Apr 18 2008 3:01AM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
email,
conferencing,
VoIP,
Skype,
presence,
instant messaging,
Unified Communications,
UC,
Fuze,
Callwave
TMCNet’s Rich Tehrani recently wrote about a UC offering from Callwave called Fuze. Unified communications can level the playing field for smaller companies that want to compete with the big boys. In this instance, Callwave is leveraging their approach to unified communications to produce a unified communications solutions aimed at small and medium businesses, and, in the process, squaring off with the big boys in their own arena like Microsoft, Cisco, and Avaya. Fuze appears to provide a fairly comprehensive approach to unified communications, including email integration, Skype-based audio and video conferencing, media sharing, follow-me functionality, and more. What is most unique about Fuze though is that it is a web-based solution, with no software to install and no special equipment to deploy. That could be a tremendous advantage, and it could be an achilles heel. The product is in Beta now, projected for a summer 2008 release. Fuze may be worth taking a look at if you are evaluating UC solutions for a small or medium business.
Apr 11 2008 3:49PM GMT
Posted by: Tony Bradley
VoIP,
instant messaging,
streaming video,
Qik,
Twitter,
Skype,
SearchUnifiedCommunications
Companies are typically slow and cautious to adopt new technologies. That is partially a function of due diligence and testing to ensure that any new technology or application will function properly and provide value before committing to adopting it. The larger the enterprise, the slower the process of migrating to new technologies or updating applications. Almost every organization has their share of power users though who push the technology envelope and start using bleeding edge technologies as soon as they hit the streets. These users tend to be the “better to ask for forgiveness than permission” crowd and simply attach their rogue devices and install their rogue applications and figure out how to make them work from within the enterprise. In general, this behavior should be discouraged. It can cause problems with the user desktop and the network. It can introduce unknown risks and make the enterprise network open to threats that the network and security administrators are not even aware of. With some technologies though, they reach a sort of “Hundredth Monkey” critical mass and resistance becomes futile. In those cases, organizations are better off trying to figure out the business benefits of the technology and how to incorporate it in a logical and secure way, rather than wasting resources trying to fight it. This article on SearchUnifiedCommunications addresses three consumer unified communications products which have gained in popularity and could serve as a pseudo test environment for organizations looking to define the business value of unified communications.
