UC Strategies’ Blair Pleasant Answers Questions From VoiceCon

UC Strategies Group, the leading voice in Unified Communications, has a post up from cofounder Blair Pleasant that answers some additional questions from VoiceCon.

My question is “IsVoiceCon a viable conference?”  or should it be called “AppCon” - Voice is only a feature of Unified Communications.  In fact one of the most impressive things that I saw was IBM’s presence integration within Sametime to accomadate social networks.

Here is Blair’s post and some snips.

Regarding who are the key UC professional services firms, there are several types of organizations – the UC vendors themselves, system integrators, professional services organizations, and large management consultancies. Some of the key professional services providers are Dimension Data, INX, Touchbase, IBM Global Services, and of course the Accentures and companies like Avanade (IT consultancy dedicated to the Microsoft platform). Many vendors recognize the importance of professional services in UC implementations, and several are revving up their practices for UC. Aspect recently announced its foray into UC professional services and systems integration with a new practice designed to assist organizations with the planning, implementation and support of UC products across their enterprises and into their contact centers.

IBM Global Services (IGS) is an important part of IBM’s overall UC program, offering a comprehensive suite of strategy-and-assessment and architecture-and-design services, as well as integration, deployment and managed services. IBM is one of the few companies that really emphasizes its professional services organizations – as well it should. This group provides an important competitive edge to IBM, which recognizes the complexities of UC and how important it is to integrate with existing business processes and applications.

Another question I didn’t really get time to respond to was about mobile UC and the role of fixed mobile convergence (FMC) and UC. Mobile UC capabilities include the ability to transfer mobile calls to a landline phone and vice versa with the click of a mouse. Extending enterprise telephony features to the mobile environment generally involves integration with the corporate IP PBX. Some UC offerings make it possible to transfer mobile calls to your landline phone and vice versa with the click of a mouse. Mobile UC capabilities make it possible to extend the desktop communication environment to the mobile device when needed, giving mobile workers access to features like conferencing, unified messaging, integration with the calendar and enterprise directory, and other communication capabilities – so mobile workers can be just as productive when out of the office as when in the office.