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Siemens Communications will integrate Twitter with its Unified Communications (UC) platform, and PBworks announces plans to offer voice alongside its collaboration and social software services.

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As we count down to the September 11 bankruptcy court auction that will determine the buyer of Nortel Enterprise Solutions, No Jitter recently ran a compelling and controversial writeup from an industry observer arguing against the likelihood of a successful combination should Avaya capture Nortel in the auction. The piece drew quite a few detailed and insightful comments, as well as at least one point-by-point rebuttal on another blog.

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Allan Sulkin is out with his mid-year numbers for enterprise communications shipments, and as he previewed in a No Jitter blog a week or so back, the second quarter was a pleasant surprise, as revenues rose from 1Q09. However, the full report shows that we're a long way from done with these bad times.

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You have to wonder if Unified Communications is ever going to be a moneymaker. Before the economic crisis hit, the technology was a bit too immature, with too uncertain a value proposition even in flush times. Then when the money was gone, UC applications and interfaces mostly started to look like a luxury that enterprises weren't in a mood to splurge on.

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It might have got lost in all the Avaya-Nortel reporting last week, but we had a No Jitter post that may have as much to say about the future of enterprise communications as anything the rest of us wrote about the big acquisition. Tom Nolle wrote a piece called, "How Light is the End of the Tunnel for Enterprise Spending?" in which he suggested that buying paradigms and the resulting customer-vendor relationships may be undergoing a fundamental shift as we work our way through and (hopefully) out of the recession.

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This week's big UC news, of course, is the announcement that Avaya is bidding $475 million to acquire Nortel Enterprise Solutions out of bankruptcy. You can follow all the latest news on No Jitter; but there's another couple of No Jitter posts, not directly related to Nortel, that I want to call your attention to. These have to do with purported interest on the part of Silver Lake partners, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, in potentially acquiring Tandberg, the video solutions company (Sulkin here; me here).

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We've had a very lively discussion going on over at No Jitter, in response to a post by Matt Brunk about security of SIP trunks. We've also got a Webinar coming up with Acme Packet on technical obstacles to SIP trunking, in which security is sure to be one topic of discussion (register here). We also got a brief discussion of security in SIP Trunking from Richard Shockey of the SIP Forum, as part of our Virtual VoiceCon session on SIP Trunking last week (go here if you missed that session or any other part of the event).

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In her latest blog at No Jitter, Melanie Turek of Frost & Sullivan gives a synopsis of some recent research on IP endpoints that shows IP phones-hard and soft-both proliferating in the enterprise, with the obvious caveat that current economic conditions are taking something of a toll.

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Our newest feature on No Jitter summarizes Synergy Research's findings about the size and shape of the Unified Communications market. The authors, Jeremy Duke and Ken Landoline, spend the first portion of the article laying out their taxonomy of the market and explaining why this particular classification makes sense. They include a helpful "organizational chart" showing how they consider the pieces to be put together.

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This morning, HP announced that it would soon begin selling IP desk phones, a potentially lucrative way to inch up competition with Cisco in networking and communication. However, it's already uncertain just how much HP really cares about phones.

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One of the best recent additions to our family of contributors over at No Jitter is Dave Michels. Dave has a background in the end user and reseller world, and he also has his own blog, Pin Drop Soup; he's just written a feature for No Jitter on the idea of the "Dumb PBX" (you can find the feature here.

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Greg Scherer, CTO of the I/O device maker Neterion, explains a weakness buried in virtualization's hypervisor. When it comes to virtual machine I/O, the hypervisor has to deal with it through a software switch, and lots of I/O means frequent interruption of the hypervisor's main job, processing guest application needs.

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I've gotten accustomed to the hot issues in our industry being about things other than, strictly speaking, technology: What's the future of Nortel? What's the future of Unified Communications? Will Microsoft beat out Cisco? Are the "legacy" vendors doomed?

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When I interviewed Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy last week (transcript here), I was particularly struck by this comment: "My first day at work [at Avaya] was the first of January, and in January we had a bankruptcy of one of the competitors in the marketplace. We had another competitor sort of up the ante in the way they're playing and declare their intentions in the server world. And so the competitive environment actually changed quite a bit."

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We're getting to the point in the VoiceCon Orlando cycle when I start thinking about what I'm likely to see and hear during the event, what themes I expect to hear repeated over and over during the week. Clearly, a lot of the focus this year is going to be on cost savings, business cases, ROIs, and the like. How could it not be?

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A couple of interesting developments have come up recently when it comes to desk phones. A recent blog by Steve Slattery, VP and general manager of Cisco's IP Communications Business Unit, made reference to two market research studies that offered up conflicting projections on the future of the desk phone:

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I've been reviewing slides for VoiceCon Orlando, which is always intense. One that's just loaded with great information is the Nemertes Research tutorial on business cases for IP telephony and UC.

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I had a chance to chat recently with Henry Dewing of Forrester Research about Forrester's latest UC report, and the conversation quickly turned to ROI.

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Over at No Jitter, John Bartlett of NetForecast has a blog post that asks a question I expect will be on the minds of an increasing number of enterprise decision makers in the months and years ahead: "Is videoconferencing a second-class citizen on the network?"

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Will the smartphone become your only computer, and if so, what are the implications for the enterprise-in terms of cost and security, among other issues?

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When I wrote on No Jitter last week about cell phones being invisible to presence, I characterized this state of affairs as a bug. But maybe it's really a feature. In any event, is it a critical issue?

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At the opening of this week's Lotusphere, a lot of the talk was about LotusLive, which is IBM Lotus' new offering in the cloud/software-as-a-service (SaaS) market, and Bob Picciano, general manager of IBM Lotus software, talked this solution up as an extranet service -- i.e., one that could connect an enterprise's CPE-based Lotus systems with cloud-based systems used by partners.

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I don't know if Cisco is going to make it as a consumer electronics company, but it's making some really important moves to reposition itself in the enterprise. And it's all about the desktop.

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The voice-over-IP visionaries have always hung out in the consumer space, for the most part; after all, VoIP started out as a subversive, disruptive application whose advocates more or less explicitly predicted that they'd kill the big telcos. A noble goal, and one that proved well beyond their means. Even the wildly successful (and free) Skype didn't come close to killing the carriers.

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Allan Sulkin's latest No Jitter feature details the results of Allan's third annual survey of North American consultants, and the results I found most intriguing had to do with the consultants' experiences and opinions regarding Unified Communications.

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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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