Paul Robinson

At the beginning of November bigtincan (BTC) unveiled BTC hub - an enterprise content and productivity solution for mobile devices that link with advanced server side control with built in content intelligence that users leverage to get the highest value content at the right time and in the correct context, unlocking the value of the social enterprise while helping the content author to understand its use and be able to improve it in real time.

Zeacom, a provider of multimedia contact center and business process automation software has just announced the release of the version 6.2 of its Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC 6.2). A mature and feature-rich software-only product, ZCC 6.2 continues Zeacom's investment in Microsoft Lync integration while also including a hybrid environment that lets organizations trial Lync while maintaining their existing telephony infrastructure.

The explosive proliferation of WiFi-enabled mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets and notebooks and the increasing availability of mobile apps and services, both personal and corporate, have led to the phenomenon known as the Consumization of IT. Industry analysts predict 2 billion devices in use by 2015 with 75 percent of them used for both business and personal use. Already 75 percent of all trouble tickets are generated by mobile users. Given this ever-pressing demand for BYOD, IT has a pressing desire to understand BYOD deployment program requirements and costs.

Many companies have monitoring tools focused on network assurance, customer assurance, service assurance and other key OSS/BSS (Operations Support Systems/Business Support Systems) applications that provide extraordinary amounts of data. But manually analyzing and cross-correlating these traditionally siloed customer, service and operational trends to strategically enrich user experience and build revenue loyalty, while simultaneously reducing operating costs and optimizing network infrastructure is not the way to go.

Gartner has recently designatedSonus as a market "Leader" in its Magic Quadrant for SBCs (October 9, 2012). This Magic Quadrant focuses on incumbent SBC vendors and those that have developed competing products for communications service providers in the past two years.

Following on the heels of its UC One press release BroadSoft announced the addition of Rich Communications Services (RCS) to its BroadCloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. BroadCloud is a white label component of UC One - a core communication platform consisting of network software, cloud services and user experience applications:

For the past two years LifeSize has been focused on moving away from the more traditional video collaboration infrastructure consisting primarily of fixed configuration hardware appliances or fixed configuration software towards a configuration that offers the customer a flexible, simple to use, fully software-based application infrastructure. Last January LifeSize launched its Universal Video Collaboration (UVC) Platform consisting of three applications UVC Video Center (HD video streaming and recording), UVC Transit (firewall/NAT traversal) and UVC Access (IP routing and call control).

Last month we reviewed the enterprise SBC market as seen by Infonetics Research. According to that research Ciscoand Acme Packetwere the two top enterprise SBC vendors in terms of first half 2012 (1H12) global revenue share with Ciscoin the lead having captured 26 percent of 1H12 revenue.

BT just announced the availability of BT One Cloud for Microsoft Lync (BT One Lync), a cloud service based on Microsoft Lync 2010, providing instant messaging, presence, audio, video and web conferencing, and enterprise voice. The new BT One Lync has 100 percent feature parity with a Microsoft Lync on-premise deployment, but packaged as a cloud-based service offered on a monthly "pay-per-user" basis.

Earlier this month, NextPlane announced UC Exchange, its next step in the development of real-time collaborative business communities for UC platforms. For the past two years, NextPlane had been providing a UC federation service called the NextPlane Federation Cloud service. UC Exchange is effectively the next generation, where significant new features have been added such as Directory Services and a federation management portal / provisioning workflow tool.