BLAIR PLEASANT
With 20 years experience, her primary areas of focus are convergence applications, including Unified Communications, Unified Messaging, the contact center, computer telephony integration (CTI), and voice processing. Blair has authored many highly acclaimed multi-client market studies and white papers, as well as custom research reports, and provides market research analysis and consulting services to both end user and vendor clients.
Ms. Pleasant received a BA degree in Communications from Albany State University, and an MBA in marketing and an MS in Broadcast Administration from Boston University.
Blog Entries by Blair Pleasant
In the past few years, voice mail has become a commodity, a feature of other applications such as telephony, with little if any price premium for basic functionality.
A bank even managed to create an application to approve personal loans via a special IVR service.
We made progress in 2009, but we've still got a long way to go.
The ADTRAN solution supports a more powerful and feature rich system while saving the school district over $200,000 in annual operation costs.
More and more, when I talk to people about their UC and IP implementations and the benefits they're hoping to achieve, cost savings from SIP trunking has been topping the list.
UC and social software tools are allowing people to work together as if they are in the same place, while providing continuity between tasks and activities as people move between locations and devices.
What are the questions enterprise customers should be asking themselves, what are the suggested ways to get started, and some things they should be doing to ensure success.
Virtualization, which has been around for a long time in the data world, is now coming to a telephony application near you, but there are tradeoffs.
So while the UC market in general has taken a hit from the economy, conferencing and collaboration technologies are the one exception, as they help companies save time and money.
The hurdle for utilization of expert agents is less about technology than it is about people management.
Look for a solutions integrator that can not only sell a shiny new IP-PBX, but can work together with the company to identify and understand the impact a UC solution will have.
"Better offer" doesn't just mean higher price, but it means the total value of the offer, including the certainty of completing the transaction.
The company claims that it will do in the UC space what Skype did in the telephony space.
Mitel is being aggressive and taking an early leadership position in this area.
Unfortunately, outbound collection calls are on the rise.
How do we get our workers to use the UC functions and capabilities they have available to them?
There were a few questions we didn't get to answer, so I asked the panelists to send me their responses.
At last week's VoiceCon Orlando, we didn't hear any dueling definitions about what Unified Communications is or how it should be defined, as in previous years. Instead, we heard discussions about the hard dollar savings companies are experiencing from their...
It's all about business process integration and transformation, not about individual productivity improvements or time saved.
Enterprises that can align networks, people, process and knowledge have a better chance at being able to save money and make money.
UC won't continue on the same trajectory it's been on for
the past few years. But there are still some bright spots.
Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, newly-named Genesys President, discussed how Genesys is looking to transform the customer experience.
For now, it's reassuring to hear that UC still has a somewhat promising future.
Vendors and channel partners need to step it up a notch to help the UC market continue its momentum.
Some UC purchases have been put on hold, and many companies are now taking a wait and see attitude.
I consider UC to be more than the integration all of the various real-time and non-real time tools and technologies that we use as part of our communications--it also ties in with presence capabilities, business processes, and a unified user interface.
Has unified communications' time come and gone already? When you listen to Cisco executives at Cisco's global analyst conference C-Scape talk about collaboration as the greatest thing for enterprises since IP, you have to wonder what ever happened to UC – is the UC heyday over before it even happened?
What are the "must haves" to be considered a UC solution?
In these challenging economic times, many of us are wondering whether enterprises will continue to invest in UC technologies and solutions. The answer is, it depends.
Several vendors, including Avaya, IBM, Mitel, and others, mentioned in keynotes or panel discussions that they are focusing on the end user (not the IT manager) to build the UC business case.
Avaya has brought in many outsiders to its executive team and we expect to see lots more fresh, new ideas. I was pleased to see a reinvigorated organization, with a strong company transformation strategy that has been set in place.
Several months after the whirlwind introduction of OCS last year, Microsoft was relatively quiet about its UC activities, although the UC group was still keeping busy. At VoiceCon Amsterdam, it announced the latest version of OCS 2007 – Release 2...
The first UC eWeekly I wrote two years ago was entitled "The Election and UC--What Do They Have in Common," and I thought it would be appropriate to revisit this topic since the election is less than a month away...
Summer is over and fall is officially here – no, it’s not because the weather is getting cooler and the days are getting shorter – it’s because the industry analyst conference season is getting into full gear. Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) kicked...
I’ve been hearing a lot about how the Intervoice acquisition by Convergys will impact these companies and their customers from the customer contact/relationship management business point of view. What I didn’t hear as much about is Intervoice’s other business--providing platforms...
I’ve received a few emails about last week’s post on social software and unified communications, so I’d like to expand on some of my comments....
I've been thinking a lot about social software lately. The UCStrategies.com team is in the process of adding a social software community to our website, and last month I joined the ranks of twitterers (or is it tweeters or twits?)...
There’ve been some interesting discussions recently about the role of presence in unified communications, and of course I want to put in my two cents. I strongly agree with what Zeus and Irwin wrote about presence (yes, sometimes analysts agree...
Those who have attended my "State of the UC Market" sessions at VoiceCon for the past several years know that I've deferred a market report and forecast until the shape of things became clearer. Well, that study, called "Unified Communications...
While thousands of people were in Vienna last week for the Euro 2008 games (soccer, football, whatever you call it), some of us were there for Siemens Enterprise Communications’ Global Analyst Conference. The location was amazing, the pastries to die...
After months and months of research, I’ve finally completed and released my new UC market study, creatively called “Unified Communications 2007-2012” – chock full of market numbers and forecasts, vendor profiles, information on what UC is all about, how it’s...
This week I was in Dallas, where Nortel assembled a small group of analysts in conjunction with Nortel Global Connect, an event sponsored by Nortel’s enterprise user group. Nortel spent a day and a half with us discussing its enterprise...
By now we've all heard about--or possibly experienced--the benefits of Unified Communications: Improved responsiveness, reduced costs, increased revenues, enhanced customer satisfaction, etc. Nancy Jamison and I recently interviewed end users to determine how and if UC is helping them be...
UCStrategies.com’s first annual UC Summit was a big hit – with resellers, system integrators, consultants, and vendors gathered together in a heavenly resort in Scottsdale for 2 ½ days of networking and education (and even relaxing in the sun for...
WebMessenger, announced WebMessenger Mobile for Microsoft OCS, enabling enterprises to extend their investments in the Microsoft UC platform out to BlackBerry and other mobile devices. WebMessenger provides mobile real-time presence, IM, VoIP, and collaboration products for enterprises and mobile professionals....
The UCStrategies.com team has been differentiating between the two types of Unified Communications: UC User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC Business Process (UC BP)....
At Dimension Data’s Analyst Conference,UC was a hot topic. While currently a very small part of Dimension Data’s business, UC is playing an increasingly important role....
There’ve been lots of changes at Intervoice in the past few years – it’s a different company than the old stodgy IVR vendor it used to be. There are new products, new services, new leadership (for the most part), and...
We’ve been hearing a lot about Unified Communications and the contact center lately, especially in light of the agreement made between Microsoft and Aspect. Hopefully we’ll start seeing more companies implementing UC in the contact center to provide improved customer...
VoiceCon Orlando 2008 was held last week--and it did not disappoint. The discussions and interactions between and among speakers, exhibitors and attendees clearly showed that Unified Communications is on everyone's mind, and that the industry is moving from defining UC...
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