Cisco’s announcement last week that it’s acquiring email vendor PostPath for $215 million put the spotlight on a technology that had begun to seem passe. Microsoft accused Cisco of denigrating the importance of email in the past, while Cisco countered that it’s always seen email as part of the continuum “from text to TelePresence,” as Cisco’s Joe Burton said last week.

a Silver Lake-Tandberg deal–assuming Avaya played into the scenario–would really set Avaya apart and would arguably make Avaya the most credible alternative to Cisco for enterprise communications. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the conclusion that video is moving from nice-to-have/status symbol, to critical element of a communications solution going forward. Of course, video means lots of different things: Desktop, room, telepresence. All but desktop seem like a pretty good bet to take off for business purposes

Don Brown, Interactive Intelligence’s chairman, president and CEO, told me he wants to compete against the likes of BEA and Ultimus in providing programming tools that automate business processes, instead of just communications-enabling those processes. In Brown’s view of things, communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) “undershoots the potential” of the cluster of technologies that are typically deployed first in the contact center, which is the marketplace where Interactive Intelligence has its historic strength.

On No Jitter this week, Zeus Kerravala makes some valid points about the whole “human latency” issue around Unified Communications (see “Mobile Unified Communications Provides More Bang For The Buck Than On The Desktop”). Essentially, Zeus says that at least when it comes to landline communications (as opposed to when we’re mobile), most of us have developed pretty effective workarounds for the human latency in our communications routines, so that it’s really not as inefficient to work in separate media as the UC marketers make it out to be.

This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by IBM:
Unified Communications And Collaboration-IBM Calls It UC²
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from [...]