From time to time, UCStrategies.com experts are invited to be keynote speakers at customer events sponsored by leading vendors in Unified Communications.  In addition to our sessions at conferences such as VoiceCon and InterOp, Blair Pleasant (COMMFusion), and Don Van Doren and I (UniComm Consulting) have each enjoyed responding to those requests to provide independent industry viewpoints at these customer events.

Beginning on November 20, I will be speaking at Microsoft Unified Communications Road Show events in the US, India, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Italy, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. 

The theme will reflect the white paper that Don Van Doren and I recently created with Microsoft sponsorship, “Achieving Cost and Resource Savings through Unified Communications.”   This highlights roughly a dozen areas where companies around the globe are applying UC solutions, especially Microsfot Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Exchange Server 2007 and 2010, to produce measurable savings.  On a “per employee per year” basis and backed up with actual case studies, the potential savings are in the range of $12,000 per employee per year — a very compelling ROI and cash positive within months.

Since Unified Communications is very likely to be quite different in each country, my plan is to report the perspectives on UC as well the creative UC solutions being implements at each stop along the way.  You may share my curiousity about what will be found at each stop.  

If you have questions you would like me to explore, please post them here.   It will be a joy to share with you.

Best Regards….

Marty Parker 

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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I spent a few days in San Francisco at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. John Chambers, as always, did an amazing job of positioning Cisco as a leader and innovator. I totally agreed with Chambers when he said that the technology for collaboration is the easy party, but changing a company’s culture is hard, and it’s especially hard to change the way people work. He noted that collaboration needs to be driven from the top down to match a company’s business goals. It also leads to new business models, such as how to respond to a hurricane, or how you move operations to the data center.

Jim Grubb, Demo Master, demonstrated the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP), which lets users create and share social content and expertise. ECP brings together people, information, and communities in an integrated collaboration experience. Customers will have to wait for this, however, since ECP is just going into beta trial today with some key accounts.

Here’s the basic idea behind ECP. Similar to IBM’s Lotus Connections and products from smaller Enterprise 2.0 companies like Socialtext, ECP is a social software portal application that lets users form team spaces and communities of interest where they can search for individuals with specific expertise, share information, and collaborate and communicate. As Grubb demonstrated, communities can be dynamically created based on a project, for example, and people and resources can be brought into the community quickly and easily. Based on tags and other criteria, users can search for individuals based on skills or expertise and bring them into the community. Using Cisco’s UC tools, users can integrate real-time voice and video capabilities, and send IM’s, initiate real-time voice and/or video calls using click-to-call capabilities. They can also invite other people to join the discussion. Community members can share blogs, wikis, videos, documents, and other information within the shared community workspace.

Cisco acknowledges that other vendors have similar social software tools, and they’re not the first ones in this area. However, there is a gestalt that occurs when ECP can be integrated with Cisco’s UC tools, allowing for a richer collaborative experience, with real-time voice, video, and chat capabilities.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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