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CCG Telecom and G12 Team to Make Lync Voice Easy
February 25, 2015
by Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing, AudioCodes
When it comes time to choose a deployment model for Office 365 and Lync voice, the "Easy Button" gets a lot of attention. Through continued refinement and teamwork, partner alliances continue to form with the goal of reducing the complexity for end-customers to migrate to Lync voice, leveraging all the collaboration and communications capabilities included in Office 365.
This week CCG Telecom and G12 announced an exclusive partnership with the intent of continuing the trend toward simplification. This new alliance is based on CCG's experiences learned while buidling their own internal Lync voice deployment.
When it comes time to choose a deployment model for Office 365 and Lync voice, the "Easy Button" gets a lot of attention. Through continued refinement and teamwork, partner alliances continue to form with the goal of reducing the complexity for end-customers to migrate to Lync voice, leveraging all the collaboration and communications capabilities included in Office 365.
This week CCG Telecom and G12 announced an exclusive partnership with the intent of continuing the trend toward simplification. This new alliance is based on CCG's experiences learned while buidling their own internal Lync voice deployment.
As noted by Kevin Yorio, Principal of CCG Telecom "This is a game changer...Up to this point, for a small-to-medium enterprises to fully benefit from the promise of Unified Communications, they were looking at multiple vendors, significant capital investment, and bringing on full time staff to manage and support the solution.
The art of Consultative Selling Lync
February 13, 2015
A discussion with Quentin Kramer
By Alan D. Percy, Senior Director of Marketing at AudioCodes
This last week while participating in the Strategic Products and Services (SPS) Sales Summit in Houston, I had the opportunity to spend some time with Quentin Kramer, Director of UC Consulting and Architecture, one of the UC industry technical experts. Having spent a number of years as a UC consultant, Quentin has been engaged on some of the early OCS and Lync deployments. Quentin joined SPS in June of 2013.
Managed IP Phones - Bringing Order to the Desktop
February 7, 2015by Alan D. Percy
Moving to a SIP-based IP-PBX, Contact Center or Unified Communications system often involves retiring an old and expensive PBX, replacing the desktop legacy phones with new IP Phones. Deploying new IP Phones often results in chaos at the desktop - an opportunity for partners.
Let’s face it, provisioning and installing hundreds of IP Phones can be a tedious process – most IP-based systems offer some form of automatic provisioning system, loading the correct firmware and configuration data into each device as it is installed and activated. “Self-provisioning”, where the end-user is handed a device and asked to do the physical installation and some minimal activation procedure, is a great way to reduce the labor involved with large deployments.
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.
