Laszlo Systems, a vendor that creates rich unified Internet applications for consumers and businesses, has announced the launch of Laszlo Webtop Cloud, a Web-based platform that merges e-mail, voice and messaging with social networking and other applications.
The Webtop platform has been adopted and deployed by many of the Tier 1 service provider, company officials said, "to provide subscribers with engaging personal portals for unifying and managing information, collaboration and communications on the Web."
The launch of Laszlo Webtop Cloud is intended to extend this Web 2.0 capability to companies of all sizes with a suite of capabilities and services for creating personal portals that function across devices and "foster brand affinity and deeper levels of customer engagement," company officials say.
Last December TMC had the news that Laszlo Systems announced that it has entered into an agreement with Cincinnati Bell for the deployment of Webtop.
Video usage in both high-speed fixed line and wireless mobile networks has increased dramatically over the last few years. The increase in Internet and mobile video has kept pace.
RadiSys recently issued an informative whitepaper useful for anyone seeking to understand and profit from this trend. It explains that mobile telecommunications is the growth engine of the telecommunications industry - "3G mobile network infrastructures are being deployed at a rapid pace around the globe, with the capabilities and bandwidth to finally deliver captivating video services to handheld mobile devices."
While the consumption of 1-way video streaming services continues to grow, the paper finds, interactive two-way video telephony services based on 3G-324M standards "present unique operational challenges for economical mass market deployment."
According to company officials, Nice Systems has extended the reach of its call monitoring technology by allowing automatic recording of incoming and outgoing calls on mobile devices.
Nice hopes to bring mobile communications in line with call center systems, company officials say, "allowing companies to identify and investigate events outside of the office, including calls made by field engineers and sales staff, helping all workers adhere to legal and internal guidelines."
Mobile monitoring is one of the planned Financial Services Authority requirements outlined in its recent consultation paper to discourage insider trading, but it also has the potential to help with staff training and customer service improvements, according to Nice officials.
Nice president Udi Ziv said that by offering an open option, "we enable all of our partners and all smart client providers to offer Nice's enterprise grade compliance recording solution to financial services customers."
A recent report from Verizon Business' UC practice manager, Ben Green, has found that "the need to integrate mainstream enterprise applications such as ERP and CRM with unified communications services and make them accessible from any device, anywhere will drive all these applications into the cloud over the next few years."
Industry observer Stuart Corner writes that "Green says the 'unified communications as a service' platform of the future will provide a full suite of communications services, such as hosted IP telephony, voicemail, e-mail, instant messaging and presence, but more importantly will interface readily to other applications such as ERP and CRM, virtualized and running in the cloud."
He sees this integration as "the next revolution" in unified communications services, Corner writes, but "predicts that it will likely be around 2015 before the first large scale adoptions take place," adding that widespread availability of SIP trunking "will also be key to delivering this functionality from the cloud."
Many reasons to look forward to 2015 - its the target year for the High Definition mobile phone market boom, according to ABI Research, which recently predicted that around 487 million mobile phone users will use HD-enabled handsets to make high-quality calls over upgraded networks in 2015.
This advancement could provoke VoIP providers to make a similar improvement in the standard of mobile VoIP phone calls - as the bandwidth offered over mobile broadband networks increases, according to ABI officials.
And friends, that would be a heck of an improvement over today. Although there is a high demand for HD television and radio sets, as the ABI research has found "the mobile phone HD market is virtually non-existent at present."
Principal analyst for ABI Research, Fritz Jordan, says the industry is expected to grow in 2013, before expanding significantly in 2014. ABI officials have pointed to cost as a major driver, with Jordan saying "implementing the new technology will not be an expensive task for newer 3G networks."
