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.

VoIP is not limited to the fixed space and is equally at home in wireless networks. This session looks at best practice, practical illustrations and case studies to show how VoIP can be exploited to provide extended reach and mobility allowing your company to get more out of its IP telephony investments

Once VoIP has been deployed across the enterprise the challenge is how you combine it into applications such as ERP and CRM to create a presence-enabled and communications-enabled business. This session will take a close look at the fundamentals of integrating business processes and applications.

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...

Telephony applications are evolving quicker than ever before with development driven by changing regulations, varying business demands, budgetary issues and Disaster Recovery considerations. This session looks at how hosted and managed services such as landline and VoIP call centre applications, voice recording and mobile recording addresses these challenges, assisting organisations to both leverage and reduce their risk.

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.

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.

Using communications technology for competitive advantage is key to the real time enterprise. This session discusses how enterprises can use a software powered VOIP foundation to integrate into applications, enhance collaboration and mobile working via streamlined communication while maintaining operational control.

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

It’s always been a bit of a puzzle keeping colleagues, suppliers and customers in touch, both in and out of the office, particularly if you are a small business with limited resources. Well now that's changed. This session looks at a unified communications solution built specifically for small businesses, that can reduce operating costs, improve customer service, and help you work better together, wherever you are.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

In this session you will learn how to unify wired and wireless networks to deliver secure common services both inbuilding and across the campus, and how to deliver operational efficiencies and an enhanced user experience.

Wireless Internet is becoming more popular among businesses who want the increased freedom and practicality that 'going wireless' can offer. This session looks at branding opportunities, guest wireless services and location based content.

By some estimates up to 50% of employees work off-site at least part of the time. How can organisations keep their business running smoothly and make applications available in this new reality? Learn the strategies and solutions in this ‘how to’ session.