Telecom

The “New Mobile” era is here. What are the top 10 insights in this growing market? And how can you capture its value? Find out in this Cisco® Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) survey of 1,060 Canadian mobile users. Download now.

The future of work is mobile. Liberated by the internet and new mobile solutions, more and more businesses are embracing flexible working arrangements in which employees work from wherever they want. Smart businesses utilising flexible working know that it’s no longer about the hours you work—it’s about results. These businesses are freeing themselves and their employees from the burden of counting hours and minutes worked, and are now focusing on output.

There has never been a better time for small and medium businesses to start using video conferencing. Sweeping changes in technology and price decreases due to competition among service providers have made it easier than ever to get started.

Apps have become critical to small businesses’ success. Small businesses are increasingly using apps in their daily operations. According to a recent survey, nearly three-fourths (72%) of small businesses are using apps on smartphones or tablets for their business and 38% report they could not survive—or it would be a major challenge to survive—without apps.

Talk just got cheaper. Thanks to the Internet, you no longer have to invest in expensive business PBX phone systems or pay handsomely for long distance calls. Internet phone systems can provide you with the same features you are accustomed to at a fraction of the cost. And they can go even further, enhancing your productivity and giving you new ways of getting your work done.

Devices can ‘talk amongst themselves’. Technology jargon is often confusing and complicated. And more often than not, the only people that understand the terminology are the people that coined it to begin with. For example, take the term Unified Communications (UC). If you say it a few times and really think about it, you’ll probably get a sense for what it means. But just in case you don’t, let’s break it down and talk about how it can help you.

Nothing is more important to business success than communicating professionally and promptly with customers and colleagues. The way businesses communicate and handle incoming calls, and everything from faxes to conference calls, affects public perception of the company. Evolving businesses can better serve customers and enhance the way employees work by adopting the most readily available and affordable technology. In today’s world, leading edge communication begins and ends with a high-speed Internet-enabled, cloud-based, IP-connected phone service from RingCentral.

Business of all sizes have a fundamental reliance on their communications infrastructure. We use it to interact with our colleagues, our customers, partners and suppliers and for them to communicate with us. Our ability to effectively communicate defines our capacity to conduct our business successfully. This guide is designed to help you with the considerations you should be taking when looking to implement a new communications solution. It will provide you with the tools you will need to start.

In many enterprises, marketing is a multichannel effort that includes a wide range of touch points. The touch points range from websites and email promotions to traditional print advertising, postal mail, and broadcast, and direct sales by phone and in-person sales teams. But too often, each channel works independently, accountable to its own objectives, unaware of the efforts and results made within other marketing channels. As a result, call centers speak to customers without knowing the offers the customers previously accepted or rejected. In addition, emails launch without reference to online promotions and websites present messages that disregard their visitors’ previous contact history.

This infograph displays the comparison between a Hosted VoIP & VoIP PBX explaining the differences between service maintenance, phone system and upfront costs. By reading this infograph, you will be able to figure out whether Hosted VoIP or VoIP PBX is a better fit for your business.

There are lots of possible reasons you might want to switch to a new phone system. The old one might cost too much or be too troublesome to operate and maintain. It might not be flexible enough. It might not be reliable enough. Or it just might not have the kinds of features and capabilities that you need in today’s competitive business climate. But even the thought of switching can be intimidating. There is an enormous number of factors to consider. They have to do with cost, features, technical complexity and other issues. And the impact of each factor varies depending on what kind of system you’re changing from. In short, when it comes to switching phone systems, nothing is simple or straightforward.

Are you spending more time than you anticipated shopping for a new business phone system? Evaluating all of the phone system options on the market can be quite time consuming. Rather than wasting valuable time looking at a system that won’t fit needs of your size of business, it pays to focus in on those phone systems that are truly appropriate for your needs. Compare Business Products has prepared the following comprehensive listing and reviews of the five leading phone systems on the market for each of the following business size categories: • Small-size businesses • Medium-size businesses (includes both on-premises and hosted solutions) • Enterprise-level businesses

Unified Communications, or UC, has no official or even widely accepted definition. Pundits, analysts and journalists all have their own descriptions. So do vendors – theirs just happen to fit their own products perfectly. But this lack of consensus doesn’t mean the term is meaningless. In fact, unified communications is a complex but very real phenomenon. And this phenomenon has the potential to radically improve businesses’ ability to communicate.

Business telephony is changing more rapidly than ever before. Several developments are driving this accelerating change. They range from targeted technical initiatives to broad communication technology trends. If keeping your business communication strategy up to date seems difficult now, it will become much more so in the future. It is also important to stay abreast of – or ahead of – the latest developments; if you don’t, you’ll find yourself with a seriously outdated communication system. And that could put you at a competitive disadvantage.

A mix of well-thought-out policies and up-to-date technologies are needed to protect critical data.

A NEW RAN FOR A NEW ERA IN LTET

Enterprises were originally attracted to PRI trunking because it saved them money.

Sonus and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) have a long history together: first as a VoIP gateway visionary and today as a leading vendor of session border controllers (SBCs).

SBCs for Increased Enterprise Voice Security and Resiliency

4 Steps to Successful Video Collaboration

In December 2012, Wainhouse Research (WR) and Polycom jointly created and fielded a WR-branded survey focused on the benefits that organizations realize via the use of video conferencing. Invitations to participate in the survey were released in numerous ways including: - Via email invites to a list of Polycom end-user contacts - Via email invites to a list of WR end-user contacts - Via clickable banners on numerous websites This document provides a top-level view of the survey data, along with some additional findings and observations.

This paper will examine the benefits of today’s video collaboration technology; identify the ways in which video collaboration can improve business processes across a range of industries and job roles; and highlight what to look for in a video collaboration solution to maximize your return on investment.

Video conferencing is an increasingly important technology to improve employee and partner collaboration, especially for increasingly virtual organizations supporting rising numbers of mobile and home workers. But many companies still struggle to justify their investments in video conferencing, and not to understand potential cost differences among competing solutions - not just hardware and software expenses, but also investments required for bandwidth and operational support. Comparing various video conferencing solutions requires examining deployment models, licensing arrangements, network, hardware, and operational costs for leading video conferencing solution vendors in a variety of scenarios, using real-world data gathered from actual buyers of video conferencing products and services. The result: Significant differences in costs across all areas, especially for varying deployment models.

What if you could transform your communications system to rival the rich functionality and flexibility of bigger competitors with dedicated IT staff? This new white paper compares the costs and functionality of using a hosted unified communications (UC) system "in the cloud" versus investing in an on-site "premises-based" system. The findings might surprise you. Download this new white paper now to: •Understand the tradeoffs between owning vs. hosted UC systems •Review a dollars-to-dollars comparison in a full total cost of ownership (TCO) study •Learn the pitfalls to avoid when evaluating different UC systems

This case study shows how On Demand Verification plays an important role in increasing business and improving efficiencies for Santander.