May 17, 2012

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Facing the Top Challenges Confronting IT: Avaya Podcast

February 6, 2012 By Editor Leave a Comment

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As a leading vendor that supplies infrastructure and tools to help customers address business requirements around voice, data and unified communications, Avaya sees first-hand the biggest challenges companies are facing. But it also knows how to address them. In this information packed podcast, we caught up with Steven Bandrowczak, Vice President of Global Accounts at Avaya, to get his thoughts on what he sees as the most vexing IT challenges of the day. 3 Biggest Challenges Facing IT Without hesitation, Bandrowczak cites the bring your own device phenomenon as the # 1 trend, “in every industry, every size segment, every… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Contact Center, Industry Trends and News, Mobility, Network, Network Architecture, Podcasts, Social Media, Unified Communications Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Emerging Technologies Make for a More Effective Contact Center – and Happier Customers

January 26, 2012 By Editor Leave a Comment

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The keys to running an effective contact center are keeping agents as productive as possible and increasing customer satisfaction. Accomplishing that, of course, has always been a challenge but companies are taking advantage of a number of technology trends to help raise the bar on both fronts, says Zach Shankle, Director of Call Center Services for Carousel Industries. Contact Centers Get Social Asked what sorts of new things are happening in call centers, Shankle doesn’t hesitate: social media integration. Companies are monitoring what people are saying about them on social media venues like Twitter and Facebook and having contact center… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Contact Center, Productivity, Social Media, Telephony Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Security: Addressing the 3 Big Threats Around Social Media in the Enterprise

December 21, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment
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As companies grapple with how to incorporate social media in their everyday business practices, a topic we’ve covered in posts including this one, they also need to be concerned about the threats social media presents. But the threats you really need to worry about may not be the ones that immediately come to mind, according to Thorsten Behrens, lead IT Security architect for Carousel Industries. Asked what he sees as the main threats with respect to social media, Behrens doesn’t hesitate: “Productivity, reputation and complying with regulations that say all communications about a company must be audited,” he says. You… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Social Media, security Tagged With: , , , , ,

Trends in the Modern Contact Center: Zeacom Podcast Interview

August 15, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment

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We’ve all had our share of nightmare customer service calls but Miles Valentine is on a mission to keep them to a minimum. Valentine is CEO of Zeacom, a leading provider of customer contact center and telephony integration software, and a Carousel partner. For the latest installment in our podcast series, we spoke to him about trends in the Contact Center area, including the adoption of unified communications technologies, the integration of social media into call centers and how call centers can affect the company brand, for better or worse.  In this information packed interview, we discuss all of these… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Contact Center, Industry Trends and News, Podcasts, Productivity, Unified Communications Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Networks Drain Business Productivity

May 25, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment
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How much time are your employees spending on Facebook and Twitter instead of focusing on work? If they are like employees in most businesses around the country, it is probably morethan you think. e-Week recently reported on a survey conducted by uSamp (United Sample) and sponsored by social email software provider harmon.ie, which found that social tools are costing businesses millions of dollars per year in lost productivity. According to the article: Nearly 60 percent of work interruptions now involve either using tools like email, social networks, text messaging and IM, or switching windows among disparate standalone tools and applications.… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Industry Trends and News, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

CIO Tech Talk Wrapup – Westcon Group’s Bill Hurley

May 24, 2011 By Editor 1 Comment
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In the most recent of our CIO Tech Talks last Friday, we spoke with Bill Hurley, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice-President of Westcon Group, Inc. a leading international technology distributor. In a lively discussion moderated by Tom McCoy, former CIO of American International Group (AIG) a lot of ground was covered on a variety of hot topics. Here are some of the highlights of that conversation: Virtualization Westcon started down the path of virtualization as a way to make sure older, legacy applications were protected and stayed alive. They quickly realized the business benefits including server consolidation, easier management,… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Cloud, Industry Trends and News, Mobility, Network, Network Architecture, Unified Communications, Virtualization Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Data Security Roundup – April 2011

April 28, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment
Einbrecher an einem Fenster

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Some big names and institutions make up this month’s roundup of high profile security breaches. With attacks coming fast and furious, it appears that no organization is safe these days. It never ceases to amaze us the variety of breaches we run across. This month the gaming industry washit hard, Phishing attacks went mainstream, and good old fashion human error resulted in the largest breach in Texas state history. Sony’s Playstation Network Compromised The personal data of 77 million Playstation users was stolen. It is still unclear how the breach took place or who was responsible, but Sony is sitting… Continue Reading ›

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Amazon’s EC2 Outage Highlights Potential Cloud Risks

April 22, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment
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Yesterday, close to 100 major websites including FourSquare, Reddit, HootSuite and Quora were either completely down or seriously impacted for extended periods of time by a substantial outage at Amazon’s popular EC2 cloud service. Although we like to believe that big brand name cloud providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Rackspace are immune to these types of hiccups and have magical redundancy protocols that eliminate downtime, this situation shows how even the best of cloud providers can be impacted. Amazon offers their customers protection against this type of outage with what they call Availability Zones. By spreading your application out… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Cloud, Data, General Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Social Media and Unified Communications – How Do They Relate

February 15, 2011 By Editor Leave a Comment
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At Carousel, we often have discussions with customers and colleagues about the opportunity that social media represents and the role that it should play in an enterprise’s strategy.  When most businesses think about social media, they focus on Twitter, Facebook and company blogs and consider it in the purview of marketing.  However, the tools that have evolved in the social media realm are now making their way into the business world with a trend towards ‘social business and collaboration”.  IBM recently announced a major Social Business initiative, and as they describe it: Social business is the world of possibility that… Continue Reading ›

Filed Under: Contact Center, Productivity, Social Media, Unified Communications, service Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,