Unified Communications and Collaboration: Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility and Innovation

These are challenging times, with organisations facing continuous change, including the shift to a more agile, virtual organisation, increasingly mobile workers, and the unremitting demands to increase productivity and lower costs. The requirement for a multi-channel IP network and unified communications to support all of an organisation’s interaction and collaboration needs has never been more evident.

It is becoming increasingly important for IT management to begin to lay the foundations for the availability of integrated common communication services, either by infrastructure upgrades or through Managed Services. If organisations have not already, then Butler Group recommends that enterprises should put in place the foundation of a converged IP environment, along with exploiting unified communications and the latest collaboration mechanisms.

Section 1: Management Summary

1.1 Management Summary

Section 2: Introduction

2.1 Report Introduction and Objectives

2.2 Providing Communication Services

2.3 The Collaboration Environment

Section 3: Business Strategies

3.1: Cost Reduction

3.2 Process Enablement

3.3 Working Practices

3.4 Improving Collaboration

Section 4: Planning and Implementation

4.1 Issues

4.2 Assessment

4.3 Organisational Impact

4.4 Deployment

Section 5: Unified Communications Architecture

5.1 Platform Architecture

5.2 Physical Layer

5.3 Network Layer

5.4 Session Layer

5.5 Presentation Layer

5.6 Application Layer

Section 6: Unified Collaboration Systems

6.1 Applications

6.2 Systems and Solutions

6.3 Services

6.4 Devices

Section 7: Case Studies

7.1 Case Studies

Section 8: Market Analysis

8.1 Convergence Solution Adoption

8.2 Market Trends

8.3 Vendor Selection

8.4 Vendor Analysis

Section 9: Vendor Profiles

Alcatel-Lucent

Avaya Inc.

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Ericsson, Inc.

Eurodata Systems

HP

IBM Corporation

Interactive Intelligence, Inc.

Microsoft Corporation

Mitel Networks Corporation

NEC Unified Solutions, Inc.

Nortel Networks Corporation

Novell, Inc.

ShoreTel, Inc.

Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEC) GmbH & Co. KG

TeleWare plc

Vocera Communications Inc.

Section 10: Glossary