The cost savings, increased functionality, improved productivity and mobility offered by VoIP is fast making it a business priority. But what are key factors to consider when evaluating and choosing a VoIP provider, and how can you be sure that the vendor you select will be flexible enough to meet the growing needs of your company?

It's getting tougher out there. Many IT managers want to invest in new technology, but are struggling to make the case. Spiralling energy costs have eclipsed savings on cheap hardware, while users don't seem to be able keep corporate data secure. The risk grows with every new mobile device added to the mix. Help is at hand. New, low energy technology that minimises the risk to data integrity could be the answer. This session explores the new innovations in thin client converged communications.

Whilst many enterprises have seen both cost and operational benefits in the deployment of VoIP, it is the further migration to unified communications that promises true business transformation. But, with so many VoIP implementations running into difficulties, management tools and management operations also need to be unified through each stage of the project. This session discusses how to ensure availability and performance of key network, system and application services on the road from VoIP to unified communications.

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?

Service providers face increasingly complex challenges in turning an 'empty network' into one that is efficiently delivering VoIP services, without a slow and complex process of manual service provisioning - these challenges are particularly acute when serving enterprise customers. In response, service providers are investing in more integrated and automated VoIP delivery processes that provide a coherent model of subscribers and services. These integrated systems also help to meet the customer demand for more sophisticated self-service portals that provide a complete view of services and users, including automated service activation.

You can send an email to anyone you want by entering their address. Your mail server finds theirs and delivers the message across the Internet with no fuss. If only VoIP were as simple. If only you could dial someone's number, have your VoIP server find their VoIP server and make the call across the Internet, no call charges, no telco, just like email. Well you can, all you need is ENUM...

Today, VoIP is much less a disruptive influence and much more a mainstream technology. This session looks at how the unified communications evolution will continue to keep VoIP in the headlines and what that means for your business.

13,000 HP employees worldwide work exclusively from home offices. In 2007 HP's teleworking program saved almost 2.5 million round trip commutes, saving approximately 65 million miles of road travel and almost 28,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions. This presentation will look at the implementation of flexible working practices within HP both in the UK and worldwide. It will examine the challenges which were encountered from both a technological and cultural perspective, look at the tools which HP employees use to communicate with each other, and explore the benefits that have accrued to the organisation.

Whilst many enterprises have seen both cost and operational benefits in the deployment of VoIP, it is the further migration to unified communications that promises true business transformation. But, with so many VoIP implementations running into difficulties, management tools and management operations also need to be unified through each stage of the project. This session discusses how to ensure availability and performance of key network, system and application services on the road from VoIP to unified communications.

VoIP flows differ from many other application flows because they are real-time and peer-to-peer. For traditional applications, a lack of resources can result in deterioration of application performance, but for VoIP, these results in the service being unavailable. What steps should an organisation take to ensure that the deployment of VoIP applications does not make overall WAN performance unpredictable, endangering both the VoIP rollout and existing application performance.

As the world moves from dedicated voice systems to voice applications and unified communication, techniques for testing and verification of all components and services becomes not only essential but critical for successful implementations. This session will explore testing and monitoring strategies for ensuring that this new generation of technology meets customer, employee, and call centre agent expectations while providing the bottom-line benefits originally intended.

Enterprises are striving to maximise the potential of their infrastructure and collaborate across geographical boundaries and time zones. Achieving increased productivity and profitability are critical management objectives. Unified Communications solutions are increasingly being viewed as a means of realising this objective. Verizon Business will present how enterprises can leverage their capabilities and and the migration paths available to them.

Web 2.0 and collaboration technologies are widely predicted to drive massive productivity gains for businesses over the next decade and radically transform the way people work. This session describes the major transformations that will take place and the technology implications

Unified communications and collaboration can connect your customers, employees, partners and suppliers no matter where they are and at any time. This session looks at how to deliver great service to your customers, get more from your partners and suppliers and give your organisation the agility to achieve competitive advantage

These are challenging times, with organisations facing continuous change, including the shift to an agile virtual organisation, increasingly mobile workers, and the unremitting demands to increase productivity and lower costs. The requirement for a multi-channel IP network and unified communications to support all an organisation’s interaction needs has never been more evident. It is becoming increasingly important for IT management to begin to make possible the availability of common communication services, either by infrastructure upgrades or through Managed Services. If organisations have not already, then enterprises should look to put in place the foundation of a converged IP environment.

Andrew Penn will discuss likely scenarios familiar to IT teams across the UK and will look at how current infrastructure need not determine future Unified Communications technologies. Looking across the IT product and service spectrum, this master class will help the IT professional understand what and where their legacy systems are. By using this knowledge they can determine the path to Unified Communications understanding how, with a flexible system and service lead approach, organisations can ensure they are able to adapt to meet the changing needs of both their users and customers.

This session will provide an insight into the latest technologies that will influence the way you operate your business and how you can enable your employees to communicate more effectively.

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

Having a unified communications strategy is fast becoming an enterprise must-have. This session shows you how to align your communications roadmap with your business strategy and how this can help you build the business case for unified communications.

“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.

The Web has evolved from a content distribution vehicle into a platform for collaborative applications. A new generation of on-demand applications are leveraging the reach and scale of the Web to make us better informed, more productive and completely connected. How will the changing software landscape impact the way we work and who will benefit?

Whether your company is already crafting your UC strategy, deploying UC technologies across your enterprise, or just beginning to investigate the UC phenomenon that seems to be one of the most talked about trends in many years, Microsoft and Aspect have formed an alliance to help meet your needs. By bringing unified communications to the contact centre, companies will be able to deliver better customer service, sales and collections results by being able to seamlessly access subject matter experts across the enterprise. Hear how consumer experiences will dramatically improve when organisations start leveraging Unified Communications.

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.

Unified communications infrastructures must systematically incorporate security features and use well-known security techniques. This session discusses the security that should be foremost in your mind when evaluating or implementing a UC product or solution in your company

All the leading vendors recommend that customers actively ensure their networks are ready for unified communications deployments. Additionally, experience shows that post-deployment a unified communications environment should be pro-actively monitored in terms of availability, capacity and call quality to ensure continued success. In this session you will learn how to successfully deploy, monitor and troubleshoot unified communications deployments.

Guaranteeing the performance of critical applications over the network while preserving the performance of all other applications and controlling telecom costs is a fundamental goal for all organisations. This session demonstrates how implementing and maintaining the integrity of high priority and critical collaboration, conferencing and VoIP applications can be guaranteed and protected during times of high network traffic

Teleworkers have to make maximum use of the communication tools available to keep in touch with people, whether that’s their employer, their client or their colleagues. Aside from work requirements they are also social human beings and need mechanisms that substitute or compensate for all the informal communication that goes on between co-located colleagues. This session will consider communications from the individual human perspective and will incorporate examples from both the public and private sector. It will provide a background against which to evaluate the various technology options for ensuring that teleworkers and remote workers are integrated with, and able to contribute to, the overall objectives and culture of their organisation.

Calls for a work/life balance are being made as workers are spending an increasing amount of time at work. Senior management, while resistant to this idea, are slowly realising that in order to retain and recruit staff, they must begin to provide alternatives. However, before adopting homeworking, it is critical to understand both the challenges and opportunities homeworking present. This session explores homeworking and demonstrates that supporting home workers doesn't have to be a burden for the IT manager.

With the business workforce becoming increasingly mobile, employees need to have access to enterprise applications and communication tools wherever their workspace is located. Hear about the latest innovations in mobile Unified communications technology and customers who have achieved real business results.

Many vertical industries see VoIP as a cost-effective solution yielding many benefits. This session describes the fundamentals of the business case for enabling VoIP covering productivity, collaboration and cost efficiency.

This session will provide valuable insight into how Hosted IP Telephony and Mobile VoIP has been used to deploy simple, scalable and secure remote solutions for teleworkers both in the UK and abroad. In these scenarios combining Hosted IP Telephony with Mobile VoIP ensures the teleworker is simply seen as an extension of your main system with features such as Call Recording, Call Reporting and Unified Messaging available as standard to users whether they are located in small remote offices, home based workers or even teleworkers constantly on the move.

With the growing choice and maturity of mobile computing and communications platforms; flexible and home working has become ever-more achievable for an increasing percentage of the working population. However, whilst much emphasis is places on designing and implementing the requisite technical infrastructure and devices, the considerations related to end-user training and support are equally important but often over-looked. And yet, without the correct application of these new technologies and applications within the targeted user communities, the anticipated productivity and efficiency savings will not be realised. Consequently, output may actually suffer if employees fail to make changes to their working practices and their approach to team working.

In this presentation, a&o will outline their “working without boundaries” vision, and the key considerations for enterprises embarking on mobile working and/or unified communications projects. We will highlight the importance of taking an “end-to-end” approach to the provision of the ICT infrastructure as well as the associated IT service management processes. We will also present an overview of our cost-effective service offerings, which are designed to provide superior service levels for mobile workers – locally, nationally and internationally.

From desktop to mobile: realising the end-to-end unified communications solution.
The service provider opportunity: delivering differentiated unified communications and mobile services to SMEs
Mobile presence and location-aware context: intelligence and semantic priority in the mobile environment

Calls for a work/life balance are being made as workers are spending an increasing amount of time at work. Senior management, while resistant to this idea, are slowly realising that in order to retain and recruit staff, they must begin to provide alternatives. However, before adopting homeworking, it is critical to understand both the challenges and opportunities homeworking present. This session explores homeworking and demonstrates that supporting home workers doesn't have to be a burden for the IT manager.

Unified Communications is a culture change. The old command and control structure is being replaced by a more collaborative way of working. Is your organisation threatened by this, or embracing new ways of working? Your people are your best assets and Unified Communications changes the rules. Others are ready, are you?