Enterprise Connect Webinars 
Mobile Collaboration: Faster, Smarter, Better
February 15th, 2012
For employees away from the office—whether on the go, at a remote location, or telecommuting from home—success depends on connecting the right people with the right information anywhere to accelerate business. In this webinar you will see how Avaya provides employees with tools that mirror the office work environment, with all of the features they need to communicate faster, smarter, and cost-effectively. Avaya mobile collaboration solutions help ensure employees stay available and productive, no matter where they work. To help you understand the challenges and how you can solve them, Avaya’s Lawrence Byrd is joined in this session by well-known enterprise mobility expert Michael Finneran of dBm Associates and UCStrategies.com.
A Proven Approach—Four Steps to Drive Organizational Video Adoption
February 1st, 2012
Have your video implementation projects fallen short of your expectations in user satisfaction or utilization? Reaping the benefits depends on not only on selecting the technology, but on careful planning, management and adoption programs that fit your unique business. In this webinar, Ira Weinstein, Wainhouse Research and David Danto, Dimension Data will reveal the keys to a successful video rollout. You’ll discover reasons organizations fail to achieve desired results, industry trends that affect your investment decisions, how to overcome typical video deployment challenges, methods for improving the user experience and adoption and proven strategies for maximizing return on investment.
Real-World Lessons for Your UC Migration
January 18th, 2012
As your enterprise moves into its Unified Communications migration, you’ll need to meet short-, medium- and long-term goals that provide investment protection, return on investment, and real business value. In this Enterprise Connect webinar, two industry veterans with a wealth of real-world experience will share their tales from the trenches, offering real-world lessons from actual deployments that they’ve been involved in. They’ll use these examples to draw conclusions that you can apply in your own enterprise, on everything from network planning to security to company organizational issues, and lots more. Sponsored by Black Box Network Services.
Building Cloud Grade Data Center Networks
November 30th, 2011
Industry is ramping up to build private and public cloud infrastructures in an effort to realize the operational efficiencies and cost savings achieved through server consolidation. However, server virtualization is not without its risks. Traffic and I/O requests driven by an increasing number of virtual servers places tremendous stress and higher performance requirements across the end-to-end data center network. Careful planning and pre-deployment risk assessment are necessary to understand how to squeeze the most out of server resources without compromising the reliability and performance of supported applications and services. Enterprise IT also needs comparative performance information to assist them in product differentiation and critical purchase decisions. Today’s data center Ethernet fabric network design implementations require low latency and power consumption and the ability to scale both north-south and east-west flows, all with a minimum number of network tiers. This presentation reviews best practices and tools for implementing data center clouds, including how to pin-point and resolve problems, and minimize cost while maximizing performance and usability. We will discuss new performance benchmarks for evaluating data center switches and adapters functioning in converged and virtualized data centers. Industry expert Nick Lippis will share new test results from multiple vendors for core and edge 10GbE and 40GbE switches. The session includes a 15-minute live question and answer period with experts from Extreme Networks, Ixia, Infonetics and the Lippis Report. Sponsored by Extreme Networks.
Self-Service Comes to Telecom Management: Enterprises Drive Cost Savings with End-User Tools
October 26th, 2011
Cutting expenses and doing more with less is the mantra of the day. Telecom and IT departments are looking toward self-service management and automation strategies as a solution. Telecom equipment vendors offer some self-service capabilities but often times give end-users too many options with little direction. This creates confusion and causes the system administrator to trouble-shoot even more problems. What is needed is a solution that allows an organization to define exactly what an end-user can self-manage and user friendly tools to make it possible. This webinar will focus on the strategies, best practices, and technology surrounding self-service telecom management. The webinar will feature a live enterprise case study presented by Steve Mifsud, Automation and Support Manager, Royal Bank of Canada. Sponsored by Unimax.
Top 3 Reasons Your Network is Slow and How to Fix It
October 12th, 2011
Most organizations today cannot tolerate a slow network and know that business and employee productivity plummets when the end users experience slow application delivery, dropped VoIP calls, connectivity bottlenecks and overall poor performance! But slow networks don’t happen by accident. In this webinar we will review the three top reasons why the network is slow and provide insight into why the problem is occurring and how to resolve it. This webinar will also discuss how the networking team can more effectively demonstrate when the performance problems are not occurring because of the network, but another issue. Join AppNeta CTO Matt Stevens and Terry Slattery, principal consultant at Chesapeake NetCraftsmen, to learn how to ensure that your network is prepared to handle business critical applications, your end users are happy, and you have an answer to why “The Network is Slow!”
Key Steps for a Successful Hosted IP-PBX Implementation
September 28th, 2011
As more enterprises look to take advantage of hosted or “cloud ” communications services, they realize that up-front planning is essential to ensure a seamless and smooth implementation. IT and network managers who have made this transition for their companies realize the importance of planning and identifying the network infrastructure, functional and feature requirements before they made the transition from a premise-based PBX to a hosted IP-PBX solution. In this webinar, you’ll hear from experts with deep real-world experience, who will walk you through the steps you’ll need to take in order to ensure that a successful migration to a hosted IP-PBX infrastructure. Sponsored by XO Communications and Polycom.
The TCO of Cloud-based Contact Centers
September 14th, 2011
Cloud-based contact center solutions can provide significant savings when compared to the TCO of premise-based contact center solutions. In this webinar, call center expert Sheila McGee-Smith will bring you up to date on the state of cloud-based contact centers; and Donald Greco, Director of Siemens Enterprise Communications’ Customer Interaction Practice, will compare the TCO of cloud- and premise-based contact center solutions. You’ll leave with a clear view of what’s possible via the cloud and how to evaluate the financial effects for your contact center. This Webinar is sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications.
Microsoft Lync: Ready for Prime-Time for Large Enterprise Deployments
July 27th, 2011
Enterprises face a number of opportunities and diverse challenges as they try to streamline communication/collaboration and be fiscally responsible to management and shareholders by efficiently controlling costs, while also managing major technology change. These challenges plus the need to accelerate innovation and improve agility are driving major changes to the IT and telecommunication environment of the organization. Microsoft Lync 2010 is the next generation of Unified Communications solutions helping people connect in new ways. A Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Lync Server shows that an organization with 5,000 information workers can realize benefits totaling more than $18M in three years with a ROI of 337% by implementing Lync. Microsoft solution is in the Leaders quadrant of the 2010 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. Lync brings together an ecosystem of partners from systems integrators, ISVs, hardware and infrastructure partners, and key members of these communities will take part in the next Enterprise Connect webinar, on Lync implementation. Attend this webinar to hear leaders from Microsoft and two of its leading Lync partners, Unify Square and NET, discuss how Lync is helping large enterprise companies transform their businesses. You also will learn about the new Solutions and Deployment best practices, for successful large scale global enterprise deployments. Sponsored by NET.
Opening up Business Communications to Skype
June 29th, 2011
Businesses are always interested in improving the way customers can contact them, especially if this can be achieved cost-effectively. One contact channel that holds much potential is the ability to direct calls from the growing Skype community to your SIP-based PBX or UC platform. Given that Skype has over 145 million average monthly connected users, tapping into this channel promises major business benefits to the enterprise. Attend this webinar to hear about the latest trends in cloud communications and how businesses can connect to the Skype community without having to replace their existing infrastructure.
Best Practices for Managing the Performance of Your Video Conferencing Deployments (Those You Know About and Those You Don't)
June 15th, 2011
The latest generation of video conferencing solutions is leading to unparalleled productivity and richer communications, helping to explain the explosion of real-time video-based services on enterprise networks today. Performance sensitive applications such as video conferencing are critically dependent on the health of the network--and if you can't see how it is performing, how do you ensure that your calls and video conferences won't degrade, or get dropped completely? But the interaction between video-conferencing and your network is a two-way street. While key network performance and quality metrics must be measured and managed in order to deliver consistent and predictable call quality from your designated video conference rooms, understanding the use and associated network impact of impromptu desktop-to-desktop video calls on your network (video sprawl...) is also important for overall successful service delivery. This webinar will cover best practices for ensuring your network is up to the task of supporting your video-conference deployments. The webinar will discuss the challenges faced when managing network performance specifically for video-conferencing and how to resolve these issues. AppNeta CTO Matt Stevens and John Bartlett of NetForecast will be your hosts for this session.
SIP Trunk Implementation: Key Steps to Ensuring Interoperability
May 25th, 2011
In this webinar, you will get an understanding of all the factors you need to consider in order to ensure interoperability of all your network elements over a SIP Trunk-based wide area network. A leading consultant with extensive real-world deployment experience will provide a catalogue of the issues and pitfalls, and will spell out the elements that must be integrated as part of a SIP Trunk implementation, describing the challenges and offering solutions. He'll be joined by a leading service provider's representative, who will provide in-depth description and illustration of what a successful, truly integrated SIP Trunk deployment looks like. They'll also answer your questions. You'll walk away from this webinar with a clear idea of the steps you need to take in order to ensure that your SIP Trunking deployment succeeds. Sponsored by XO Communications.
SIP to Softphones: Using End to End Management to Drive Convergence ROI
April 13th, 2011
The business case for SIP and Unified Communications is increasingly compelling, with high expectations for significant cost reductions and increased productivity. But once deployed, turning these expectations into reality is often the biggest challenge. SIP, UC, and VoIP networks often add complexity with an array of different elements from different vendors, as well as increasing demand for voice quality, performance, capacity, support, and service level compliance. To tackle these challenges, enterprises need end-to-end management and unified visibility over every location in the network to isolate and troubleshoot issues with QoS, performance, faults, and SLAs. Deep visibility is also needed throughout the entire "stack," from the network and session layers right up through the application-from SIP at the core to the softphone at the edge. In this webinar, Nemertes Research Principal Research Analyst John Burke is joined by Tone Software Director of Strategic Technology Advancement Amit Kapoor, to detail what it takes to actually implement this level of unified visibility and management, the standards and tools required, and how to make the business case for deploying these tools. You'll come away from the webinar with an action plan for specifying and deploying holistic end-to-end management that helps ensure you can deliver the expected ROI from SIP and UC based communications.
Voice & Unified Communications: State of Security 2011
March 30th, 2011
What's the true state of real-time communications security in 2011? Which are the most serious threats to your enterprise and customers, and which are still, at this stage, more distant prospects?Several industry reports have emerged since the late 1990s detailing real-world, measured security issues and threat levels associated with traditional data networks and IP-based communications. These reports play an important role in profiling and measuring IP and data network threats and incident levels to help guide corporate security decision making, while educating the public at large. Interestingly, a dearth of attack and threat data for voice/UC communications exists, even though voice technologies pre-date IP systems by more than 100 years. A new industry report and webinar from SecureLogix changes this. In this webinar, we will discuss the current, real-world state of security in the realms of enterprise Voice and Unified Communications (UC). Leading security experts from SecureLogix will present real-world findings drawn from documented and observed operational attacks against U.S. corporations over the past year, and compare them with data observed over the past 10 years where relevant.
Best Practices for Successful VoIP/UC Deployments
March 16th, 2011
Today's leading applications are more performance sensitive than ever before. Performance sensitive applications such as VoIP, Video and other UC services are critically dependent on the health of the network - and if you can't see how it is performing, how do you ensure that your calls and video conferences won't degrade, or get dropped completely? As organizations transition from traditional network infrastructure to remotely distributed applications and cloud-based communications services, they are at risk of serious performance problems like latency, loss and jitter. When these parameters are not carefully managed, VoIP & videoconference calls experience serious problems and often fail abruptly. This webinar will cover the challenges of successfully preparing for and rolling out performance sensitive communication services like VoIP, Video and other internet based applications. Apparent Networks CTO Matt Stevens will discuss best practices for ensuring successful deployments, and remotely managing the performance of Unified Communication services at and from remote locations.
Using Mobile Integration to Solve Business Problems
February 16th, 2011
Much has been discussed regarding the integration of IP-PBX and Unified Communication features with mobile phones, and how a seamless mobility solution can drive increased productivity. Features such as single number, single voicemail, PBX feature extension, and abbreviated dialing are often most touted as productivity enhancers. However, while those benefits are real, it's often difficult for IT managers to justify investing in them, as the cost benefits are often "soft" - i.e., they do not result in a direct benefit to the bottom line. This webinar will not focus on those soft benefits - rather, it will examine a number of customer scenarios where mobile integration solved a vexing business problem, enabled the customer to clearly reduce their operational costs, or both! Discussion will hit on a number of verticals, such as healthcare, professional services, manufacturing, and service industries, where features such as call recording, call tracking, and call masking all led to a clear ROI. Presenters will also review how to cost effectively eliminate desk phones and move on-the-go employees to a mobile-only environment with no loss of functionality or connectivity. Please join Al Leo, Vice President - Sales and Business Development, Tango Networks, and Brian Gregory, General Manager, Convergence Marketing, Sprint, on Wednesday, February 16, for an informative discussion on the flexibility, new utilities and solid business benefits of mobile integration.
Best Practices for Achieving a Greater Return on your Enterprise Communications Investment
January 27th, 2011
Unified Communications (UC) is new to many organizations and deployments are complex. Nemertes Research has surveyed over 1,000 companies and found that capital costs account for only 38% of the total first-year expenditure, and only 19% when looking at total cost of ownership over 5 years. Yet, despite this relatively small portion of the total costs, IT staffs tend to focus on capital rather than deployment and operational costs. Nemertes has also found that one of the biggest keys to success is having specialist management tools in place from scratch. Not only do specialty management tools help improve performance; their use correlates with significantly lower implementation and operational costs for both single- and multi-vendor implementations throughout the entire communications platform lifecycle. In this webinar, Nemertes and VOSS Solutions discuss how organizations can achieve a greater return on their VoIP and UC investment by using specialty management tools. Robin Gareiss, EVP and cofounder at Nemertes will present her research findings, and Christopher May of VOSS Solutions will provide real life examples of how organizations have saved over $500 per end unit, per year.
Unified Communications for Small-and Medium-Sized Businesses
November 18th, 2010
Unified Communications (UC) is a requirement for most large enterprises looking to deploy new communications solutions. But is UC applicable for smaller organizations as well? Do they need it, and, more importantly, can they afford it? Historically, many SMBs assumed a UC solution was infeasible for their business due to lack of resources, both financial and personnel. This is no longer the case as vendors are developing UC offerings that are targeted for SMBs with functionality and pricing that can be implemented and scaled as a business grows. Now, UC can be an evolutionary process, allowing companies to start with a solution that meets their basic needs and add capabilities over time. In this webinar, Blair Pleasant, President & Principal Analyst from COMMfusion, and Gary Mading, Senior Product Manager from Aastra, will focus on what SMBs are looking for from UC applications and how these applications can help them meet their business challenges including: Doing "more with less" - improving productivity, support for a mobile workforce, limited IT staff and budgets, empowering workers with increased access to information and improving customer responsiveness. Join us for this informative webinar to learn how to build a UC Business Case for your small or mid-sized business.
Bringing All Your Communication Modes Together—Simply
November 10th, 2010
It's a challenge keeping up with all the ways we can "connect" with someone, via: desk phone, cell phone, email, IM, Facebook or a tweet. With all the different devices, contact directories, user interfaces and underlying technologies, it is time-consuming just managing it all. New classes of enterprise devices are emerging to help users integrate all of these media, connectivity options and user interfaces, and bring together all of these communications channels in an easy-to-use format. Portable devices with wireless connectivity and desktop-docking options are leading the way, by offering exceptionally high-quality audio and video, along with touch-screen interfaces that offer a consistent user experience no matter where the user is, and what network he or she connects over. In this webinar, leading industry technologists and analysts will help you understand the technology and business case that underlie these new devices. You'll learn how the new generation of computing devices provide higher-quality communications while sharply reducing the bandwidth requirements that traditional devices imposed for applications like videoconferencing. You'll also get an understanding of how to make the business case for deploying this new generation of devices within your enterprise. Sponsored by Intel.
Understanding & Protecting Against the Surging Threat of Telephony Denial of Service (TDOS) Attacks
October 27th, 2010
In this webinar, Mark Collier, CTO and Vice President of Engineering for SecureLogix Corp. and long-time Enterprise Connect voice security expert presenter will help you understand how to recognize, profile, and protect against TDOS attacks and fraud schemes inside your business. You'll come away from the webinar with the very latest in TDOS attack profiles and growth trends, an understanding of why TDOS attacks are expanding so rapidly and the implications for your business, very recent real-world examples of TDOS based fraud schemes and other attacks that can be used to identify TDOS activity in your network and an awareness of best practices and TDOS prevention solutions to help ensure the integrity of your business operations.
How to Build a Compelling Business Case for Unified Communications
October 13th, 2010
In the current economy, IT departments must ensure that all new projects align with business goals. So how do you prove that your proposed IPT/UC project delivers true business value? The best way to successfully present the benefits of IP telephony and Unified Communications to management decision makers is with a business case that demonstrates how IPT and UC offer both immediate cost savings, as well as longer-term total cost of ownership and business process benefits. The areas of potential savings with IPT and UC are so numerous and diverse, that you risk not capturing the full cost benefits and strengths in your business case. In this webinar, Robin Gareiss, Executive Vice President & Senior Founding Partner of Nemertes Research and Kevin Gavin, Vice President of Marketing at ShoreTel will help you frame the business case equation and identify all the ways in which your enterprise can benefit from IPT/UC.
