Archive for the ‘Unified Communications’ Category
Google Wave no longer requires an invitation to get an account.
“Google Wave is now open to the public as a Google Labs project and to Google Apps users, subject to administrator approval.
Google plans to announce the general availability of Wave at its annual developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, where the real-time communications platform debuted a year ago to considerable fanfare.”
Read more of the article here
Microsoft recently announces that they will be discontinuing the “sale, support and development” of the Response Point phone system.
In 2009 Microsoft stopped enhancing Response Point and put it into “engineering maintenance status”. This was due to lower than expected sales levels. At one point Costco was selling Response Point on their website and in some stores.
Makai Communications installed, then removed a 20 phone Response Point system due to issues with the handsets before the product enhancements stopped. Users liked the speech recognition and the end user GUI. We had issues with handset locking up and with the pass through Ethernet being slowed down during a call setup.
I always felt that Microsoft should release Response Point as part of the Small Business Server. Microsoft could tie it to Exchange 2007 speech recognition and used external gateways.
You can read the Microsoft announcement here
It is very hard for smaller companies beat the price of “Free” that Google offers for its standard services.
“I’ve recently been thinking about how Google Voice, Google Wave and Google Buzz joining the full Google Apps lineup would make it a budget-friendly teleworking platform. Organizations can now literally purchase themselves a “telework in a box” solution — a complete office productivity software, communications and collaboration package — with little or no requirement for support from their own technical staff.”
Read the 9 reasons here
“Tuesday the 27th, at Interop in Vegas, sandwiched between network stalwarts, HP (Marius Haas) and Cisco (Brett Galloway), Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy will take the stage and talk about Avaya, the network vendor.
Avaya a network vendor? That’s about as crazy as Microsoft being in the voice business or Cisco selling servers! But here we are, Avaya with a keynote at Interop. For details on what products Avaya is announcing, you can check out Eric Krapf’s blog here. What I want to discuss is more of the market impact and Avaya’s chance of success.
When Avaya first announced the acquisition of Nortel’s enterprise business I thought that they should sell the data business to a real network vendor and not be a UC vendor that pretends to be a network vendor. When Avaya management told me their intention to keep the business and invest in it, I was convinced that the network business at Avaya would be nothing more than an enabler for UC. However, after meeting with some of the Avaya data team (that still sounds strange) in Billerica, MA a couple of weeks ago, I’m convinced now that the former Nortel data business has cheated death and has a better than punchers chance at returning to being a major network vendor for the following reasons:”
Read the rest here
