Why rent if you can buy? This common piece of real estate wisdom can also apply to fibre-optic networks. Economics is economics: making the upfront investment to own your pipes is becoming a potent option for many organizations.

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Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are more likely than large companies to think strategically about IT projects, according to a Telus online tool designed to measure such things. But while the results suggest SMBs are ahead of the game, small companies are less likely to see substantial business value from IT projects.

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The first IP-PBX products started appearing in the mid-1990s, and hype around the technology grew quickly. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, pioneering telecom managers were beginning to implement IP telephony solutions, lured by promises of cost savings and amazing new applications. For organizations wrestling today with whether and when to migrate to IP, it may be instructive to know how those early adopters fared.

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When it comes to technology adoption, few groups in North America come as close to shunning the concept than the Old Order Mennonites who live near Waterloo ON. But these tech skeptics could teach the modern world a thing or two about value.

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Opposition members of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Ind-ustry, Science and Technology were not happy last month.

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When Cisco Systems Inc. unveiled its TelePresence system last year, the firm as much as informed the telecom industry that the video conferencing sub-sector would never be the same. Here was as big a name in enterprise networking as you could get, horning in on Tandberg, Polycom Inc. and others providing video communications technologies and trying to win a piece of an elusive pie.

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After years of anticipation and a boost from high-speed wireless broadband, the business use of mobile handheld devices is finally taking off. Gartner Inc. predicts that two out of three workers will be using mobile enterprise applications by the end of the year. However, delivering secure remote access to mobile workforces is not easy.

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January 25 was Robbie Burns Day, honouring Scotland’s national poet and favourite son. He once wrote, "O wad some power the giftie gie us. To see oursels as ithers see us!" Which means, "O would some power give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us." That applies in spades to call centres. Many organizations just can’t get a fix on how the call centre appears to their customers. Executives rely too much on metrics or vague satisfaction surveys; the managers feel paralyzed by lack of funding; and the agents just try and cope.

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