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.

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...

VoIP is now accepted as the way forward for voice infrastructure so whenever new systems are required, enterprises will consider both in-house and hosted VoIP solutions. This session looks at case studies of outsourced VoIP solutions for medium and large businesses, the problems the solutions had to address, and how the offerings available succeeded in providing answers

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.

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.

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.

Today’s dynamic business climate sees organisations embracing communications technology as a tool for differentiation and improved business agility. Using references to best practice, practical illustrations and case studies, this session looks at how to create a collaborative business across diverse environments with unified communications

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Successfully deploying advanced services such as VoIP on today’s complex multi-vendor, multi-technology networks is a challenge for service providers and their enterprise customers, particularly with automated service activation through portals. A key ingredient in efficiently delivering and assuring VoIP services is accurate network data showing exactly which network devices, cards and ports are involved in a given business VoIP service, enabling service activation with low fallout, and ensuring rapid diagnosis and resolution of faults that are often reported as simply "my phone doesn't work".

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.

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

With the rise in teleworking, organisations are seeking ways to implementing VOIP for remote user in a secure and reliable way. Microsoft’s Office Communications Server integrates IM, Presence, Conferencing and Voice all of which the remote user can access. This talk looks at the security issues in providing Voice and focuses on key security aspects.