InterCall, a “Cloud” Pioneer

The “cloud” is everywhere these days. It’s probably the latest overused term in the world of IT, so please bear with me here while I cover InterCall’s experience in the cloud. This isn’t something new to InterCall; it’s simply customers leveraging our infrastructure and unique offerings to deliver great service to their own clients, partners and colleagues instead of building their own service internally—and it’s available on-demand, regardless of location.

InterCall has been in the cloud for many years, making us somewhat of a pioneer in cloud services.  The cloud may have been known as a service provider, ASP, hoster or a combination of all of them. We’ve moved along the continuum of IT marketing terms as time has passed, but the fact is we’ve been delivering a hosted and managed service to customers since 1991.

2011 will be the biggest year yet for InterCall product development teams, industry partnerships and business investment into the cloud. It has always been at the heart of InterCall’s business model, and I plan to post some upcoming blogs to discuss product timelines, how the cloud can help your business, benefits of the cloud model and other cloud-related topics.

Stay tuned and I’ll see you in the cloud!

Rodney Horton is senior director of hosted services for InterCall, the business unit for UCaaS and other hosted UC and collaboration solutions. Rodney spends most of his time providing direction and support to the hosting services area of InterCall by working with internal teams and external customers to develop solutions that will enable companies to save time and money through the adoption of cloud-based UC. When he’s not working with InterCall customers on their UC strategy, Rodney enjoys spending time with his family, traveling and exercising.

We're Calling It: Unified Communications Predictions for 2011

With the turn of the calendar from December to January, you can count on predictions from TV reporters, newspapers and bloggers about what’s ahead in the world of finance, politics and Hollywood.

Not to be left out, our Unified Communications team compiled our own list of insights and predictions to what 2011 may bring to the world of UC.

Mobile Interactions Become More Personalized
Let’s face it: no one likes to be JUST a number. Thankfully smartphones allow us to pair faces, places and relevant information about people within our contact lists.

More information workers in 2011 will be associating a name to contact people, empowering them to identify availability on the fly and delineate the most effective mode of contact—whether it’s IM, email, direct dial or conference call right from their desktops. And these connections will be made in a faster, more accurate manner than ever before.

With the ability to identify the location of the speaker at the end of your line, like with the Polycom CX5000, ever increasing speed of cellular services and growing access to WiFi, meetings will share more emotion, attention and accountability and, according to Cisco, last longer because of the increase in productivity.

There Will Be an Increased Focus on Presence
Presence, the ability to “see and be seen” (with status updates we’re all familiar with on IM, such as available, busy, away, on the phone, out of office, etc.), will be built into more and more applications as opposed to being a separate tool.

2011 Is the Point of No Return for the Cloud
Cloud computing in the year ahead, particularly as it relates to UC, is driving toward an adoption level that will soon make it “mainstream” in nature. Just as the economy has driven organizations to explore any viable means to save costs and better utilize IT resources, the cost savings and enhanced efficiencies that cloud-based collaborative technologies afford will become too great to ignore.

Mobile Goes to the Cloud
Extension of cloud-based apps to mobile phones will become a greater factor and more prevalent in 2011. Moving beyond just getting emails on your phone, the prevalent adoption of smartphones will spur more enterprise application developments designed to improve and speed-up everyday business practices.

Cloud Services Will Flourish within Remote Countries and Employees
As the price of the microprocessor falls, access to more intelligent software in the cloud and more powerful hardware will become available. This brings opportunity to share information, technology and data faster across a wider array of users.

Tablet PCs Will be Used for Video Conferencing
Have you seen the part in the movie “Demolition Man” where the metal bodies with tablet PC faces are conducting a meeting? Granted, we’re not going to be having meetings quite like that in 2011, but technology is constantly becoming more engrained in our day-to-day lives. With the trend toward tablet-based computing heating up, more and more video conferences will be held on tablet PCs.

Video to Become the Key Driver of UC Implementations
Today, many room-based video systems are collecting dust between uses, instead of being integrated into the more collaborative and efficient, minute-to-minute business operation of the desktop environment. As video capability expands, with vendors such as Cisco/Tandberg, Microsoft and Polycom leading the way, these environments will become more seamless in both operation and management, closing a key gap in the UC space that will make its strategic value even greater than it is today.

So what do you think 2011 will bring for Unified Communications? Share your ideas and let us know what you think about our team’s predictions!

Damon Martin is vice president of sales for West UC Solutions, InterCall’s dedicated team of UC specialists. Based in Wichita, Kansas, Damon oversees InterCall’s systems integration and consulting services. When he’s not working with InterCall customers on their UC strategy, Damon enjoys spending time with his family, boating and reading.

A New Piece to the Unified Communications Puzzle

It’s been busy time for InterCall’s Unified Communications (UC) team, thanks in part to Microsoft’s recent Lync Server 2010 launch.

Last month we held two well-attended events in support of the Lync Server 2010 launch. Sponsored by Microsoft and coordinated by InterCall, the events featured speakers from Microsoft, Polycom, Dialogic and our own UC group and covered everything from features and benefits to product demos and complementary solutions. You can also take a look at some pictures from our Lync launch events—head over to Facebook, become a fan and check out our album!

Wedged in between our two Lync launch events was Microsoft’s global launch in New York on November 17. We were there for the big kickoff and took away some of these key ideas:

• Lync 2010 completes the family of Office products, ushering in a new era of communications
• Lync is the linchpin of Microsoft’s Unified Communications solutions
• Businesses that have already deployed Lync are seeing reduced costs and quick adoption rates

Perhaps the most important idea we heard at the launch was that Microsoft’s goal is to deliver UC on the customer’s terms. That’s a goal we share here at InterCall. Whether you’re looking for hosted, managed on premise or hybrid solutions, we work with our clients to deliver Unified Communications in the way that works best for them. We also don’t support the “rip and replace” mentality, which means we analyze your environment to determine which solutions will integrate with your existing infrastructure.

Other global launch highlights: It was great to see Bill Gates “drop by” (virtually via a Lync meeting) and we were pleased to have InterCall listed as part of the Lync Partner Ecosystem during the presentation given by Microsoft corporate vice president, Gurdeep Singh Pall.

On the same day of the global launch, we wired a press release debuting our new services in support of Lync. If you haven’t heard about our professional services for Lync, including planning, deployment and management solutions, go ahead and give it a read. And stay tuned for upcoming information about the release of Office 365.

If you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Comment on the blog and let us know what you’d like to hear next regarding UC!

Damon Martin is vice president of sales for West UC Solutions, InterCall’s dedicated team of UC specialists. Based in Wichita, Kansas, Damon oversees InterCall’s systems integration and consulting services. When he’s not working with InterCall customers on their UC strategy, Damon enjoys spending time with his family, boating and reading.

The Trend in Conferencing? Unified Communications

On October 10, I traveled to Boston for the annual CSP Summit hosted by Wainhouse Research, the premier research consulting firm in the conferencing and collaboration space. It was a great day, as we had the opportunity to get a more in depth look at the industry as well as network with our colleagues from all over the world. The New England Clam Chowder was pretty good, too.

I thought the most interesting part of the conference was the discussion around the emergence of Unified Communications (UC). The transformation of the conferencing and collaboration industry to UC is already on its way and is expected to really make strides within the next 5-10 years. While UC lacks a firm definition in terms of the products and services offered within any given model, the one thing that remains constant is the ability for all of your day-to-day business communications to be integrated and work together. It really allows for companies to work and act smarter, which is something that every good organization strives for.

One final note. Most people probably attribute InterCall with conferencing, but the reality is we’ve been offering messaging, streaming, managed services and other UC services for years giving us a head start on the rest of the industry. It’s important we continue to communicate this to our customers.

Daniel Carroll, is an associate marketing manager and the company's resident competitive intel and market trends research guru. He earned a BBA in marketing at Temple University. In his spare time he likes to swim, rollerblade and sample fine Italian cuisine.

Beating Cannibals with Text Messages and Twitter

When we first approached event producers to try webcasting, they called us cannibals.

Fearing that us ‘streamers’ would eat up their live attendance figures, marketing folks and trade show planners kept us at arm’s length and asked, “Why would our audience show up to the physical event if they can just watch it from home?” But then along came the recession, bringing with it budget cuts and travel restrictions, and we suddenly got along famously.

Now at the end of 2010, it’s difficult to find any live conference or corporate gathering that isn’t streamed as well.

But when you have two audiences—one in the room and one that’s separated by thousands of miles watching on a 17” monitor—how can you possibly keep them both involved? How can a live presenter encourage interaction between the virtual and physical worlds?

Working with our sister company, Televox, the InterCall streaming development team took advantage of a tool that is already in everyone’s pocket to truly pioneer some new “hybrid” technology: By using regular cell phones to send text message questions and respond to live polls, physical attendees and virtual attendees can both weigh in, seamlessly taking part in the presentation together. The presenters, the physical audience and the virtual attendees all work together, blurring the technological divide.

This past Wednesday, we hosted a hybrid event for a major pharmaceutical client. We streamed a live presentation from a studio in San Francisco to approximately 3000 live viewers gathered together at over 160 restaurants across the country. Interspersing the presentation with several viewer polls, all attendees were able to vote with their cell phones and respond directly to the presenters, making for an unparalleled level of engagement in the event.

Since we also integrated Twitter with the InterCall Streaming platform only a few months ago, we’re seeing those truly connected folks taking advantage of webcasting like never before! During our own Unified Communications panel in September, we saw conversations starting on Twitter and then rolling into our live panel discussion, while users texted questions and voted on live polls directly on their screens. Clients have recently been requesting the SMS and Twitter integration for events as varied as corporate updates, product launches, promotional trade shows and even a financial webcast! Creativity in marketing (and growing trust in the virtual audience) is really changing the business of meeting planners.

So what’s our next step? What else are you doing to merge the physical meeting and the virtual event?

Andrew Parker is a senior marketing manager for Streaming and Event Services at InterCall. Working between the product, promotional and production teams, Andrew has experienced every facet of the webcasting and virtual event industry as it has grown into a must-have business technology. Outside of InterCall, Andrew likes live music, good food and exploring New York City by bicycle.

Posted at 08:00 AM in Unified Communications, Webcasting | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

There has been an enormous amount of discussion in the past few years about Unified Communications and its business impact. However, companies are now moving beyond asking the question, “What is Unified Communications?” and instead are asking what Web 2.0 and social networking mean to their business. The reality is that there is an inherent link between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking tools and Unified Communications.

What is changing in the workplace?
The effects of a troubled economic environment have led to reduced budgets and staff. Even as hints of recovery begin to emerge, the following trends are staying true:

• Unwillingness to return to previous employment levels
• Information workers are expected to increase their output
• Elimination of organizational layers
• Increasing expectations for staff to take on a variety of roles and responsibilities

This new way of doing business--and growing business--with less resources demands more productivity. As a result, the need for a collaborative working culture has increased. Combined with the general acceptance of social media tools in our everyday lives, it is clear that:

1. Workers have become accustomed to instant access to friends and family thanks to text messages, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.
2. Workers need to collaborate quickly and effectively. Today’s phones and email are not fast enough, with most communications resulting in a voicemail or replies hours later.

Bottom line: workers have a desire and need to use collaboration tools. If we look at Unified Communications as a tool to facilitate communication and explore its ability to add business value by driving collaboration, we can start to understand how social networking is an indication of the willingness to embrace Unified Communications and Collaboration.

Why is Web 2.0 relevant?
The question about whether people can use social networking tools to collaborate has been answered by the prolific growth of social network sites and the various tools that support and integrate with them. Workers already tweet feedback from trade shows and conferences, recruit new talent on LinkedIn, or interact with customers and prospects, publicize events and share product updates on Facebook and blogs.

Workers have realized that collaborative technology enriches communications and makes productivity sustainable. As businesses strive to boost productivity without returning to the staffing levels or increasing spending, Unified Communications becomes key to achieving those goals. The burden now is on solutions providers and vendors to help executives understand how to best leverage a Unified Communications platform in a way that meets their collaborative and productivity requirements.

Businesses are not going to back away from demands for increased productivity. By understanding the correlation between social networking and Unified Communications and Collaboration, companies can begin to embrace these solutions as an important part of today’s workplace.

Damon Martin is vice president of sales for West UC Solutions, InterCall’s dedicated team of UC specialists. Based in Wichita, Kansas, Damon oversees InterCall’s systems integration and consulting services. When he’s not working with InterCall customers on their UC strategy, Damon enjoys spending time with his family, boating and reading.

When developing a Unified Communications (UC) strategy, there comes a point when you have to make decisions about what applications to keep on premise and what applications can and should be hosted, or ‘in the cloud.’ But what factors are involved in making those choices? And how do the various vendors, like Microsoft, Cisco, Google and others, approach UC delivery?

Thursday, June 24 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 10:00 Pacific, we’ll be joined by UC experts Damon Martin and Rodney Horton of SKT for a webinar titled, “Hosted or On-premise? Developing a UC Strategy that Fits Your Needs.” SKT and InterCall are both a part of West Corporation.

Attend and learn:

• What can and cannot be delivered via cloud
• Best practices for building a UC strategy
• How the major vendors approach the cloud
• The pitfalls and benefits of integrating hosted and on-premise applications
• Real-world case studies

Register Now!

SKT is a leading UC consulting firm and national systems integrator (NSI) with numerous UC certifications and designations. The event will feature a Q&A session, so take advantage of your chance to get free, expert advice! For more information about SKT and the services they provide, send an email to ucsales@intercall.com. Are you working on a UC strategy for your business? Please share your tips and challenges with us!

Ken Kurz, Director of Product Management for Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible all aspects of the UC product portfolio and is constantly working to add to and refine our UC solutions and services.

Unified Communications is the next step toward a global workplace. But what exactly is Unified Communications? And can you afford it?

Unified Communications integrates real-time communication services with non-real time communication services in one unified user interface across multiple devices and media. In other words, UC gives you the ability to operate and manage the following business processes together:

• Audio
• Video
• Web conferencing
• Email
• Instant messaging (chat)
• Voice mail
• SMS (Text)
• Call center
• VoIP
• Network and Infrastructure

It may sound complicated, but it’s actually a process designed to simplify and integrate communications. That means faster project turn-around times, improved customer service, and more productivity across the board. Now that InterCall hosts UC solutions, UC has gotten even easier—and less expensive.

Unified Communications and InterCall Collaboration

InterCall recently partnered with CallTower to offer InterCall Hosted Unified Communications. You may have heard of Software as a Service (SaaS), where your software applications reside on the Internet, speeding up processing speed, eliminating hardware installations or upgrades, and cutting costs. Hosted UC, or UCaaS offers the same benefits, with InterCall’s renowned training and 24-hour customer support behind the service.

But InterCall’s Unified Communications and collaboration offers more than just integrated phone, text and messaging. The robust package, with custom options available, includes central hosting and management of:

• Microsoft Exchange
• Office Communicator
• SharePoint
• Active Directory
• Cisco UC Manager (IP PBX)
• IP phones
• Data and telephony services

How Can Unified Communications and Collaboration Improve Productivity?

Hosted UC can make projects run more smoothly and collaborations—even across thousands of miles—go faster. For instance, InterCall Hosted Unified Communications lets you quickly escalate an IM between project team members into a full-fledged Web video conference, complete with virtual whiteboard and shared browsing capabilities.

Schedule audio, video and web meetings with a few touches using any communications device and, through InterCall’s Mobile Assistant, team members can sign on from any location in just one easy step. The Connect2Meeting function delivers automated reminders to participants e-mail inboxes through UC, which can reach them anywhere they are. Never start a meeting late again!

The Future of Business Lives on the Web

As more and more businesses rely on the Internet and smartphones for the bulk of their communications and collaboration, UCaaS hosted by InterCall makes it easy, at a price affordable to nearly any size business.

Technology blogger Charlene O’Hanlon said it best when she speculated, “The question is whether your organization is ready to embrace that level of change and attenuated innovation or sit back and watch somebody else eat your company’s lunch because they put in the time and effort to reinvent their business processes.”

It may sound harsh, but it’s true. Technology is advancing quickly, and only developers have a hint of what’s next on the horizon. By taking the next step into UCaaS, with a trusted company that will walk you through the sometimes-confusing process, you’ll be that much further ahead of the curve than your competitors, and prepared to offer the advanced levels of customer service, project management and production that today’s clients expect.

Have you thought about integrating United Communications into your business communications plan?

Read the press release »

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Enterprises are showing strong interest in deploying Unified Communications (UC) solutions because of their next generation collaboration features, enhanced voice capabilities, promise of reduced cost and improved workflow. In short, UC integrates real-time and non-real-time communications, like IM, telephony, conferencing and more, across multiple communication devices in a single unified interface.

To help companies better understand, implement and embrace UC solutions, InterCall currently offers:

• Audio federation with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and OCS R2
• Assessment and design
• Pilot program management
• Deployment assistance
• Adoption and training
• Hosted Live Meeting
• Microsoft Online Services, also known as Business Productivity Online Suite or “BPOS”

Check out the Unified Communication and Collaboration section of InterCall.com to learn more about these solutions and find out how we can help you. In addition, you can stop by our booth (#409) at VoiceCon 2009 on November 3-4 at the Moscone North Convention Center in San Francisco. Billed as "the leading enterprise communications event," the show will also feature booths and speakers from some of our partner companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Polycom.

While at the show, you may want to consider attending some of these UC-related sessions:

Monday
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Choices in UC: Comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server to IBM Lotus Sametime
3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
Managed/Hosted Services for UC

Tuesday
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
UC Leadership Roundtable: How Far Have We Come? What's Next?
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Comparing UC Options and Vendors: Who's Offering What?

For more information about the show, be sure to check out the VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 website or the No Jitter blog, which is brought to you by the same people who produce VoiceCon. And remember to stop by Booth #409. We'll see you there!
 

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Our sales team brought me along to talk with a customer to assist their Unified Communications (UC) strategy and budget for next year. As customary for meetings about UC, the meeting assembled several cross-functional department heads–  the desktop application management team, telecom and data networking group, the person that manages the messaging systems, the individual responsible for conferencing and collaboration, senior management, and representatives from the finance team. You get the idea.  It was a typical IS-meets-business- strategy planning session.

With this group in the room, before you know it I’m saying things like “this UC-EIM system utilizes SIP and has a standards-based codec supporting VoIP click-2-call by integrating with your PBX”.  And in concern to the non-IS folks in the room, I was becoming very aware of the amount of jargon and TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that were being thrown about during our discussion. As the meeting progressed, my concerns of the effect of “jargon-overload” on the finance guy was diminished - he was keeping up and he made several great points that let you know he was completely engaged.

But it got me thinking. We use tech terms everyday and it has a way of actually decreasing understanding and making what we’re talking about seem like it has less relevance to everyday workers in their business life.  The meeting inspired me to write this blog entry. Here are a few terms you are likely to encounter as you navigate the world of Unified Communications.

Unified Communications (UC) – I like the way Frost and Sullivan defines this term in our free Unified Communications Whitepapers.  In its most fully realized form, unified communications offers users a single application interface from which users can access a range of communications tools, including voice calls, IM chat, e-mail, faxes, voice messaging and conferencing—audio, video and web.

I’d like to add that UC is a system, and not a single-vendor product. Additional to the technologies that define the system, a UC framework includes deployment considerations (hosted, on-premise, hybrid) and system management and end-user training considerations.

Unified Conferencing and Collaboration (UCC) – also from our Whitepapers, UCC is defined as integrated audio, video and web conferencing in a single interface.

InterCall likes to call this “Unified Meetings” – whereby a single URL or shortcut can be clicked and you are joined to a rich virtual meeting environment with no complex effort to enjoy seamless audio, video, web collaboration.

Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) – a system that delivers secure, auditable, corporate, instant messaging on private servers that can be deployed on-premise on in “hosted” environments.

The top suppliers of EIM are Microsoft, IBM, and Jabber (recently acquired by Cisco). When designing a UC system, you will want to do some planning around federating your UC-EIM system to partners and suppliers outside of your internal networks.

Unified Messaging (UM) – a system that routes (so users can store and retrieve) different types of messages (voicemails, email, faxes, etc) from a single, “unified” inbox – which is accessible from a variety of devices and applications – like your email inbox on your laptop, or a handheld smart device, or even the ability to take a standard phone and dial-into a text-to-voice converter.

Whew! UM products are available from telephony hardware vendors (I won’t list them all, here are products briefs for Cisco and Avaya) and there are systems from InterCall partners Microsoft and IBM.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – a telephony networking solution that allows you to transmit voice telephone calls across an IP network as an alternative to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Ha! I threw that last one in for free… ;-)

Softphone (IP Softphone) - a software application (that runs on your laptop or smartdevice) for making and receiving telephone calls on a computer using VoIP.

A softphone should ot to be confused with an IP telephone handset device. A “soft” phone provides an on-screen interface for outbound dialing and must interoperate with the computer’s sound card and microphone or accessories that plug into the computer’s USB port. There are business-grade and consumer-grade softphones. The term “click-to-call” refers to mouse-clicking on a contact or phone number using your softphone in order to “dial” the connection.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – an Internet standard (see RFC 3261) used for session establishment and teardown for voice communications and video conferencing over an IP network.

At InterCall, we utilize SIP on our audio conferencing platform to effectively manage media stream (audio) sessions to deliver robust conferencing as efficiently as technically possible.

If this glossary of terms has been helpful, respond in the comments section below, and I’ll continue this topic on my next posting.

Ken Kurz, Director of Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible for the end-user success of Unified Communications deployments; ensuring businesses have a more efficient, easier-to-use communications environment.

Unified Communications and the Web 2.0

There has been an enormous amount of discussion in the past few years about Unified Communications and its business impact. However, companies are now moving beyond asking the question, “What is Unified Communications?” and instead are asking what Web 2.0 and social networking mean to their business. The reality is that there is an inherent link between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networking tools and Unified Communications.

What is changing in the workplace?
The effects of a troubled economic environment have led to reduced budgets and staff. Even as hints of recovery begin to emerge, the following trends are staying true:

• Unwillingness to return to previous employment levels
• Information workers are expected to increase their output
• Elimination of organizational layers
• Increasing expectations for staff to take on a variety of roles and responsibilities

This new way of doing business--and growing business--with less resources demands more productivity. As a result, the need for a collaborative working culture has increased. Combined with the general acceptance of social media tools in our everyday lives, it is clear that:

1. Workers have become accustomed to instant access to friends and family thanks to text messages, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging.
2. Workers need to collaborate quickly and effectively. Today’s phones and email are not fast enough, with most communications resulting in a voicemail or replies hours later.

Bottom line: workers have a desire and need to use collaboration tools. If we look at Unified Communications as a tool to facilitate communication and explore its ability to add business value by driving collaboration, we can start to understand how social networking is an indication of the willingness to embrace Unified Communications and Collaboration.

Why is Web 2.0 relevant?
The question about whether people can use social networking tools to collaborate has been answered by the prolific growth of social network sites and the various tools that support and integrate with them. Workers already tweet feedback from trade shows and conferences, recruit new talent on LinkedIn, or interact with customers and prospects, publicize events and share product updates on Facebook and blogs.

Workers have realized that collaborative technology enriches communications and makes productivity sustainable. As businesses strive to boost productivity without returning to the staffing levels or increasing spending, Unified Communications becomes key to achieving those goals. The burden now is on solutions providers and vendors to help executives understand how to best leverage a Unified Communications platform in a way that meets their collaborative and productivity requirements.

Businesses are not going to back away from demands for increased productivity. By understanding the correlation between social networking and Unified Communications and Collaboration, companies can begin to embrace these solutions as an important part of today’s workplace.

Damon Martin is vice president of sales for West UC Solutions, InterCall’s dedicated team of UC specialists. Based in Wichita, Kansas, Damon oversees InterCall’s systems integration and consulting services. When he’s not working with InterCall customers on their UC strategy, Damon enjoys spending time with his family, boating and reading.

What’s Your UC Strategy?

When developing a Unified Communications (UC) strategy, there comes a point when you have to make decisions about what applications to keep on premise and what applications can and should be hosted, or ‘in the cloud.’ But what factors are involved in making those choices? And how do the various vendors, like Microsoft, Cisco, Google and others, approach UC delivery?

Thursday, June 24 at 1:00 PM Eastern / 10:00 Pacific, we’ll be joined by UC experts Damon Martin and Rodney Horton of SKT for a webinar titled, “Hosted or On-premise? Developing a UC Strategy that Fits Your Needs.” SKT and InterCall are both a part of West Corporation.

Attend and learn:

• What can and cannot be delivered via cloud
• Best practices for building a UC strategy
• How the major vendors approach the cloud
• The pitfalls and benefits of integrating hosted and on-premise applications
• Real-world case studies

Register Now!

SKT is a leading UC consulting firm and national systems integrator (NSI) with numerous UC certifications and designations. The event will feature a Q&A session, so take advantage of your chance to get free, expert advice! For more information about SKT and the services they provide, send an email to ucsales@intercall.com. Are you working on a UC strategy for your business? Please share your tips and challenges with us!

Ken Kurz, Director of Product Management for Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible all aspects of the UC product portfolio and is constantly working to add to and refine our UC solutions and services.

Intercall Makes Unified Communications More Accessible

Unified Communications is the next step toward a global workplace. But what exactly is Unified Communications? And can you afford it?

Unified Communications integrates real-time communication services with non-real time communication services in one unified user interface across multiple devices and media. In other words, UC gives you the ability to operate and manage the following business processes together:

• Audio
• Video
• Web conferencing
• Email
• Instant messaging (chat)
• Voice mail
• SMS (Text)
• Call center
• VoIP
• Network and Infrastructure

It may sound complicated, but it’s actually a process designed to simplify and integrate communications. That means faster project turn-around times, improved customer service, and more productivity across the board. Now that InterCall hosts UC solutions, UC has gotten even easier—and less expensive.

Unified Communications and InterCall Collaboration

InterCall recently partnered with CallTower to offer InterCall Hosted Unified Communications. You may have heard of Software as a Service (SaaS), where your software applications reside on the Internet, speeding up processing speed, eliminating hardware installations or upgrades, and cutting costs. Hosted UC, or UCaaS offers the same benefits, with InterCall’s renowned training and 24-hour customer support behind the service.

But InterCall’s Unified Communications and collaboration offers more than just integrated phone, text and messaging. The robust package, with custom options available, includes central hosting and management of:

• Microsoft Exchange
• Office Communicator
• SharePoint
• Active Directory
• Cisco UC Manager (IP PBX)
• IP phones
• Data and telephony services

How Can Unified Communications and Collaboration Improve Productivity?

Hosted UC can make projects run more smoothly and collaborations—even across thousands of miles—go faster. For instance, InterCall Hosted Unified Communications lets you quickly escalate an IM between project team members into a full-fledged Web video conference, complete with virtual whiteboard and shared browsing capabilities.

Schedule audio, video and web meetings with a few touches using any communications device and, through InterCall’s Mobile Assistant, team members can sign on from any location in just one easy step. The Connect2Meeting function delivers automated reminders to participants e-mail inboxes through UC, which can reach them anywhere they are. Never start a meeting late again!

The Future of Business Lives on the Web

As more and more businesses rely on the Internet and smartphones for the bulk of their communications and collaboration, UCaaS hosted by InterCall makes it easy, at a price affordable to nearly any size business.

Technology blogger Charlene O’Hanlon said it best when she speculated, “The question is whether your organization is ready to embrace that level of change and attenuated innovation or sit back and watch somebody else eat your company’s lunch because they put in the time and effort to reinvent their business processes.”

It may sound harsh, but it’s true. Technology is advancing quickly, and only developers have a hint of what’s next on the horizon. By taking the next step into UCaaS, with a trusted company that will walk you through the sometimes-confusing process, you’ll be that much further ahead of the curve than your competitors, and prepared to offer the advanced levels of customer service, project management and production that today’s clients expect.

Have you thought about integrating United Communications into your business communications plan?

Read the press release »

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Visit InterCall at VoiceCon and Learn More About Our UC Solutions

Enterprises are showing strong interest in deploying Unified Communications (UC) solutions because of their next generation collaboration features, enhanced voice capabilities, promise of reduced cost and improved workflow. In short, UC integrates real-time and non-real-time communications, like IM, telephony, conferencing and more, across multiple communication devices in a single unified interface.

To help companies better understand, implement and embrace UC solutions, InterCall currently offers:

• Audio federation with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and OCS R2
• Assessment and design
• Pilot program management
• Deployment assistance
• Adoption and training
• Hosted Live Meeting
• Microsoft Online Services, also known as Business Productivity Online Suite or “BPOS”

Check out the Unified Communication and Collaboration section of InterCall.com to learn more about these solutions and find out how we can help you. In addition, you can stop by our booth (#409) at VoiceCon 2009 on November 3-4 at the Moscone North Convention Center in San Francisco. Billed as "the leading enterprise communications event," the show will also feature booths and speakers from some of our partner companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Polycom.

While at the show, you may want to consider attending some of these UC-related sessions:

Monday
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Choices in UC: Comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server to IBM Lotus Sametime
3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
Managed/Hosted Services for UC

Tuesday
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
UC Leadership Roundtable: How Far Have We Come? What's Next?
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Comparing UC Options and Vendors: Who's Offering What?

For more information about the show, be sure to check out the VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 website or the No Jitter blog, which is brought to you by the same people who produce VoiceCon. And remember to stop by Booth #409. We'll see you there!
 

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Unified Communications Glossary of Terms

Our sales team brought me along to talk with a customer to assist their Unified Communications (UC) strategy and budget for next year. As customary for meetings about UC, the meeting assembled several cross-functional department heads–  the desktop application management team, telecom and data networking group, the person that manages the messaging systems, the individual responsible for conferencing and collaboration, senior management, and representatives from the finance team. You get the idea.  It was a typical IS-meets-business- strategy planning session.

With this group in the room, before you know it I’m saying things like “this UC-EIM system utilizes SIP and has a standards-based codec supporting VoIP click-2-call by integrating with your PBX”.  And in concern to the non-IS folks in the room, I was becoming very aware of the amount of jargon and TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that were being thrown about during our discussion. As the meeting progressed, my concerns of the effect of “jargon-overload” on the finance guy was diminished - he was keeping up and he made several great points that let you know he was completely engaged.

But it got me thinking. We use tech terms everyday and it has a way of actually decreasing understanding and making what we’re talking about seem like it has less relevance to everyday workers in their business life.  The meeting inspired me to write this blog entry. Here are a few terms you are likely to encounter as you navigate the world of Unified Communications.

Unified Communications (UC) – I like the way Frost and Sullivan defines this term in our free Unified Communications Whitepapers.  In its most fully realized form, unified communications offers users a single application interface from which users can access a range of communications tools, including voice calls, IM chat, e-mail, faxes, voice messaging and conferencing—audio, video and web.

I’d like to add that UC is a system, and not a single-vendor product. Additional to the technologies that define the system, a UC framework includes deployment considerations (hosted, on-premise, hybrid) and system management and end-user training considerations.

Unified Conferencing and Collaboration (UCC) – also from our Whitepapers, UCC is defined as integrated audio, video and web conferencing in a single interface.

InterCall likes to call this “Unified Meetings” – whereby a single URL or shortcut can be clicked and you are joined to a rich virtual meeting environment with no complex effort to enjoy seamless audio, video, web collaboration.

Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) – a system that delivers secure, auditable, corporate, instant messaging on private servers that can be deployed on-premise on in “hosted” environments.

The top suppliers of EIM are Microsoft, IBM, and Jabber (recently acquired by Cisco). When designing a UC system, you will want to do some planning around federating your UC-EIM system to partners and suppliers outside of your internal networks.

Unified Messaging (UM) – a system that routes (so users can store and retrieve) different types of messages (voicemails, email, faxes, etc) from a single, “unified” inbox – which is accessible from a variety of devices and applications – like your email inbox on your laptop, or a handheld smart device, or even the ability to take a standard phone and dial-into a text-to-voice converter.

Whew! UM products are available from telephony hardware vendors (I won’t list them all, here are products briefs for Cisco and Avaya) and there are systems from InterCall partners Microsoft and IBM.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – a telephony networking solution that allows you to transmit voice telephone calls across an IP network as an alternative to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Ha! I threw that last one in for free… ;-)

Softphone (IP Softphone) - a software application (that runs on your laptop or smartdevice) for making and receiving telephone calls on a computer using VoIP.

A softphone should ot to be confused with an IP telephone handset device. A “soft” phone provides an on-screen interface for outbound dialing and must interoperate with the computer’s sound card and microphone or accessories that plug into the computer’s USB port. There are business-grade and consumer-grade softphones. The term “click-to-call” refers to mouse-clicking on a contact or phone number using your softphone in order to “dial” the connection.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – an Internet standard (see RFC 3261) used for session establishment and teardown for voice communications and video conferencing over an IP network.

At InterCall, we utilize SIP on our audio conferencing platform to effectively manage media stream (audio) sessions to deliver robust conferencing as efficiently as technically possible.

If this glossary of terms has been helpful, respond in the comments section below, and I’ll continue this topic on my next posting.

Ken Kurz, Director of Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible for the end-user success of Unified Communications deployments; ensuring businesses have a more efficient, easier-to-use communications environment.