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Five Key Trends To Watch In Unified Communications

IT leaders are rethinking their voice and UC deployment plans, says consultant Irwin Lazar. Those technologies with demonstrable cost savings such as SIP trunking (96 percent are deploying, planning to deploy, or evaluating SIP trunking) continue to move forward.

But replacement of TDM endpoints with IP has slowed as IT managers struggle with the costs associated with infrastructure upgrades at a time when mobility and telecommuting raise questions about return from such investments.

UC adoptions continue to increase, with nearly 88 percent of companies having at least some UC plans. Delivering on-premise web conferencing as part of a Microsoft Office Communications Server installation is gaining traction; while adding click-to-call or desktop video to supplement voice is more difficult to justify.

Video deployments continue to increase, but usually require some business case, such as reducing travel costs.

Five Key Trends To Watch In Unified Communications

comScore Reports Android Made Biggest Share Gains in May

Some 49.1 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May, up 8.1 percent from the corresponding February period.

RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 41.7 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft with 13.2 percent.

Google saw significant growth during the period, up four percentage points to capture 13 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent.

Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow.

comScore Reports May 2010 U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share

Firms Embrace Social Media

About 72 percent of executives recently surveyed say they have a social media strategy in place. Of firms without an existing strategy, 80 percent say they will create one within the next 12 months. As you would expect, 85 percent of survey respondents say that original content is critical to the success of their social media campaigns.

Branded original and expert content is used more often than any other type of content, and audience development is one of the top objectives of marketers.

That finding alone points up what has become increasingly obvious with the growth of blogging and other self-publishing platforms. These days, firms themselves have become "media," producers of content. That obviously should have some important impact on the use of, support of, and health of traditional "media" outlets, shouldn't it?

In a sense, firms face a new sort of "build versus buy" decision in areas that used to be part of the marketing budget devoted to "advertising" and "web" spending. Firms can find "media" that already have aggregated the target audience, or firms can do their own media and create the target audience. In the former case, firms will "buy" placement in existing media, while in the latter case they will create their own media, and shift spending that used to go to "advertising" into "content production and distribution."

Fully 43 percent of respondents said they don’t need to show positive return on investment to get social media funding from their organization, as it apparently is clear to all that something new is beginning and the important thing right now is to get started, start learning and refine techniques as successful practices and approaches are discovered.

King Fish Media study, co-sponsored by HubSpot and Junta42, surveyed more than 450 senior management and marketing executives on their social media investments as part of the study.

As you would expect for activities that still are considered experimental, only nine percent of surveyed organizations have full-time positions dedicated to managing social media responsibilities, while 90 percent include those as part of someone’s overall responsibilities.

About 85 percent of companies are handling their social media efforts internally.

Two thirds of the company’s surveyed (67 percent) focus their social media efforts on their company as a whole, while 41 percent promote individuals within the company and 24 percent promote a specific brand.

Some 73 percent of respondents said original branded content was key, while 72 percent said expert content was important.

Video content (51 percent), user case studies (45 percent), and reviews (41 percent) are also used by roughly half of all respondents.

There seems a clear understanding that social media and networking are becoming more important, but it is just as clear that marketers are still struggling to identify best practices.  If you remember how the World Wide Web first was used by firms, and how it developed, you know it is part of the process.

That understanding also explains why 64 percent of firms aren’t yet requiring definitive measurable ROI to justify their social media budgets.

To download the complete findings of the King Fish Media Survey, go here http://www.kingfishmedia.com/marketing-resources/research/social-media-usage-2010/.

Apple is the 800-Pound Gorilla in Music, No Matter What Some May Say

Apple’s dominance of the download market is a huge deal, Forrester Research analyst Mark Mulligan says. "I’d argue that EMI and WMG are actually downplaying the importance," he says.   It’s not in their interest to scare investors. And Apple's dominance might be a cause for concern.

Apple’s dominance is such that would be new entrants have to think as a priority about what their "Apple strategy" should be.  Should they be MP3 or build an iPhone app?  Should they integrate themselves into the iTunes ecosystem or co-exist?

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"More Bandwidth" Does Not Necessarily Cure Latency Issues

Though it can help, increasing bandwidth on any network experiencing latency issues does not necessarily fix the problem.

Congestion and forwarding delay are the more important types of latency on an network, and are not entirely independent. As a network element is subjected to heavy load, it may need additional queue time to handle and
process the increased volume of traffic, which causes forwarding delay.

But there are other sources, as well. Serialization delay is the most constant, having only a small influence on end-to-end latency. Propagation delay, typically stable in circuit-switched networks, can be irregular and introduce jitter over routed networks.

As network congestion can have a large impact on end-to-end latency, affecting both forwarding and pure congestion (queuing-related) delay.

Reducing traffic bottlenecks therefore is a key part of network management and design. Increasing capacity (available bandwidth) should, at least in theory, help reduce congestion when applied to network “pinch points”.

However, increasing throughput does not always lead to the expected decrease in latency, even if
congestion is reduced. Results will vary depending on implementation, network architecture, traffic
patterns, and a number of other factors.

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Dark Fiber, Wavelengths, Capacity Issues

Abovenet’s Bill LaPerch, Zayo’s Dan Caruso, Allied Fiber’s Hunter Newby, USMetroTel’s Frank Mambuca, and CityTel’s NiQ Lai talk about long-haul and metro wholesale, dark fiber and high-bandwidth access in this webcast. 
http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-eventDetails&c=147513&eventID=3291152