Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:
Thanks to the promise of open interconnectivity optimized for IP networks, SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, has emerged as the de facto signaling standard for unified communications, including Voice Over IP (VOIP). Now, the rise of unified communications is pushing SIP into the world of videoconferencing, offering the potential for easier integration among disparate applications and interconnectivity across corporate boundaries.

Enterprise IT architects should demand SIP support from their vendors and they should look to solutions that let them easily integrate existing H.323 solutions with emerging architectures based on SIP.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview:
The modern healthcare organization operates in an ever-challenging environment. It must fulfill its primary mission of providing high-quality patient care, while also addressing economic realities that require maximum operating efficiency and minimal costs. What is more, healthcare is highly regulated; data and information resources must meet strict requirements for privacy and protection. These requirements often extend beyond the traditional enterprise boundaries, thanks to programs such as telemedicine, and the need to support contract-based workers.

Unified communications can help meet all these requirements by reducing communication complexity, integrating disparate applications, and tying communications services directly to specific business process to reduce human latency.

Overview:
Organizations are in both a reactive and proactive mode in response to the current economic challenges. Reactively, they trim budgets and staffs. Proactively, they re-evaluate what is and is not core, assess their teams, and move people to strategic areas to concentrate on more tactical, business-value services and projects. They also selectively outsource some of the day-to-day monitoring and management to third parties, taking advantage of the predictable monthly expense that managed services offer.

A big driver toward managed services is the increased adoption of complex unified communication and collaboration applications. The increasingly virtual workforce has led to growth in adoption of applications such as VOIP, unified messaging, video conferencing, Web conferencing, and document sharing. Unfortunately IT organizations struggle to support these collaboration applications. Many work with limited on-site resources and inadequate, centralized management tools. They also find a lack of internal, specialized expertise.

Nemertes Research predicts adoption of managed communications services will continue to increase across the board in 2010 and beyond. We expect the use of managed services for other UC applications to double or even triple by 2011, similar to what we saw with managed VOIP over the last couple years.

Overview:
Since the introduction of the AT&T Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair, proponents of videoconferencing have argued that widespread adoption is just around the corner. However, while room-based videoconferencing is widely deployed, usage has suffered due to the high costs of bandwidth and systems, complexity of use, and poor picture and audio quality. Now, after decades of promise, a number of key trends have converged to create a “perfect storm” driving increased videoconferencing deployment and use. These include:

* The growing distribution of the workforce across geographic boundaries,
* The coupling of increasingly high-quality systems with falling prices,
* Economic concerns forcing travel expense reductions.

Growth of videoconferencing adoption has led to a new set of challenges, including how to integrate video plans with unified communications architectures, how to extend videoconferencing to mobile and remote users, how to enable videoconferencing across company boundaries, and finally, how to effectively manage video delivery and quality.

Nemertes’ PilotHouse Awards recognizes how vendors and service providers perform in the eyes of their business customers. What makes Nemertes’ PilotHouse award so unique?

The winners of the Nemertes PilotHouse Awards represent the “movers and shakers” among communications and computing vendors, and their customers, the IT practitioners deploying those technologies.

Vendors:

After decades of promise, a number of key trends have converged to create a “perfect storm” to drive increased video conferencing adoption. These include the rapid distribution of the workforce, the coupling of increasingly high-quality systems with falling prices, and economic concerns forcing organizations to reduce travel expenses.

It’s highly likely that in a few years, we’ll be looking back at 2009 as the year when everything changed for IT. The recession literally decimated IT forces, or worse: Sixty-seven percent of organizations are decreasing their IT departments by an average of 17%.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Relevant to IT. Information technology’s role in businesses is changing dramatically. Today’s business issues open the door for the IT staff to play a major role in the transformation from a mildly effective, somewhat progressive organization to one that is truly innovative and industry-leading.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Overview: Whether an organization’s virtual workers are at a branch location, on the road, or working from home, they require IT support to stay connected to the rest of their team. The IT department’s challenge is to make sure these workers get predictable, high-performance access to applications and data no matter where they reside. The problem: Only 18% of branch locations (and virtually no telecommuter sites) house IT expertise.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM EDT

SIP trunking has emerged as an effective way to reduce telecom costs and take advantage of new call routing services. During this webinar we'll define SIP trunking, look at trends around adoption, explain the differences in service offerings, and discuss implementation issues around compatibility, security and management. Presented by Irwin Lazar, Vice President Communications Research

This week I’m switching gears and writing about unified messaging (UM); another agility enabler. Specifically, how UM raises significant e-discovery challenges.

Nemertes Issue Paper

Mobility represents one of the fastest-growing line items on most IT budgets today, as a rising number of employees request and receive an increasing range of mobile services. Nemertes strongly recommends companies consciously define a mobility strategy and policies to align deployment and procurement practices with business goals.

Nemertes Research has tracked growing enterprise demand for video conferencing solutions, especially as organizations look to video to reduce travel costs and improve collaboration among distributed workers. But a number of concerns are clear:

• How to build a solid business case and measure return on investment?
  
• What technology makes sense and where?

Nemertes Issue Paper

The Issue:

Overview:

By leveraging a hosted VOIP service, an organization does not need to make a large investment in equipment, nor manage an in-house IP-telephony infrastructure. Rather, organizations can purchase hosted VOIP services much in the same way they buy any other hosted application or software-as-a-service (SaaS).

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PRESSRELEASE

November 11, 2008
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For more information, contact:
Nemertes Research
Phone: 888-241-2685
research@nemertes.com

The 2008 Nemertes Research PilotHouse Awards dinner for VOIP and Unified Communications were held Monday, November 10, 2008 at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco.

PilotHouse and Innovator Award winners were recognized and honored for their achievements.

Nemertes 2008 VOIP and Unified Communications PilotHouse Innovator Awards

Overview:

Organizations have ever-increasing products and services to evaluate, as more hardware and software vendors bring their Unified Communications offerings to market.

Companies Adopting Mobility Strategies See 60% Increase in Productivity

Overview:

This volume provides details on unified communications adoption in the enterprise. With so much vendor and media hype surrounding Unified Communications, this volume enables the reader to separate fact from fiction, allowing enterprise IT executives, vendors and service providers to understand what is being adopted and why.

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