications and e-mail. And that opens up your network to new avenues of attack.

Driving better operational efficiency within an organisation is a top priority and unified communications is helping to make it happen.

Integrating enterprise communication tools -- from telephony to e-mail, conferencing and instant messaging -- is the key to delivering a richer collaboration environment that increases productivity. But deployment and management of unified communications systems can be daunting.