Cisco/J Arnold & Associates Webinar - Moving Beyond Dial Tone

Just doing another shout-out for this upcoming webinar. We're in the process of finalizing our presentations now, and this should be a good event. If you're wondering whether you should simply upgrade your aging PBX or are ready to consider the bigger/braver/better world of Unified Communications, SIP, collaboration, etc., then this is where you want to be on Nov. 13 at 1pm.

I don't have a event website to point you to for the full overview, but here's text that is being used by Cisco and IT World Canada in their email invites:

IT World Presents: Moving Beyond Dial Tone

How to gain the benefits of truly collaborative communications

Many companies face important decisions as their PBX systems begin to reach end-of-life. Decisions like ... What do we want and need from telephony? How can we extract the most value out of our communications? Can we cost-effectively gain all the benefits of today's advanced collaboration technologies? 

Once you answer those questions, what about implementation? Do you perform a full-scale rip-and-replace project? Can you gracefully migrate to new collaboration technologies without a full-scale change? Should the new system be premise-based, hosted or a hybrid of the two? 

Technology decisions about telephony have never been more challenging... 

But the good news is that today's telephony goes far beyond the dial tone to deliver valuable features like web conferencing, BYOD, unified messaging, unlimited scalability and more. Plus, the real opportunity lies in the business value gained through improved productivity, cost-efficiency and collaboration that only a unified communication system can offer.

Attend this one hour webinar to get the answers you need to make the best decisions and deliver the best business outcomes.

Does that speak to you? If so, here's the link to register, and I hope you join us on the 13th!

Desktop Video - When Good Enough is Good Enough

That's the title of my latest article running in the current issue of Internet Telephony Magazine. I think the title is self-explanatory, and am just doing a quick shout-out in case you don't get it - either in print form or the digital edition.

I hope you give it a read, and your comments are most welcome. In case you don't know, I have a monthly column in the magazine called Rethinking Communications, and you can access the article archive here.

12 Analysts to Watch in the Contact Center Space

Fonolo is a Toronto-based startup I've been following for some time, and CEO Shai Berger is definitely passionate about the contact center space. He writes regularly on the topic, and is very much up on the issues facing contact centers and where the technology is going.

Shai is also on top of how analysts are covering this space and earlier this week, he profiled "12 Analysts to Watch" on his Customer Service Blog. I'm happy to be included in the list, and while an advisor to Fonolo, I'm certainly not the only analyst cited, so I'd say this is a pretty good group to be following.

All I really want to do here is socialize the list, and if you're looking to stay on top of contact center thought leadership, you've got plenty to work with here.

ShoreTel, the Giants and yes, the Blue Jays - Right Place, Right Time

I haven't blogged about baseball in a while, but that doesn't mean I'm not following it. If I didn't have to work for a living, I'd be doing that all day long, along with writing about cooking, music, cinema and culture. Otherwise, I'm happy to steer you to my previous posts - just scan the Boston Red Sox category, listed in the sidebar of the homepage of this blog.

Those who know me well  know that baseball is a major passion, and a few threads have come together this week that call for a quick post.

First, of course, is the World Series. Really, who thought the Giants would be here? Still hard to believe, but they sure made it look easy in Game 1. Different path, but same result last night. WHY did they try to score Fielder in the 2nd? Dumb move. Slowest guy on the team - hold him up and you have 1st and 3rd with no outs - I'll take those odds any day to plate at least 1 run in that inning. That could have been enough to win. The throw even missed the cutoff man, and they still threw him out - yeesh.

Giants have the mojo again this year - plain and simple. Detroit needs a parade so bad - I really feel for them. If the NHL lockout continues, there may not be a Winter Classic, and guess where that's supposed to be? Yup. U of M Stadium, Ann Arbor - Wings and Leafs. I've been there - now, that's a big crowd.

Oh, and speaking of the stars not lining up, the Giants are a decent team, but how cool would a Tigers-Cardinals WS have been? If you're old enough to remember 1968, you'll likely agree with me that's right up there for all-time great finals, especially if you like pitching. Bob Gibson and Mickey Lolich EACH pitched 3 complete games - it's just so unthinkable by today's pitch-count driven standards. Al Kaline is one of my all time faves - he fell 1 HR short of 400, but got 3,007 hits - how criminal is that? Only 8 players ever got 400 HR and 3000 RBI - soooo close to being #9. At least he got his WS ring in '68 - there is some justice in Tiger-land.

Back to 2012 - and some telecom too. Watching the opener on Wed, I just had to smile and think back to March, when I attended ShoreTel's analyst day, where they shared their initial roadmap for how the M5 Networks acquisition was going to tie in with their business.

Well, they hosted the event at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Naturally, it was a dreary, rainy day, but that didn't spoil our fun during the stadium tour. I included a few photos of the park on my blog post about the event, and if you're a fan of their stadium, you'll like this. You'll like it even more if you want to see what complexity looks like in terms of the telephony infrastructure that ShoreTel has replaced there.

I didn't think much of it then, but it was really cool to wander freely about an empty ballpark, and needless to say, I took a lot more photos. Thought I'd share a couple of shots that you're not likely to see anywhere else.

Behind home plate - how often do you ever see an ungroomed baseball field - no base paths, no mound, no plate area. Well, you have now!

The view deep and low in the right field corner - cool, huh?

Enough said and shown. Here we are, 7 months later, and the ballpark is a lot busier! Thanks for the event, ShoreTel, and kudos for making a big splash with M5 the same year as the Giants being here, in both of your home towns. Not to mention both of you having the same color schemes - that's good marketing - brilliantly simple, right?

This alone is enough for a nice baseball post, but there's more! Wednesday marked the 20th anniversary of the Toronto Blue Jays first of back-to-back World Series wins. That was pretty cool, especially being the first WS title won outside of the U.S. It was also special for me, not just being in Toronto, but also because my first son - Max, whom many of you know - was born on that date. So, he's also 20 - wow - where did the time go?

In Cloud We Trust - Even for Contact Centers

Wearing my UCStrategies Expert hat, I regularly contribute content to their portal, which I believe to be the best go-to spot for what's really happening in the Unified Communications space. This includes writing sponsored posts, and we're very transparent about that. I was engaged to write the most recent one for Interactive Intelligence, a company I have long followed and always regarded as an innovator - and I'm not alone in that assessment.

The topic was the suitability of the cloud for contact center solutions, and to help our readers better determine if this is right for them. To me, it really boils down to trust, and that's what my analysis is focused on. Sure, ININ has a cloud-based contact center offering - CaaS - but the article isn't really about that. Yes, I think CaaS is a good solution, but others exist too, and my main objective is for readers to look beyond that - and look within themselves to think through what trust really means.

For broader context, I referenced what Google did last week to pull back the veil and let us see what really goes into a cloud infrastructure. It's way more complex than most of us can possibly imagine, and we need more of that instead of the blind trust that seems to be driving this push up to the cloud.

Hopefully, that's enough of a teaser to get you reading my article, titled "In Cloud We Trust", which was posted on the portal late yesterday. From there, I urge you to spend time exploring the UCStrategies portal. I'm just one of many analysts and consultants who follow this space, and if you can't something new from our collective insights, then you're probably in charge of Google's cloud team!

ITExpo Takeaways - Views from UCStrategies

This is a bit late in coming, but for last week's UCStrategies podcast we focused on the recent TMC ITExpo event in Austin, Texas. I did my own posting about the show previously - as many others have - but this podcast was a good opportunity to share our collective thoughts, specifically about what we took away from a Unified Communications perspective. The transcript of our podcast has been posted now on the UCS portal, and I hope you give it a read.

In addition to the UCStrategies takeaways and my blog post, TMC's Paula Bernier did a video interview with me at the show. It runs about 10 minutes, and I cover a wide range of topics around UC, including the challenges of selling it through channels, getting end users to understand the UC concept, the current state of UC offerings, and how UC fits in the contact center. Here's the link to view the interview, and from there, I urge you to view the other interviews conducted by various TMC editors during the show, mostly with vendors, but some keynotes are posted there as well.

One video in particular is Rich Tehrani's interview with Andy Abramson of Comunicano, both of whom should be well known to my readers. Andy, of course, is not a vendor, but he cites some great examples of how he's using collaboration tools to help his clients with their go-to-market plans. UC isn't just for big companies, and if anything, it's a great leveler for businesses of all sizes.

Empower, Engage and Innovate - my takeaways from Cisco's Collaboration Summit

I got back late last night from LA, and really enjoyed this year's Cisco Collaboration Summit. Yesterday I posted some photos and said I'd have a recap coming, and I managed to write that on the flight home.

Lots to think about, and I could have written 5 very different recaps - there was a lot to digest. Well, the first one's free, folks, and that one is running now on the UCStrategies portal. Wearing that hat, I'm looking at the UC implications from the summit, and you might not agree with me. That's fine - just calling it the way I see it, and I hope we can have some dialog, so let's hear from you. So, here's the link, and I'll leave it with you to share your thoughts.