Unified Communications

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.

As its name suggests, 724 Solutions is offering seamless communications for IP-based domains around the clock, and now it seems industry player Nortel has chosen 724’s Seamless Messaging solution.

724 Solutions, which provides next-generation mobile data solutions, is poviding its Seamless Messaging solution to allow transparent messaging between enterprise and mobile networks. Execs at the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based company say its plan will benefit Nortel’s leading Fixed MobileConvergence (FMC) Enterprise solutions including Nortel’s Communication Server 1000 and CallPilot Unified Messaging.

Read more about it here.

There isn’t a day that goes by that TMCnet isn’t covering or monitoring the Unified Communications space. So, this blog has a lot of to follow. For example, earlier this week Hitachi Consulting deployed the ShoreTel UC solution at all of its offices in the U.S. and Europe, creating a single, integrated phone system complete with five-digit dialing, centralized management, and toll bypass.

According to Hitachi Consulting, ShoreTel's UC system has made the company a more collaborative and productive organization while saving more than $10,000 every month.

To find out more read this TMCnet article here.

Session border control solutions firm Acme Packet says XO Communications has expanded its installed base of Acme Packet Net-Net session border controllers (SBCs) to support its wholesale service provider VoIP customers. Interesting!

Acme Packet's Net-Net SBCs are used by XO Communications to facilitate interoperability between peering networks and to provide protection of XO's VoIP infrastructure. Why is that important, you say? Because this security architecture provides denial of service attack protection, topology hiding and access control to protect XO's network. This unification helps maximize service reach and revenue potential by normalizing signaling protocols at the interconnect border.

TMCnet’s Susan Campbell has more on the story here.

Hey, even third place is pretty good when you're talking about an ultra-competitive field like Unified Communications. So, that is why Active Voice, a global provider of Unified Messaging, Unified Communications and speech-activated solutions, is touting its position as the third leading Unified Messaging provider for messaging systems shipped in North America.

Read more about it here.

Today’s news that Microsoft made a $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo! will very likely shake up the highly competitive market for Internet search, but ripples could also be felt in the bourgeoning Unified Communications space.

Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 is the company's flagship UC offering and a revamped version of Live Communication Server 2005 is still key to the product's IM capabilities.

However, while it's unclear how Yahoo's portals and other services would be integrated, a combined Microsoft-Yahoo would be able to create a "social platform" that could become a new entry point for UC to the Web.

"The combination of these two teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own," Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie, told the AP.

And that likely means an expansion of UC capabilities and an extension of ways in which it is delivered. Because so many company employees use public IM clients the consolidation of clients always help ease regulatory and compliance issues. Overall, OCS is designed for the tight integration of Exchange and Outlook, which extends the presence feature of IM to other mediums.

And challengers in the UC space are around every corner. Let’s not forget the competition heating up back east as IBM’s Lotus Development unit recently shifted its integration, social software and Unified Communications operations as it readies for a Web 2.0 battle.

It is going to take some time to shake up. To learn more about today’s news, please read TMC’ President and Editor-in-Chief Rich Tehrani’s article here.