The cloud is here and here to stay. No one expects a wholesale move to the cloud overnight, but I’ve been hearing recently from numerous customers whose journeys are well underway, and some common themes are emerging as businesses explore various deployment models. Business agility, flexibility and balance sheet liquidity will drive cloud adoption, and, as the popularity of hybrid models increases, users will demand a seamless end-user experience between the cloud and on-premise systems.

A few weeks ago, I included these themes in my predictions about the future of cloud collaboration. This week I had the chance to speak with two Cisco customers about why issues such as flexibility, cost savings and user experience drove them to deploy cloud collaboration technologies and other cloud solutions. Sheila Jordan, senior vice president, communication and collaboration IT, co-hosted the discussion with me and offered her insights from an IT perspective. She also recapped the discussion, sharing some specific tips for how IT managers can best take advantage of the cloud.

John Jackson, vice president of global infrastructure and vendor management for D+M Group, said that he can relate easily to the prediction about business agility, flexibility and cost when thinking back to his company’s decision to move to the cloud. D+M Group employs people in several different operating divisions around the world and grew through a series of acquisitions, leaving the company to globalize shared-services IT team that did not previously exist. Read More »

Tags: avaya, Charlotte, CIO, Cisco, City of Charlotte, cloud, cloud collaboration, cloud_computing, collaboration, D+M Group, hosted collaboration, Hosted Collaboration Solution, hybrid clouds, IT, North Carolina, on-premise, predictions, private cloud, Public Cloud, UCS, user experience

Did you know that by 2016, two thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video? And by 2020, 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet? This is huge. Plus, the global cloud market will grow nearly 500 percent by 2020. For me, this means I get to communicate with bunches of new people!

For your customers, it means figuring out how to tap into this major shift to empower employees to engage in entirely new ways. It’s also about putting the collaboration solutions in place to help their workforces evolve from knowledge workers to next-generation collaborative innovators.

This transition presents an exciting—and profitable—opportunity for our partners. And Cisco just sweetened the pot with its launch of new products, services, and promotions at the Collaboration Partner Summit in Los Angeles.

Want to accelerate your collaboration sales? Find out what’s new. Read More »

Tags: Cisco Business Edition 6000, Cisco HCS, Cisco prime collaboration manager, Cisco Unified Communications., Cisco WebEx Meeting Server, collaboration summit, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Prime Collaboration

Another Enterprise Connect has come and gone; now that the booths have been rolled away and sales teams begin the process of doing follow up with prospects met at this year’s show, I had some thoughts about UC applications in the cloud.

Unified Communications services deployed from the cloud was all abuzz during the show; from Sprint announcing its Complete Collaboration suite to many vendors discussing how they are moving their contact center offerings to the cloud. Even analyst Zeus Kerravala offered his observations following a cloud panel he moderated during last week’s show.

Specifically, Zeus mentioned that one of the key takeaways he heard during his panel was when organizations are deciding when to implement a UCaaS model, they think about which UC service they currently don’t have and deploy it through the cloud. This had me thinking about what features an organization should look for as they explore the possibilities of a cloud collaboration model.

With our recent news with Sprint, we demonstrated to the market again that Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution or HCS was designed from them ground up to support the needs of today’s business savvy organizations. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Cisco Systems, cloud, cloud collaboration, Cloud Computing, collaboration, enterprise connect, Hosted Collaboration Solution, unified communications

Both mid-sized and large enterprises know the value of employee collaboration to increase productivity and give the business a “leg up” on its competitors. As more businesses make sizeable investments into collaboration technology, it’s important for them to select products and services that not only meet their unique needs but also encompasses a comprehensive solution from the ground up that caters specifically to increasingly mobile employees.

Today, Sprint announced the availability of Sprint Complete Collaboration, a bundled service that gives customers a full UC solution that can be quickly and easily deployed over an all IP network. This Sprint solution is based on Cisco’s Hosted Collaboration Solution which gives partners, including service providers and integrators, the ability to deploy multiple collaboration applications on one server in a virtualized environment and then host those applications for multiple client organizations. The solution is designed to be run from partner data centers.

What does this mean for the end users who are increasingly on the go? It means being able to access collaboration applications from any device (smart phone, laptop, tablet -- you name it) anywhere at any time. It’s instant collaboration designed for today’s distributed enterprise; a feat that is best achieved when an organization opts to deploy a collaboration solution that -- at its foundation -- is keeping the bigger picture in mind: that these days, employee collaboration is no longer bound by “office walls.”

Sprint’s news validates the demand for a collaboration solution that allows service providers to leverage their own infrastructure to differentiate and drive fixed mobile convergence. We announced this new feature last December with new mobile features to HCS. As one of our first customers to announce availability of this feature, we are thrilled to see that the market is seeing the value of extending this feature to their subscribers. Read More »

Tags: Cisco, Cisco Jabber, cloud collaboration, Cloud Computing, collaboration, contact center, customer, customer collaboration, Hosted Collaboration Solution, hosted contacted center, hosted unified communications, jabber, Sprint, Sprint Complete Collaboration, unified communications

In today’s economic climate, a value-conscious shopper may look to wholesalers such as Costco to stock up on household goods. I frequently find myself at Costco versus specialty stores, because I know I can get the same high-quality olive oil at a fraction of the price.

And when you switch out the olive oil for network solutions, the concept remains the same.

Earlier this week, I shared a blog post about Nexus IS’ experience with wholesaler Neutral Tandem’s Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) proof-of-concept trial. We got to hear the VAR’s side of the story, but I knew you’d want to know more. So I checked in with Ian Neale, Neutral Tandem’s VP of Product Marketing, and asked him to give me an insider’s look at his company’s wholesale model.

What I really wanted to find out was what our partners could expect when working with them, and, more important, how they can help partners increase their revenue opportunities. Want to know what I learned? Read More »

Tags: Cisco, HCS, Hosted Collaboration Solution, Neutral Tandem, partner, VAR, wholesale