Stories about: Communications Solutions

Dimension Data recognised in categories across licensing, Office deployment, systems management, desktop deployment and unified communications.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard have expanded their partnership to develop and sell a common platform for delivering voice, video and messaging services to office workers.

I hate faxes. When I had a fax machine in my office, I would arrive in the morning and see the accumulation of restaurant menus, insurance come-ons, and other junk that arrived during the night. Plus, I was always running out of the special paper or the ink cartridges would dry out because I would so seldom use it. There is a better way, and I want to review your options with how you can connect your email to your faxing needs.

While competitors like the Apple iPhone and the budding Google Android platform have garnered a lot of attention lately, Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry smartphone, sees itself as the right choice for businesses, a company official stressed Friday.

Hewlett-Packard's ProCurve networking division Monday announced an ambitious alliance with enterprise application vendors to optimize their software as it runs over ProCurve switches and other networking gear.

Complexity has made unified communications difficult to implement, but Siemens hopes to change that with OpenScape Unified Communications Server.

The IP wars continue this week with Avaya, now a privately-held rather than public company, announcing Avaya Communications Manager 5.0 and new customer service solutions, including a SIP-enabled handset for CSRs (Customer Service Representatives) Communications Manager 5.0 is a full upgrade rather than a point upgrade to Avaya's main telephony and communications platform. The new version takes the technology from IP to SIP and adds a number of new capabilities.

Given a level playing field, can anyone unseat Microsoft as the king of productivity applications? This is just one of many questions numerous companies, from Google to IBM to Sun, are trying to answer as they cram more and more capabilities into rival productivity solutions.

While Todd Sharp is driving down the highway between Charlotte and Atlanta, a new sales order triggers a lookup for the customer phone number and salesperson (that would be Todd) assigned to it. The system then polls Siemens OpenScape UC (unified communications) software and checks Todd's presence status, discovering that he's working remotely and available only on his cell. OpenScape kicks off a VoIP call to Todd's cell phone and, using a text-to-speech engine, reads the sales order over the phone. It then prompts Todd to press 1 to autodial the customer. Minutes after the order arrived, Todd is thanking the customer from his car.

Avaya said on Thursday that it will develop communications solutions for small business that combine Google's updated Apps Premier Edition suite of Web applications with its own IP telephony technology.