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Mike Gotta and I recently did a webinar for the Collaborative Technologies Conference entitled Communication & Collaboration (Con)Fusion?. The webinar covers trends in real-time communications and collaboration, organizational challenges, and keys to successful implementation. Mike covers the web conferencing, portal, and IM space for us at Burton Group and is a great speaker.
The webinar is archived for download.
I've been a fan of Saturday Night Live for as long as I can remember, but as most regular viewers have realized, the show isn't what it once was.
But every once in a while, something comes along that makes it worth watching. Everyone loves lasers, and everyone loves cats. Watch what happens when you put them together.
From the article: "What's motivating organizations to deploy MPLS?"
When we drilled down into the survey data, we found a strong relationship between the deployment of VoIP and the deployment of MPLS. In particular, the vast majority of companies that are either making their initial deployment of VoIP or expanding their VoIP deployment are also planning on expanding their QoS policies. The vast majority of these companies expect to expand their QoS policies by implementing MPLS.
Interesting correlation between VoIP and MPLS.
The Skype Mac Blog writers recently posted "Busy days at the Mac team" noting that they are still working hard to deliver Skype for Mac 2.0 (the Windows version has been out for some time now).
One item of note, Skype founder Niklas Zennstöm recently bought himself a MacBook Pro, so one would assume this might accelerate the release of the next version of Skype for Mac. Skype.com also opened up a Mac store, with a collection of Skype accessories for Mac.
I'm looking forward to being able to try out the Skype video conferencing features (and compare them with SightSpeed), as well as having the ability to group contacts in my Skype address book.
In one of my other lives I am conference director for MPLScon, an annual event covering Multiprotocol Label Switching. This conference has been going on for six years now, and it has emerged as the premier conference covering MPLS for both enterprises and service providers.
This year's event takes place next month on May 22-25 in New York City at the Marriot Financial Center in lower Manhattan. We've been there for three years and it is a great venue.
The program is available at http://www.mplscon.com/. Our keynote speakers this year include Douglas Hill of Boeing, Rose Klimovich of AT&T, Mike Marcellin of Verizon Business, and George Swallow of Cisco. There are also wonderful pre-conference tutorials being presented by the MPLS-Frame-ATM Forum. Tuesday night is our annual "Beer & Pizza Shootout", this year's topic is on the future of MPLS-based services in the age of the Internet.
If you are interested in attending, contact me and I'll provide you with a discount code.
VoIP News reports that a NASA Blunder Leads To VoIP Shutdown. You know, the good thing about VoIP from a support perspective is that if the phones go out, nobody can call you to report the problem. :-)
The article cites the cause of the error as being an administrator inadvertently deleting the entire user directory. Of course these sorts of things could potentially happen in the non-VoIP world, but don't be surprised if this event is portrayed as yet another reason why VoIP is evil.
My post on the divide between IP telephony systems vendors and their customers is now available on VoIP Loop.
Jeff Pulver and Tom Evslin's Post-Disaster Communications Petition at the FCC is now available for public comment. This petition is designed to provide means to use IP communications services as a lifeline in disaster situations. Check out Jeff's blog post for more information.
I will be presenting an overview of SIP on a Cisco webinar entitled How To Deploy Real-World Presence Applications With Session Initiation Protocol which will be available starting on April 25th.
My role is to answer the "what does SIP mean for the enterprise?" question that has been floating around as of late. Cullen Jennings of Cisco will be presenting Cisco's vision of SIP and some current applications available in the Cisco environment.
I had an opportunity this morning on my two and a half-hour commute into the office this morning (two construction zones and a medivac helicopter blocking the road to my office) to listen to a wonderful interview with Todd Landry of Sphere Communications discussing the integration of SIP-based communications capabilities into a web services environment. Todd provided several interesting examples of how integrating telephony services into enterprise applications and provisioning tools could improve operations and streamline communications.
The integration of telephony and web services is a pretty hot topic now among the IPT vendors, many see it as the "holy grail" for justifying large-scale IPT deployment as the "it will save you money" argument just isn't resonating all that well anymore. This interview provides some good examples of how businesses can benefit from integration of telephony services into their service-oriented architecture.
