Gartner

Vidyo announced today VidyoH2O™ for Google+ Hangouts. VidyoH2O™ is a video gateway from existing SIP, H.323, and IP PBX based video devices and platforms using H.264 to the Hangout environment that uses VP8. The gateway function is essentially a tether point that talks traditional legacy video on one side and Google+ Hangouts on the other side, providing transcoding for the video streams and mixing and image delivery form multi-party conferences. Prices range from $99 per month in the cloud to $149 for a premise version.

IT research firm Gartner, Inc. has predicted that by 2016, 20 percent of enterprise BYOD programs will not succeed because their mobile device management (MDM) implementations would be too restrictive.

BYOD, mobile devices, and cloud applications are scrutinized for the risks they pose to corporate security. Fifty-two percent of IT decision makers said that workers have read or seen corporate documents that they were not given access to, while 45 percent believed that employees within their organization were willing to sell company data if the right price was offered, according to a new study by SailPoint Technologies, Inc., an identity and access management (IAM) provider.

Through the first three quarters of 2013, there was a steady rise in the corporate purchasing of smartphones, according to Strategy Analytics. This may suggest that enterprises are rethinking the extent by which their BYOD programs are allowed to grow.

In the third quarter of 2013, 73 million smartphone units were bought directly by business users or by companies for their business users. This represents an increase of 34 percent in excess of the total sales volume of business smartphones a year ago.

A BYOD decision should be treated as more than just a purchasing policy and should be based on applications architecture and solutions design, according to a new Gartner, Inc. research note, BYOD Is an Applications Strategy, Not Just a Purchasing Policy, which is part of a Gartner special report entitled The Mobile Imperative: Mobile Application Strategies and Architecture.

The Session Border Controller (SBC) can be a puzzling device. There's just no equivalent to it in traditional telephony. It is the unique characteristics of VoIP and the Internet that make implementing SBCs a modern best practice. SBCs protect and simplify voice communications, and now with its latest release Sonus takes the SBC further with multimedia services.

Microsoft ups the scare factor for Windows XP users after April 8, 2014, the date when Microsoft stops providing support for the old operating system. Tim Rains, director of Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft, claimed in a corporate blog post that the malware infection rate of PCs running on Windows XP could increase by up to 66 percent after April 2014.

Introduction

Unified Communications (UC) has been a term in use for close to 7+ years now, and elements of it back to the 1990s. At a high level it's "communications integrated to optimize business processes." My colleague Marty Parker provides "A Short History of UC" in his article of that name.

Analyst firm Gartner Inc. has refuted a recent claim made by International Data Corporation (IDC) that predicted a boost in commercial PC sales in EMEA because businesses and consumers would be looking forward to upgrading their machines from Windows XP. In April 2014, Microsoft would no longer be providing support for Windows XP. The looming end of Windows XP support would only pose a slight, if any, impact on the sales of mobile phones, PCs, and tablets, according to Gartner.