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Juniper and Avaya extended their partnership with an announcement this morning that Avaya will integrate its branch office VoIP gateways with Juniper J-series branch office routers. Avaya gateways can plug directly into open slots on the Juniper platform.
This approach will enable Juniper & Avaya customers to deploy one box instead of two at branch offices. The announcement also includes joint support and service offerings.
M-Networks is soliciting beta testers for its "Unified Call Control Gateway' Asterisk-to-Microsoft LCS gateway. The gateway enables support for telephony features in the Microsoft Office Communicator client including click-to-call, and routing of in-bound calls to the MOC client.
The Asterisk ecosystem continues its rapid growth, both in participants and breadth of products.
From Network World
Cisco acquires Orative for $31 million Cisco continued its buying spree by announcing Thursday it will acquire privately-held mobile telephony software company Orative for $31 million in cash.
Orative has been a Cisco partner, so this acquisition makes perfect sense, and it underscores the growing importance of integrating telephony services with mobile devices.
Cisco today unvieled its long awaited telepresence solution to provide for teleconferences that give the participants the impression that they are in the same room with other conference participants. Cisco joins HP's HALO in the ultra-high-end video conference space.
I'll have more to say about this in a Nemertes Impact Analysis next week. But as I noted in my post last week on Collaboration Loop, I'm seeing a great deal of interest in telepresence from the very large enterprise market, though almost no interest in desktop video.
Update: The cisco announcement has roiled up the blogosphere. See Ken Camp, Om Malik, and Andy Abramson. I've read all their posts and they make good points. As I noted on Collaboration Loop though, I'm just not seeing much interest in desktop video conferencing in the enterprise market. Most folks I talk to just don't see the value.
FWIW, at Burton Group we all had iSight cameras and other than calling home when on a business trip, we rarely if ever used them for internal communications. I still see the trend being much more toward less intrusive (e.g. IM) communications for person-to-person. That being said, I can see the value in the telepresence solutions simply because of the quality they provide. Telepresence is about a lot more than video conferencing, rather it's a virtual reality environment featuring video.
During my trip this week to San Francisco I was pleased to discover that United Airlines had placed work areas throughout its gate areas inTerminal 3. The work areas feature a long counter, with stools, and numerous power outlets. I'm sure anyone reading this has spent a great deal of time searching airport concourses for the rare, and often unavailable power adapter. The installation of these work areas is a welcome change (and surprisingly they are free to use).
It's taken a pretty long while, but maybe airports will finally make the transition to providing greater support for the virtual worker. Still I wonder what the impact of these types of work areas will be on airport club rooms. My primary reason behind joining a club was to have a quiet place to work and a power outlet. Now that I've got it in the main part of the concourse, do I really need to pay for a club anymore. Maybe I should keep this quiet?
Apple again posted great financial numbers, but what I found most interesting was that their share of the PC market is now over 6%, with a 30% growth in the last year.
The i-Pod halo effect, coupled with the ability to natively run Windows apps on Mac using either dual-boot or Parallels desktop have really done wonders for Apple in the last year (that and building great computers of course).
Alec wraps up what looks like one of the more interesting conferences this year: Voice 2.0 Wrap Up:
My latest post on Collaboration Loop is now available: Counterpoint: Demand For Video Conferencing Seems Weak.
My latest Collaboration Loop post is now available: Do Standards Really Matter?.
Here's a great essay by Bob Frankston on howutilizing the Internet design approach of intelligent end-points and a dumb network couldbeapplied to other engineering challenges: The Internet as Design Principle.
Of course, it seems that the "dumb network" approach is being phased out in favor of closed network designs that offer the carrier additional revenue opportunities at the expense of the opportunity for innovation by the end-user, but nevertheless, the design principles that the Internet is based upon are still valid, and still can apply to other systems.
