Once upon a time, companies sold their enterprise communication solutions, including switches, ACDs, voice mail, and other systems, based on features. “Feature Wars,” as they were known, pitted one vendor’s offerings against another’s, based on the features that each product supported. There were competitive matrixes that listed all of the hundreds of features, with check ...

Well, it’s official.  Cisco, the company that rebranded all its voice communications gear “Unified Communications” a couple of years ago, has demoted the term.  The ascendant star is “Collaboration”.  And I got some of the reasoning directly from John Chambers.  Here’s the story. I’m at the Cisco “Collaboration Summit” in San Francisco where analysts, consultants, ...

This week HP announced its intent to acquire networking vendor 3COM.  This acquisition certainly ups the growing competition amongst IT industry leaders – H-P, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.  As a networking infrastructure and VoIP/UC provider, 3COM brings some interesting assets to H-P and continues the circling/competitive motions of the large IT industry players – having ...

The new NET VXe Series Voice Switches are now generally available. The new VXe Series incorporates a number of enhancements, as described here in my October 2 preview article. The announcement headlines “Features to reduce costs and increase ease of deployment.” The preview article describes a significant list of those capabilities. But wait, there’s more ...