Unified communications has the potential to create a new breed of knowledge workers, if a clear, organisation-wide implementation strategy and plan are laid out. For the enterprise, UC will deliver a more efficient, anytime, anywhere business environment. This in turn will lead to faster decision-making, better acceptance and use of collaborative tools, work-life balance improvement and an outstanding customer experience. So, is this communications utopia?

Unified communications comprises a powerful set of converged network applications that can directly enhance all aspects of a company’s operation. This session discusses the characteristics of unified communications, its ability to enhance the quality of the interaction across the enterprise and how it can be used to optimise application performance according to the unique needs of each business

Unified communications innovations span networks, devices and applications and extend customer value by adding increasingly powerful features. This session looks the latest conferencing innovations and how they integrate into existing messaging platforms.

“The largest single value of Unified Communications is its ability to reduce "human latency" in business processes,” Gartner Group, 2007. Unified Communications (UC) is set to be the key theme for enterprise communications in 2008. Solutions such as the Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) are tearing down the boundaries between an enterprise customer’s telephony and computer networks, and “unifying” all types of business communication. Ultimately, UC will deliver massive benefits for enterprise in terms of business efficiencies and productivity, and reduce the problem of “Human Latency.”

This presentation will outline a number of examples of effective UC in action. But UC is still at a very early stage of its development and it cannot be expected to deliver results overnight. The many different types of communications used in business - instant messaging, VoIP, mobile, video, e-mail, voicemail and SMS – still exist in isolation from one another and often depend on completely separate network infrastructures. So what’s the fastest way to bring all this together without another huge round of network investment? The elements and applications that make up today's UC construct do not require a complete IP or VoIP infrastructure to deliver their business process and bottom line benefits. Instead, this presentation explains great results can be delivered adding many UC capabilities on current PBX and PSTN networks with an effective gateway strategy, which can serve as the “glue” between different types of network.

In this session Richard McCammond will discuss the changing face of telephony as Carriers migrate from traditional PSTN services to the new world of VoIP and IP Telephony. Richard will explore how Carriers are addressing the technology challenges in their core networks, and finish by looking at the opportunity for organisations and consumers to benefit from the integration of voice with other “Collaborative” applications.

Every business starts along the path to unified communications - where speed, reliability and network capacity are of the utmost importance - with a unique set of needs and an existing infrastructure. This session describes how companies should go about planning and implementing unified communications in these circumstances

This session describes the business benefits that can be achieved by unifying infrastructure, bringing life and intelligence to buildings through simplifying systems, making sure security is at the forefront of business operations, reducing the carbon footprint and cutting the energy bill and reducing costs and increasing your productivity. The session will also describe proven solutions in these areas by referencing a number of case studies.

Andrew Penn will discuss and investigate ways in which Unified Communications software products can be integrated with legacy platforms including Siebel and Salesforce.Com. In particular, this session will highlight the business benefits of such integration and what users can expect. It will also confirm how important it is to have an open architecture with open interfaces so that application integration is made simple.

Branch office architectures are evolving, inheriting more applications, services, features and functions usually contained at corporate headquarters sites while LAN architectures are also undergoing a fundamental change. This session looks at the impact of so-called ubiquitous computing on the next generation remote office, discusses the benefits and potential pitfalls, and reviews the technologies involved.