Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

Network World Webinars

I've recently had the opportunity to participate in two Network World webinars on VOIP:

• Perspectives Editorial Webcast: VoIP: The Next Steps
• IP Telephony System Architecture: Manageability Matters

Enjoy!

More on Mac in the Enterprise

From: The Mac's Stealthy Return To The Enterprise - eWeek

He said there were "visible productivity improvements" by Mac users over Windows users within organizations at the company. This was helping to drive switchers.

 

"The advantages to engineering is especially great. PC users are getting frustrated with Mac users as many engineering call flows, architectural diagrams, etc. are being whipped up in no time with [The Omni Group's] OmniGraffl.e [Microsoft Office] Visio is nowhere as fast to work with," he continued.

The most interesting observation noted in the article was that Mac users had set up a wiki to support themselves, or were simply buying AppleCare and going to their local Mac store for more serious issues such as hardware failures.

Why Apple's 'consumer' Macs are enterprise-worthy

Computerworld: Why Apple's 'consumer' Macs are enterprise-worthy

Does it not seem as if there is a huge opportunity for someone to bring Mac to the enterprise with enterprise-class service and support, especially now that we're at an inflection point where enterprises will migrate to Vista....unless perhaps there is a compelling alternative (and critical windows apps could run in a virtual machine on a mac)??? Couldn't an enterprise easily create a business case showing how less time spent dealing with Windows-related problems would lead to greater productivity?

(Disclaimer: I write this after spending a good chunk of yesterday trying to figure out why every time I clicked "Save" within Word, Powerpoint, or Excel my machine would jump to 99% utilization requiring a hard reboot, something I did once in three years on my Mac. Somehow simply booting into Windows Safe Mode, saving a document, then rebooting into normal mode fixed the problem, but don't ask me why).

Another VoiceCon in the books

I returned today from VoiceCon in Orlando. I'll have my recap posted on Collaboration Loop fairly soon, but I wanted to post some thoughts here as well.

First off, this was my fifth spring VoiceCon, and I'd argue this was the most interesting, perhaps by far (and from what I've heard, the most well attended with over 6,000 attendees). The debate over UC, both from a "which vendor will win" perspective as well as "how do we convince enterprises to buy this stuff?" was extremely interesting, and evoked a lot of passions from a lot of the people I met with. UC has sparked a fire in the IP communications industry, and there is a large effort by all the major vendors to position themselves as market leaders in this space.

Certainly Microsoft's keynote by Jeff Raikes has sparked a lot of discussion, given Microsoft's push into the market, and his prediction that the cost of enterprise VOIP would fall in half in 3 years (and 100 million people would have the capability to make calls from within Microsoft Office applications including Outlook. Microsoft also got a boost from Royal Dutch Shell which discussed its plans to migrate to a communications environment based on Office Communications Server 2007 (along with integrated services from Nortel).

Avaya went a different route, pushing its vision of "communications enabled business processes" and introducing a new development program to let enterprises integrate business processes and communications systems.

Cisco's partnership with IBM around the Lotus SameTime unified communications and collaboration client also generated a significant amount of buzz, especially since it appears to set up a market dynamic in which Cisco & IBM are aligned against Nortel & Microsoft (though the reality is that none of these arrangements are exclusive and all the leading VOIP vendors continue to develop greater interoperability with Microsoft and Lotus environments.

Vendors such as Mitel and NEC made significant announcements focused around mobility, while ShoreTel, who has consistently scored high in our ratings of VOIP vendors won a "Best in VoiceCon award." Siemens kicked off Monday night with a big party featuring the Brian Setzer Orchestra. Alcatel-Lucent introduced a new phone and updated software and messaging capabilities.

Surprisingly despite all the news out of VoiceCon, I've found the VOIP blogosphere to be pretty quiet, perhaps everyone was at eTel?

Rather I'd recommend you check out Network World's VoiceCon HQ for a great amount of coverage, Mike Gotta has also covered what he saw in a great amount of detail. VoIP Loop contributors have written extensively about the conference as well. Finally, somehow Eric Krapf (the VoiceCon program chair) managed to find the time to write up a number of key developments at the VoiceCon eNews site.

VoiceCon