Archives : August 2008

Enterprises look to network service providers for application optimization

published on 2008/08/28 by Anthony Plewes

A report published by Ovum earlier this summer found that businesses are still struggling to deliver decent application performance over their network. The analyst spoke to senior IT professionals in 150 large enterprises in Europe and the US about how their WAN is coping with the ever-greater demands from applications. It found that the vast majority were starting to look to their network service provider for application optimization services. The report was sponsored by Ipanema and the top-level findings are in its press release. Although 78% of respondents admitted that poorly performing networked applications would have a serious impact on......

top 10 tips for IP telephony deployment

published on 2008/08/21 by Anthony Plewes

This is a useful list of top tips for deploying IP telephony that we developed that I'd like to share with you. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has any additional advice for making IP telephony a success, so please feel free to leave a comment. 1. Don't think of telephony in isolation – consider other requirements from the start End-user experience with voice in IP telephony can be no different from legacy telephony, leaving users to ask 'What's in it for me?'. The power of IP telephony is that it can be integrated with collaboration tools, such......

Microsoft's telephony credentials stir up a hornet's nest

published on 2008/08/19 by Anthony Plewes

Analyst Gartner has stirred up a hornets nest by putting Microsoft's Office Communications Server (OCS) in its recent Corporate Telephony Magic Quadrant, where it joins telephony market stalwarts such as Avaya and Cisco. This is the first time Microsoft has appeared in this particular MQ, and positions the OCS as a complete telephony solution instead of just a unified communications platform. However, the analyst notes that most companies will view OCS as an extension to their PBX rather than a replacement. It says that without additional PBX functionality OCS is out of the running as an all-out replacement of the......