The Dock clearly cannibalizes the market for IP phones, but ShoreTel is choosing to be an enabler of that instead of ignoring the demand that’s there.

Over the past couple of years, there has certainly been no hotter driver of IT spend than prepping the enterprise for BYOD. We’ve seen the explosion of the mobile device management market; the continued strength of WiFi vendors and cloud services has been on the rise as a way of delivering apps to consumer devices.

The UC market, though, hasn’t really managed to take advantage of this trend other than augmenting their solutions with “soft” clients that run on consumer devices, which hasn’t been a great driver of UC spend.

It’s a significant milestone, as it lets the company take advantage of several market transitions and evolve Polycom to being more than a vendor that sells expensive room-based video systems.

Last October at its Strategy Day, Polycom announced that its RealPresence CloudAXIS suite was in beta. The software suite is an extension of the company’s RealPresence platform and enables browser-based UC applications such as chat, presence and, of course, video. After what appears to be a successful six-month beta program, Polycom this week announced the general availability of CloudAXIS.

The GA version of CloudAXIS is a significant milestone for Polycom, as it gives the company a solid platform to take advantage of several market transitions and continually evolve Polycom to being more than a vendor that sells expensive room-based video systems. CEO Andy Miller regularly talks about the evolution of Polycom, and CloudAXIS is a good proof point. These transitions are:

The company is willing to share the risk with its channel partners to move this market forward and this will be a competitive differentiator.

This week was Alcatel-Lucent’s (ALU) industry analyst conference in Annapolis, MD. Much of the first day was dominated by presentations and discussions around the communications portfolio, which had a distinct cloud flavor to it. The company had announced some of this at Enterprise Connect last month but did fill in some gaps, and I thought it was worth the review of the offerings given how hot cloud-based UC is today.

ALU will go to market with three cloud packages–OpenTouch Cloud Enterprise, OpenTouch Cloud Office and OpenTouch Cloud Personal. ALU’s strategy, like the other equipment vendors, is to be a cloud enabler, not a cloud provider; they’ll sell infrastructure to their resellers and channel partners. There are many similarities in the go-to-market for ALU compared to the other UC solution providers, but there are a number of differences.

Attention Microsoft and Facebook: “People first” makes sense some of the time, but it doesn’t make sense all of the time.

As we all know by now, last week was the overhyped launch of the Facebook “phone”, which really isn’t a phone at all but more of an overlay to Android. The phone created a tremendous amount of media coverage and prompted Microsoft to issue what I thought was an overly whiny blog about how they came up with the same ideas two years ago.

In the blog, Microsoft spokesperson Frank X. Shaw made the comment:

Conferencing, Lync, innovation and management were among the themes that loomed largest

Well, the 2013 version of Enterprise Connect is behind us now, and the show seemed to have more energy and activity than other shows in years past. This wasn’t your typical Enterprise Connect, as topics such as interoperability or the cost of VoIP weren’t dominating the conference. Instead we saw a number of new topics take center stage in a big way, particularly true mobility (see this post and visual conversations (I’ll get to this later). Overall, a great conference, well worth the four-day investment. Here are my key takeaways from Enterprise Connect 2013: