Unified Communications

Join us for our Intro to Box series, a monthly discussion of the latest in
the world of enterprise IT, content collaboration, cloud technology, and Box.
We'll cover an overview of Box, how businesses like yours are changing the
way they work with Box and other cloud technologies, and walk through a
demo of the latest and greatest in the product. The sessions will be led by
Box product experts, and you might even get a guest appearance from one of
our fearless leaders.

Join us for a 30-minute live session every Friday, where we’ll tour the RingCentral interface, discuss the latest innovations and features available on the RingCentral platform, and share best practices on leveraging cloud communications for your business. This session features a live demo of RingCentral Office and an open Q&A session led by a Sales Engineer. This week tune in and learn how your employees can hold multi-point HD video meetings around the world, anytime and anywhere with RingCentral Meetings.

Practical Machine Learning using Ensemble Methods

Do you have visibility into all the applications running on your network, their traffic patterns and bandwidth consumption? For critical business services and applications it is essential to understand exactly how your network is being used and to effectively manage resources to meet availability and performance expectations.

Join Wilson Leong, Sr Principal Consultant at CA Technologies on this webcast, to learn how the CA Network Flow Analysis (NFA) solution provides you the capability to understand how, what and where network traffic is flowing across your production environment to ensure you:

• Solve performance problems faster with complete visibility of network consumption
• Optimise the network infrastructure for application performance with effective workload scheduling and QoS policies
• Make more-informed infrastructure investments by understanding the impact of application rollouts and future capacity requirements

Join us for a 30-minute live session every Friday, where we’ll tour the RingCentral interface, discuss the latest innovations and features available on the RingCentral platform, and share best practices on leveraging cloud communications for your business. This session features a live demo of RingCentral Office and an open Q&A session led by a Sales Engineer.

The advent of SDN (Software Defined Networking) is proving to be a disruptive force in the networking market. SDN represents an architectural approach to cleanly separate the control and data functions of a switch or a router. Even though mass adoption is still two to three years away, the impacts are already being felt in the industry as witnessed by the tremendous venture capital investment made in this space and over $1.5 billion spent in SDN company mergers and acquisitions.
In this webinar, we will examine the following SDN-related topics:

• SDN: evolutionary or revolutionary?
• Drivers & restraints
• Use cases
• Market timing and an early attempt at market sizing
• Competitive landscape: distinct strategies taken by established vendors and new startups
• The role of the OpenFlow standard
• Early adopters: data centers and enterprises
• Enterprise, cloud and service provider impacts
• Software-only SDN: will this solution enjoy a broad adoption?
• Implications to existing vendors: will SDN commoditize existing vendors’ hardware?
• VC investment spurring growth: over 225 SDN vendors today
• Future outlook

SDN is yet another instance of the ongoing phenomenon of the “ITfication” of the telecom industry that will make its presence felt over the next few years.

Today’s businesses are moving faster than ever to adopt new technology like VoIP to enhance voice functionality or save money. But there is more to VoIP than just enhanced calling features; it’s now about the integration into a business’ day-to-day workflow. This webinar will explain how today’s business must understand the UC strategy between call flow and workflow.

More and more companies are moving away from a centralized physical structure and allowing employees to work from home or remotely when traveling on business. In 2013, there were an estimated 28 million small businesses in the United States. These businesses have generated over 65% of net new jobs since 1995.

So how do small businesses or for that matter, businesses of any size, keep up with competition in the USA and internationally? One of the answers is to incorporate the concepts of a “virtual business” and employ the rapidly evolving technologies generally called cloud communications.

Some of the topics to be discussed:
- Telecommuting: The ability to have employees work from their homes or while traveling on business yet appear as if they are working from the office.
- Be Local, Act Global: The ability to expand into new markets or even countries, without having to expand your office.
- Contingency Planning: How a virtual business can become more resilient in light of natural or manmade disruptions to business.

Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, has been sold to enterprises for over 10 years. It is the defacto telephony platform technology used in today’s market. VoIP is also complex, as it is an ‘app’ that runs on the data network, and has an effect on data network design, SLAs, and throughput.

Attend this upcoming BrightTALK Webinar and learn:

-How VoIP is different than traditional digital ‘TDM’ Telephony
-Risks associated with staying with legacy TDM technology
-What is a high reliability VoIP model (as with TDM digital)
-How VoIP differs from UCC
-How VoIP affects your data network, routers, switches, and cabling environment, and what possible options are available
-Leverage VoIP for Disaster Recovery purposes
-Why Network Assessments are crucial to VoIP deployments
-What key areas VoIP can reduce your annual telecommunications costs

From this webinar. you will take away a baseline for what VoIP is, why it is a must for your enterprise, and strategies for avoiding risk with older technologies while leveraging VoIP advantages and savings.

According to Infonetics Research, the VoIP industry will grow to $76.1 billion by 2015. It is safe to say that VoIP is here to stay, making it crucial to stay up to date with the latest industry shifts to ensure easy, cost-effective and efficient communications within your business.

Join industry experts in this panel session as they discuss the impact cloud computing and mobility are having on the VoIP industry and what this means for your enterprise. Attend this webinar and participate in the discussion in real time.

The panelists will discuss:
- the drivers for moving to cloud, the different types of cloud and its benefits for small and medium businesses and enterprises
- the security concerns of moving to the cloud
- mobility strategies and BYOD

With the changing dynamics of the business workplace where location is no longer important, we take a look at what business need to do to better enable their workforce to remain connected whilst communicating effectively. Customer demands and expectations are higher now than ever before and customer response times have significantly reduced meaning regardless of where you are, your customers expect answers faster. Mobility in the workplace looks at how you can remains connected regardless of location securely to provide a consistent user experience to your customers to ensure you are reachable all of the time.

Comcast Business talks about the capabilities and features of its Ethernet network for enterprises. These organizations are juggling technologies ranging from mobility to cloud to big data. This shift is requiring faster, scalable communications, which Comcast provides via its 40G/100G Ethernet network in most major metro markets.

Learn how managed service experts: Don Bentz – Founder Preferred IT Group and Steve Bateman – VP/Principal ERB’s, use CompTIA Trustmarks to differentiate themselves and sell more managed service business.

The RingCentral Office is a comprehensive cloud phone solution that delivers excellent call quality, reliability that's easy to manage and easy to use. All it takes to get started is an Internet connection and a phone. Setup is just as quick—taking only minutes, instead of the weeks that traditional phone systems require. Watch the video to learn more.

RingCentral Meetings gives you the power to hold face-to-face conferences with anyone,
anytime and anywhere. RingCentral has incorporated the power of HD video into an already robust phone system, now making RingCentral Enterprise Office edition and an all-inclusive mobile-centric business communications and collaboration solution. Top features and benefits:

- Invite up to 25 people – colleagues, project teams, clients, partners - to your meeting
- Connect from anywhere around the world using any computer (PC or Mac), tablet (iPad or
Android) or smartphone (iPhone or Android)
- Share presentations, websites, and files from cloud services like Box and Dropbox.
- Enhance your demonstrations by making notes and illustrations using mark-up and drawing
tools.
- Scheduling meetings is easy with your Outlook, Google Calendar or iCalendar.
- Boost productivity by bringing together remote teams and ensure better, faster
collaboration.
- Increase sales by turning sales calls into demos, conduct online presentations and review
proposals and agreements online.
- Save thousands of dollars on travel expenses and other standalone video and web
conferencing services

Call quality matters, and you know how much your business depends on it. Here's a secret: It's actually easier to fix poor call quality than you think. Watch this video to learn three simple steps that can transform your call quality – literally within minutes.

Dan Miller, Senior Analyst with Opus Research, presents results from the latest Opus Research “Intelliview” report. He will describe criteria that should be taken into account when marketing, sales and contact center professionals evaluate vendors of Enterprise Virtual Assistants (EVAs) – especially those providing human-like interactions on the Web and with mobile devices.

Miller will be joined by Brett Beranek, Solutions Marketing Manager at Nuance Communications, who will provide insights into customer acceptance of EVAs based on implementations of Nuance’s Nina Web and Nina Mobile services.

When service degradation impacts the bottom line, every application is mission-critical. As a network administrator, it’s your job to find the problem and fix it fast. But how? “Cut Troubleshooting Time in Half,” is designed to help busy network professionals reduce the time it takes to resolve service complaints. The 45 minute webinar features key strategies for overcoming common challenges and choosing the right application monitoring solution, as well as workflow demonstrations, and successful real-world examples. Find out what top teams already know and which solutions get to the source of application problems faster, and more efficiently.

For many IT Operations Teams, by the time you’re alerted to application performance issues, your end-users have already been impacted. And in many cases, the only performance analysis you can do is live at the very same time that the incident is happening! Even worse, sometimes you just have to wait until the incident happens again to try and really understand the cause of the problem.

With such limited performance data available to you, it’s only a matter of time before the blame game and finger pointing starts between groups – “It’s probably the Server”… “I reckon it’s the Network”… “I bet it’s the Application” Sound familiar??!!

Join Wilson Leong, Senior Principal Consultant from CA Technologies to learn how to troubleshoot Application Delivery problems in just minutes rather than hours (or even days!) by having the right objective data you need to quickly stop the blame game, start remediating the problem and prove the ongoing performance of your applications delivered over the enterprise network.

In addition, this session will also cover how to:
- Take a far more proactive “Performance First” approach to your IT Operations
= Mitigate risks from any planned infrastructure changes or new application roll-outs
- Validate performance before you move applications to a virtual or cloud environment
- Validate any WAN or WAAS optimization, load balancing, or upgrade efforts

This webinar will first examine the ongoing work to enhance the existing LTE standard (coverage expansion efforts via multi-sector eNodeBs, densification via small cells, indoor coverage improvement via IMCS and femtocells, advanced C-RAN concept, etc.), culminating with the LTE-Advanced spec and initial deployments. LTE-A will combine aggregation (multi-carrier), MIMO and Hetnet, providing higher peak data rates and leading towards the next iteration of the standard, LTE-B. Concomitantly, circa 2016, the new 5G vision will begin to evolve from research, prototypes and early trials towards the development of the 5G standard itself.

The keynote will then explore key 5G criteria: throughputs of at least 1Gbps (to support ultra-HD video and virtual reality), or 10Gbps to support mobile cloud services; great capacity improvement (via beam forming gains, massive MIMO, new access schemes, etc.); < 1ms latency to support mobile control and in-vehicle apps; up to 10 ms switching time between various radio access technologies to ensure seamless service delivery; green: a much lower energy consumption (substantial reduction in the energy-per-bit usage to improve endpoint battery life). We will explore early concepts such as NTT DoCoMo’s Future Radio Access (FRA), cognitive radio, SON (Self Organizing Networks), NFV/SDN enhancements, early research from vendors such as Ericsson and Huawei, and initiatives such as the Horizon 2020 program. Finally, the webinar will conclude with a rough timeline for the development of 5G, point out future research directions and summarize the key takeaways.

Machine learning is an ever-evolving field which enables computers to make and improve predictions and behaviours based on data. A series of three webinars will be given by staff from the Industrial Maths KTN which introduce the topic of machine learning, provide examples of machine learning methods and demonstrate their application to real world problems. The webinars will be:

1) An Overview of Machine Learning: Categorisation and approaches. Dr Michelle Ledbetter (Wednesday 19th February, 14.00)
2) Practical Machine Learning using Ensemble Methods. Dr Siddhartha Ghosh (Wednesday 5th March, 14.00)
3) An Introduction to Clustering. Dr Owen Jones (Wednesday 19th March, 14.00)

Today’s customer expects personalized, unified conversation across sales, service, and every other interaction with an organization. Organizations with siloed data or a fragmented approach to customers are unable to create a single, unified view of their customer, which results in a poor customer experience and less productive employees.

In this webinar, salesforce.com customer LegalZoom will share their journey connecting their sales and customer service teams with Salesforce, and how a customer platform has helped them achieve:

-Increased agent productivity - 50% decrease in agent wrap-up time and 50% reduction in steps needed to create and close a case
-30% increased sales productivity
-A single, unified view of the customer for sales and customer service teams
-Increased business agility and an improved customer experience