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A Cost-Effective Solution for Enterprise Telephony for Office 365 E4
November 10, 2014
by Barry Spielman, Marketing Manager at AudioCodes
Lync voice and Unified Communications are becoming increasingly popular. In this environment, it is natural that innovative solutions for specific requirements within the ever expanding Lync ecosystem are being introduced to the marketplace all the time.
Enterprise Voice for Lync can be accessed through Microsoft’s “Plus” Client Access License (CAL) offering, which in turn can be achieved by either deploying on-Premises Lync devices, or through the cloud-based Office 365 suite (Word, Excel, Outlook, Publisher, and OneNote, Exchange, Sharepoint, Yammer and OneDrive). Microsoft’s Office 365 E3 plan, which costs $20 per user per month, provides UC functionality such as presence, IM, mobile clients, peer-to peer video and voice, voice and video conferencing, screen sharing and editing.
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UC - How will SMBs make the move?
October 4, 2014By Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing at AudioCodes
A few days ago I had the pleasure to visit Houston and Michael Cassady, VP of Sales and Marketing for The Via Group. The Via Group has been one of our leading partners and almost always on the leading edge of trends in communications.
During our discussions, Michael and I were comparing notes about the adoption of Lync in the typical Small and Medium Business (SMB).
Enabling True Unified Communications Solutions for Customer Care with Microsoft Lync Server 2013
September 30, 2014by Jeremy Puent, Product Manager at Clarity Consulting
The term, “Unified Communications” is a buzz word that’s thrown around a lot nowadays. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Unified Communications is taking the industry by storm. As the UC market continues to grow, and the legacy systems try and catch the shooting star, the term is now being applied to products that, while on the surface seem unified, are really just a mix of independent products and infrastructure tied with a front-end bow to look like a single product. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to build a snazzy UI than it is to rebuild your communications products as a single piece of software.
Are IP Phones Doomed?
July 31, 2014The trusty old telephone on your desk is getting a lot of attention lately. The various blog and on-line magazines have seen plenty of discussion and debate on the future of IP Phones. Some have declared them “doomed to the evolutionary dustbin” – an easy declaration to make, but highly unlikely. Heck, there are still fax machines in many offices!
High Availability - Redundancy for All
July 7, 2014
by Barry Spielman, Marketing Manager, AudioCodes
In a recent post on the AudioCodes corporate blog, I discussed the need for businesses to remain on-line at all times. The ability to continue service should the connection to the service provider or on premise equipment go down – High Availability - is a critical one for all businesses, large and small alike. The blog discussed the various elements of High Availability, including survivability, resiliency and redundancy and the importance AudioCodes attaches to providing these capabilities in its Session Border Controllers (SBC), especially redundancy, across the range of sessions, from tens to thousands. Click here to read more.
Conferencing - the Gateway Drug to UC?
May 7, 2014By Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
I've spent time with a number of our partners more recently discussing the opportunity to extend their Unified Communications practices – much of the conversation centered around helping businesses voice-enable their UC implementations. Many of the partners I've spoken with wonder how to get their end-customers to "test the waters" of Unified communications, without a huge commitment.
The challenge is – how do you get a business “hooked” on Lync voice?
Lync with Avaya - Taking a Closer Look
April 7, 2014By Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
Unified Communications has matured and is on the minds of many CIOs as a means to improve collaboration and reduce costs. But for those businesses with Avaya communications systems, the road to implementing UC can be daunting.
One solution that is getting a closer look is using Microsoft Lync with Avaya.
3 Steps to Understanding the Cost Saving Benefits of Microsoft Lync
March 18, 2014Guest blog by Curtis Johnstone, Unified Communication (UC) product architect with Dell Software and a Microsoft Lync MVP
As organizations realize the promised benefits of better collaboration and more efficient communications from their Unified Communication (UC) solution, the cost saving benefits are drawing more attention. UC solutions such as Microsoft Lync are being deployed to reduce travel costs, reduce existing telephony and web conferencing costs, and even reduce physical office space costs as remote workers are first class citizens and capable of effectively working from anywhere.
A recent survey commissioned by Dimensional Research on Lync Adoption and Challenges confirms that for organizations that have adopted Microsoft Lync:
• 80% hoped to save on their travel budgets
• 76% hoped to reduce costs of other web and teleconferencing tools
• 66% hoped to reduce meeting room space costs
• 55% hoped to reduce spending on traditional telephony costs (e.g. desk phones)
• 36% hoped to reduce email expenses
Despite these intentions the survey also revealed that over half of organizations did not know they were successful in achieving any of these desired outcomes!
Getting insight into how much cost savings a UC solution brings to the table is difficult. The dimensional research survey confirmed that close to 70% of companies that have adopted Lync cannot easily report on savings.
The primary challenge in determining UC cost savings are establishing comparable cost metrics for existing non-UC costs such as telephony, travel, and meeting rooms.
Lync in the Enterprise and Thinking "Big"
February 9, 2014By Alan Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
As preparations come together for the upcoming Lync Conference in Las Vegas, one pattern seems to be emerging – Lync is making strong inroads in Enterprise. Just looking at the end-customers expected at the event and the scheduled presenters, you can see a long list of household names, most of which are home to over 10,000 employees. Large enterprises have some unique challenges, requiring their network architects to “think big”.
Enterprise Scaling and SIP Trunk Consolidation
January 14, 2014
AudioCodes announces high-capacity SBC for Enterprise SIP Trunking
By Alan Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
Large global enterprises have made it clear that SIP is part of their future. The challenge for them is making the migration. With complex multi-site networks, an array of telecommunications suppliers, lengthy contracts and network infrastructure, things don’t happen overnight.
