I've lost count on how many Unified Communications (UC) platforms are out there. It seems every week there is an announcement on a new vendor launching its own. It does not surprise me, as per most analysts, UC is a growing market with a market cap that is expanding by multiple billions of dollars year over year. Everyone wants a piece of that!

As in most market segments, in the UC market there are those vendors that took a risk and now are market leaders and others that came later, but by flexing their financial muscle were able to buy market share (you know who they are…). There are also the niche vendors that identified an interesting gap and are capitalizing on it. Independent of the type of vendor, in UC, there are base factors that can contribute to success or failure. One of these factors is audio and video quality. It is quite hard to collaborate when you have a poor experience on audio and video calls and conferences. A UC vendor could have the most advanced APIs or integrate with a multitude of applications, but if audio or video quality is not there and adaptable to different network conditions, then it is destined for failure.

“I feel the need – the need for speed!”

If you’ve spent time in or around the telecom industry, then you’ve inevitably heard the term ‘Least Cost Routing (LCR)’. If not, here you go:

I am currently reading the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's a great read on humanity and evolution. One interesting detail is that there were several different species of humans that lived on the earth. Eventually all other species disappeared. Homo sapiens won out in the end, but why?

The future contact center is an exciting place.  Artificial Intelligence will be front and center.  The elements of some of this exist today.

“In Many Cases, Media Servers Make or Break the Real-Time Video Application.”  

So it says in the beginning of the white paper “Building Real-Time Video Apps that Scale” written by BlogGeek.Me. I couldn’t agree more considering media servers are at the heart of real-time communication applications.

Both enterprise and service provider networks, whether PSTN-based, cellular or mobile-based, or IP-based, provide monitoring ability to the administrators of the network.  Most of the network monitoring involves providing analytic information so the network administrators know how the network is behaving.  Some monitoring involves line tapping, both for “lawful intercept,” and in the case of call centers, to help (or hopefully) improve your experience.  Let’s take a further look at some specific monitoring applications.

Video is one of the all-time “killer apps” – allowing users to use their acute sense of vision to see hidden emotion on people’s faces, detect danger, and provide comfort when needed.   Video is quickly becoming the norm for the millennial generation, a feature in many of the social and communications applications.