This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

When companies go shopping for a unified communications (UC) solution, they typically have focused primarily on phone systems. Then, they might spend a little time evaluating features such as videoconferencing and instant messaging.

Things are about to change. Now, whether they are searching for a new UC supplier or considering upgrades to their current systems, companies must make mobility a major part of the buying decision.

The intent of mobility is to connect remote workers to the enterprise’s IP-PBX over the Wi-Fi and cellular data networks. This eliminates cellular voice long distance charges. Plus, it makes remote workers more available to co-workers and customers, no matter their location. As a company’s mobility tools develop over time, users will be able to use their corporate software on smartphones and tablets – anytime and anywhere. This can enhance customer service, improve productivity, and even enhance quality of life.

But companies need to understand what their mobility solution may look like at the end, so they can begin making important strategic decisions as they build a mobility infrastructure. Here are a few questions to consider:

• Where will your users get their devices? An increasing number of remote and enterprise workers prefer to use their personal iPhone, Android smartphone or tablet as their only communications device. They simply don’t want to juggle two phones – one business and one personal. At the same time, UC suppliers such as Cisco and Avaya are already developing their own endpoint devices. They will encourage clients to adopt these tablets and mobile phones for the entire workforce. Which route will your company wish to take?
• What are your policies? Every organization needs a mobility policy – right now. The IT department should establish policies and procedures regarding the use of personal mobile devices. Decide when and how these may connect with the enterprise IP-PBX and LAN. If your organization wishes to keep personal devices off the network, be prepared with an alternate strategy that will work for your mobile employees.
• Are desk phones necessary? Many mobility users may prefer a mobile device, making an investment on a desk phone just a wasted expense.
• Will video be part of your strategy? In the near future, companies will increasingly rely on enterprise video communications. If mobile workers don’t have access to video on employer-provided devices, they will again default to their personal smartphones and tablets.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

Your company is probably being over-billed for phone service.

Unfortunately, most phone carriers send out long, complex and hard-to-understand bills. Companies simply write a check, hoping that the charges were accurate. But chances are, they paid too much.

We hear the stories from our clients all the time. They discover problems on their phone bills, only to discover that bogus charges have gone on for years. If someone discovers a questionable line item and calls the phone company for an explanation, they end up frustrated and sitting on hold.

Let me give you an example. We are moving a legacy customer onto our hosted platform. In the process, we discovered that they have been billed for services they shut off years ago. It has been incredibly difficult and time-consuming for them to sort out the bills. Plus, this small company has paid a couple hundred dollars extra every month – for services never used!

Unfortunately, learning to read and understand a phone bill has become a necessary evil. Assign one person in your company to read through the bill, line by line, and determine which services your company is actually using. That same person should check the bill every month for inconsistencies. The Federal Communications Commission provides a basic primer on how to read and understand a phone bill that may be useful.

Keep an eye out for common instances of overbilling. Here are some examples:

• Phone and data lines that should have been disconnected – but were not. These might include modem lines and data circuits.
• Companies are charged for outbound long distance on inbound-only lines.
• Hackers use the company’s phone system after hours or break into the 800 line to re-route long distance calls.
• Services are double-billed, literally showing up twice on the same invoice.
• Long distance services are not charged at the agreed-upon rate.

Not ready to take on the phone company by yourself? Several consulting firms specialize in phone bill auditing. Many of these agree to work on a contingency basis, meaning they are paid only if they uncover savings on your phone bills. Not surprisingly, phone bill audits for large companies have actually netted hundreds of thousands of dollars in refunds for past over-billing and contract violation.

Whether you choose an outside auditor or in-house personnel to monitor your phone bills, put a strategy in place today. The time spent will more than pay for itself.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

For years, we’ve been hearing about the bleeding-edge technologies that were supposedly the next great thing. They would change our businesses and transform our lives. And soon, we wouldn’t recognize the working world around us.

And now, this long-promised technology-enabled wonderland may actually be within our reach. I couldn’t help but be excited by the possibilities when I attended the UC Strategies Summit in La Jolla, Calif.

This gathering of national vendors, system integrators and consultants in the unified communications (UC) space received fascinating and eye-opening presentations from the biggest names in UC, including Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, NEC America, and Siemens Enterprise Communications. NET, AudioCodes, Acme Packet, Empirix and Interactive Intelligence also made presentations.

The talks covered collaboration, social media, mobility, and the cloud. These thought leaders gave insights that included:

• In UC, mobility is of the utmost importance. The business world expects to move and work freely, regardless of location. Products and services will need to fit this more flexible operations model if they want to succeed.
• Video is being integrated into everything, from consumer technologies to business applications.
• Similarly, social media is being integrated into all aspects of communications.
• Call center technologies are incorporating video, social media and data mining.
• Tablet technologies will play a major role in UC. The iPad will get more and more competition in the coming years. Some new tablets in development revolve almost entirely around video and chat.
• Work is becoming increasingly virtual. Rather than owning equipment on the premise, an increasing number of companies will have their applications sitting out in the cloud. Because most new applications will be web-based, companies will make smaller and smaller hardware and software investments, which will lower the barriers to trying new technologies.
• On-premise equipment will serve as backup, while off-premise equipment and applications in the cloud will become the standard. That’s the exact opposite of most computing environments today.
• The line between work and home is beginning to evaporate. Employees are being expected to be available at any time. Ultimately, each organization will have to develop its own culture with guidelines about this increased intensity.
• Over the next three years, significant changes in these and other UC areas will be made. Those who don’t adapt will be left in the dark – in a hurry.

With increased reliance on the cloud and remote applications, we expect a more critical focus on network remote performance management (RPM) going forward. For companies that rely on UC and hosted applications, RPM services will ensure that uptime remains high. Even more importantly, when there is a problem with a device or application sitting outside the premise, RPM solutions can locate the problem and help remediate them.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

Decades ago, companies began naming chief executive officers to take on the primary leadership role. In the last several years, a slate of additional “chiefs” has been added to many organizations, including chief marketing officers, chief technology officers, chief information officers and more.

In the near future, a new chief may be adding his chair to the conference table. With the adoption of new work methodologies and the development of endless specialized apps, corporate America may soon need a chief mobility officer.

Of course, smaller companies may not need to take such a step. At organizations with fewer than a hundred employees, the IT department may be able to easily keep a handle on mobility using its traditional organizational structure.

But for larger enterprises, mobility issues can absolutely overwhelm existing IT personnel. What’s more, the current IT department may not fully understand – much less embrace – the trends toward increased mobility in everything from in-house applications to cloud computing.

Employees are streaming in the door every day with their own consumer wireless devices, including laptops, smartphones and tablets. They are asking for more powerful mobile apps from their companies to increase productivity. Plus, the workplace is asking employees to travel, work from home, and be available to customers and co-workers around-the-clock. At the same time, customers are demanding faster access to information and jonesing for apps to help them manage their own purchases and accounts.

All of these trends point to the need for a mobility officer, manager or task force. By assigning responsibility for mobility to a person or group in the organization, a formal strategy and methodology can be put in place and managed over time.

But, like IT, the mobility officer cannot “own” mobility. Rather, this person should serve departments throughout the company, helping to facilitate the availability of apps, data and equipment needed by a mobile workforce.

Citing the recent explosion in mobile apps, research form Forrester Research, Inc., recently began leading the charge for a chief mobility officer to be introduced into the corporate hierarchy. In a report dubbed “Mobile App Internet Recasts the Software and Services Landscape,” Forrester said the growing and changing app market will take advantage of cloud-based services, smart computing, and newly app- and Internet-enabled devices, like cars, appliances and entertainment systems. Under the Forrester model, the chief mobility officer would manage apps that span the call center, customer service, marketing, e-commerce, and IT.

In 2010, apps on smartphones and tablets generated $1.7 billion worldwide, Forrester said. The company forecasted that this number will grow 82 percent each year through 2015.

For small businesses, wireless access has created a tremendous challenge. Many organizations need strong network security, yet have not been able to justify the expense of the more robust, enterprise-level wireless access solutions that have long been on the market.

That’s why we’re excited about new products soon being released by Aruba Networks. These wireless access points and controllers provide small-scale, easy access to the network, but with high levels of security.

For many years, Aruba has provided some of the market’s most powerful wireless access solutions. Their controllers have provided access points for hundreds to thousands of wireless devices in an organization. But these were too pricey for small organizations that need great security, such as law firms, medical offices and other businesses with a moral or legal responsibility to protect information.

Now, Aruba is launching the Aruba Instant, a virtual controller built into an access point. Aruba Instant is ideal for companies with one physical location and up to 16 wireless devices. The controller supports over-the-air authentication, as well as a wide range of enterprise-class WLAN capabilities:

• A high level of reliability
• Mobility, enabling users to roam effortlessly
• Guest access, eliminating the need to set up a guest VLAN
• Scalability, including the ability to manage thousands of Aruba Instant networks across multiple locations from the centrally located Aruba AirWave solution.
• Intrusion detection and content filtering

According to a recent analysis of wireless access technologies by Gartner, Inc., Aruba maintains one of the largest catalogs of products in terms of access points, controllers, sensors and management consoles, appealing to nearly all network design types and price points, including network designs that embrace the emerging utility access point paradigm.

Aruba’s centralized zero-touch configuration and management model enables its controllers to be deployed, monitored and controlled without any local IT staff. Deployment options include remote management or local configuration via a web interface. Aruba controllers manage authentication, encryption, virtual private network (VPN) connections, IPv4 and IPv6 Layer 3 networking, and more.

The mini-controller will be ideal for branch offices or smaller business environments. It will cost less and consume less power, making total cost of ownership more effective over the long haul.

As WLAN requirements expand, Aruba Instant can be re-imaged as an 802.11n campus access point and migrate to a centralized mobility controller architecture that supports up to 2,048 access points.

Can an office phone be revolutionary? Now, the answer to that question is a definite “yes.” ShoreTel has released its IP Phone 655, which boasts a large backlit touchscreen and advanced speakerphone capabilities. The design includes the same user-friendly features that many consumers already enjoy on their mobile smartphones.

Check out our video, where I demonstrate how easy it is to improve productivity with the ShoreTel IP Phone 655.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

According to a study released by Infonetics Research, annual spending on video conferencing and telepresence systems grew by 18 percent in 2010, to $2.2 billion worldwide. What’s more, those numbers are expected to increase even more rapidly in the coming years. By 2015, the enterprise video conferencing and telepresence market will more than double to $5.0 billion in annual sales, the Infonetics study revealed.

“Communicating via video continues to be one of the top trends in telecom, as evidenced by strong growth in the enterprise video market,” said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise video at Infonetics Research.

“Businesses worldwide are looking for richer means of communications with their employees, partners, and customers, and enterprise video conferencing and telepresence solutions are a natural fit,” Machowinski added. “The biggest winners in the enterprise communications market will be those who offer solutions that are multi-modal, visual (e.g., video-based), and support the collaboration requirements of globally distributed organizations. “

These findings were buttressed by a study released by Forrester Research, which said that 29 percent of enterprises surveyed are investing in new or upgraded room-based video conferencing systems. This means that, by 2013, about two-thirds of businesses will have implemented video systems. In addition, 33 percent of responding companies said they plan to implement desktop video conferencing technology.

“The number of employees who need to communicate and collaborate with highly distributed teams will only increase as telecommuting becomes more prevalent and businesses emphasize collaborative interactions with partners and customers,” said T.J. Keitt, an analyst for Forrester.

The Infonetics report also noted that:

• Due to their versatility, multi-purpose room systems account for the majority of enterprise video conferencing equipment
• Immersive telepresence systems are expected to have the highest growth rates of all video conferencing equipment
• Thanks to their low cost and availability on PBXs, software-based endpoints out-ship hardware by 10-to-1

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

As the VoIP and unified communications (UC) markets made a comeback in 2010, SIP trunking had a break-out year. This is according to a report by Infonetics Research, which found that the VoIP service market reached $49.8 billion in 2010, a 43 percent increase from 2008.

What’s more, Infonetics predicted that the combined business, residential and small-office/home-office market for VoIP services would skyrocket to $74.5 billion in 2015. Infonetics also noted that managed IP PBX business VoIP service revenue is expected to more than double from 2010 to 2015.

One of the report’s most startling findings was revenue growth of 143 percent in SIP trunking, making it the fastest-growing segment of the VoIP services market.

For small and mid-sized businesses, these findings lead to a natural question: What is SIP trunking?

For years, large enterprises have leveraged this technology to save on their telecommunications bills. Now, SIP trunking is available for smaller organizations, which can reap significant savings as well.

Session Initiated Protocol (SIP) allows businesses to install a PBX to use Voice-over-IP (VoIP). It essentially goes around the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network, or the traditional copper-and-switches telecom infrastructure) to make phone calls inexpensive. If both parties on a call are using SIP devices, the call can cost just a fraction of a cent per minute. If only one end of the call is using a SIP device, there will still be some savings, though not as much.

SIP trunks can create major cost-savings for companies, which may no longer need local PSTN gateways, ISDN BRIs (Basic Rate Interfaces) or PRIs (Primary Rate Interfaces). Most new phone systems include built in support for SIP. SIP-enabled phone systems also provide a greater feature set, such as virtual phone numbers, follow-me phone numbers, and more.

As SIP trunks continue to grow, expect a gradual decline in the use of T1 lines for voice and data. The increased affordability and reliability of high-end DSL, fiber and other high-speed services, paired with the huge cost advantages of VoIP, makes T1s and other expensive, dedicated lines less attractive to small and mid-sized companies.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

Just two years ago, it seemed that RIM’s Blackberry product set was unassailable in the corporate smartphone race.

Yes, the iPhone was all the rage with consumers. But corporate IT and telecom managers had marginalized the Apple product as not ready for primetime (or strict corporate security policies). RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server was head of the class in enforcing security and administering access policies for almost every corporate network. Thousands of business apps were deployed and in use every day.

But in the summer of 2009, I spotted a troubling trend for Blackberry. As we deployed an IP telephony solution for a Global 100 corporation, I had the opportunity to meet most of the company’s upper management. I quizzed them on their preference for handheld devices. To a person, all had a company-issued Blackberry in one pocket and a personal iPhone in the other.

They eagerly showed me the variety of business applications they could perform with the iPhone. We were deploying a client for their Blackberry to provide a virtual connection to the corporate IPBX, and the universal question was, “When will we have this for the iPhone?” I asked our vendor partner the same question.

Fast forward two years and look at the landscape now. For 2011, Apple forecasts 80 million iPhone shipments and an astounding 40 million iPads as well. An incredible number of these are destined for corporate America. The security issues have been addressed and a new dynamic has emerged: Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT). And the preferred technology is overwhelmingly Apple.

Just this week, I visited with one of our key vendors that transacts business in 27 countries, with a field force of more than 500 employees. They are providing iPhones to everyone and equipping the sales force with iPads. All others are encouraged to use their own iPads as needed. Yes, the Android is gaining steam, but it is actually hampered by the openness of the platform. App developers have to deal with multiple implementations of their software on all different screen sizes, resolutions, and front ends to the underlying Android operating system.

How does corporate telecom management handle this influx of employee-owned technology? The major smartphone manufacturers have tools for administering security, wiping stolen or lost phones, and distributing software. And with the move to cloud-based (centralized) computing, many of the applications are accessed via browser as opposed to phone-based apps. Distribution and standardization as provided by Apple and the Android market ease the workload of the telecom manager in deploying software.

BYOT is here to stay. It is the new normal in distribution and administration of smartphone apps, including unified communications applications.

This blog first appeared on Best in UC.

In 1977, the number 4.3 billion looked big enough to Internet pioneer Vint Cerf. It was Cerf who decided to create IP addresses that were 32 bits in length, which meant that only 4.3 billion addresses would be available.

Today, that fateful decision has created an impasse on the Internet. Thanks to new computers, servers and mobile devices coming online every day around the world, the Internet is about to run out of IP addresses. Some news outlets are, of course, greeting this news with doomsday predictions.

But have no fear. These “old” IP addresses, created under a protocol called IPv4, are being replaced by IPv6. The new protocol uses four 32-bit numbers, for 128 bits in total. Under this scheme, IP addresses would seemingly never run out, since there will be 340 undecillion of them. (Fun fact: there are 39 digits in the number 340 undecillion.)

Deployment of IPv6 is still in its infancy, and it will take several years before a majority of traffic is taking place on the upgraded network. The IPV6Forum was founded way back in 1999 to drive worldwide implementation. Yet as of the end of 2010, only about 5 percent of network addresses had moved to the IPv6 standard.

Over time, however, the entire Internet eventually will be upgraded to IPv6. This includes home equipment such as gateways, gaming systems and smartphones. At the office, phone systems, servers and more will need to comply with the new standard. Most of these changes, however, can be made gradually as electronics wear out and need to be replaced. A slow transition should be fine in most cases.

In the unified communications industry, most equipment is already IPv6 compatible. And over time, you will see better performance as devices move to the IPv6 standard. With so many IP addresses available, each piece of personal and business equipment can be assigned its own number. This means better and easier communication between devices, and without going through a network. Speaking of networks, they should become easier to manage as well, and peer-to-peer communications will improve.

Faster. Cheaper. Better. And for UC customers, a smooth transition.