By Irwin Lazar, Principal Research Analyst and Program Director, Collaboration and Convergence, March 9, 2007

This week at VoiceCon IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) announced plans to integrate their unified communications client development, and make their source code freely available. This announcement builds on IBM’s previous release of Sametime 7.5 in September of 2006, which is based on the open-source Eclipse framework. IBM is also offering certification of products developed on its platform, thus providing a guarantee that apps will interoperate. (Third parties who develop products using the Cisco-IBM code must pay licensing fees to bring those products to market). .

Eye on the Carriers By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, January 24, 2007.

If you’re like a lot of folks, you’re probably thinking IPTV is just a tad overhyped: Service providers from AT&T to BT to India’s Reliance Infocomm have announced IPTV initiatives. Market researchers Dittberner Associates forecast an IPTV services market of $12 billion in 2013, an increase from virtually nothing in 2005 (now that’s a long-range crystal ball). And Microsoft has been investing heavily in the technology — a sure sign that the hype-fest is at its height.

Collaboration Loop, By Irwin Lazar, 2/5/07

Last week Skype introduced new features for its “Skype for Business” offering designed to make Skype manageable in a business environment. Do these tools finally give the green light for widespread enterprise deployment? Well….the answer is a decidedly “maybe”.

Skype initially announced its business offering last year, which was designed to let small groups centralize billing for Skype-to-PSTN connectivity services (SkypeIn/SkypeOut). With last week’s announcement Skype adds management and configuration tools, enabling Windows network administrators to use the Windows Installer to centrally deploy Skype and disable unwanted features such as file transfer capabilities (no such capabilities yet exist for centralized control of Mac or Linux clients). In addition, Skype announced enhancements to its business control panel, further improving centralized account administration capabilities.

The Issue:

Unified communications offers tremendous opportunities for enterprises of all sizes to improve organizational efficiency and enhance collaboration. By integrating voice with related real-time communications applications including instant messaging, presence, and voice/video/Web conferencing, an organization can make it easier for individuals to access the information they need in a timely and efficient manner, enabling faster and more efficient response to customer and sales inquiries.

A key opportunity for unified communications resides in the contact center. Unified-communications technologies can be a bridge to enable contact-center agents to shorten problem-resolution cycles, quickly answer customer inquiries, or more effectively up-sell services and/or products to prospective customers.

Will telepresence products ever reside in the branch office?

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter, By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 1/02/07

Like most new (and expensive) technologies, telepresence is gaining the attention of global enterprises that have large concentrations of employees at a dozen or two dozen locations worldwide. They can install these expensive systems at those sites, and reduce costly international travel expenses.

By Johna Till Johnson, President, Nemertes Research

The Issue

Mergers and acquisitions create a particular kind of stress on IT systems, organizations and processes. Companies typically have limited time and information within which to craft an integration strategy. IT staffs, in particular, are legally constrained regarding the knowledge they can acquire about the new acquisition—yet are under pressure to have the new entity fully integrated from Day One. The challenge is often exacerbated by the expectation that IT organizations will “recognize synergies” from the acquisition---i.e., the same individuals crafting and executing the acquisition are often in danger of losing their jobs. It’s no wonder, then, that mergers are often highly inefficient and painful, at least from an IT perspective. However, with foresight and planning, it is possible to put in place an integration strategy that appropriately sets expectations (both in the amount of time required for full integration and the degree, if any, to which layoffs are possible); delivers improved operational performance; and shows a measurable degree of integration from Day One.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com

By Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President

Executive Summary

Employees are increasingly distributed and far-flung. As recent Nemertes Research studies have repeatedly shown, about 90% of employees work away from the headquarters facility or campus. The bulk of those people work in branch offices ranging in size from 1 to 1,000 employees. There are good reasons for this: Branch offices afford organizations huge advantages, ranging from less-expensive real-estate, wider geographical selection for employees, and reducing commuting time for employees. And the trend is continuing: the average growth rate for branch offices is 8.9% annually, according to Nemertes’ Spring 2006 Convergence & Next-Generation WANs research benchmark.

But branch and remote offices also pose challenges for IT and network managers. Managing remote devices—including switches, routers, PBXs, network optimization devices, firewalls, intrusion-detection/prevention systems—imposes significant challenges to IT staffs, which are increasingly centralized even as their internal customers are distributed.

Hosted services can be a compelling alternative, particularly when it comes to voice over IP offerings. But in assessing hosted VOIP offerings, enterprises should keep in mind their own requirements, the services available, and the feature-functionality that best matches up with their own organizations.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Senior Vice President & Founding Partner, Nemertes Research Inc.
June 16, 2006

The FBI arrested a man in Miami on Wednesday for allegedly hacking the networks of Internet telephone service providers to fraudulently sell more than 10 million minutes of calls. This highlights the increase in security threats against VOIP and more specifically the escalation from simple denial/loss of service threats to more serious theft of service attacks

Converged networks lead to converged threats: VOIP is likely to suffer from both data attacks and voice attacks as data and voice are converged. As with any new technology there is a short “honeymoon” period during which attackers familiarize themselves with the new technology. In an article published in 2002, Nemertes predicted four stages of security threats emerging in voice technologies:

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By Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President

Convergence is here, no question about it. Based on findings from Nemertes’ 2006 Convergence & Next‐Generation WANs benchmark, it’s clear that enterprise organizations are deploying convergence—starting with VOIP—en masse. Fully 96% of benchmark participants are deploying VOIP today or planning to do so within the next three years. And that seismic shift places a unique burden on networking and IT staffs in several areas:

• Delivering low‐cost, high‐value networking services;
• Ensuring predictable applications performance;
• Managing and monitoring the applications (including voice) and the network;
• Leverage IT applications and networks to improve employee productivity;
• Leveraging converged applications in IT to make it easier to manage the growing number of remote employees.

The complete issue paper is available to Nemertes clients. Non-clients, please contact research@nemertes.com

Published: 03/17/06

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 01/23/06

If you're like a lot of folks, you're probably thinking IPTV is just a tad overhyped: Service providers from AT&T to BT to India's Reliance Infocomm have announced IPTV initiatives.

By Johna Till Johnson, Network World, 12/12/05

Some kids are born to be network engineers. But for many of us, it was a decision shaped as much by nurture as nature. And nurture included things like the movies we watched and the books we read, which engaged our minds and fired our imaginations.

* Integrating management of data center facilities with information systems

By Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Network World, 11/15/05

Convergence has had a significant impact on enterprise networks and data centers, with voice and video and data frequently carried on the same IP network.

[July 26, 2005]

SMB Owners 'Apprehensive' About VoIP

A recent Switchvox study find apprehension among SMBs over VoIP.

By DAVID SIMS
TMCnet CRM Alert Columnist

57% of small- to medium-sized business owners are "apprehensive" about the reliability of Voice over Internet Protocol service providers available today, according to a recent survey by Switchvox, who sells PBX phone systems to SMBs....