Microsoft has found a magic lamp, as it now has a new Genee. That is to say, it's acquired the virtual assistant (VA) startup Genee. With this acquisition, Microsoft will be able to enhance its own VA programs by integrating the Genee software.
In this Industry Buzz podcast, Simon Dudley leads a conversation with UCStrategies Experts
In the largest deal in Microsoft's history and in a move extremely counter intuitive to their previous Modus Operandi, Microsoft is buying LinkedIn for $26.2Bn.
It is no secret that Apple has a long history or ignoring the needs of enterprise users and has focused its attention on the consumer market. With a half-hearted approach to enterprise support at best, Apple projected an attitude that seemed to say, "Here's what we've got, take it or leave it." In response, many in the technical community looked askance at the company's offerings and did their darndest to keep Apple products out of the corporate network.
A description and assessment of the Microsoft and 3rd-party tools to support enterprise deployments of Skype for Business<
Last month I blogged about Skype Translator. Since then, I had a chance to visit Microsoft in their Building 99 research facility to learn more about the technology behind the product. Next month I will talk more about its commercial potential.
In this Industry Buzz podcast, the discussion is about the prospects for Microsoft in the smartphone business.
Brent Kelly and Marty Parker wrote an excellent piece in UCStrategies this month that included a look at how to model TCO for Lync deployments. One takeaway I hope you got from their insights is that the deployment of Lync is generally complicated. Barb Grothe made this point several times in her blogs about Lync deployment over on No Jitter last summer.
What did not come out of the Lync Conference was a lot of clarity about UCaaS and what Microsoft is expecting of that channel. Disappointing, but not unexpected. Microsoft has been consistently focused on the premise enterprise deployments. Gurdeep Singh Pall and Giovanni Mezgec made a lot of references to cloud enablement for Lync but the details were sketchy and by context they were likely talking about private cloud deployments of Lync (via HP or the telcos) or about hybrid solutions (similar to what West IP Communications is doing).
Cisco's 17th annual Global Partner Summit was concluded as the company voiced its "unwavering" commitment to partners. The end of the summit was also used to highlight the point that competitors of the company were finding it difficult to keep up.
