But at the same time, interest in increasing the productivity of the existing workforce through the better use of IT is on the rise. The question is how can solution providers best leverage unified communications to meet the needs of customers while simultaneously advancing their own business goals? The answer to that question is to start thinking more like a carrier that is delivering set of services that have been customized for a specific customer.

We all know that every major carrier is looking to expand their footprint in unified communications. But the issue these big carriers will have over time is their inability to customize these services. As unified communications evolve in the enterprise, customers are going to want to see these services delivered inside the applications they use every day. That creates an opportunity for solution providers to provide custom unified communication services as a managed service to the customer.

To pull that off, however, solution providers are going to need to deploy a suite of products based in industry standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) that by definition creates an open architecture. For example, it’s the maturity of SIP that enabled Siemens to replace Tandberg with Polycom as its preferred partner for the video conferencing component of the OpenScape unified communications platform. That same approach has also allowed Siemens to make a case for layering its software in on top of existing Nortel infrastructure rather than just assuming those customers will become customers of Avaya in the wake of the latter company buying the enteprise assets of Nortel, said Michael Garland, head of the North America channel for Siemens Enterprise Networks.

As time goes on, SIP will be extended to integrate with a host of service-oriented architecture (SOA) services, as promised this week separately by Avaya and IBM, that will allow unified communications to be delivered seamlessly across public and private cloud computing implementations.

In the meantime, unified communications represents one of the best opportunities for solution providers to inset themselves inside the business processes of their customers. And as we’ve said before, whoever controls the business process controls the customer.

Now comes along a more modular approach in the form of a Tandberg T3 Custom Edition, which gives solution providers in the channel access to the core components that make up a Tandberg telepresence system without having to commit to using the same displays and furniture that Tandberg uses in its standard product line.

In recent months, Tandberg, Polycom and Mitel have all been making a concerted effort to battle Cisco for dominance of this emerging market. Of course, Cisco is making a play to acquire Tandberg, so it remains to be seen what will ultimately happen to Tandberg.

But as the spectrum of high definition video offerings continues to reach all the way from the desktop to fully-immersive room experiences, the opportunity for the channel continues to grow. Right now, the economy is clearly holding back major IT investments in telepresence, but even now you can see more of these system being used in a variety of conference room settings. That means it’s only a matter of time before these system go mainstream, especially on the desktop where integration with existing systems management tools is the next barrier about to be overcome.

Seems that the next biggest thing for Android in terms of hardware will be in 2010 when Sony’s Xperia X10 and when the rumored Google branded phone comes out from HTC. Windows 6.5 is looking increasingly like an OEM OS for generic hardware.

The iPhone released their 3Gs phone, and yes it is faster and “better” then it’s predecessor, though I still have my 3G which works just fine. With the 3.x OS upgrades, they really started to branch the phone into the range of business use with native Exchange and Cut/Paste abilities. Its library of over 100,000 apps also offers great variety of business class applications. And as reported on, IT Portal Pro, the phone has the majority of the worlds Smartphone traffic, and 50% traffic in the US alone.

The Palm Pre released in the summer of 2009 to big hype and marketing about being a blackberry killer, but has been quiet ever since release. Phone reviews came in good, but reviewers quickly got dizzy around the blitzkrieg like attack of new models, OS’s and feature sets released in the 3^rd and 4^th quarter.

Adroid phones became the rage with the initial release of the G1 last year, and had a tremendous boost with the second generation android phones released in HTC’s Hero, Motorola’s Droid, and the 2010 release of Sony’s Xperia X10 phone. Android has become so popular that along side the iPhone they take the other 50% of US traffic.

Windows Mobile 6.5 OS released in 4^th quarter. It’s a great operating system and would have taken front stage if Google and Apple weren’t in the sector now, but other then that they pale in comparison. One good thing for the Business is that the WM6.5 phones can be treated as a computer in active directory locking down your mobile users in the same fashion you would do with a laptop. MS has also released office 2010 mobile and Outlook 2010 mobile, which promises to have a user experience that is an extension of their desktop versions.

Blackberry has pretty much been asleep at the wheel. Every time I saw them at an event they kept telling me about their newest phone the Curve 8530 – which looks just like their older blackberry models except with a high def screen.

When asked what made their phone better then others, they danced around the question with answers like it’s “super light” (but not lighter then iPhone or Droid), “has this great screen” (but not bigger then the newer phones with 4.0 inch screens) and has “great battery life” (but not as big or long lasting as Xperia or HTC batteries).

The 8530 phone would have possibly revolutionized the mobile business market if it had come out a year and half ago, but instead they released their storm platform which pretty much bombed in corporate America, so now they are going back to basics – which places them behind the shadow of Apple, Google, and MS.

With all these new platforms the need is even more urgent for a project like the Phone Gap project, which allows developers to create cross platform applications using HTML CSS and JavaScript. I’ll be talking about this project a lot more in 2010.

How do you feel about your phone and the future of this industry? Let me know via the comment box below.

Spec wise, the Xperia has more then enough memory with internal memory maxing out at 1GB and support for an additional 16GB on a micro SD card. That’s room for a lot of pictures, movies and music – which was adeptly demonstrated with a display of High Definition Spider Man movie which was played for us using the phones media player.

The unit will come with the ability to link up to numerous online stores with the default being that of the Sony store (of course). Whether they will go the Palm route and try to force their way into iTunes is yet to be discovered.

The coolest feature on this phone will the coolest feature on a lot of the newest phones: contact network aggregation. Sony call’s their aggregator the Time-Scape feature. It’ll let you be able to look up your friends activity in Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social sites by simply going to their contact card – the phone does the rest., pulling in latest status’, articles, trip plans, and everything else that one does on a social network (including announcements that your BFF is waiting on line for the bathroom – really needed to know that thanks!)

The data management is a main feature of the phone, which is understandable with today’s mass of information about someone.  Sony adds an Infinity button to each data source which lets you dive deeper into areas that you want to see. See a Facebook entry from some one that your interested in, simply click that infinity button to track that persons entire Facebook conversation.

Sony will be pushing this WCDMA phone to compatible networks in January 1^st quarter and we hoping for a demo phone – c’mon guys throw us a bone!

The successful acquisition of Tandberg would bring up the number of acquisitions the company has performed this year. Buying of smaller companies is Cisco’s newest (but not really that new of an idea) strategy to reinforce their product base while expanding into newer technologies like hybrid cloud computing and on demand security scanning.

The Tandberg shareholders have already put a stop on Cisco’s first attempt at a buy out (about $3 billion), which in fact 90% of shareholders cast down. Cisco has stated that although this is their final offer, things look good as two of Tandberg’s largest investors already agreed to the price and 40% of remaining stockholders are for the deal.

As the global recession continues to hit companies in the wallet, web conferencing offers improved cost-effectiveness as compared to traveling and many analysts acknowledge it as a growing product segment.

Cisco is the owner of the popular web conferencing tool WebEx. The Tandberg product would logically be absorbed into this business division and operate either as it’s own product or under the WebEx brand.

Let us know what you think about Cisco’s buyout’s in the comments or forums!

Almost every major wireless provider (except Sprint) has a different plan for personal and a business use. I’d assume there is a reason for this like maybe milking the business user with specific surcharges like that of the exchange surcharge. Let’s do a quick comparison of the 4 leading wireless carriers, where we will use their personal plan as a baseline to get overall fees on business plans.

Comparison of prices between major carriers., where cheapest Business and Personal plans were selected

Gmail, Yahoo, and other public facing email services assumed they serve primarily the consumer. This is reinforced by the fact that each service usually has an entirely different entry point for business accounts. Case in point, Google has “Gmail for Business”, which has different tiered plans with features that the consumer versions don’t have (like shared contacts).

For the business, the exchange surcharge, even if it adds up to “thousands” at the end of the year, is a cost of doing business. It will be absorbed and passed to the customer’s cost just like it has always been.

The only people who are haggard about these “new and improved” exchange fees are consumers who will need to pay the ability to connect their personal phones to the corporate email servers. They use their phones because most likely then not they either don’t qualify for a company phone or don’t like the one they already have.

In general upgrade your sales team to the newest phones if they add to the efficiency of your team and worry not about the fees involved. Instead just add the difference to your overhead and price accordingly and if you’re a consumer – save your receipts for your tax person in April.

What does this mean to the business user? Well lots! Many internal small to mid sized business portals in addition to many commercial websites are hosted on one of these three platforms. Now you can cut your development expenditures and increase efficiency (and tracking capabilities) by using the pre-made plug-in to connect to a local installation of OpenSSO.

Open SSO can connect to existing directories as well such as LDAP, Active Directory, and of course, Sun Directory, so you don’t have to recreate your user base in multiple data stores – which is also helpful in streamlining your support structures.

Now if you have multiple sites internally or you’re a commercial sites network, you can give your users the ease of logging in once as your surf from site to site.

Of course I have to mention that Wordpress MU has had single sign on built in for some time, but the ability to easily carry over credentials from your site to your sister or partner site could be game changing.

Have you played with OpenSSO lately? Leave me a comment with your experiences.

T-Mobile’s ever popular SideKick smart-phone is one of those consumer products that business users have started to use, eschewing integrated wireless solutions offered via the channel. For many channel players, it has been difficult to overcome the momentum of consumer devices being used for business purposes.

Sure, I-phones, Sidekicks, netbooks and so on all look great on paper and they can prove to be inexpensive, but once a user chooses a consumer class product over a business class product, they are forfeiting critical features for saving a few bucks.

The T-Mobile SideKick data failure is a perfect example of what can happen. Here, users have put all of their data in the hands of an unknown third party, which they expected to follow procedures to protect their data. What’s more, the users had no control over that data locally, in other words, they could not successfully synchronize and backup all of their data to a desktop PC.

Now those same users are surprised that the worst could have happened and that all of their information is lost. But, the fault really lies with the consumer. How many of those consumers read the full user agreement with T-Mobile? How many checked the SLAs (Service Level Agreements) offered by T-Mobile? Probably, very few!

T-Mobile and most, if not all, of the service providers have written those agreements and have published conditions to protect themselves in cases of data loss, and at the same time give consumers little recourse to protect their data above and beyond what the service provider offers.

Here is where the argument for choosing communications services through the channel gains strength, at least for business users. Solution providers can use T-Mobile’s shortcomings to sell devices and services that include business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. For example, the typical Blackberry, when used for business, relies on the businesses own exchange server for synchronization and backup. In other words, the business user has access to all of their data, regardless of the status of their handheld device or service related to it. If the service fails, or the device is lost, they can simple access their exchange account and still retrieve critical items. What’s more, a business running their own exchange server can choose to back it up as frequently as possible and even incorporate fail over technology, which is a massive improvement over what T-Mobile has to offer their sidekick users!

For solution  providers, the business case here is simple – just ask your customers how much control they want over their information before they decide on what wireless technology they choose to deploy.

Price: Less than $13 per user, with a minimum of 1000 users.

Pros:

• Very complex message routing processes can be constructed for a wide variety of purposes
• Compliance and governance can be built into messaging infrastructure
• Sendmail is a leading email server software and supports a large number of third-party applications

Cons:

• Still some integration into a single Web server for management purposes
• Policies can be fairly complex and require careful debugging

Version 4.0 was tested on a small network in August 2009.

Sendmail Inc.

6475 Christie Ave., Suite 350

Emeryville, CA  94608

510-594-5400

http://sendmail.com

When RHUB Communications entered the hotly contested Web conferencing market in 2005, research indicated that there was a need for an on-premise solution that required little or no IT support. As such, RHUB gladly took on the challenge of meeting the market’s demand by entering the industry with an on-premise “plug and play appliance”. Since the code for Web conferencing was already running as a SaaS system, and the development environment was based on Windows 2K, the natural first step was for the company to find a Windows based hardware platform for delivery.

To get things started, RHUB decided to focus on small and medium sized businesses using the indirect sales model.  Since the user environment was typically going to be a small office, the hardware platform was developed with specific characteristics in mind, like:

• An appliance that’s small in size
• A solution that makes no noise, therefore fan-less
• A solution that is on 24 x 7 and therefore uses very little power

RHUB sourced several x86 based platforms running embedded XP as the operating system for testing. The requirements quickly lead to a low power Geode or Via based system. Then, a unit was selected and a channel development effort was undertaken. Early feedback about the approach was very positive, but the early channel partners indicated a need for a lower priced, entry-level product.

RHUB’s research showed that the low power x86/Embedded XP platform would not meet the cost objective for the entry-level product. The only platforms available that could meet the cost objectives were either based on XScale or ARM processors. An ideal hardware platform was found utilizing the XScale processor. This platform met every requirement for the user with the advantage of very low power consumption (less than 5 watts). However, the hardware platforms would not support embedded XP in any fashion. The OS was far too large for the memory and flash available on the XScale platform and the added cost of the Embedded XP OS was a significant factor.

RHUB also wanted to deliver enterprise level units in a typical 1U form factor so an investigation of a Linux solution was undertaken. The development team was very pleasantly surprised to find a total Linux solution that not only enabled deployment on the XScale platform but also allowed a completely compatible code base for the 1U platform.

An Embedded Linux development effort was undertaken. The effort lasted about 4 months and involved building an absolute minimum OS environment, not just for size issues but to also insure no “backdoors” were open. RHUB wanted the on-premise appliance approach to offer users additional access security over SaaS models as one of the advantages of the approach but also wanted to make sure that the RHUB appliance could not be used for unauthorized network access.

Much of the effort was expended in just sizing the kernel. The resultant OS, including libraries ended up about 100 times smaller than the Embedded XP environment.  In addition, the cross compile effort was straight forward enabling a consistent code base.

Table 1: OS hardware requirement comparison

In addition to the size, performance and compatibility advantages of this approach, the engineers were pleased with the network support software such as DHCP and LDAP client available with Linux. The primary function of the appliance is a network device so rich networking libraries were important. Compared with the Microsoft networking libraries, the Linux networking libraries are easier to use and very stable.

The final product, called TurboMeeting, was readied in about one year from the initial development effort and the new hardware platform met every market and channel requirement. The Linux implementation was surprisingly stable and the code base between the embedded version and the 1U version was virtually unchanged (other than cross compiling).  Auto update was added to TurboMeeting about 6 months after launch. The TurboMeeting appliances have been in the field for about 2 years and have had 6 updates. All updates have been completely transparent to the customer and there were no changes required to the Linux core libraries in that time period.

More About RHUB’s TurboMeeting

RHUB adopted a “meetings accessible for all” approach by developing a web conferencing and remote access appliance called TurboMeeting that you pay for one time – and then forever you own it and control it. In addition, as one of the most comprehensive on-premise solutions in the market, TurboMeeting is the first solution to deliver four complete collaboration technologies in one appliance – allowing customers to not only do web conferencing, but to also conduct webinars, deliver remote support to clients, and to have remote access to personal PC capability – all with one box.

Moreover, RHUB’s TurboMeeting technology delivers the first “Guaranteed Attendance with No Download” Web Conferencing and Remote Access appliance in the marketplace, meaning the attendees are guaranteed access to your meetings and that no downloads of any kind are required with our view-only solution.  Unlike WebEx and GoToMeeting, NO monthly subscription fees are required with TurboMeeting – once you pay for it, you own it and control it.

Finally, with TurboMeeting, IT security is greatly enhanced since the data shared via the web conferencing solution is actually protected inside of the corporate firewall, instead of data being shared “on the outside” and unprotected across the Internet. TurboMeeting also delivers two layers of protection – both Data Transmission and Access Security, and, no additional IT Resources and/or IT maintenance cost is required for deploying this solution.

Learn more at www.rhubcom.com

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Embedded Linux Enables Low Cost Deployment for Web Conferencing Company (30)