The Lippis Report

By Siemens Enterprise Communications

The contact center landscape is experiencing significant changes, both in the business model itself and its underlying technology. The ability to access telephony and applications over the Internet has increased the flexibility of the contact center workforce, introducing a new trend: the work-at-home agent. Driven by a greater need for both flexibility and cost control, cloud contact center solutions (also known as hosted contact centers) are seeing double-digit growth rates. Cloud contact centers provide a number of business benefits: improved business agility, decreased capital expense, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This white paper provides a best practices for exploiting cloud base contact centers securely, with compliance controls and built-in disaster recovery.

By Siemens

Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) enhances the value of existing Microsoft investments, by combining communications tools, from SEN and Microsoft, and others into a single, manageable interface, and simplifying the way users communicate and share information. By integrating with current Microsoft application ecosystem, knowledge works can continue to use familiar user interfaces with the added benefits of rich, user-centric presence and click-to-contact/click-to-conference. The bottom line is, SEN can unify all communications together into one, simple, seamless experience and deliver innovative business solutions that integrate, complement, and extend the value of Microsoft products.

By Siemens Enterprise Communications, Inc.

Until recently, technologies such as unified communications (UC) might have seemed strictly the domain of big business. Now, though, UC goes straight to the heart of many of the SMB challenges you face.

The Inflobox plug-in module for VMware’s vCenter Orchestrator promises to bridge network and virtual IT team silos by enabling automated assignment of IP addresses to VMs. The Infloblox plug-in enables IP addresses to be automatically assigned to virtual machines in less than a minute and then constantly monitored and managed, which simplifies troubleshooting, accelerates time to value and offers greater flexibility for the virtual team. Steve Garrison, VP Marketing for Infoblox and I discuss the problems of networking in virtualized environments and how Infoblox’s vCenter plug-in solves them.

By Extreme Networks

Several technology inflection points are coming together that are fundamentally changing the way networks are architected, deployed and operated, both in the public and private cloud. From performance, to scale, to virtualization support and automation to simplified orchestration, the requirements are rapidly changing and driving new approaches to building data center networks. This white paper does an excellent job at articulating cloud-scale network architecture via an open fabric that accounts for all major industry trends.

By (IDC) 

The consumerization of IT is helping to drive a shift towards collaborative applications convergence. Employees want to plug their consumer technology experiences into their daily work lives. Particularly, IDC believes the industry is on a trend to combine key technologies, such as email, instant messaging (IM), team workspaces, video, voice, Web conferencing and social features into a single “superset” user environment. This Technology Spotlight discusses collaborative applications and explores the role that Avaya plays in this increasingly important market.

By Cisco Systems

The Apollo Group, owner of the University of Phoenix and other educational properties doubled the size of its network without an increase in IT staff, lowered per-port switching cost while increasing port volume and freed up several rows of space in its data centers. This white paper describes how the Apollo Group achieved this transformation.

by Force10 Networks

Cloud computing is an emerging computing model that promises a new era of flexibility and control in providing data center resources. In the cloud model, data center managers can mix and match computing, storage, and networking resources to provide an agile and highly flexible resource for customer applications. To realize the full potential, this paradigm requires open, standardized interfaces between data center layers of compute resources, the network, and storage elements. While the industry has moved toward open computing and storage layers over the past few years, networking has remained largely proprietary. Force10’s Open Cloud NetworkingSM framework is intended to unlock the network layer so data center operators can get the most out of their data center architectures and, in turn, get the most out of their cloud deployments.

By Evangelyze Communications, LLC

With a broad series of new Unified Communications (UC) and collaboration offerings by Avaya and Microsoft, IT organizations have been prompted to evaluate their UC strategy. Microsoft promises to lower the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a UC platform by leveraging an all-encompassing software powered communications environment integrated with its Microsoft Office™ suite through the release of Microsoft Lync, while Avaya introduces its newly released UC platform through Avaya Aura.

The purpose of this whitepaper is to clearly identify the comparisons between both provider’s UC offerings through a process of evaluating value that matter to IT organizations in selecting the right UC platform.

By Robin Gareiss Nemertes Research

Although line shipments for IP telephony have outstripped TDM for some time, many organizations have not yet fully replaced their TDM phones. In fact, only 17% of companies have fully deployed the technology, and the bulk of those are small and midsize businesses. Larger organizations have rolled out the technology in a spotty manner where the TDM system is end-of-life, or other tactical reasons. IT organizations are evaluating the economics, plus desktop IP phones investment when people increasingly rely on mobile devices and soft clients.

Many others are re-evaluating the market as they solidify unified-communications plans and once again contemplate go-forward strategy for IPT. Will they use the same vendor(s)? Will they shift to a hosted- or managed-services model? And what is the true business case? Understanding the true costs is crucial to a successful business case—and a cost-effective implementation.

To create a seamless collaboration environment for mobile and remote workers, Avaya has fully embraced mobile computing by integrating Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Symbian mobile endpoints plus Windows and Mac computing into its Aura core infrastructure. In this podcast Avaya’s VP of Unified Communications Product Marketing, Nancy Maluso, discusses Avaya’s UC mobile collaboration strategy and how IT business leaders can put this technology to work in their corporation.

The UC market is rapidly moving toward a cloud service for the small to medium business (SMB) market, thanks to Siemens Enterprise Communications and others offering powerful communications and office productivity software delivered as a service. Cloud services offer the SMB market with some of the same IT services that large enterprises enjoy, but without the complexity and cost. For example, Siemens has been working with Google to offer its OpenScape Cloud Service that integrates features into Google applications, like click to call/conference, etc. In this Lippis Report podcast, I talk with Paul McMillan, Director UC Technical Vision & Strategy at Siemens Enterprise Communications, about the SMB market and how its OpenScape Cloud Services is offering new, innovative solutions that allows these firms to be more competitive and agile.

By Cisco Systems

Deploying network services in virtual data centers is extremely challenging. Traditionally, such Layer 4 through 7 services relied on intrusive, inline deployment and static network topologies. They were thus completely at odds with highly scalable virtual data center designs with mobile workloads, on-demand virtual machine (VM) provisioning, and strict service-level agreements (SLAs).

Cisco® Unified Network Services (UNS) addresses all of these problems by creating a framework for multiple services that can be configured and provisioned on demand, dynamically, to suit the service needs of enterprise applications and cloud users. This dramatically reduces network management overhead, allowing for a much more agile data center and business while providing improved application performance and a secure infrastructure. Cisco UNS comprises Cisco’s industry-leading solutions for virtual data centers that deliver.

● Load balancing and application controllers
● WAN acceleration
● Network security
● Network analysis and monitoring

I am happy to announce the availability of our second round of industry data center switching performance and power consumption test evaluating 10/40GbE fabrics. 



Test week is scheduled for April 4-8, 2011. Equipment suppliers have until end of day PT March 11, 2011 to signup, but don’t wait until then, as test slots will be gone. There are only a few test spots available as we have received a number of commitments already. 



The test prospectus can be downloaded HERE detailing logistics, test methodology, schedule, test result promotion and FAQs. 





The Spring 2011 test report license agreement is available too. Please request a copy by sending email to nick@lippis.com with “license agreement” in the subject.