A recent study conducted by Plantronics and TNS is showing large changes in the way that organizations are conducting business. Due to the increasing costs of travel, employees of virtually all organizations are traveling less, and conducting business through teleconferences more.

This study, released on November 18, 2008, specifies that 36 percent of knowledge workers are traveling less, and that 40 percent are spending more time in teleconferences.

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In a recent press release, Microsoft has announced that Office Communications Server 2007, Release 2, will become publicly available beginning in February 2009. Visitors to the VoiceCon 2008 event in San Francisco this week got quite a bit of exposure to the OCS platform through panel discussions, keynotes, and demonstrations.

Microsoft has slowly been building a client base for the platform, which proposes an "in-place" migration to VoIP while maintaining existing PBX hardware, focusing the feature-set to the software platform.

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Yesterday, November 10th, Nortel announced a 'shakeup of sorts' after disappointing quarterly results, prompting a decentralization and large structure change at the company. These sweeping changes are resounding throughout not only the enterprise telephony industry, but other Nortel influenced markets including Carrier-Grade Systems and Metro Ethernet as well.

In addition, the highly-visible John Roese, the present CTO of Nortel will be leaving in January 2009. This decision comes as a response to the company's decision to vertically align and integrate its business structure.

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The busy winter conference season is upon us once again, promising a dizzying array of product annoucements, IP telephony news, and presentations and discussions that will continue to revolutionize the convergence industry.

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A recent British Telecom survey finds that more than half of organizations sampled are using VoIP in "production" environments. This figure is up from a 2007 statistic of 31%, proving that the industry continues to quickly adopt IP telephony as a primary communication solution.

When questioned about what issues still surrounded IP telephony platforms, network reliability, security, and voice quality were named. These were also issues that were also at the forefront of customers when choosing VoIP platforms.

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There's no doubt about it: IP Centrex is gaining steam, and quickly. With a comparatively miniscule initial investment to traditional telephony platform offerings, the market may be shifting ever-so-slightly to the "switch in the cloud."

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The market of wireless VoIP endpoints and devices has become a unique, almost niche environment over the last few years, previously gaining traction in verticals. While ‘wired’ endpoints have become commonplace across the industry, the idea of wireless VoIP has still lagged behind in development priority. This trend is quickly changing, in part, due to the rapid adoption of SIP, and also due to Polycom's accelerated development of the SpectraLink wireless product lines that support a number of SIP platforms.

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Any network infrastructure or voice environment of any scale requires an adaptable network monitoring environment to proactively keep tabs on the system. Potential problems and outages can be identified and recognized earlier with the appropriate monitoring environment.

Yesterday, GroundWork released Network Management Suite 2.1, a new version of NMS that introduces new features, including "single sign-on, simplified installation, consolidated monitoring data and comprehensive online user documentation integrated with GroundWork Monitor."

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Everybody is becoming familiar with the violent see-saw that the global economy has become within the last few months. In fact, we've heard about how the economic uncertainty is affecting jobs, fuel prices, and even the presidential election. Point is, these recent economic developments will directly affect the IP communications / convergence industry as well, and in many ways.

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Most of us, whether we would like to admit it or not, are likely members of some sort of social network. Social networking sites are some of the hardest-hit, highest-demanded, and media-rich sites on the Internet today, and for good reason. They have hundreds of millions of users from across the globe, and are expected to be always available - 24/7/365. What do some of the most popular social networking sites have in common? They use Splunk to search, organize, correlate, and analyze logging information from hundreds of sources.

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On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission released the report and order details of the "Implementation of the NET 911 Improvement Act of 2008". The NET (New and Emerging Technologies) Act was enacted on July 23, 2008, and outlined the statuatory requirement that VoIP service providers deliver 911 and enhanced 911 service in full compliance with FCC rules.

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After a few week hiatus from the security front, we're back on the trail of finishing out the 10 part "Securing the Line" series. Today, we're focusing on host security, or securing the underlying system that supports convergence applications.

Platforms that exist on top of non-proprietary OSes are great things. They allow for ease-of-management, and easier integration into other systems. However, what happens when critical security updates are released for the host OS, only to be unsupported, or worse, unrecommended by the application-level vendor?

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The financial services market has been through some very tough times lately. With multiple bank failures and problems at lending firms, there's even more uncertainty on the horizon. As you have most likely read in the news, investigations are being launched against C-level employees, investment, and accounting firms to 'get to the bottom' of this mess. Undoubtedly, information will be subpoenaed. Investigators will ultimately try to obtain call detail records to narrow down the 'paths of communication.'

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The small and medium business IP-PBX markets are alive once again with new blood being brought in to refresh multiple vendors' existing product lines.

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Just last week, Digium announced a partnership with Skype yielding the new "Skype for Asterisk" beta. This exciting announcement came from the annual Digium Asterisk conference, Astricon 2008, in Phoenix Arizona.

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Even in the fast-paced and forward-thinking field of Information Technology, there is still a significant underrepresentation of women in the workforce. There is significant amounts of research being poured into this gender discrepancy. Sylvia Beyer wrote an article titled “Gender Differences and Intra-Gender Differences amongst Management Information Students,” published in the Fall 2008 issue of Journal of Information Systems Education. Ms. Beyer examines the reasoning for a significant underrepresentation of women in Management Information Systems.

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Have you heard of Microsoft ResponsePoint? Ironically, not many people really have. ResponsePoint is Microsoft's new SMB-focused IP phone system appliance. With hardware vendor support from a wide variety of companies, including D-Link, Quanta, and Aastra, there are multiple choices for the hardware side of the system.

ResponsePoint has had a mildly slow "take-off" into the market, but it will be a product to watch. What could potentially hamper RP? First, Microsoft will need to show continued commitment to the product. Recently, Service Pack 1 was announced, so the development lifecycle of the product is indeed continuing. Secondly, the actual user experience of the product focuses on voice recognition. Time will tell as to whether this will be a time-tested implementation of a user interface.

Scalability of RP seems to be a chief concern among users. The system will likely not scale above the 10-12 line (analog) environment (with multiple appliances), with no PRI support on the way. This is definitely a small business product. However, other vendors are offering appliances with more features and more scalability options at the same relative price point.

The future of ResponsePoint is unknown. It will be interesting to see whether some of the intuitive voice recognition features make it into the mainstream releases of Microsoft OCS, however, time will tell.

For more information about Microsoft ResponsePoint, visit this site.

On September 16, Avistar announced a partnership to its provide bandwidth management technology for IBM unified communication and collaboration solutions. I recently had the wonderful opportunity of speaking with Avistar's CEO Simon Moss, and CMO Stephen Epstein about their company's exciting new advances into the unified communications "quality of experience" field.

The unfortunate reality of the UC (unified communications) and convergence fields is that many users are simply "turned off" to the new technologies being deployed due to poor quality of experience. Avistar's Stephen Epstein described the large number of potential bottlenecks in modern IP-based unified communications systems. From the endpoints, to the local network, wide-area network, and all of the devices in between, there's significant potential for packet loss, delay, and other common IP-related problems. While other applications can sustain such network inconsistencies, videoconferencing cannot. This is where Avistar's technology really shines.

Since the beginning of proprietary videoconferencing nearly 15-20 years ago, Avistar has provided quality-assurance technologies to improve and enhance the end user experience. Since most of the proprietary videoconferencing hardware has been ported to more 'open' software platforms, Avistar has adapted their technologies towards the new environment.

Avistar's technology utilizes dynamic monitoring of the end-to-end environment to provide a better end user experience. This can include many factors, including:

- IP network quality (packet loss, delay, etc)
- Endpoint performance (memory, video performance, etc)

Using a dynamic algorithm, Avistar's software reacts to deficiencies or problems in the network or the endpoints, and modifies frame rates or other variables. The use of "class of user" environments can be implemented as well to provide different levels of QoE to several sets of users.

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Just this morning at the AstriCon 2008 event, Skype and Digium announced a collaboration partnership and the beta version of Skype For Asterisk. This partnership will allow "the integration of Skype functionality into Digium's Asterisk software and enable customers to make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within their Asterisk phone systems."

This very exciting feature development will significantly benefit both platforms, allowing business users to "make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware." In addition, this collaboration will allow users to "save money on inbound calling solutions such as free click-to-call from a website, as well as receive inbound calling from the PSTN through Skype's online numbers."

For more on this exciting late-breaking story, please visit the Digium press release, "Digium and Skype Collaborate to Bring Skype to Business Phone Systems."

In the next few weeks, I hope to discuss this new functionality and partnership with Digium and Skype. Stay tuned!

Sometime in your life, you have likely used a Polycom telephone or video conferencing system. Once known for their conferencing systems, Polycom expanded into high-fidelity teleconferencing products, and has now proven themselves in the field of IP telephones.

Especially in the SIP-centric IP-PBX market, Polycom has made a significant statement. The SoundPoint IP series has become the 'de-facto standard' for many IP-PBX and UC system vendors. With Digium|Switchvox, Fonality, and many other IP Centrex providers supporting the SoundPoint IP series, interoperability is definitely present with Polycom's products from platform to platform.

What has made Polycom especially successful in the SIP endpoint market? In my opinion, there are a few key factors to the success of any endpoint.

First, hardware build quality is extremely important. There are simply a lot of 'junk' devices out there that only add confusion and a poor end user experience. Sure, these devices may cost less in the short-term, but will likely add exponentially to that cost through user frustration and hardware failure.

Second, configurability and centralized provisioning is essential. The entire SoundPoint IP series offers extremely flexible provisioning through TFTP, HTTP, or FTP, and also rapid deployment through this boot-server model. Many UC server and IP-PBX vendors require control over the minute details in any endpoint in order to seamlessly provide an advanced feature set to the user. Polycom's endpoint configuration files are indeed very detailed and long, but offer granular control over even the smallest details.

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