VoiceCon eNews: Comparing Vendor Offerings
VoiceCon eNews: Managed/Hosted UC
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009
**** VoiceCon eNewsletter ****
Weekly opinions and analysis of the trends in enterprise communications and technologies http://enews.voicecon.com/
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Week of October 21, 2009
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Comparing Vendor Offerings
One of the best trends that’s developed at VoiceCon over the past few years is the increasing number of our presenters who have offered to take on the considerable time commitment of building their sessions around comprehensive reviews of vendor products and positioning. The godfather of this approach is of course Allan Sulkin, whose PBX RFP session provides a wealth of information about the top vendors’ systems, including the specifics of responses to a mock RFP.
A couple of years back, Marty Parker added his own tutorial on Unified Communications choices, and in a couple of weeks, for the first time, we’ll have a mobility component too, thanks to Michael Finneran. And of course Brent Kelly’s Microsoft/IBM tutorial also delivers a similar in-depth presentation focused on important vendor offerings.
Presenting accurate, detailed, objective information about vendor offerings is a key mission for VoiceCon. You can’t give a complete picture of an industry or technology without some reference to the products that turn technology visions into reality. After all, these are the systems that you’ll actually be going out to consider purchasing. Having strong experts offer advice and side-by-side comparisons is incredibly useful.
That doesn’t mean we’re willing to get any lighter on “pure” technology, with in-depth sessions on issues like QOS, SIP trunking, troubleshooting, basics of SIP and IPT, network design, etc. etc. But vendor issues are by nature a moving target, so the tremendous amount of work that goes into these sessions has to be substantially repeated for each VoiceCon.
So I’m grateful to Allan, Marty and Michael for digging in and producing such impressive pieces of work (I’ve seen all the presentations). You can check out a very short preview of Marty’s presentation here.
I hope you’ll join in the conversation!
Eric Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
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This Week’s UC Weekly - The UCstrategies.com team
To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, the word of the day is “virtualization.” Virtualization, which lets you consolidate applications and run them on a single (virtual) machine or server, is all the rage, and the UC vendors are getting into the act. Several have or will be announcing virtualization strategies that enable customers to leverage standard servers to minimize space, be more energy efficient and improve business continuity options.
The top reason why enterprises are moving to virtualization is the potential for cost savings. In the past, a company would buy a license for a telephony application, and also buy the application vendor’s hardware or a dedicated server to run the application.
In a virtualized world, the application licenses are still purchased and the applications themselves are still administered separately just as before, but several different applications can run on one virtual server, using packages such as a VMWare server or Microsoft HyperV server, which can also run other business applications. You wind up buying fewer servers and realize lower costs for server maintenance and power. Moreover, apps can be turned up as needed and in slightly less time - no need to install another physical server - resulting in implementation savings.
Virtualization, which has been around for a long time in the data world, is now coming to a telephony application near you, but there are tradeoffs.
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On No Jitter This Week
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News, Analysis and blogs on Enterprise Communication from industry experts.
* SIP Trunking; How Do You Get the Savings Without the Risk?
* Avaya and Virtualizing Call Processing
* Email Is No Longer Number One
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Video
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Use Communications to Transform Your Enterprise
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From The Blog
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VC Virtual Event
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If you missed VoiceCon’s first-ever Virtual Event last June, there’s a wealth of information waiting for you to access on demand.
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VoiceCon Podcast
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* 10 Guiding Principles of Reducing Network Costs:
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Free Webinars
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* 10/14 - Taking Advantage of SIP Trunking:
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