IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

Tue, 12 Dec 2006 16:23:49 +0000

NEWS FLASH: Virtual Reality not as good as Reality

We've all been there. Travel expenses have to be cut, and yet your work centers are geographically separated, work groups are forged from different work centers, and your management suggests you increase your use of video conferencing. You grudgingly submit to the idea but hope that you still have enough money to do the necessary amount of travel, and you might even try some video conferencing. But will it work?

Corporations have learned a lot since this 2004 Norwegian study that indicated that video conferencing affected corporate travel from 2.5-3.5%. Part of the following study suggests that it's merely a matter of implementing the right culture with the right technology and you can start saving, but what might the long term impacts be of reducing personal interaction amongst employees.

David Siegel

Director IP Product Management

biography

April 16th Boston

My day started with a 7am flight, followed by a soon to be customer visit, I then presented a
IPv6 state-of-the-union perspective at a Futurenet panel discussion along with John Curran Chairman of ARRIN, and Todd Underwood of NANOG. And ended the day with the Massnetcomms 2008 award dinner.

The highlight of my day was at the award dinner, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Vanu Bose (he is the son of the founder of Bose) who was honored with the most innovative product of the year. Vanu has developed a software controlled radio that can operate across many deployed mobile standards . Instead of fork lifting hardware, you change the software and mobile operators can efficiently rollout new wireless protocols. Kinda like adding a new application on your PC.

Onofrio (Norm) Schillaci

Principal Solutions Architect

biography

IVR Hell Solved

I think everyone has at least one horror story about navigating through an Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) menu over the phone. You know what I am referring to...those “Press one for this, press two for that”. One example of the miserable part about these systems is when you have to listen through the entire thing only to find out that the option you need isn’t an option at all –OR- when someone (usually my kids) talks to you during the recording and you miss some options (most likely the one that you needed!), so you have to listen to the entire announcement again. This, my friends, is IVR hell. Well I just stumbled upon a company that is addressing IVR hell head on, and with a whole bunch of ingenuity mind you…

Adam Uzelac

Director and Principal Network Architect - Converged Architecture

biography

Harvard visit

Monday I had the pleasure of re-connecting with a former professor of mine, Nolan Bowie. He was gracious enough to allow me to guest lecture his class which focuses on the future of communications media and the intersection with public policy. I was honored to be asked to share my experiences and insights with such a diverse and eclectic group of truly gifted students.

It was extremely refreshing to engage with Professor Bowie whose ideas are both provocative and conventional at the same time. His ideas are provocative because they challenge the established interests in fundamental ways. But his ideas are conventional because they simply take established policy in one area and apply it in another. For example, just putting the label “national security” on something can dramatically change the way people address a concern. If economic competitiveness is a matter of national security and broadband deployment is a critical component of economic competitiveness, then massive government investment in broadband infrastructure doesn’t seem all that radical, and in fact seems down right conventional.

Paul Kouroupas

Vice President Regulatory Affairs

biography

The Value of Presence ? That is the question.

While visiting with several individuals a few weeks ago at the Ziff Davis Unified Communications Summit in Seattle, WA I noticed that some people hadn't yet realized the power of one aspect to the overall value of unified communications which relates to presence awareness. That is leveraging presence not just in instant messaging but in other communication vehicles can play an important role in transforming your business impact as an IT organization. As a result I thought I would dedicate this post to help create ideas around things that can be done to assist in helping IT in leading the way.

Here at Global Crossing in an attempt to leverage this core components of Unified Communications in an ongoing effort to incorporate the advantages of collaborative, converged services within our enterprise we've transformed internal applications from static non presence aware to anticipatory engaged communication tools that are supporting contextual collaboration with presence-awareness throughout the enterprise. In this instance presence-awareness (whether someone is available in simple terms and how to contact) is utilizing capabilities including chat, computer-based telephony, conferencing, IP video, and e-mail across tools that leveraged across the enterprise drive in principle more efficacy from consumption and corresponding execution. In fact it is my opinion that since presence has been embedded into our application infrastructure to enhance our collaborative capabilities it is natural to see transformational improvements occur around our "quality of experience" associated to the overall user experience. This is so because enabling enhanced customer experience truly enables the IT organization to drive one more component to our IT organizations transformational success in enabling the business to not only "react" but be proactive by achieving extensibility required within the distribution transparency model required for execution. Said another way the fact that presence awareness has been integrated into our application infrastructure means this action will further enhance our agility to enhance operational efficiency by allowing application "pivots" to be present thus accelerating communication by eliminating in some instances serial cognitive task execution.

Thomas Hobika

VP, Sales Engineering, EST

biography

IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings -

IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings