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Alcatel-Lucent recently announced a sweeping set of enhancements across many of its switch and unified communications product lines. ALU, better known in the service provider arena, wants to send the message that it can compete with the likes of Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, and 3Com as a total solution provider for voice and data services rather than a point product vendor. Is a single source necessary or the best option?

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Is it possible to be very happy and very disappointed with a service at the same time? That's the way I've felt about the GrandCentral phone service since Google bought it last year. I'm happy because GrandCentral does the job that I wanted it to do: Callers dial one number, and it rings my cell phone, office phone, and home phone, in any combination I desire.

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Perception does NOT equal reality. Many technologies simply can't live up to their hype, while others languish in unwarranted obscurity. bMighty.com pumps up the hidden gems and takes the blowhards down a peg.

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At VoiceCon San Francisco last week, I had a chance to speak with Jim Burton about his role as intermediary in the talks between Microsoft and IBM on presence federation. Thinking about that conversation now, I kind of wonder if maybe Jim shouldn't put in his name for Secretary of State in the new administration. Sounds like the negotiations were as complex and delicate as a lot of international diplomacy.

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Microsoft's entry to the communications market has changed the way enterprise decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.

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The big headline out of Johan Krebbers' keynote at VoiceCon Amsteradam was Krebbers' assertion that at Shell, voice is no more important than the other peer-to-peer real-time media. In his talk, Krebbers elaborated, saying that within Shell today, if you travel, you're encouraged to use a softphone to save on international dialing; the expectation is that you'll become comfortable enough with the softphone that you'll be willing to use it when you're in the office as well.

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Early on in the VoIP migration, you heard, "Voice is just another application on the network." Then you heard it wasn't; it was tougher to do and more mission critical. At VoiceCon Amsterdam next week, an executive from Royal Dutch Shell will say, in essence, that voice actually is just another application.

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As you can see in my No Jitter post on the topic, my friend Allan Sulkin, the ultimate voice communications expert, considers Cisco's announcement of a software-as-a-service play for UC/collaboration a "game changer." Maybe it changes the game; it definitely alters the debate.

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DiVitas Networks has been one of the leaders in enterprise fixed-mobile convergence (FMC), going back to the time when FMC mostly meant the ability to transition from a cellular network to voice over Wi-Fi without dropping the call. Now, DiVitas's CEO calls that capability "table stakes."

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Allan Sulkin's mid-year study of the voice communications market shows a contracting market overall, but big gains for the new market leader, Cisco.

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Wainhouse Research is out with a new survey of enterprise attitudes and practices in adopting unified communications. One of the key findings is that, more so than last year, the decision is being made by IT, rather than at the CXO level.

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Cisco today announced that it's acquiring PostPath, a vendor that makes a messaging and collaboration server, for $215 million. It's a shot across Microsoft's bow.

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In what is probably the first really interesting consolidation rumor I've heard in a long time, there are reports that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, has approached Tandberg about acquiring that video-focused vendor.

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There's been a lot of buzz over at No Jitter about the most recent Gartner report in the area of IP telephony/Unified Communications, in which Gartner gave a spot in its coveted Magic Quadrant to Microsoft. What drove the commentary was the fact that Microsoft made the Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony, an area in which most observers have seen Microsoft coming up short, at least relative to the incumbent vendors, in terms of feature/function.

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Last week's deal for Siemens Enterprise (SEN) solved the vendor's immediate problem of reassuring its customer base that the brand and products would go on, be supported, and form the basis of future strategic activities. That was really Job 1 for SEN last week; now we have to see where it invests and what approach it takes to the North American market. Meanwhile, there remains the question of the environment among UC/enterprise communications vendors.

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Some two years after it was spun off from the Siemens AG parent company, with the intention of being acquired, Siemens Enterprise (SEN)has finally reached that goal with today's announcement that Gores Group, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, will acquire 51% of SEN, while Siemens AG retains the rest. (For more posts, go to No Jitter.)

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If you sit through enough unified communications marketing presentations, sooner rather than later, you'll hear someone confidently assert that "UC is more than just click to call." But what if click to call is really enough for you?

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Here's a response to my post, "Is Anyone Actually Implementing UC?" The writer, Ken Camp, argues that everyone's implementing UC, because UC encompasses so many things:

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A debate has been going on over at No Jitter about whether enterprises are actually adopting Unified Communications (see here, here, here, here, and here). I tend toward the skeptical end of any conversation about how widely a hot new technology is actually being adopted, but I do see a few signs that enterprises are at least paying attention and, where possible, looking for an opportunity to get their feet wet.

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What makes Unified Communications unique, something other than just a bunch of applications running on an IP infrastructure? How does UC fundamentally change the communications architecture? There's a growing consensus that the answer is: Presence.

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Videoconferencing is a hot technology, one that's seeing 30%+ annual growth in both revenue and units shipped, according to Wainhouse Research. The assumption is that this growth is being driven, at least in part, by companies' desire to avoid employee travel as fuel prices rise. But people who look at this market closely say travel avoidance is only a small part of video's appeal.

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It's become conventional wisdom in the VoIP/IP telephony/UC security space that the major vulnerability for voice-over-IP traffic today remains the simple fact that it runs on IP infrastructures that may be the targets of attacks that have been plaguing data networks for years. In other words, all those exotic types of attacks with names like SPIT (spam over IP telephony); VOMIT (voice over misconfigured IP telephony); or eavesdropping via packet capture -- these have not yet materialized to any significant degree. But there is plenty of reason to stay vigilant when it comes to VoIP/UC security.

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I mentioned in last Friday's post that Unified Communications is expected to require much more systems integration work than traditional telecom implementations. That's directly related to the fact that communications is becoming more of a software business and less of a hardware business. It also means that many of the "hardware" vendors of the past are trying to imitate IBM's successes of the last decade in re-positioning from hardware supplier to software/services firms.

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I've been watching the Unified Communications market since it began two years ago, and one of the things that everybody's been trying to figure out is how to quantify the market and characterize how fast it's moving and where it might be headed. This week, Blair Pleasant of COMMfusion and UCstrategies.com delivered a great contribution to this emerging body of knowledge. The executive summary and TOC are here, and Blair's been blogging about it here, here, and here. After reading these various items, my takeaway is that the UC market is quite small, at least as of now.

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Over at No Jitter, consultant Gary Audin has posted a blog based on a new report that looks at IT services costs. The report, from the OnForce analyst firm, finds that VoIP is by far the most expensive IT component to service; the average VoIP work order is more than half again as expensive as the next-highest category, wiring and cabling, which of course also can be a significant contributor to VoIP/IP telephony expense, too.

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This week the carriers are having their big show in Las Vegas, NXTComm, so we're seeing announcements like this one from Nortel, of a joint solution with Microsoft for carrier-hosted Unified Communications. The focus of that particular release is SMBs, which have generally been the target market for hosted services. There's an ongoing debate about whether larger enterprises will opt for hosted UC.

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Communications-Enabled Business Processes, or CEBP, is one of the hot buzzwords in enterprise communications. Many people see CEBP as the Holy Grail of communications technology, something that may be attained years from now. But, in fact, you have CEBP in your enterprise now. It's called PBX features.

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Forrester Research has a new report out that offers some insights into the communications technologies that enterprises are adopting -- and are still holding off on. There's also a provocative data point on how involved business unit executives are in Unified Communications purchases.

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Here's a thought: What if contact centers become the breeding ground for a new generation of Internet-created media stars? That provocative idea comes from our friends at Wainhouse Research, Andrew Davis and Brent Kelly.

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Avaya announced today that its president and CEO, Lou D'Ambrosio, is stepping down due to "medical reasons" (about which no further details were given), and that he'll be replaced on an interim basis by Charlie Giancarlo, who left Cisco late last year to join the private equity firm, Silver Lake Partners, that acquired Avaya almost exactly one year ago. The Avaya announcement is here and my No Jitter analysis is here (we'll be following the story at No Jitter throughout the day). The timing couldn't be much worse for Avaya, as a slowing U.S. economy threatens to stall growth for the enterprise voice market in North America.

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One of the hottest topics in Unified Communications is video, and specifically the high-definition, high-end experience known as telepresence. HP and Polycom make telepresence systems, but the concept really took off in the market when Cisco announced its version of the technology almost 2 years ago.

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If you're looking for early-adopter scenarios of Unified Communications, your best bet is probably to watch what happens in enterprise contact centers (or call centers, as they used to be known). Contact centers are frequently at the cutting edge of communications technologies, as occurred with computer-telephony integration (CTI)--a comparison that understandly makes UC advocates a little nervous.

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One of the major discussions in UC has to do with the need for interoperability. The legacy voice world is highly proprietary, built around PBXs that speak vendor-specific protocols understood only by that vendor's telephones. A lot of people like to compare the PBX to the mainframe computer, and suggest that, just as in computing, the end station will become untethered, hardware will become commoditized, and everything will reside in software. That may, in fact, turn out to be the end state, but we're nowhere close today. And the interoperability aspect is even more challenging than the basic software issue.

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The convergence of voice and data onto a single network has required some significant changes to the IT organization. But those changes may pale beside the effort that will be required to get the enterprise IT shop ready to implement and support Unified Communications.

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The whole reason for Unified Communications, it’s believed, is that UC makes your workers and your business processes more efficient and productive. But productivity benefits are almost always tough to quantify and measure reliably, and that’s certainly the case with UC.

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Since this is a new blog, I'll start with a very quick introduction: I'm the co-chairman of VoiceCon, the leading conference on enterprise real-time communications/UC. I'm also editor of a TechWeb site called No Jitter, which runs blog postings and in-depth features on IP telephony, UC, and converged networking. I used to be the editor of Business Communications Review, which many of you may remember, and which sadly was discontinued at the end of last year. I'll be blogging regularly here on Unified Communications topics.

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