The Lippis Report

December 3rd, 2007

By Avaya

With four regional campuses and a presence in almost every county in Virginia, Marshall University serves an estimated 16,000 students annually. Marshall University competes to attract the best and the brightest students, it also is striving to manage its costs by creating a scaleable communications infrastructure to bridge its growth into the future. Communications technology is also critical to providing the campus security and emergency preparedness that a 21st Century Marshall University demands. Arnold Miller, assistant vice president of information technology, explains that attracting the best students with innovative courses that are delivered online as well as in classrooms is only part of the equation. Marshall needs to ensure that its telecommunications and infrastructure methodology “is as up to date as its course structure too.” In this white paper, Marshall University demonstrates how it lowered cost, increased services and tied communications tightly into strategic university initiatives.

December 3rd, 2007

By Cisco Systems

This white paper provides a framework to guide business and IT leaders toward a pervasive unified communication migration by connecting UC islands over the wide area via SIP trunks. Most enterprise UC networks are islands relative to other such enterprise networks, interconnected by the public switched telephone network (PSTN) using older time-division multiplexing (TDM) trunking technology. The PSTN is used for all extra-enterprise or extra-campus communication with other businesses and, in some cases, even with remote branches within the enterprise itself. This imposes limitations on intra- and inter-business communications due to the inherent limitations of TDM technology. As service provider SIP offerings increase, an organization can gracefully migrate services from TDM trunks to Unified Communications trunks as needed, minimizing risk.

December 3rd, 2007

By Insignia for Siemens Communications

Unified Communications (UC) is a relatively new technology solution category with a lot of different definitions. This research summary describes several categories of latent cost that are unnecessarily borne by businesses of every industry and size each year. Insignia Research, a global marketing research firm headquartered in Toronto, set out to objectively and comprehensively measure the nature and impact of communications friction, latency and overload — based on the real-world experience of those who know best — knowledge workers. The study clearly identifies, prioritizes, validates and quantifies the pain, frustration and costs (both monetary and customer satisfaction) that is endured in the typical organization today.