Unified collaborative communications solutions player Polycom reported impressive first quarter earnings this week, thanks in part to a rapidly growing UC space.

"Unified collaboration continues to be a key priority for our customers worldwide," said Robert Hagerty, chairman and CEO. "We believe the fast return on investment of our solution, compliance with the green initiatives in Europe and other important markets, and globalization of the workforce, are driving adoption within enterprise and public sector customers alike.

To learn more, please read the TMCnet article here.

Creating a single unified interface for advanced rich media content is helping companies like Vignette established a stronger foothold in the unified communications space. Now, with the acquisition of Vidavee, a video Web services company, the company expects advertisers and publishers to be able to land more traffic, increase revenues and increase customer management.

Read more about it here on TMCnet.

Unified collaborative communications solutions player Polycom today announced the expansion of its relationship with Microsoft to include compatibility between Polycom's visual communications solutions and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Check out the full story in this TMCnet article.

As many loyal readers of this space can attest, one of my favorite topics is finding a workable definition for Unified Communications.

Art Rosenberg weighs in on that and more in this TMCnet article.

Art says “The industry has finally stopped touting just ‘VoIP’ cost savings for traditional legacy telephony and moved on to unified, multimodal and mobile business communication applications. That includes an emphasis on real-time messaging, instant voice and video conferencing, and communications enabled business process applications.”

Pure IP Unified Communications provider ShoreTel has released a news suite of applications the company says is designed to dramatically improve customer service while reducing the cost of deploying and maintaining high-performance inbound or outbound multimedia call center.

Here is the deal in a nutshell: ShoreWare Contact Center 4.66 is designed to support more simultaneous agents while offering several new features to enhance the customer experience. Such an execution will make it ideal for expanding mid-sized contact centers.

To find out the deal outside the nutshell read this TMCnet article

Mitel has announced the availability of the Mitel Communications Suite (MCS), which is a pre-integrated unified communications (UC) solution based on Mitel’s flagship 3300IP Communications Platform software and Sun Microsystem’s X4150 SunFire servers.

Wow, that really seems like a mouthful! To get a great breakdown of what this means and check out Greg Galitzine’s article here on TMCnet.com

Zannel has launched an open API that will allow developers to leverage the functionality of its Instant Media Messaging (IMM) platform to create media-rich mobile applications, widgets and mashups.

Here is an interesting article on the subject.

For some time it has been popular to rant about the lack of a definition for the growing Unified Communication space. In fact, so much so that it has almost become cliché to say “there is no cohesive Unified Communications definitions.” Well, I’m not going to say it any more…. At least without providing concrete reasons for why I this is the case.

To read more about why check out this TMCnet article.

Quick summation: Part of the problem is that some obvious prerequisites for the UC vision have not been met from an open, standards perspective, i.e., “federated presence” across enterprise and service provider networks. The other part of the problem that scaresIP management is how to start a UC migration selectively, yet be “future-proofed” for the new capabilities that UC might offer, especially in a mobile, device independent world.

Unified collaborative communications solutions leader Polycom is helping create global classrooms by providing symmetrical telepresence in each location across the world that feature high definition video, voice and content-sharing capabilities. Now, thanks to the company’s telepresence solution students separated by more than 7,000 miles of ocean and land are able to interact and collaborate with each other and faculty as if they were in the same room.

Read more about Polycom’s global classroom efforts here.

N-trig is suddenly flush with cash as it announced this week it has completed a fund-raising round of $28 million from Canaan Partners, Evergreen Venture Partners and current investors.

You may recall N-trig is the provider of DuoSense technology combining pen and zero-pressure touch for mobile computers into a single device. The outfit also recently secured a credit facility of $5 million from Plenus, a leading Venture Lending Fund in Israel.

To find out how they are going to use that money read this TMCnet article here.

It is not surprising that the varied ideas and definitions of Unified Communications (UC) has caused some confusion among enterprises, and to some it is increasingly difficult to determine the value UC delivers to businesses. However, if the number of e-mails, voicemails, telephone calls, instant messages, newspapers and Web sites the average employee encounters during a given day are considered the need of UC begins to come into focus.

That is because businesses often require an all-inclusive unified communications approach with the understanding that communication needs vary depending upon the organization.

To learn more about it read this TMCnet article here.

VoIP and United Communications security solutions outfit Sipera Systems today announced John Lochow has joined Sipera as president and chief executive officer.

For more info on the move check out this TMCnet article here.

While Unified Communications (UC) solutions are available in the market include a number of individual applications that deliver specific capabilities, one much-talked-about app. is Presence Management. The presence application enables users to manage accessibility and preferred mode of communication, as well as view the availability of others.

TMC, along with IntelliCom Analytics, recently asked enterprise decision makers to share their near- and mid-term plans for deploying UC applications to their employees.

To crunch the numbers have a look at the TMCnet article here.

It is no secret that the Unified Communications space has been heating up as of late, and now more and more players are moving into fill existing needs in the market. One outfit making a big splash is SpinVox.

The a global leader in Voice-to-Screen messaging entered this week the Unified Communications Services market with Spinvox CallMail for Call Centers, the company said today.

SpinVox Unified Communications Services are driven by its core Voice Message Conversion System (VMCS). VMCS enables voice messages to be converted to text and then delivered as an email on PC or PDA or as an SMS to a mobile phone screen, according to Christina Domecq, SpinVox co-founder and CEO.

Read more here on TMCnet.