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Visual Conversations Redefine Enterprise Collaboration
January 2013 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
Few companies are islands unto themselves. Most are global, networked organizations comprised not only of internal employees but also suppliers, vendors, partners and customers. This work style enables them to respond to market opportunities and competitive threats faster than companies that are highly structured and vertically siloed.
Get Your Wi-Fi Ready for Mobile Applications:
Top 10 Considerations for WLAN
October 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The IT landscape has changed significantly over the past five years. In many ways, the exception is now the norm. Nowhere is this truer than in client computing. Mobile computing dominates the workplace and promises to bring orders of magnitude more devices into the workplace.
Preparing the Wi-Fi network for the growing number of mobile applications requires more than just a simple upgrade of the network. Below are the top 10 things IT departments must consider to prepare for the migration to mobile computing.
Mobile WAN Optimization Helps
Cut Costs and Avoid Upgrades
October 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The nature of work continues to evolve. Mobile work was once limited to laptop-carrying professionals working outside company offices. Today, worker mobility has expanded to encompass a much wider range of users. While the mobile professional remains an important group of mobile workers, they are hardly the only ones. Home-based workers and locations where multiple users share a single device, such as retail locations, are examples of the broadening definition of enterprise mobility.
Microsoft Lync Transforms Business Communications
September 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
Unified communications (UC) has been a market in the making for more than a decade, with a focus on bringing together all collaborative applications. The coming together of communications and collaboration technology opened the door for many new vendors to enter a market historically dominated by voicecentric solution providers.
Microsoft, with its latest release of Lync, provides a high-quality collaborationcentric alternative to the traditional UC solutions. Many organizations have begun to take a serious look. In fact, a 2012 ZK Research survey on UC purchasing intentions shows Microsoft and Cisco are now the two dominant vendors in this rapidly evolving market.
Cloud Services Maximize the Strategic
Value of Business Video
August 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
Video technology has been around for the better part of two decades, but has never been a mainstream corporate collaboration tool for a number of reasons. Legacy systems were costly to procure and manage, there was limited availability of video endpoints, and quality was often poor. Only the largest of large enterprises had the budget, staff and opportunity to fully leverage business video.
Today’s systems are easier to use — many are as easy or easier to use than a phone, they work on ubiquitous IP technology making video simple to deploy, and social media has driven the fear out of video. Additionally, video systems are no longer strictly room-based. Almost every laptop, tablet and smart phone has highquality video capability, which can complement room-based systems to deliver spontaneous or scheduled video meetings.
Collaboration Is the Next Game Changer in Customer Service
May 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
For most companies, customer service is a continually evolving process. Customer demands are always in flux and there are always new methods of reaching customers, and competitive threats to the status quo. Organizations that wait too long to adapt run the risk of losing customers to more agile competitors waiting for the right moment to pounce. But do it right and the results can be staggering: happier customers, faster problem resolution, consistency in measurement — all at a lower cost.
The Top 10 Reasons to Consider
Hosted Collaboration Solutions
February 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The value proposition of unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) is multidimensional. UC&C empowers workers to streamline the collaborative process, raising productivity to new heights, enables individuals to collaborate in real time with coworkers, partners, customers and suppliers in different parts of the globe, and can significantly reduce communications costs.
Because of the strong potential ROI, deploying a collaboration solution should be at or near the top of every CIO’s priorities list. Collaboration technology is widely used by technically savvy early adopters, and is now moving into the mainstream.
A Scalable BYOD Access Strategy is
Crucial for K-12 Districts
February 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The IT demands on a school system are among the most complex of any organization. Schools are a mix of technically savvy users and nontechnical users. Additionally, technology is not upgraded consistently so different locations in the same district can have widely different technology.
Technology is becoming an increasingly important part of school operation, and the challenges around operating the IT environment continues to grow.
The Rise of the Network Has Made it Crucial to User Experience
February 2012 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The role of the CIO has changed more in the past five years than any other in the business world. Several IT forces have come together to usher in a new era of IT — the network computing revolution. This transition created new expectations from business leaders and corporate workers, as IT is now tasked with delivering a high quality, consistent experience to all users. At one time the thought of delivering any application to any device over any network was just a vision, but today it’s expected. Network computing is making that vision a reality.
Optimizing User Experience Requires
an Enterprisewide Network Fabric
November 2011 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
Consumerization, mobility and device evolution have all contributed to IT transformation. However, no technology has been a bigger disruptive force than virtualization. Virtualization has reached a tipping point where there are more virtual workloads than physical ones. It is the norm, not the exception. Virtualization is now moving into the next phase of maturity — being able to take any virtual resource and move it to where it is needed, based on business policy. This era of virtual computing will continue to lower the cost of computing and raise the value of the network.
The Evolution of Unified Communications and the
Essential Role of Specialty UC Middleware
October 2011 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
The value proposition of unified communications (UC) is multifaceted. It has the potential to raise corporate productivity to new levels, streamline business processes and dramatically lower the cost of communications. Deploying UC should be among the top initiatives for all companies, large and small. However, despite the hype and strong marketing push from solution providers, UC has yet to see the accelerated growth that signals the technology has moved out of the early-adopter phase into the mainstream.
Pervasive Mobility Drives the Need
for Wireless LAN Evolution
October 2011 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
Today’s CIOs face significantly more challenges than at any other time in history. Companies look to IT departments to boost worker productivity and simultaneously lower the cost of IT. The shift to pervasive mobility is a significant step that allows companies to achieve both goals. Historically, the shift to pervasive mobility has been difficult and expensive to implement, and as a result it was a reality for a very small number of organizations. However, a number of technology trends have come together to create a “perfect storm” effect, which will bring this vision to reality.
Understanding the Total Cost of Unified Communications
October 2011 – Prepared by Zeus Kerravala
For most companies, building the business case for unified communications (UC) has been a difficult task. The value proposition for UC is multifaceted, and ROI is difficult to measure. Additionally, numerous solution providers have UC portfolios that widely vary, making it very difficult to do an apples-to-apples comparison for evaluation purposes.
This report will define unified communications, help organizations understand all of the components that need consideration when making the business case for UC, and compare the two leading solution providers — Cisco and Microsoft — to help build total cost of ownership (TCO) scenarios. Lastly, this report will give actionable recommendations to UC evaluators that can guide them through the decision-making process.
