Despite the Cloud, Part II
Business communications manufacturers are putting a lot of R&D into building out their cloud unified communications (UC) offers. Their commitment to “cloud” is strong, and for good reason as we witness the continued migration from traditional on-premises telephony and UC…
Mitolycom: Blabbing About Potential Merger of Mitel and Polycom.
Zeus Kerravala and I hosted a Blab on the potential merger of Mitel and Polycom. Still unsure about this Blab thing, but it is indeed fun. Simon Dudley joined in and we had a good conversation about this possibility and/or…
Corvisa in Queue at ShoreTel
Twas a few nights before Christmas when ShoreTel announced its intent to acquire Corvisa, a Milwaukee, WI-based hosted provider. Corvisa is an unusal cat. It’s part UCaaS, part PaaS, and part carrier. Download the TalkingPointz 2Pager on ShoreTel’s acquisition of Corvisa. PaaS…
Will the Smartphone Replace Enterprise UC
One of my favorite topics over the past decade is the future of the desk phone. There’s been a debate about how and when it will die. At first its nemesis was the desktop softphone. Gradually over the years the…
Cloud Contact Center: Watching the Shift
Acceptance and adoption of hosted/cloud solutions for business telephony and unified communications is well underway. This includes a shift toward cloud contact center services as businesses recognize the benefits in subscribing to a contact center solution “as-a-service” rather than purchasing…
ShoreTel Connects Premises and Cloud
ShoreTel has begun the phased rollout of its newly developed platform, ShoreTel Connect, which will function as a common platform for cloud, on-premises and hybrid deployments. ShoreTel describes the new solution as a “monumental” release that blends the best of…
ShoreTel’s Next Act?
Over the past few years ShoreTel has gone through the largest transformation of all UC companies. Don Joos was named CEO in August, 2013. Evidently he looked around and decided to change everything. The company primarily competed on simplicity with simple…
4 Questions with Mitel CMO Durow
Last week, Mitel announced that Wes Durow as the company’s new Chief Marketing Officer. Wes is an industry veteran with prior stints at Nortel/Avaya, Fonality, and Sonus. Wes got into marketing as an ad man, helping build brands for leading companies…
NokiALU
Nokia acquired Alcatel-Lucent. What is the narrative to tell? Drastic measures to take on the Chinese? Will these vendors ever learn? Both of these firms are well known in enterprise comms circles, but not for what they do today. Nokia…
What to UC in 2015
2015 is off to a bold start. Here’s a handy guide for some of the drama to watch for this year. ALUE ALU who? With regards to ALUE, most of us fell asleep while its parent worked to unload it….
Mitel CMO Etherington Out
Unexpected – Martyn Etherington, CMO at Mitel is leaving the company this month. Martyn joined Mitel in August of 2012. His tenure there was less than three years, but a hell of a ride. During his stay, Mitel has made multiple acquisitions…
Split-Up or Shut-Up
In a recent interview, investor superstar Marc Andreessen told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang at the Salesforce Dreamforce Conference on Wednesday. that if a technology company is more than 20 years old, then “they’ll probably benefit from being broken up, and many of them…
Mobility with Video
A few thoughts on ShoreTel Mobility 8 ShoreTel released Mobility 8 last month (Aug 8). ShoreTel Mobility 8 includes the router and ShoreTel Mobility Clients for iOS and Android. The clients support single-touch dialing which now includes video calls too….
Mitel a UC Leader
Companies always refer to themselves as leaders especially in press releases. It’s generally a meaningless term unless of course its Gartner calling the company a Leader in the context of a Magic Quadrant. Mitel was recently recognized as such in the Gartner…
ShoreTel Update
At the Recent Wainhouse Summit in Santa Clara, I made it over to Sunnyvale to check-in at ShoreTel World Headquarters. I consider ShoreTel a contemporary because we both got into telecom about the same time. The problem with that image is that…
Vertical and Fulton Merge
From the stranger than fiction department, Vertical Communications and Fulton Communications merged. The new company will operate as Vertical Communications with Fulton continuing to operate under its existing brand through the integration period. Vertical will continue to sell and support…
A Room With A View
Somewhere within the hard phone v softphone debate is an emerging class of collaborative endpoints. These are devices and/or accessories that facilitate collaboration. It’s a new and growing category of hardware that lies between an app and a device. I…
IBM and SIP Phones
IBM sold off its low end server business to Lenovo. Lenovo was born when IBM sold off its PC and laptop business. Why would a computing company want out of computers? Well, they kept the good stuff (mainframes), but it…
Mitel To Buy Telepo
Acquisitive Aastra managed to make another acquisition before being acquired itself by Mitel. Aastra announced today that is acquired Telepo, while just last week it announced its own shareholders approved its sale to Mitel. By law of transitive property, Mitel…
Aastra Shareholders Approve Sale to Mitel
Big week for industry Canucks eh? Last week the shareholders of Aastra Technologies agreed to be acquired by Mitel. Ballots were dropped in a large toque that was passed around the maple log lodge. Ninety-nine percent of the voters indicated Oui,…