NextPlane

Although multimodal unified communications (UC) are slowly but surely dominating business communications, person-to-person voice conversations are still an important part of UC. However, UC must support end users both inside and outside of an organization, especially whenever they are using different UC technology platforms or services (UCaaS). Federation services play an important role in facilitating such contacts between people in different organizations or different locations, but must frequently connect easily for real-time and near-real-time conversations.

Farzin Shahidi, Founder and CEO of NextPlane, asked UCStrategies to take a look at the question of where and when voice and video will be of major interest for inter-organizational communications, especially if provided through UC federation and if linked to business processes or applications. Great question, Farzin!

According to Mary Meeker, in 2013, there were more smartphone users than laptop and desktop users put together, a clear indication that these kinds of devices are working to replace traditional computers.

Depending on your age, you'll think I'm like, totally being clever with this title, or that I actually talk this way all the time. Well, I don't speak as if every statement was a question, and I only say like or awesome if I really mean it. The Grand Canyon is awesome - showing up for work on time is, well, being on time - not being awesome.

VoIP, SIP, UC, IM, Presence and Federation have introduced anew set of capabilities that are transforming many organizations and generating huge potential productivity gains and savings. However, we have all known that with great power comes great potential threats. With these technologies, we left the relatively secure world of the TDM based PSTN and ventured into a new world where the power of IP can be used to disrupt the communications or the communications system.

IT Expo in Las Vegas is upon us. There's no shortage of panels and presentations to see, no matter what your area of interest may be. For those of you who are attending the expo, here are a few highlights and suggestions to keep an eye out for.

Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) and NextPlane recently formed a partnership, combining their forces to provide federation services for Siemens' OpenScape UC Suite. The goal is to help end user customers improve collaboration, as well as decision-making speed, and of course, productivity.

Federation has been a very important topic at UCStrategies from the beginning (see "Presence Functionality," July 2007), primarily because the new tools of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) are so effective in optimizing business processes and user communications. Federation is the technology that allows connection between multiple UCC Systems so that the benefits of UCC are not limited to the local domain, inside an organization's firewalls.