Businesses 'saving costs with UC'

2008-11-20 | Category: General VoIP
Organisations are using unified communications (UC) to lower their costs, according to a security solutions provider.Frank Cabri, vice president of marketing and product management at Facetime, which develops security for 'greynet applications' such as instant messaging and VoIP, explained to TMCnet.com that a wide variety of groups are taking advantage of the burgeoning 'work from anywhere' mentality.This included call centres, hospitality businesses and regulated workplaces such as hospitals."Where organisations in the network are trying to reduce costs and are moving employees to either home offices, semi-permanent or temporary hotel-type offices in a sort of corporate location, they're deploying UC to ensure that the individual is still connected and that people can see that the person is online," he said."They have as many of the benefits as possible as they would if they were sitting a cubicle right next to their fellow employees."Last month, it was revealed in a survey by IDC and InfoWorld magazine that businesses are becoming more sophisticated in their use of UC and what they require from suppliers of the technology.

Worldwide broadband subscribers hit 400m mark

2008-11-20 | Category: Broadband
There are now 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, a new report has indicated.The study, by analysts Point Topic, was put together for the Broadband Forum as the organisation entered its 15th year.Broadband subscription increased almost six-fold from 57,200 worldwide users in 1998 to more than 280,890 the following year.Of the total, some 45 million have fibre-optic connections, up from 18,000 in 2002.According to Point Topic senior analyst Oliver Johnson, when his company began studying the technology it was "still mostly in the technical trial stage"."Getting to 400 million subscribers in the ten years since then has been one of the fastest rollouts of a major new technology the world has ever seen," he said."Now we're in the early days of a new era, which is going to be much more about quality than quantity."The Broadband Forum added that new technologies like IPTV and Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), as well as the continued adoption of fibre, were big talking points at its last quarterly meeting of the year.

Conferencing spend '$2.6bn by 2012'

2008-11-20 | Category: Networking hardware
An estimated $2.6 billion will be spent by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) on conferencing technology by 2012, according to a new report.Research by AMI Partners revealed that the companies, defined as having up to 999 employees, will need IP-based conferencing to help them lower costs as they become more mobile in nature and geographically distributed."In today's tough economic times, driven by the global economic crisis, high travel costs, increase in gas prices and natural disasters, the relevance of conferencing solutions increases enormously," said Sanjeev Aggarwal, the company's vice president for SME infrastructure solutions. "[SMEs] are turning to conferencing solutions that will help reduce costs and provide clearly identifiable ROI and drive business growth."The figure of $2.6 billion represents compound annual growth of 5.9 per cent from 2006, when the total was $1.8 billion.AMI revealed that hosted IP-conferencing is becoming more accessible, though many medium-sized companies (100 to 999 employees) are also using onsite solutions, due to the increasing deployment of IP-PBX hardware.

'Green infrastructure' solution for SMEs

2008-11-19 | Category: Networking hardware
A new service for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may allow firms to save money while helping the environment.ThinkGrid, an IT company, is to provide thin client devices to replace businesses' PCs, which will provide basic functionality like internet access.The IT infrastructure will then be held at a remote data centre, which has been designed with energy efficiency in mind.According to co-founder Rob Lovell, the service will allow SMEs the opportunity to reap benefits which larger organisations have had available for some time, reports BusinessGreen.com."Smaller companies operating between five to 100 PCs have a lot of IT headaches, but they often don't have an IT department and simply don't relate to terminology such as 'virtualisation' and 'thin clients'," he said."As thin clients have no moving parts, using them to replace PCs allows you to move from using up to 300W per machine to using 10W to 30W per machine."The SMEs will also require less air conditioning in their offices due to the lack of heat given off by PCs, allowing further energy bill savings, he added.