Unified Comms

Charles Giancarlo spent more than a decade at Cisco Systems and was widely considered a likely heir to Chairman and CEO John Chambers before he left last year for investment company Silver Lake Partners. Then Silver Lake orchestrated a private-equity buyout of Cisco rival Avaya, and Giancarlo stepped in as interim president and CEO. In January, former JDS Uniphase chief Kevin Kennedy will take over day-to-day operations as president and CEO, and Giancarlo will become chairman. Stephen Lawson of the IDG News Service spoke with Giancarlo on Tuesday after he delivered the opening keynote at VoiceCon in San Francisco.

Australia's $485 million Unified Communications market increased its growth by almost a third in 2007, with CIOs and IT managers increasingly turning to UC applications to improve efficiency and save money, according to Frost & Sullivan's 2008 Australia Unified Communications Report.

Staying connected with customers, partners and co-workers is vital in today's competitive economy. Missed calls can result in lost opportunities and can weaken companywide job performance. Integrating cell phone and Wi-Fi environments, and adding the benefits of presence and instant messaging, is the holy grail. Call it mobile unified communications (UC).

Australian start-up Azurn has developed a unified communications appliance, dubbed "Merlin", that takes the complexity out of voice and video collaboration across multiple types of end-points.

The New York Mets will have new networking and unified communications systems in their new home, Citi Field, when they start playing baseball there next spring.

Unified communications offers the potential for anywhere, anytime connectivity between employees and the enterprise. But as the InteropLabs hotstage team found in piecing together more than a dozen commercial and open-source voice, data and messaging platforms, the technology is still at a relatively early stage, and today represents more promise than practice.

Telephony has at last become an IT product, claimed Nortel as it announced SCS500, an open source-based unified communications suite for small and mid-sized businesses.

The cold-war between Microsoft and Cisco for the much coveted "unified communications" market has escalated to all out war, with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates predicting "the death of the PBX."