Open Solutions is bringing its unified communications solutions way south of the border, announcing an international reseller partnership agreement with Senior Solution, a Brazilian software and services provider for the financial market.
The partnership is expected to offer all Open Solutions’ products and services, including The Complete Banking Solution, to its retail banking client base within the Latin American financial services marketplace.
Read more about it here in TMCnet.
Atrion Networking Corporation has acquired Shazamm, an interactive multimedia company that is expected to allows Atrion to offer customized technical and aesthetic client business solutions. This is likely going to beef-up their unified communications presence.
Shazamm is an interactive firm specializing in software development and Web and multimedia design. Shazamm specializes in detailed Web, print and multi-media communications and marketing solutions, with Web application designs and technologies being its signature trademark.
There is more here.
Mobile TeleSystems is preparing for the commercial launch of its 3G network in Saint Petersburg, Russia and technical readiness of 3G networks for commercial launch in Sochi, Yekaterinburg and Kazan.
According to my sources, the company expects the key benefit of a next-generation network to provide customers with “faster data download speeds with top download capacity using HSPA technology up to 3.6 Mbit/s.”
Read all about it here.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) on Tuesday said that French-American networking group Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has not infringed on Microsoft patents for unified communications technology.
The latest verdict came after an earlier ruling by administrative law judge Paul Luckern that Alcatel-Lucent was guilty of violating one of four Microsoft patents included in the lawsuit. ITC overturned that decision, stating that the many of the contested patent claims in the lawsuit were invalid. To learn more read this TMCnet article here.
Interesting news from Wainhouse Research. The outfit has published a report documenting attitudes, interests and opinions of resellers and channel partners that shows strong interest in Unified Communications and Telepresence. Check out Eve Sullivan's article here to find out more.
Tulsa Technology Center is getting in on the unified communications game. The oldest and largest career and technology education center in Oklahoma, has chosen XETA Technologies to deploy the largest Nortel/Microsoft unified communications (UC) platform to date, the company announced today. Check out the whole story here.
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.
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.
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Slashdot
Digg
