Jeff Holton, Vice President of Technology

In an earlier blog post, we discussed the freedom that Cisco Jabber brings to employees in terms of collaboration and communication tools. Cisco’s CloudVerse provides a similar service giving employees the freedom to access their network from anywhere, at any time.

 A cloud is a growing trend in IT and consumer services. With networking, storage and management services, companies can give users access to the information that they need on a day-to-day basis. These applications are available to them regardless of location giving them the flexibility to work remotely or in a physical office and every in between.

Cloud computing may not be the right thing for every organization, but if you decide that using a cloud to carry IT services to your users, you must be sure that it is highly secure, reliable and predictable. Users need the assurance that their information is kept safe and secure while also easily accessible and transparent among devices.

For additional information on Cisco’s CloudVerse or Cisco Cloud Intelligent Network, reach out to your SKC Account Executive for additional information.

Jeff Holton, Vice President of Technology

Gone are the days of hunting down a colleague in the office for a quick question. Say goodbye to phone tag and dozens of email exchanges. It’s now time to collaborate with your colleagues at your convenience. 

Cisco Jabber transforms workplace communications with tools such as presence, IM, voice and video. Find your colleagues and connect to them using your preferred method with a simple click of the mouse. Employees are able to work anywhere, on any device, with Cisco Jabber. Dozens of devices including PCs, laptops and smartphones are all supported.

With an increase in employee flexibility comes increased collaboration and productivity. Being connected to colleagues throughout the day, regardless of location, gives employees the flexibility to collaborate with those outside of their physical building, state or even country.

Employees should no longer be stuck to their desk. The technology is here to connect us all and allow for the freedom and flexibility we all demand.
For more information

Jeff Holton, Vice President of Technology

Security
There are a number of security issues with Skype, including hackers’ ability to find the location of users through the IP address used to log in. Here’s an example.

Quality
With true HD at the desktop, small conference room, large conference room, and Immersive Telepresence, video from SKC partners offer a much clearer picture than you receive using Skype. Combined with the higher bandwidth used for these video calls, you’ll have less interruptions due to choppy video or audio.

Jeff Holton, Vice President of Technology

The consumer market is increasingly driving what products we are using in businesses – a movement our industry is calling “consumerization of the enterprise.” More and more employees are finding a way to translate products they use at home into their work life. We want to use devices that we want to use – not what our company says we can use. This has been true even for me. I’m a Mac user but my company primarily uses PCs, which can cause some compatibility headaches at times. Apple users seem to be an under served population in the enterprise when it comes to business communications.

Macs aren’t limited to schools and ad agencies anymore, and the iPhone… can you walk a block without seeing someone who has one? It’s the most popular and hyped mobile device on the market. Then there’s the iPad: that one caught everyone off guard. A device you never knew you needed until you started seeing other people with it.

But why is it so difficult at times to merge these popular consumer products with our business applications, especially when your company has typically been running with PCs and Blackberries?

Avaya recognized this pain point. Earlier this year, they released one-X Mobile SIP for iOS. This software adds the capability of Voice over Wi-Fi on a corporate wireless-enabled Avaya Aura SIP environment. Now your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad device can access your corporate directory, sync to your desk phone and work voicemail, and make calls on the company’s wireless network (which avoids costly cell phone minutes.)

Polycom’s CMA desktop video collaboration solutions for Mac OS X also offers seamless interoperability with existing Polycom CMA desktop for windows – further enabling video collaboration with anyone, any time, and on any device.

Polycom also just recently announced its RealPresence Mobile app. It’s a free application on iTunes that gives you enterprise-grade video communications on your iPad 2.

These are a couple examples of how our industry is adapting to demands and keeping their promises of interoperability and open standards. Now with new iPads and iPhones on the horizon, we expect to see solutions focused on Apple products continue to evolve in the next 12-18 months.

Note: As I completed this entry, I read – on my iPhone – about the passing of Steve Jobs. His impact on the industry I call home has been incredible, and his legacy will carry on for generations to come.

Kristen Bowser, Area Manager, Plantronics
Kristen is Plantronics’ area manager for the states of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.

The Calisto P825-M. Where do I begin? This product is fantastic. It’s a nice surprise coming from Plantronics, whose bread and butter has always been top-of-the-line telephone headsets and as of late, USB headsets. This device has taken my home office experience to the next level. So what exactly is this new device?

In a nutshell, it is a multi-device speakerphone system that allows me to connect to both my Microsoft Lync client for my PC calls, as well as my iPhone for my mobile calls. Big deal? Yes. Big deal!

I love this product. It integrates seamlessly with Lync and my iPhone. I often (like every day I am in my office and not traveling) leave my iPhone in my purse downstairs, or in the kitchen, or anywhere but upstairs in my office with me. The Calisto P825-M automatically detects it, even though it may be over the standard 30 feet of Bluetooth range, and asks me if I would like it to connect to my iPhone. I push yes on the display pad and then when my mobile phone rings downstairs, I can answer it from upstairs, thus eliminating my 100-yard dash to find my phone ringing from some unknown location in my house. If my Lync client rings, I press the button and answer that too.

The Calisto P825-M has full call control with Microsoft Lync 2010 and even comes with a Bluetooth wireless microphone I can clip onto my shirt so I don’t sound like I am on a speakerphone. (I am sure all my clients and colleagues appreciate this. I know I hate when people talk to me on a speakerphone.) The sound is incredibly clear, not only on PC and mobile calls, but even on the music that I have playing over my PC when I am not on a call. Oh, and one more feature I now cannot live without: I can pass the active mobile call I am on from the Calisto P825-M to my iPhone mid call and walk out the door without missing a beat. It really does make home office life much easier.

Set up of the product took two minutes, and really, I mean only two minutes. I plugged it in to my USB port and I was up and running. It asked me a few questions on the display which I answered with a press of the yes or no button and I was ready to make and receive my calls.

In all, this is a product that has made my life easier. I can use one device to answer either phone and no longer have to sprint around my house looking for my misplaced mobile phone.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Yesterday, we took a look at the biggest communication technology trends in 2010. Today, let’s see what’s in store for 2011.

Integration
Integration is going to be a theme and discussion that we see and hear all year in 2011. This could be the integration between a customer’s existing Telephony System and IM/Presence platform for click-to-dial capabilities and presence. It could also be integration of a Telephony System, IM/Presence platform, and videoconferencing network to allow dialing between all systems and presence capabilities.

Social media integration in contact centers is another trend that many companies should be investigating for 2011. Customers are posting on Twitter, Facebook and blogs about the products that we sell and our brands on a daily basis. By integrating social media feeds into contact centers, companies can mine social media platforms for specific data and be able to act immediately based on their business criteria they have setup. This allows companies to be more responsive to customers’ needs and requests.

Having the knowledge to be able to integrate all of the technologies together and also fit our customer’s specific business requirements is a high growth area for SKC that we continue to invest in.

Interoperability
One of the biggest issues facing the Collaboration industry is interoperability. There are all these exciting new pieces of technology and software suites to make up our collaboration space, but without common standards and certified interoperability we can’t be guaranteed a new investment won’t cut us off from communicating with the rest of the business world. Until now, manufacturers would pair up and test their products against each other one at a time, but now there might be a more efficient solution. Some of the major players in this space have teamed up to support making interoperability a little more pervasive and a little easier to attain as a group effort.

HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech/LifeSize, and Polycom have joined together to found the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a group dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor UC interoperability. A growing number of companies are joining these players in the forum including Acme Packet, Aspect, AudioCodes, Broadcom, BroadSoft, Brocade, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Teliris.

The forum–while not developing its own standard–will work to deliver interoperability based on current standards, developing interoperability testing, and certification of UC products to ease customer integration and increase adoption. They plan to tackle video and Telepresence solutions first and are currently exploring the XMPP and SIMPLE standards for IM and H.323, SIP and XMPP/Jingle for voice and video.

2011 promises to be one of the most exciting years for the collaboration space, with companies focusing heavily on integration and interoperability between all products, which allows customers to choose a solution for each business need rather than a manufacturer.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Social media has taken over the online landscape in the past decade, offering consumers an outlet to produce content, connect and then share it. There are plenty of blog posts, websites and even companies devoted to helping organizations take advantage of social media and the opportunity it provides to interact with customers. With social media feeds and other tools, keeping track of what is being said about your company is a little easier.

Avaya recently announced the release of their Social Media Manager to their product portfolio. The program takes social media feeds and looks beyond just the buzzword traffic by listening, filtering and looking at the actual content of the messages. It then passes those onto the appropriate contact center agent. Filters can be topics or even language detection so that the item gets routed to the agent with the right language skill set.

By automating the process of filtering through messages and finding the relevant and actionable items before passing them on, the Social Media Manager improves productivity. For example, someone might tweet about a flight delay, but if it’s due to weather, something out of the control of the airlines, then it probably isn’t worth the airline taking action. In another situation, a person may tweet about their hotel only having six cable channels, causing them to miss a certain show. Another local hotel could pick up the tweet and offer a special rate to switch.

With social media becoming an ever-growing part of conducting business, firms should find the innovative efforts made by Avaya to be more and more useful in managing social media presence and responding to customers’ needs.

Ty Bechtel – Video Engineer

When I think of firewalls, I envision security and trust. From a traditional videoconferencing perspective, firewalls were a foe. In the infancy of video over IP networks, firewalls were taboo to the point that in order for video to work on the internet, systems were placed outside of the firewall. I am happy to see where we have now evolved.

Videoconferencing has transformed to a point of cooperation with typical network security. No longer do we need to ask IT security for more public IP addresses or ports to be opened so that we can make a call. No longer does the security team cringe when they have to work with videoconferencing. We can now work effectively together in a network that will allow security and at the same time, enable video users to grow and move as needed.

How did we get to this point? Video aware firewall solutions and a little protocol named H.460. There are a few other gems out there, but at this point these are the two major solutions in the marketplace. They each have their place in the network design. Each provides one IP address for access and limited port visibility. The bottom line is that they each allow video networks to grow and move while still adhering to the security standards of most networks.

Video aware solutions typically sit on the edge of the network alongside an existing client firewall and route traffic to and from the video network as requested and acknowledged from behind the firewall. This eliminates rogue calls into the network. In addition to the internal call acceptance, the firewall ports typically needed for video calls are no longer continually open. Ports are opened and closed as calls occur. No more open ports at 3 a.m. on a Saturday for hackers to work over.

H.460 is an ideal way to enable multiple locations access back to a central location. H.460 appliances sit outside the firewall and communicate back into the network on a session basis. The key for H.460 is that call control is from behind the firewall. All call setup is performed outbound, so as long as your firewall has just a few ports open out to the internet, you will be able to make calls. The slick part of H.460 is that even when a call comes into a network behind a H.460 appliance, the call is established outbound. From a security standpoint, all validation occurs from a trusted source inside the network. Once again, no rogue calls. The added benefit of owning a H.460 appliance is that in the event your organization is working with a site that has a H.460-enabled video device, but may not have firewall rules set to support NAT, etc., you may be able to still call them. They simply register to your appliance and connection is established through your H.460 appliance.

My experiences over the last few years have been that we, as video users, can now supply a solution to our own network security team that allows video to grow.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

When I was discussing the move to my new position at SKC as the “Director of Technology” I started wondering, can technology be directed?  As many of us have experienced, technology has a tendency or even ability to direct us more than we are able to direct it.  It’s my job to help with your technology direction and also lead SKC in our future direction.

In the coming weeks and months I will be blogging about different areas of the technology world that I see as either emerging areas or areas that have been around and are becoming increasingly popular.  Some of these technologies will be:

• Establishing presence across your entire voice and video network
  • Alphabet soup of OCS, AES, CUPS, CUCIMOC

• Available options and strategies to implement desktop video
  • CMA, MOVI, OCS, 1XC with Video

• The potential of parallel forking in SIP video
  • One address multiple devices

• The video conferencing applications of Session Border Controller
  • Intracompany video communication
  • SIP to H.323
  • H.323 to SIP
  • Manufacturer independent firewall traversal

• Utilizing social media in the contact center
  • Facebook & Twitter

I am very excited about our new blog at SKC and hope that you are too. I look forward to your feedback and input on the topics or areas that you would like to see me discuss and cover.

We are in one of the most interesting and exciting times for technology and understand that navigating through the main twists and turns can be difficult.  This is where SKC comes in to help you investigate different technologies and how they will help your company become more efficient and successful.

It’s our belief that SKC can help you to direct your technology to ensure that it is working for you and help you and your origination succeed.