Author: ionline

WHY Cisco Spark and Spark Kit Videoconferencing together with Spark board?

eVideo Communications  is proud to provide Cisco Spark and Spark Kit Videoconferencing together with Spark board

Cisco Spark Logo

Features and benefits which are unique to the Cisco Collaboration portfolio:

  1. Intelligent Proximity

Ultra sonic wave sent from the endpoint which NFC devices can connect to for wireless presentations and control. This does not require Spark, but is built into Spark app.

Benefit: Wirelessly present content to the system, no need to connect a wire.

Benefit: Control your endpoint from your mobile device, place calls, mute calls, add   participants.

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  1. Spark Directory

Any Spark registered endpoint can find any other Spark endpoint or user in the Spark directory, whether within their organization or not and make calls without needing to ask for addresses to dial them with.

Benefit: You don’t need to know long dial strings to make calls, just search for the endpoint or user you want to dial.

Benefit: No need to contact the far end ahead of time to get the details needed to make the call.

 

  1. In Room Control

The Touch 10 controller can be used to control blinds, AV switching, lighting and other room control elements. This does not require Spark.

Benefit: No need to add additional control panels to control room elements, all can be done from one panel.

 

  1. Digital Zoom Speaker Tracking  spark board4

The fixed lens will use its zoom capability to automatically frame participants as they speak and change it’s zoom to show the active speaker in a room. This does not require Spark. Not applicable to SX Series.

Benefit: No need for manual camera movement or pre-setting camera locations, the system will automatically show who is talking on screen to the far end like you have your own camera man.

 

 

  1. Automatic Wake Up

The camera built into the system detects movement in the room and will automatically come out of standby mode and give you a prompt on screen of suggested actions; if connected to Spark it will also detect any mobile devices logged into Spark and suggest pairing yourself to the system for directory, spaces, scheduled meetings or file access. Not applicable to SX Series.

Benefit: You don’t need to wake the system up or figure out how to do so, it will automatically do so and suggest that you use the touch panel to place a call or connect via proximity to present.

Benefit: If connected to Spark, it detects your Spark account and you can open your Space on the device so you can access your files in that Space or dial out to scheduled conferences you have created with your teams.

 

  1. Wi-Fi Network Connectivity

Built in Wi-Fi card allows you to connect to wireless networks instead of cabled networks. Not applicable to SX Series.

Benefit: No need to run network cables in difficult to reach areas, simply connect to the WiFi.

 

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Cisco Spark Meetings Promotion- Free Spark Room Kit!

What’s the offer?

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Purchase 50x Cisco Spark M3 Cloud Videoconferencing User Licenses as well as a Cisco Spark Room Registration License and receive a free Cisco Spark Room Kit Videoconferencing Endpoint.

What is Cisco Spark?

A simple, secure space where you can get things done from anywhere in the world. Connecting your endpoints to the cloud.

Cisco Spark is an app-centric cloud-based  service that provides a complete collaboration  suite for teams to create, meet, message,  call, care, whiteboard, share, regardless of  whether they’re together or apart; in one  continuous workstream before, during, and  after meetings. It is built to make teams work seamlessly. It is a simple, secure, complete,  and open service that enables people to work better. Communication needs to be agile. Mobile.  Collaborative. All thanks to mobile devices and evolving innovations in infrastructure and applications. The Cisco Spark service makes instant communications and live meetings possible through a deeply integrated set of industry-leading communications tools for an unmatched collaboration experience—that only the Cisco cloud can deliver.

Cisco Spark Datasheet

Cisco Spark Room Kit

Cisco Spark Room Kit delivers the unmatched video and audio experience customers have come to expect from Cisco. In addition, new capabilities enable even smarter meetings, smarter presentation capabilities, and smarter room and device integrations – further removing the barriers to usage and deployment of video in small to medium-sized rooms.

The Room Kit – which includes camera, codec, speakers, and microphones integrated in a single device – is ideal for rooms that seat up to seven people. It offers sophisticated camera technologies that bring speaker-tracking capabilities to smaller rooms. The product is rich in functionality and experience but is priced and designed to be easily scalable to all of your small conference rooms and spaces – whether registered on the premises or to Cisco Spark through the Cisco Collaboration Cloud.

Bringing more intelligence to small and medium-sized rooms

The Cisco Spark Room Kit offers video innovation in a box, bringing more intelligence and usability to your small to medium team collaboration rooms. While others are still struggling to insert advanced features such as speaker tracking, wireless sharing, and 4K content into their high-end products, Cisco is already bringing these innovations to small and medium team rooms in a cost-effective and simple way. With the Room Kit, Cisco is helping customers experience smarter meetings, enable smarter presentations, and create smarter room and device integrations.

These features were previously the domain of higher-end video conferencing rooms, but can now be brought to every room and every team. And when registered to Cisco Spark, additional cloud-based functionalities are enabled that enhance the user experience and team workflow as well as further simplifying deployment.

  • Smart meetings: Powerful, integrated cameras deliver intelligent view capabilities, such as automatic framing and speaker tracking
  • Smart presentations: Dual screens, dual content sources, wireless sharing, and 4K content make for great presentations
  • Smart integrations: People count for usage metrics and resource allocation; tight integrations with screens for enhanced functionalities
  • Registration flexibility: Built for both cloud and on-premises deployment, protecting your investment

The Room Kit Datasheet

Call us Today on 1800 111 387

Talk To An eVideo Expert Today!

eVideo Communications Australia’s leaders in Cloud Videoconferencing ,Cloud Telephony, Huddle room technology, Visual Collaboration, Telepresence solutions, Unified Conferencing, Audio Conferencing, Virtual Meeting, Video Conferencing, Collaboration services, Webcast & Webinars, and Virtual Events.

Cisco Spark Meetings Promotion- Free Cisco SX10N+Touch10

What’s the offer?

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Purchase 10x Cisco Spark M3 Cloud Conferencing User Licenses as well as a Cisco Spark Room Registration License and receive a free Cisco SX10 Videoconferencing Endpoint with Touch10.

What is Cisco Spark?

A simple, secure space where you can get things done from anywhere in the world. Connecting your endpoints to the cloud.

Cisco Spark is an app-centric cloud-based  service that provides a complete collaboration  suite for teams to create, meet, message,  call, care, whiteboard, share, regardless of  whether they’re together or apart; in one  continuous workstream before, during, and  after meetings. It is built to make teams work seamlessly. It is a simple, secure, complete,  and open service that enables people to work better. Communication needs to be agile. Mobile.  Collaborative. All thanks to mobile devices and evolving innovations in infrastructure and applications. The Cisco Spark service makes instant communications and live meetings possible through a deeply integrated set of industry-leading communications tools for an unmatched collaboration experience—that only the Cisco cloud can deliver.

Cisco Spark Datasheet

Cisco SX10N

The Cisco TelePresence SX10 Quick Set is an all-in-one unit designed to video-enable your small collaboration spaces, offering great affordability for small-to-medium businesses just starting out with telepresence. With the SX10, you can also extend telepresence pervasively throughout your enterprise. The SX10 supports cloud registration to Cisco Spark Services for even faster and more cost effective deployment.

This low-cost, high-quality unit combines camera and codec into a single, compact device that is mounted over your standard flat-panel display and connects through a discreet single-cable system for Power over Ethernet (PoE). High-definition video is enabled with 1080p30 resolution, while an industry-leadership wide-angle field of view provides the best overview even in small spaces. Support for Cisco Intelligent Proximity allows you to use your iOS and Android devices to wirelessly control the SX10 as well as receive shared content for richer collaboration. Wireless content sharing is also possible from your laptop or PC.

High quality, simplicity, and affordability come together in the SX10 Quick Set to create a practical and powerful business class solution for video ubiquit

Click here to download the SX10 Datasheet

Call us Today on 1800 111 387

Talk To An eVideo Expert Today!

eVideo Communications Australia’s leaders in Cloud Videoconferencing ,Cloud Telephony, Huddle room technology, Visual Collaboration, Telepresence solutions, Unified Conferencing, Audio Conferencing, Virtual Meeting, Video Conferencing, Collaboration services, Webcast & Webinars, and Virtual Events.

Huddle Rooms and Cloud Videoconferencing

Make Your Business More Productive, with Huddle Room Equipment, Products and Software

If you haven’t been seeing the productivity you want out of your employees and your business as a whole, consider that the layout and design of your office space might be to blame. In recent years, many companies have started trying to innovate their office designs to pursue the look and feel of a modern office.

In many cases, this idea of a ‘modern office’ results in an open concept design where most employees work side by side or across from one another, clustered together in one big main room. Maybe there are a few standalone offices for senior members of the staff, or a few conference rooms for meetings, job interviews and the like. For the most part, though, the office is designed as an open floor plan.

The Problems with the Modern Office Layout

There are two core problems with this kind of office design, and you can solve both of them (at least partially) by investing in huddle room equipment for your business.

The first issue is that open workspaces, while they can drive collaboration and promote a teamwork mentality, can also create loud, distracting environments where very little actual ‘work’ gets done. There is too much chaos and not enough direction.

The second issue, meanwhile, is that the office’s open concept design means that there aren’t many other rooms for team meetings or collaboration sessions. There are a couple of larger conference rooms or boardrooms, but those are intended for more important meetings—not for gatherings of smaller teams or segmented departments.

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The Benefits of Using Huddle Room Equipment

Investing in huddle room products is an effective way of reversing these negative impacts of an open concept office. Huddle rooms are smaller rooms in an office space that act as less formal conference rooms. They are maybe the size of a traditional office but come equipped with key electronics and software to allow for video conferencing, Power Point presentations, idea brainstorming and more. Best of all, the size of these rooms makes them perfect for smaller group meetings.

Having huddle room equipment and software in your office helps restore the sense of collaboration often lost amidst the madness of an open floor plan office. When your individual teams can regularly go into smaller rooms to have meetings or conversations, it removes some of the noise and chaos from the central work area. It also keeps the conference rooms and boardrooms open, available for larger gatherings.

Because huddle rooms are smaller than standard conference rooms, they cost less to outfit with key technology and software products. As a result, turning three or four smaller rooms or offices throughout your workspace into huddle rooms might be more affordable than you realise.

At eVideo Communications, we specialise in huddle room equipment and huddle room software in Australia. We can help you design and implement a huddle room strategy in your office. We predict you will start noticing the benefits right away.

To start collaborating with the eVideo team, call us today on 1800 111 387

Polycom EagleEye Director II

Get ready for your close-up with the only smart camera that makes every videoconference a true face-to-face experience.

Today, more people than ever are using video as a way to communicate across the globe.  Traditionally, conference rooms have been equipped with one camera at the front of the room.  While this allows people to still communicate and enjoy many of the benefits that video technology brings, there are some limitations for users.  Using the camera in the front of the room requires a person to operate the remote control in order to be seen up close.  IT teams often set camera presets to help users, but this is often overwhelming, frustrating and time consuming to most average users.  Because of this, most people will leave the camera view as-is when the enter the room.  Depending on the size of the room, this can leave a long bowling alley view for the other participants on the call.  It makes it hard for them to see who is in the room and they cannot pick up on critical body language and nonverbal cues of the presenter.  Many times, there is a need for a presenter to walk around to a white board but unless someone is familiar with operating the remote control, there will be a limited view for the participants on video

eagleeye director2

New technology has emerged that automatically finds faces and frames everyone in the room.  No one needs to use a remote control or do anything out of the ordinary.  People simply walk in and work without the frustration of using technology.  As people enter the room or leave, the camera notices and will reframe everyone in the room for the best view.

Finally, there is speaker tracking technology that goes one step further from group framing.  A person can begin speaking and the camera will automatically zoom in to show them up close.  This allows people at other sites to clearly see the nonverbal cues of that speaker, making the meeting more engaging and productive.  When the active speakers stops the view returns to show the entire group before showing another active speaker if applicable.  It’s a natural meeting experience where technology doesn’t get in the way of collaboration

automatic people tracking

Automatic people-tracking technology

People simply walk in and act naturally during a meeting, EagleEye Director II does all of the heavy lifting to show people up close.

  • Eliminate manual camera operation
  • Clearly identify everyone in a room
  • Zoom in on active speaker

Intimate and inclusive meetings

Experience the benefits of video conferencing with the ability to see speakers up close for an engaging, natural meeting experience.

  • See vital nonverbal cues up close
  • Maintain context with a smaller view of the entire room while a speaker is shown up close
  • Seamlessly switches the view from speaker to speaker with TV-production quality

Intelligent data analytics analysis

The power of EagleEye Director II extends beyond the conference room door by providing powerful data analytics to measure the return on investment.

  • Monitor room usage to ensure that automated conferences are being attended and not running in empty rooms.

EagleEye Director II Datasheet

Determine Your Video Conferencing Requirements with These Questions

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Integrating video conferencing into your organization is quickly becoming essential. However, a top quality video conferencing system can be expensive. Therefore, in preparation for deciding on a provider, and choosing a plan for your company, it is well advised that you define your video conferencing requirements well before you begin to draft any contracts with vendors.

The following list should help you narrow down which types of video conferencing systems and equipment you should consider adopting when moving forward with your purchase. Make sure you consult both your management and IT departments in order to cover all bases.

There are three broad areas you should take a look at with regards to your video solutions.

The first is business requirements – the direct business goals that video conferencing should be looking to facilitate.
Next, there are functional requirements; specific details such as number or users and/or overall functionality that feed back into the business goals.
The final requirements to consider are technical. This may include any limitations you have in regards to space, systems, and bandwidth. Take advantage of the deep knowledge your IT team has in these areas before moving forward. Then ask yourself the following:
What is your organization looking to achieve with video conferencing solutions?

This is first and foremost the most important question you must ask before going forward with a video conferencing solution. The wider strategy your team outlines will be a fundamental help in determining the type of video conferencing solution you choose.

What is your budget for video conferencing solutions?

Your budget should be determined by assessing how valuable the solution will be to your operations. In addition, look at where the solution will reduce costs and improve productivity i.e. travel costs, scaling knowledge, connecting remote workers etc.

How many users does your video conferencing system expect to support?

Knowing how many users your organization will have can help you with issues such as bandwidth and pricing plans. However, knowing how much you are likely to grow in the future is just as important.

Where will your users be located?

Will your users be based in the main office or will they be remote? Remember to look to align your bring-your-own-device (BYOD) strategy with the solution to make it simpler for remote workers. Also, look at how many meeting rooms you wish to convert into video conferencing suites and, of course, don’t forget to look at all of your office and subsidiary locations.

Do you have in-house IT support or will you need to outsource?

Most vendors should be able to offer you IT support, though this will be at an extra charge. If you are fortunate enough to have onsite IT staff members, they must familiarize themselves with the solution.

Cloud or on premise video conferencing?

It’s not just applications and storage that are offered from the cloud, it is now possible to dispense with expensive video network infrastructure and have video conferencing and calling delivered as a service. This option is by far the most scalable and affordable. In very few cases, organizations prefer to have on premise infrastructure deployed behind firewalls. Therefore, engage with your IT to understand the pros and cons of both environments.
When you are going to implement a video system, follow these questions and assess your business goals to find a video conferencing solution that best suits your company.

At eVideo, we have a complete range of cloud video conferencing services and a portfolio of hardware for meeting rooms systems and software for desktop and mobile devices.

To find out more visit us at www.evideo.com.au   or 1800 11 387

Sydney | Melbourne | Gold Coast | Brisbane| Canberra | Adelaide| Perth

 

Communication – Solutions – Integration

Why Cloud Is Driving Innovation and a Must-Do for Midsize Organizations

Midsize organizations have an enormous opportunity to leverage cloud computing to drive innovation and improve their competitive position. Cloud computing—whether private, hybrid or public—enables organizations to be far more agile while reducing IT costs and operational expenses. In addition, cloud models enable organizations to embrace the digital transformation necessary to remain competitive in the future.

 

 

Cloud computing levels the playing field for midsize organizations. With the cloud, midsize businesses can leverage the same technologies as much larger organizations without the burden of investing in expensive data center resources and highly skilled IT personnel. Businesses in all industries are using cloud computing to support new business models. Prominent examples include Uber in transportation, Netflix in home entertainment, and Amazon in retailing.

Every company in every industry can benefit from the agility and economic advantages the cloud enables. But as the saying goes, you’ve got to be in it to win it. If your organization is not using cloud, you may not be able to embrace the digital transformation that is affecting most industries. Here are some of the key reasons why cloud is a must-do for midsize organizations:

  • Reduces costs: Cloud enables midsize organizations to reduce IT costs—if they take the time to understand the models and how to best deploy them for specific workloads and applications. In addition, costs can be more predictable, which helps midsize organizations manage their budgeting processes with greater accuracy.
  • Increases agility: Cloud models enable organizations to move much more quickly when developing new business services and mobile applications, while empowering business teams and line-of-business managers with shared resources, self-service capabilities, elastic scalability and automatic chargebacks.
  • Improves productivity: Organizations can significantly ease the burden on their internal IT teams by leveraging a public cloud deployment model or services-based models such as platform as a service, infrastructure as a service or software as a service. Instead of building infrastructure, with all the requisite expenses, training, maintenance and so on, IT teams can purchase services.
  • Reduces complexity: One of the biggest challenges with maintaining legacy data centers is that they are increasingly complex and siloed. This means they are expensive to maintain and limited in terms of supporting business agility. Shifting to a cloud model, particularly a public cloud or private cloud as a service, makes it much simpler to manage IT. It also makes it much easier to upgrade and deploy new technologies as they become available, enabling you to future-proof your organization.
  • Enables change: The world is changing whether you are ready or not. Digital transformation is real, and it must be part of your strategy no matter what your company size. Advances such as increased mobility, big data analytics, social networking and the Internet of Things are driving innovation across all industries, including yours. You can’t afford to let the world pass you by.

cloud benefits

This is a transformative time for businesses of all sizes. Technology is allowing organizations to create new business models and efficiencies—and cloud computing is at the heart of this transformation. For midsize businesses, the cloud represents an opportunity to leverage leading-edge technologies and shift to a services-based model for IT.

Making this move can make a huge difference, particularly for organizations that may not have large IT staffs or deep expertise in all of the critical areas of IT, such as storage, networking and databases. For midsize businesses, cloud computing is not just the future of IT, it is also the present. Now’s the time to get started.

 

 

 

The top 5 risks of delaying a move to the CLOUD

From why to why not?

 

MOVE OR NOTThere was a time when people were told that everything about the way they measured their world was going to change. There was a different system—a much better one—being used by pretty much everyone else on the planet; and it was time to change the country’s antiquated ways. Inches? They were going to become centimetres. Miles? A thing of the past. Everyone from school children to grandmothers prepared themselves for the change to the metric system—which never came to pass

 

1. Ongoing hardware costs

A data centre that cost millions to build consumes even more millions for ongoing maintenance, upgrades, power, cooling, administration, and more every year; yet, the fallacy of sunk costs often seduces managers into throwing good money after bad. Cutting the cord on costly data centers can be a painful decision to make; but in many cases, the money devoted to supporting them can be used more productively.

2. Delayed response to disruption

In a world of instant communications and viral markets, the ability to respond rapidly to unforeseen events is essential. New competitors can now spring up overnight, disrupt existing industries, and claim overwhelming market share in months. A surprising proportion of the world’s fastest growing businesses choose cloud solutions to rapidly structure, expand, and scale up operations to seize market positions before slower competitors can respond. Brands such as Pinterest, Foursquare, Etsy™, and Yelp™ all grew to become household names in months, and all of them built their businesses in the cloud. The business value of the cloud’s ability to scale up rapidly is difficult to ignore

cloud benefits

3. Barriers to beneficial mergers and acquisitions

In an environment where consolidation happens in the blink of an eye, an increasing number of organizations are being forced to deal with the challenges that mergers and acquisitions present, not the least of which are the hardware, software, and infrastructure that each organization owns. The cloud can offer a safe, efficient, and economical way to avoid disruption, while smoothly folding in new organizations.

4. Insufficient disaster preparedness

We all like to think it will never happen to us, but many organizations that host their own data centers are just one fire or flood away from a potentially irreversible business disruption. Backups help, but they only represent one part of the protection provided by an enterprise-class cloud service provider. Similar to the security issue described above, cloud hosting vendors offer recovery and fail over capabilities that most companies simply cannot match independently. Even if a system fails, a cloud provider generally can restore service quickly at another facility to ensure continuity. Few companies can afford to maintain an IT infrastructure with that level of redundancy.

5. Lagging sustainability

The pressure for organizations to reduce their environmental footprints is growing, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for businesses to justify the heating, cooling, power, space, and resource demands of data centres when their solutions could easily live in the cloud. Cloud hosts can optimize resource consumption by virtue of greater scale, and then reduce the impact even more by spreading it across hundreds of customers. Moving on-premise solutions to the cloud is a quick and economical way to save money, while showing significant, measurable improvements in environmental sustainability.

Cloud solutions offer an average payback period of 7.1 months and 5-year average ROI of 626%, a level that few other investments can equal.

 

How to evaluate cloud unified communications services

This guide will help you choose cloud unified communication services that best equip employees to work from wherever they are, and on whatever device they have.

Enterprises need to extend the reach of their communications and collaboration applications and services to allow employees to be productive wherever they’re located and whatever devices they’re using. Cloud unified communications (UC) applications are an efficient means to deliver this capability; vendors, recognizing this, now offer an array of options. In this guide, we will review which UC applications are best for the cloud and outline the issues that can arise during a move to the cloud, including integration, security and enterprise support. After reading this, you’ll be in a better position to evaluate the providers of cloud unified communications products and to determine which products and services should be on your short list.

What is cloud-based UC and how does it work?

Cloud UC, also called hosted UC or UC as a service (UCaaS), is looking increasingly attractive to organizations that rely on voice, messaging, presence and collaboration to make their businesses tick.

Cloud UC offers several benefits, such as minimal acquisition costs (low capital expenditure), fast implementation and low total cost of ownership. Organizations that don’t have a healthy budget for capital investments can streamline their UC services affordably by looking to hosted UC. The flexibility and scalability to add or remove users as needed, reduced administrative effort and guaranteed service-level agreements (SLAs) all help make a move to the cloud even more attractive. A hosted UC provider also offers a level of expertise that’s difficult for smaller organizations to acquire on their own. Any good provider has valuable knowledge after dealing with many customers, with assorted situations and challenges, and can apply that knowledge to new customers to make their cloud transitions more fluid and efficient.

A UC service provider owns or leases a data center that houses the infrastructure for UC hosting. The cloud provider maintains that hardware and software, ensuring updates and patches are completed and that necessary upgrades are performed in a timely fashion. The provider also guarantees uptime through an SLA.

Customers choose one or more UC applications and pay a monthly per-user fee. The beauty of cloud-based unified communications is scalability — customers can change which applications they want to access, as well as the number of users who receive access — as business needs change. Users access cloud-based services over an Internet Protocol (IP) connection, such as the Internet, via a Web browser, and can do so from mobile devices as well as conventional notebooks or desktop computers.

best uc

What features should you look for in cloud unified communications?

Hosted UC applications include voice/telephony; unified messaging (which includes email), voice mail and faxing; presence; instant messaging (IM); conferencing (audio, video and Web); and content sharing and social tools. All of these are accessible from a single user interface, whether on the desktop or a mobile device. A provider might offer all these applications or just a subset, and allow you to choose applications or offer just a single UC package.

From a technical perspective, there’s not much of a difference in capabilities between in-house versus cloud-based UC applications, so it depends on each organization’s unique situation.The Cloud Elevates Communications Applications white paper found that companies most often deploy email, Web conferencing and voice from the cloud, followed by presence, IM and video.

Organizations that have on-premises UC can avoid rip-and-replace migrations by setting up a hybrid UC architecture, in which the organization provides some services in-house and subscribes to others. For example, voice and messaging could remain on-premises, with video and other collaborative tools used via the cloud.

UC applications, especially video and Web conferencing, consume a lot of bandwidth, and voice and video need low latency for the best quality. Organizations with wireless LANs may have to invest in more bandwidth and better coverage to support cloud-based UC. Other considerations include integration, security and enterprise support.

Cloud unified communications offers several integration options. Many UC providers enable integration of their UC system directories by implementing a customer’s Microsoft Lync, Microsoft Active Directory, IBM Sametime, or with a customer relationship management application. In this way, the organization can manage all business communications from a single interface. Some companies may want to integrate their cloud-based voice system with their accounting software to track and bill for phone calls. The ability to federate integrated applications through single sign-on is also important.

When it comes to security, cloud-based UC providers typically use a single-instance (also called private cloud) or multi-tenant architecture. In a single-instance setup, each customer has its own virtual instance, which they can integrate with on-premises applications or customize any way they like. In a multi-tenant architecture, several customers share a virtual instance of the UC software. A single-instance architecture is considered more secure and private, although multi-tenant architecture includes security measures to prevent one customer from accessing another customer’s data. Organizations that are bound to regulatory compliance or a stringent corporate security policy most likely require the single-instance option to minimize risk. In addition, because hosted UC requires connections made over IP, authentication is required and should be a standard part of every service, as well as VoIP and media encryption.

On the support front, most cloud-based UC providers are user friendly, offer 24/7/365 support, continuously monitor systems and guarantee uptime. Some providers have flexible SLA terms that support an organization’s needs during a growth stretch. For organizations that expect to grow rapidly after implementing cloud-based UC, be sure to check the SLA closely.

Bottomline considerations

When comparing UC cloud-based providers, look at the list of UC applications they offer, subscription costs, SLA terms and network access requirements, at a minimum.

Find out if the provider uses multi-tenant or private cloud to deliver UC services, which is important from a customization standpoint and, to some, a security perspective as well.

Organizations that have fully functional, on-premises UC should look for a UC partner that offers both on-premises and hosted UC, with ample integration experience to make the transition as seamless as possible.

For larger organizations that can’t find an appropriate UC application package from a single provider, choose a primary vendor, then let that company handle multiple cloud-based UC providers on your behalf and guide you through whatever interoperability issues may need to be.

For regulatory-bound companies, ensure that the cloud unified communications provider complies with applicable laws and regulations, such as GLBA, PCI DSS, HIPAA or whatever other regulatory frameworks may apply.

Finally, check out each provider’s track record. Survivability is important. How long have they been in business? What is their financial situation? Will they give you a list of references of organizations that are similar to yours?

Knowing your needs (first) and conducting thorough research (second) will give you a good sense of the best decision to make regarding cloud-based UC applications. Be aware that the market is diverse, and one provider’s offerings can differ greatly from another’s.

Phone interviews are the worst: Embracing the Video Interview

As someone who graduated in the midst of the recession, when employers had an infinite number of educated and eager candidates to choose from, I was subjected to countless interviews of all different styles—in an office, at a coffee shop, group interviews, even a scavenger hunt (that’s a whole other blog post). But the most common interviews I encountered were either by phone or video conferencing. And while phone interviews might seem like the less stressful kind, nonverbal communication goes a long way in a video interview, especially in the early stages of the hiring process.

 

 

Nonverbal communication is the combination of all the things you say when you’re not actually speaking words. Things like your gestures, facial expressions, posture and tone of voice often say more than an entire paragraph of sentences. The nonverbal cues you pick up on in a video conferencing interview versus a phone interview can mean the difference between a job offer and another Friday night spent sending out resumes.

I can remember several phone interviews in which the recruiter or hiring manager would ask a question, I would eloquently answer with a complete and succinct thought, there would be a longer-than-comfortable pause and then I’d start rambling. I totally voided the carefully crafted response I had just delivered all because I wasn’t sure if the interviewee was expecting more, taking notes or had been bored into a coma by my response.

When interviewing over video, you easily alleviate miscommunications like that. Here are the top reasons nonverbal communication in a video interview trumps phone interviews and some tips for making a great impression over video:

1) Being on the phone gives you a sort of anonymity that can lead to distraction. From checking your email to removing all the gum wrappers from the bottom of your purse, a distracted interview on either side of the table is not beneficial. When you can make eye contact with someone, it’s much easier to capture and keep their attention to show them how qualified you are for the position.

2) Smiling! People don’t want to work with a jerk. So while you may have the best strategy proposition and three years more experience than other applicants, it can be very challenging to convey happiness over the phone without an excessive use of inflection, which in turn makes you sound like a Care Bear. Facial expressions allow you to express interest and understanding of the material being presented in a genuine way that doesn’t come across as overkill.

video interviews

3) Confidence is key. So maybe you exaggerated a little on the resume that landed you the interview, but you know you’re capable and you can let this interviewer know with your impressive posture. Good posture conveys confidence, so when you’re sitting up straight during that video call, it’s that much easier to show your future employer how poised and proficient you are.

4) You control your environment! No awkward waiting rooms, no fluorescent conference room lighting—with video conferencing, candidates can meet face to face with hiring managers for the first time in a comfort zone. Plus, you can emphasize key traits of your personality that may otherwise go unnoticed. For instance, want to showcase your organizational skills? Set your video call up so your color-coded bookshelf is your backdrop. Did a quick Google search and discovered that you and your possible boss-to-be share a mutual hobby? Prop that guitar up behind you. I’m not saying that you should hang up pennants and stage the background of the call with memorabilia of his or her favorite sports team, but subtle staging can’t hurt!

Video interviews can dramatically enhance the job search from both sides of the table. Book a free trial of Cisco WebEx  with a video conferencing expert to learn more about embracing the nonverbal communication. You’ll be more engaging, enlightening and personal than you would be by phone—plus, it gives you another reason to bust out that blazer you got just for interviews. Happy job hunting!