Citrix Online has reached Australia, where they have "launched a local version of its Web conferencing service," according to industry observer Beverley Head, who described it as "aimed at individuals and small business owners."

It's offering access to unlimited Web conferences for up to 15 people for $65 a month. Pretty much in the SMB - self-employed sweet spot.

Yes, Citrix web conferencing has been available locally Down Under, Head says, "but only via the U.S. Web site, with fees charged in American dollars."

She reports that according to Citrix officials, "demand for Web conferencing in Australia has more than doubled in recent months, leading to the decision to offer local service and pricing."

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Established in 1972, Coordinated Systems is a call recording and call monitoring software development firm headquartered in East Hartford, Connecticut. The firm partners with Avaya dealers in providing call recording and quality monitoring products to call centers.

The firm's flagship product, Virtual Observer, is a call recording and quality monitoring product for call centers, giving customers "lifetime investment protection."

The company's recently issued a white paper discussing some of the basic issues call centers face.

Enterprises today are moving in many directions as they use new technologies, the paper notes, adding that "traditional call recording implementations, with servers in each and every center, are becoming obsolete, as VoIP has enabled calls to be recorded without hardware."

In today's data-centric business climate, protecting data and ensuring security are critical to any business. Recently, Erin Harrison, senior editor at TMC, interviewed Tony Lanni, vice president of marketing at AvePoint, and they discussed that very topic.

Microsoft SharePoint has become a mission-critical platform. AvePoint's infrastructure management products are used for SharePoint. "We look at all areas of back-end infrastructure management," Lanni said, "anything from backup and restore to high availability through administration, compliance and archiving."

The company also offers tools for migrating into SharePoint, and integrating SharePoint with other systems. So it's really taking our core expertise with SharePoint, and the fact that we know SharePoint better than anyone, and developing tools to address those real-world pain points that administrators are facing every day within SharePoint."

Langham Logistics, headquartered in Indianapolis, is a global freight management organization. The company operates from a global logistics center in Indianapolis, maintaining partner relationships across the globe.

So obviously they can't afford downtime of technology systems. Executives recently launched a company-wide disaster recovery initiative designed to upgrade or replace these existing key systems, according to John Huybers, director of global information technology.

"Our communications system is our lifeblood," Huybers said. "It's critical that the phone system can function in an emergency. The phone is still used quite a bit in the transportation industry - whether our customers are calling us to schedule freight, or we're calling the transportation companies."

Considering the future of next-gen communications?

Then, perhaps you should consider how to get around some of the backhaul challenges that are sure to pop up.

Consider this case study from wireless infrastructure provider CFN Services:

A Tier 1 mobile carrier was operating a statewide network of more than 1,000 cell sites, interconnecting with two primary mobile switching centers, while spending more than $15 million annually on local access transport services for backhaul from the cell sites to the MSCs and interconnection from the MSCs to the local telephone company's access tandems.

Planned 3G network upgrades are expected to double T1 capacity requirements at more than 600 cell sites. 

Read more here.