Unified Communications & Collaboration Blog

Consumer communications meets business communications in a mobile world

People communicate for work anywhere, anytime, from any device. Despite these undeniable changes in business behavior, a majority of companies haven’t optimized their communications infrastructure for mobile workforces or BYOD. The desire to use the same devices we use at home to do our work is widespread.

If your organization is migrating to the cloud, you’re already well aware of the benefits that can result from this move. In general, the cloud provides businesses with more mobility and better collaboration tools than legacy systems. Specifically, Google Apps has proven an ideal cloud solution for businesses as it offers complete universal access, unmatched collaboration tools, a scalable platform and more, all with one of the most dependable uptime guarantees of any cloud service.

BYOD stands for Bring Your Own Device - a phrase that came about with the consumerization of IT to refer to employees who bring their own computing devices – such as smartphones, laptops and PDAs – to the workplace for use and connectivity on the corporate network.

I’m all charged up on Google having spent 3 days at Google I/O last week. The keynote has gotten a lot of attention and Google really showcased a lot of new technology. I’m looking forward to the rich APIs that will extend these innovations and make them more “Enterprise friendly.” One innovation in particular is very exciting. The GMail team demonstrated new functionality that extends GMail to enable actions in the Inbox using schemas. In fact, Esna was able to demonstrate these actions for attendees as we’ve integrated the new schemas into Officelinx.

WebRTC—Watch This Space…

Everybody is talking about the exciting possibilities of WebRTC these days. And I completely agree with them—WebRTC has huge potential to change how the enterprise communicates and collaborates.  

Read part two of this series: Why Unified Communications & Collaboration Matters, Part II to learn how UC&C fosters better enterprise collaboration. 

Benefits to the Enterprise

The top three business priorities identified by more than 1,500 CEOs surveyed by Gartner in 2012 included:

Enabling the ROI in Communication + Collaboration Technology

I read an interesting report the other day that concluded UC investments were at risk if employees were not adopting the technology and leveraging investments.

Read part one of this series: Why Unified Communications & Collaboration Matters, Part I to learn more about how organizations are working more efficiently with UC&C. 

Capital vs Operating Lease? Renting vs Own? Buy vs Lease?

These are decisions that can confuse even the most savvy business people - both in their professional and personal lives. And yet, when it comes to software purchasing it can get even more complicated! In my roles as a Chartered Accountant, CFO and COO for both large and small organizations, I've experienced them all. Below are some of the things that a buyer should consider when trying to decide between the two basic software pricing models - and for simplicity, we will refer to these two models as "perpetual" (including assurance) and "subscription".

Why does unified communication (UC) technology have such a bad perception?

Why do so many key stakeholders in a business not care, or understand the value of unified communications? The bottom line, the vendors of such technology are (for the most part) to blame for this. The focus on technology over user experience has led to a perception of complexity and too much technology for too little return.