Unified Communications

KEMP Load Balancer Certified for Microsoft Lync Server 2010

February 14, 2012

KEMP Technologies today announced that its LoadMaster hardware-based and virtual appliance load balancers are now approved for Microsoft Lync Server 2010. If you recall, I spoke with Kemp last year about their Exchange 2010 load balancer, so adding Lync load balancing certainly rounds out their Microsoft portfolio. KEMP’s LoadMaster products offer server load balancing, optimized application delivery and built-in SSL acceleration. These features enable the LoadMasters to seamlessly integrate with Microsoft's Lync server pools.

By adding load balancing, traffic can be scaled wide across Lync 2010 Front End, Director, and Edge server pools. With Layer 7 health checking, the LoadMaster ensures that should a server become inaccessible, the load balancer will take that server off-line and automatically re-route and reconnect users to other functioning servers keeping application uptime guaranteed.

“Having our entire product portfolio approved for Microsoft Lync Server further strengthens the LoadMaster’s ability to deliver highly available, reliable and secure solutions to our business customers utilizing Microsoft applications,” said Peter Melerud, executive vice president of product management at KEMP Technologies. “The Microsoft -approved LoadMaster solutions for Lync Server 2010 continue to reduce the price barrier for any-sized business while ensuring high availability across all applications.”

The entire portfolio of LoadMaster products -- hardware-based, Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for Hyper-V and Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) for VMware is approved for Lync Server 2010. Pricing starts at only $1,490.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

ITEXPO IP Communications Trade Show Continues Solid Growth

February 8, 2012

ITEXPO East 2012 in Miami was TMC's best show ever with over 200 booths and over 8,200 attendees. Conferee attendance for ITEXPO East increased more than 50% from 2011, resulting in dozens of standing room only sessions at ITEXPO and collocated conferences such as HTML5 Summit, M2M Evolution, Business Video Expo, Super WiFi Summit, and 4GWE. As an example, here's a photo I took at the jam-packed Ingate SIP trunking conference session:

Even with the additional third day of exhibit hall hours, foot traffic was pretty good - on a Friday no less. I heard from several exhibitors saying it was their best ITEXPO ever.

TMC's next show, ITEXPO West 2012, is scheduled to take place on October 1-4, 2012, in Austin, Texas, (the 'new' Telecom Corridor) which will be the second time in Austin after moving from Los Angeles.

Posted in ITEXPO, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP, Wireless

Verizon and BT Announce Cross-Network Video Calling & Telepresence

February 8, 2012

Verizon and BT announced a deal enabling each of their respective customers initiate high-quality video conferences and telepresence sessions. I spoke with representatives from BT and Verizon to learn more about their collaboration.

Marc Hambley, Sr. Product Manager at BT explained, "We are connecting our respective telepresence exchanges together - that will allow BT clients to have meetings with Verizon clients, either hosted on BT service or Verizon service. It goes both ways equally.

Posted in Polycom, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing

TMC Showcases the Top 40 "Newsmakers" at ITEXPO

February 2, 2012

There is a lot of news (product launches, new versions) being made at TMC's ITEXPO, some of which I've already covered (Digium, Xorcom)... ITEXPO has a record number of exhibitors that have unveiled new products and services at ITEXPO in Miami.

There have been many competing shows over the years, most notably VON, which suffered an untimely demise. ITEXPO and VON were the two best shows focused on VoIP and IP communications.

Posted in ITEXPO, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Digium Gamechanger! Launches D40, D50, & D70 IP Phones

February 1, 2012

Today, at ITEXPO, the premiere communications event, Digium launched a line of IP phones that work in conjunction with their Asterisk and Switchvox solutions. This truly could be a gamechanger, since Asterisk is a popular IP-PBX solution that popular 3rd party phone vendors such as Aastra, snom, and Polycom offer products for. This move by Digium and the impact on these phone vendors could be quite interesting. This reminds me of 2008 when Aastra, a traditional IP phone manufacturer decided to offer a full-fledged IP-PBX based on Asterisk, called AastraLink.

Posted in Asterisk, ITEXPO, TMCnet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Zultys MX Release 7.0 Unified Communications Release Adds Android Support

January 31, 2012

At ITEXPO in Miami, Zultys today announced their latest UC software offering mobility features for Android, call center enhancements, and third-party CRM integrations. The latest major firmware release for the MX platform, MX Release 7.0 Unified Communications Software is a secure, all-in-one SIP-based IP phone system that is highly scalable and highly customizable. This version also includes enhancements to SIP security.

Zultys introduced Zultys Mobile Communicator for iPhone and Blackberry users in MX Release 6.0. In MX Release 7.0, Zultys adds support to Android-powered devices.

Posted in ITEXPO, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Pumped for StartupCamp5's Fast-paced Startup Pitches

January 24, 2012

I'm headed out to ITEXPO East, taking place next week from January 31 through February 3, at the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Miami, Florida. One of the the items of my must-see list is StartupCamp5 Comm Edition, collocated with ITEXPO East. I'm pretty pumped to see this, especially since at StartupCamp4, Internet / Ethernet legend Bob Metcalfe gave a phenomenal keynote, which was very well received. You can see his keynote here:

During the keynote Bob had some kind words to say about Apple's Steve Jobs, before Steve Jobs passed.

Posted in ITEXPO, Internet, TMCnet, Technology and Science, Unified Communications, VoIP, Wireless

Lync Federation Tool Makes it Easy to Find Lync-enabled Business Partners

January 23, 2012

Who wouldn't want to join the Federation? No, not the United Federation of Planets, commonly referred as the Federation, though it would be cool to play on the Star Trek Enterprise's holodeck. No, we're talking Lync Federation here. Matt Landis has a cool WCF Tool (Who Can Federate) that will scan through your Outlook contacts and tell you which contacts have public Microsoft Lync or OCS federation enabled. The utility works simply by checking for a specific Lync DNS SRV record for each domain name in your Outlook contacts.

You don't even need Lync installed to try this tool.

Posted in Microsoft, SIP, TMCnet, Unified Communications, Video Conferencing, VoIP

Esnatech Releases Office-LinX 8.5, a Cloud-based UC Platform

January 19, 2012

Esnatech, today announced the release of version 8.5 of Office-LinX, a unified communications platform that enables enterprises to integrate UC with cloud -based technologies such as Google Apps, VMware Zimbra , Salesforce.com, and Microsoft BPOS/Office 365. Office-LinX is optimized to work in mixed, distributed environments integrating with multiple on- and off-premise telecommunications technologies and cloud-based applications and infrastructure. It can for instance integrate with solutions from Asterisk, Avaya, NEC, Cisco, Toshiba, Panasonic, Shoretel, and more.

The latest high availability (HA) version of Office-LinX supports full virtualization of its voice clusters with VMware vSphere support. With Office-LinX 8.5, organizations have the ability to distribute the application and resources over multiple virtual servers connected to a single or distributed telephony infrastructure.

Posted in Asterisk, Avaya, Cisco, Cloud, Internet, Unified Communications, VoIP

Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk & Skype Integration Tutorial

December 28, 2011

I came across an excellent tutorial on installing and integrating Microsoft Lync 2010, Asterisk and Skype. The tutorial covers installing AsteriskNOW within a virtual machine on Windows, so you don't even have to have spare hardware lying around to install Linux + AsteriskNOW on. The tutorial mentions integrating with Skype using Skype for Asterisk (SFA), which unfortunately was killed earlier this year. You can of course use Skype Connect (formerly Skype for SIP) to create SIP trunks, but the integration isn't as "tight".

Posted in Asterisk, Microsoft, SIP, Skype, Unified Communications, VoIP

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