Unified Communications

Twitter has been flooded with complaints about a power outage at Equinix's Sydney data centre which apparently knocked out data and network systems, including VoIP.

A new piece of malicious software has been discovered that cheats Google and potentially other search engines out of money.

Unified communications has been a technology specialty of networking vendors for years, but Google Inc.'s recent forays into Google Voice and Google Wave, launching later this year, could drastically upset the competitive landscape.

Juniper this week announced enhancements to its service provider edge routers that are designed to improve multimedia service delivery to users.

The federal government has begun spruiking its Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), a communications advocacy body due to begin operations on 1 July.

With project budgets shrinking, network professionals are spending less time planning new purchases and more time trying to cut costs and squeeze more value out of existing IT resources.

Cisco's biggest challenge in gaining market acceptance for its new Unified Computing System is to convince data center managers to buy blade servers from the router giant instead of from traditional, incumbent suppliers.

For years, IT and business have heard the sexy promise of "IP convergence," which would allow all sorts of voice- and video-enabled applications to appear in business. However, for most organizations, this Jetsons-like vision has yet to occur.

When TV production company FremantleMedia Australia had an opportunity to move to IP telephony during an office refurbishment, the open source Asterisk proved itself to offer everything required and more for the 150-plus handset deployment.

With wired phones dying off at colleges, IT executives on campus are looking to VOIP and unified communications platforms as ways to meet the needs of students and faculty using wireless devices.

Mining and construction distributor Komatsu Australia is overhauling its application infrastructure to drive efficiency and keep pace with more modern technology.

With its data centre housed in 1923 square metres and spread over two levels, ensuring power continuity is at the top of Macquarie Hosting's to-do list.

Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors. Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CTO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.

We posed a few questions to Russ Housley, chair of the Internet Engineering Task Force, about why the standards body is developing network address translations for IPv6 when IPv6 was supposed to eliminate the need for NATs on the Internet. Here's what Housley had to say.

While perhaps best known as a major social networking site in the Web 2.0 vein, Facebook is becoming a popular place to interface with potential customers, similar to what companies such as Scribe and iLike have done. Facebook also is being viewed as a place for enterprise collaboration, with Serena Software leveraging the site for this purpose. To get perspective on Facebook, InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently spoke with Aditya Agarwal, Facebook director of engineering. Agarwal formerly worked in the Oracle server technologies division.

The quest to find a good price on a high-definition television can be a frustrating and confusing experience. For most people, the process concludes with the purchase of a brand-new TV set. For Mukesh Chatter, that was just the beginning.

As President-elect Barack Obama begins fleshing out his agenda, one promising sign is that he considers Internet infrastructure to be key, judging from both his stated goals and the caliber of people he's asking to advise him on policy.

With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due Monday at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Every week, I feel like I'm discovering new ways for companies to reduce the amount of paper and ink they use each day -- not to mention the amount they spend shipping pieces of paper hither and yon for signing, processing, and filing (by no means a trivial cost, either, considering that a single 6 oz. large envelope shipped via USPS Express can cost around US$19.50 or $4.80 if it's sent Priority).

I did it yesterday. Not that I was trying, mind you -- honestly, I wasn't. I did, however, predict it would happen, so I'm going to take this opportunity to gloat about that.

World and economic conditions combined with technological advancements continue to alter the business-travel landscape.

SIP works. Not only does it work, but it is easier to use, implement, and configure than older VOIP standards.