Unified Communications

Amazing Fact: Second Life Generates 1 Billion Minutes of Voice Calls per Month

secondlife_1This story by Dean Takahashi in Venture Beat provides vivid evidence of the changing models for call origination among social network participants. According to one report, this is about 12% of the traffic level on Skype these days, but given the much smaller user base, it speaks to the power of linking voice channels to all the increasingly addictive and immersive social networks.

Cisco’s New Unified Service Delivery for Service Providers

In a move designed to make it easier for network operators to support cloud computing, Cisco launched a new Unified Service Delivery package that includes the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), a data center-optimized version of CRS-1 (its flagship Carrier Routing System) and the Cisco Nexus 7000 data switch. The CRS-1 integrates two 10Gb modules and a 40Gb forwarding processor in order to support service providers’ ability to deliver resource and network intensive video and data services directly fropm from their data centers.

RIM Integrates Mobile Voice Server with Cisco UC

Recombinant Telephony fans should take note of a deep integration between RIM’s Mobile Voice Server (MVS) with Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager (UCM) software. The result, which will be generally available in the third quarter of this year, is a enterprise services platform capable of delivering many of the features of the vaunted Google Voice offering as well as call management software from other enterprise infrastructure providers like Alcatel-Lucent’s Rich Communications Manager and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (OCS2007 R2).