Going all-in can mean many things, and the fact that Avaya’s Engage event was held in Phoenix rather than Las Vegas suggests that Avaya is not gambling with their future. Coming out of Chapter 11 and then going public again, the company has had its share of nine lives, and it’s fair to say they really need to get it right now – and right now.
Analysts are good at seeing the big picture, and we all connect the dots in different ways. As we know, UC continues to be a moving target, especially as both innovation and disruption continues to be driven from players outside the realm of who we usually talk about. For this post I'm going to link takeaways from three recent items, with my take on how UC looks poised for yet another 90 degree turn.
Lots going on at IBM's Connect 2014 conference last week in Orlando. From Seth Meyers (SNL, moving to "Late Night") and Scott Adams (Dilbert) to much evidence of IBM's continued concerted push into social business as the future way to organize work.
Key to much of the conference was some important rebranding-"IBM Connections" has emerged as the new umbrella brand encompassing mail, meetings, chat, office tools, collaboration, social business, analytics, and content management.
Cloud Foundry is an open source platform-as-a-service being developed by Pivotal, the EMC-VMware big data startup; this is now being backed by IBM.
This move means that IBM will be able to assist developers get apps to the cloud, without worrying about the compatibility of technology.
SoftLayer Technologies, a web-hosting company, could be in private discussions with EMC and IBM amongst other potential suitors, who are looking at it as a possible acquisition.
Reuters made reference to three unnamed sources last week, and stated that both IBM and EMC could be potential suitors for Dallas, Texas-based SoftLayer Technologies. The deal may be worth $2 billion.
IBM has recently released new software and services, providing comprehensive networking capabilities that allow organizations to apply analytics to their social business initiatives for enhanced insight on social networking sentiment.
IBM has recently announced the release of its Connections social software for mobile devices, made to help organizations take advantage of social networking over a wide range of tablets, phones, and other mobile devices.
In order to help organizations benefit from social business, IBM announced that it is expanding its software portfolio with the delivery of IBM Connections 3.01, a social networking platform with real-time compliance capabilities.
With IBM Connections, organizations can follow data on the go. Rather than waiting days to analyze the information it gathers, the information can be analyzed in real-time using the IBM Connections active compliance service.
UC Summit 2011, presented by UCStrategies, was held March 27-30, 2011, at Estancia La Jolla Hotel
