Laurie Dack, UC and Voice Sales Specialist

As you may have seen in our Techno Talk earlier this month, Avaya has acquired Sipera, a Unified Communications security applications provider.

This is great news for all businesses who are planning to trial SIP trunking in the near future. When adding SIP trunking to your network, it is always recommended to include a Session Border Controller on your premise that protects your voice network. Sipera provides an affordable Session Border Controller that was designed for enterprise businesses of all sizes, but offers many of the redundancy and features of a more expensive carrier-grade Session Border Controller. Sipera’s SBC works with ALL types of enterprise voice systems and SKC has the technical skill to design the best SBC solution to work with your Cisco, NEC, Avaya or other voice provider. SBC functionality is scalable, compatible in environments of 20 to 10,000, with much lower costs for its small capacity SMB offering as well.

Additionally, Sipera’s Secure Access Proxy allows companies to confidently and safely extend their UC applications to any supporting endpoint in any location over any network. Using the Secure Access Proxy can save companies thousands of dollars by avoiding traditional trunking methods. SKC recommends trialing SIP trunking on a smaller scale before transitioning your entire voice network to SIP trunking. The Sipera e-SBC has a scalable solution that can be sized for a smaller trial, while growing to fit your entire SIP trunking network in the future.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

2010 was a great year to be in this segment of the technology industry. It seemed that a week could not go by without something exciting happening. Every customer, prospect, and manufacturer that I met with in 2010 discussed collaboration. In 2010, Collaboration became the new UC, which included a wider range of technologies that some companies are or were just beginning to investigate.

Desktop Video
The adoption of desktop video collaboration technology increased in 2010, which enabled organizations to capture the benefits of increased productivity through more effective meetings. This can translate into more rapid implementation of corporate strategies and faster time-to-market through increased decision-making. Ease-of-use and not having to leave one’s office or desk was another driving factor.

Social Media
For a lot of IT Directors or CIOs, social networking suggests users are pounding away on Twitter and Facebook and hogging network bandwidth with YouTube video streams. Upon further research, IT managers are realizing the concepts that such services embody are central to improving collaboration both within the organization, as well as with customers and partners. As businesses look to become more effective across different departments, functions and processes, social computing in and around the enterprise will become more widespread. While there’s no right way to do anything in social media, there are distinct tolerances, cultures, and characteristics of some communities for things like promotions, sales pitches, tone, human presence vs. automation, and responsiveness. Understanding those things first can help set you and your teams up for success and respect, rather than the reverse.

IM/Presence/Data Sharing
This includes the ability to instant message, view availability and collaborate with users. Presence status can be set by a user or automatically based on calendar, login status, and more. Users can individualize access levels for different contacts to share information with them. Data collaboration, which uses file transferring, application/screen sharing and white boarding, ensures seamless communication interchange between employees. These features provide communication mediums to enhance responsiveness, decision-making, and customer service that further increases the business efficiency and productivity.

Be sure to check back later this week for a look into what’s in store for 2011.

Brandy McDonald, Director of Inside Sales and Sales Support

SKC has been selling headsets for nearly 25 years and although I’ve only been here for six of those years, I have seen the company and the technologies we sell greatly evolve. The headset started as a device that delivered hands free flexibility but tethered you to the desk. You now have the freedom to roam about the office and collaborate with your peers up to 300 feet away or use a wireless headset for your wireless device. All of this development has ushered in the era of how to unify your communications. No matter where you are or how you chose to do business, one truth remains: the headset is the unifying piece.

Your company has invested time and money to test and deploy your desktop video, soft-phone application, smart phone and presence. Now you must decide how your voice will be heard. It’s the goal of our headset expert team to set you up with a Plantronics headset that fits your needs and style.

In my future blog posts, I will be presenting some of these solutions to you as well as keeping you up to date on current promotions. I am excited to share some of the industry trends we are seeing and how headsets are playing a part in Unified Communications. In the meantime, if you have any questions or would like assistance selecting the right headset for your phone or PC, we’re here to help.

Jeff Holton, Director of Technology

Polycom and Microsoft have recently announced a new strategic alliance for end-to-end Unified Communications. The relationship will move the market forward with resources and investments on both sides.

This announcement is exciting news. There are a few reasons that I say this:

Our customers have been asking for such a solution. The combined solutions will allow our customers to connect anytime, anywhere, and enhance productivity through voice, video, presence and data collaboration tools. While this might sound more like a marketing statement, it is the truth and is a great reason why the announcement is big news.

It gets people talking about UC. Similar to when Cisco purchased Tandberg, it brings PR and media coverage to voice and video solutions. The more that Unified Communications is discussed; especially when companies like Polycom and Microsoft are mentioned, it is great for SKC and our customers.

It will expand the reach of videoconferencing. Studies show that in 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server will have a worldwide installed base of 301 million mailboxes, and is expected to reach 470 million by 2014. This is a 12% growth. Why does this matter? Microsoft is now going back to the 301 million installed mailboxes to install Office Communication Server (OCS), which means Polycom has the potential for 301 million desktop video users to bridge and integrate with its room systems. We’re always in favor of making video easier to use and more widely adopted within our clients’ organizations.

In 2007, there were around 16 million installed seats of Live Communication Server (Now Office Communication Server). Numbers that I have seen for installed OCS are at least 100 million. This shows that OCS is being adopted by many organizations worldwide for their presence, desktop video, and instant messaging engine. Polycom is in a great position with the announced strategic relationship as it can take advantage of such a large install base with the current and future offers.

With the recent hiring of a Microsoft Engineer, SKC has invested itself in this strategy and is ready to assist with any Microsoft and Polycom concerns.

I know that my team and I look forward to further discussing with all of you how the strategic relationship will allow you to seamlessly integrate Microsoft Office Communicator and Polycom’s solution set.

Melea McRae – Marketing Director

We’re proud to announce another successful Smart Communications Technology Summit! Nearly 400 professionals convened in downtown Kansas City to learn what’s new and upcoming from 17 of our manufacturer partners.

The highlight of this year’s event was the industry expert panel, in which C-level executives from some of our top manufacturer partners expressed their thoughts on where communication technology is headed.

Among the things we learned from the panel:

There is no singular solution.

As Cisco Global Collaboration Vice President Carl Wiese said, “Technology is changing so fast. You don’t want to end up in a corner.” The first step to developing any solution is to analyze your business’ needs and goals in order to determine the best solution. The panel also advised companies to work with a value added reseller (like SKC) who can develop a customized and integrated solution around your needs and ensures the technology works today and in the future.

Interoperability is key.

A good way to make certain your technology solution works into the future is that the individual pieces interoperate with each other. Unified Communications revolves around the idea of greater efficiency and internal productivity, and interoperability plays a key role in achieving this goal. “It’s not about individual devices, it’s about integrating solutions and measuring them against the business,” said Phil Edholm, Avaya’s Global Collaboration Vice President.

The end-user will determine the success.

A huge theme we noticed during the panel is that you have to understand how people communicate because the environment adapts to the user, not vice versa. While our manufacturers strive everyday to develop new products that are easily integrated into users’ daily routines, it’s also up to management to embrace and lead the culture of adoption. Start by communicating the business rationale behind the technology and then communicate the individual advantages for employees. Be sure to take their personal preferences into consideration and train individuals to properly leverage the technology.

I’d like to thank our sponsoring manufacturers: Avaya, Plantronics, Tandberg, now part of Cisco, and Polycom; as well as all our manufacturers that participated: Accordent, AMX, APC, Audio Codes, Biamp, Christie Digital, Co-nexus, Crestron, Mitsubishi, Polyvision, Symon, VBrick and Vgo.

If you were in attendance at this year’s event, we’d love to hear what you thought. If you weren’t able to join us, we’d love to see you next year!

Tray Vedock – President

It’s a busy week for us at SKC as we’re holding our Third Annual Smart Communications Technology Summit this Wednesday in Kansas City.

Throughout the day, 17 of our manufacturer partners will be showing off their new solutions and presenting breakout sessions on products and trends in the communication technology space. Over lunch, industry experts will showcase hot topics, trends and tools in a panel discussion.

This year’s industry expert panel includes:

Ken Kannappan, President and CEO, Plantronics
Carl Wiese, Global Collaboration Vice President, Cisco Systems
Randy Klein, Executive Vice President and COO, Crestron
Rashid Skaf, President and CEO, AMX
Andy Miller, President and CEO, Polycom
Phil Edholm, Vice President of Technology Strategy and Innovation, Avaya GCS

If you’re in the Kansas City area, please join us Wednesday at the Kansas City Convention Center. Information can be found at our Tech Summit website. If you can’t make it, you can still learn and see what’s going on at the event by following @SKCComm on twitter and our event hashtag, #skcsummit, where we’ll share the wisdom 140 characters at a time.

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.