May 17, 2012

Telework Week Demonstrates Big Savings from Home Worker Strategies

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Working from home saves the time and fuel associated with commuting, and thus real dollars, but can also improve employee productivity and make employees happier. Not surprisingly, management is taking notice and becoming more receptive to the idea. Those are some of the key takeaways from Telework Week 2012, co-sponsored by Cisco and the Telework Exchange, a public-private partnership focused on demonstrating the tangible value of telework and serving the educational and communication requirements of the Federal teleworker community.  This was the second year of the weeklong event and participation was up fairly dramatically, with an 80% increase in the… Continue Reading ›

3 Important Roles that SIP Plays in a Contact Center

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Anyone who runs a contact center has to be concerned about issues like disaster recovery, business continuity and smooth, reliable communications, including for call transfers and between applications. Increasingly, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is playing a big role in enabling those capabilities and more in contact centers. SIP, as we’ve covered before, is a signaling protocol that handles call setup, tear down andsession management for a variety of call types, including voice and video but also extending to applications that may play into a call center environment, such as interactive voice response and recording systems. SIP also provides the… Continue Reading ›

3 Technologies We’re Thankful for this Year

Happy Thanksgiving!!

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It’s almost Thanksgiving (here in the U.S., at least) so we thought we’d take a moment and reflect on what technologies we have to be thankful for this year.  There was a lot of back and forth during conversations around the water cooler, but we came up with a few that everyone agreed on, all of which can be lumped under the “Consumerization of IT” umbrella – a trend we think will continue to acclerate and that you’ll be hearing more and more about in coming months and years. 1. Cloud Delivers Increased Agility, Lower Costs and More Cloud technology… Continue Reading ›

iPhone 4S with Siri – What will it mean to business?

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iPhone 4S Voice Engine Siri Has Users Singing Its Praises – Literally The initial disappointment among some Apple fans surrounding the debut of the iPhone 4S – and not the much-anticipated iPhone 5 – has turned into lots of gushing about one new feature: the voice recognition engine Siri. Consider this review from TechCrunch: Yes, others have done voice controls before — even Apple has had them baked into iOS for a few years. But most, including Apple’s previous attempt, have been awful. Others, like Google’s voice services built into Android, are decent. Siri is great…The amount of times Siri… Continue Reading ›

Got a Great App Idea? Tell Carousel and You Could Win $1000 – and Get Your App Built

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In the course of any given work day, many of us find ourselves thinking there must be a better way to do some task at hand, and wishing that a tool existed to help. Carousel Industries is giving you a chance to make your wish come true with its 2011 APPY Awards. Enter your idea for an app that will make your work life easier. If it’s chosen as the winner by our panel of esteemed judges, you’ll will have the app built by Carousel’s developers, and receive $1,000 to boot.  In addition, 10 finalists will get $100 each and… Continue Reading ›

Gartner Outlines its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

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At Gartner Symposium ITxpo last week in Orlando, Gartner presented its annual list of Top 10 Strategic Technologies, which it defines as technologies that will have a “significant and disruptive impact on IT or the business within the next three years.” Perhaps the biggest surprise on the list was that cloud computing barely made it, coming in at number 10. It’s not for lack of hype, said David Clearley, VP and Gartner Fellow, as “cloud” is still the most-searched term on the Gartner web site. But companies are all starting to build it into their strategies. Let’s look at the… Continue Reading ›

Five (plus Fifty) Ways Companies Use Video to Add Value

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If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture combined with audio and data is quite a powerful thing indeed. That’s the thinking at Burstpoint Networks, a Carousel Industries partner whose video communications platform that makes it simple for companies to send video from practically any source to nearly any end device, either live or on-demand. However, to truly take advantage of a platform as powerful as Burstpoint’s, companies need to have video content to leverage.  To learn about some of the ways companies are deriving value from video communications we talked with David… Continue Reading ›

iPads And The Enterprise Network

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I think everyone got the newsflash – iPads are cool.  So cool in fact that employees, in their role as consumers, have been buying them in droves, bringing them to work and putting them to good use (and that includes Carousel employees!)  And companies, intrigued by innovative ways the sleek tablets can be used and deployed, have been working hard to securely bring the devices into the enterprise-network environment.  And this has all been happening at breakneck speed….cool can do that. So how fast are we talking?  NetworkWorld recently quoted Apple’s CFO: “Enterprise CIOs are adding iPad to their approved… Continue Reading ›