Cisco CEO John Chambers and CTO Padmasree Warrior say the role of the network is transforming to a point that enables the connections of people, devices, and information. Some of the top trends that they see in the coming years are:

Is your network ready for the New Year? In order to be fully prepared, your business may need these technologies to move forward:

So, now that we’ve discussed who the major players are, let’s take a closer look at why it’s really such a big deal that we can now deploy our Unified Communications products as part of our virtual infrastructure, using the Cisco UCS.

Modern business communication capabilities have evolved tremendously from the days of analog and digital telephony. Back then, we relied on Private Branch Exchanges (PBXs) located physically at each site to control the analog and digital signaling for local phones and other devices, such as fax machines and overhead paging solutions. Likewise, the PBX also defined and controlled the signaling of external trunks to the telephony carrier’s central office (CO).

The Cisco UCS is truly a “unified” architecture that integrates three major datacenter tech­nologies into a single, coherent system:

Computing
Network
Storage

Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers. The net effect of this is dramat­ically reduced power and cooling costs and easier, centralized management.

If you look at the two-way radio systems public safety agencies, utilities, and other intense users use, it’s not at all uncommon to see circuits between a radio console at a dispatch center and remote tower site. These could be landline circuits like E&M, voice-grade leased lines, or even T1s. If the radio system operator is concerned about the wireline infrastructure availability, they might use a microwave radio as a backup path or replacement for wireline service where it’s unreliable, not available, or simply too expensive.

Avaya’s CallPilot solution fulfills the needs of unified messaging for enterprises by providing advanced messaging features without sacrificing traditional voicemail features. CallPilot does this while being intuitive to use, simple to administer, and easy to install and maintain. With CallPilot Unified Messaging, Avaya delivers a solid application that will improve productivity and allow your enterprise […]

During the economic downturn, many American companies saw months of staff reductions through layoffs and delays in hiring replacement workers for those who have retired or left the company. Many companies held off performing upgrades to their current systems or delayed implementing new systems altogether. The good news is that the IT economic doldrums seems […]

To effectively plan and design a business video network, you must first understand the requirements for the particular type of business video you’ll be using. This brief overview of the five primary categories comes from Cisco’s white paper: Business Video Planning: Consider the User Experience and Operational Efficiency Many-to-Many, Real-Time Interactive, High-Definition (telepresence and high-definition […]

In my last post, we considered one of the first tasks in traffic engineering: determining which calls will be traversing which links. We also explored a few ways you could collect the voice utilization data needed to complete the process of sizing a WAN link. Continuing on with our example, let’s say we collected the following […]