Google officially rolled out its 100,000-strong beta test of its Google Wave collaboration/email hybrid product and response was so strong, people posted their invites on eBay and received hundreds of bids to get into the test. Application vendors SAI and Salesforce.com also jumped on the announcement, as they released their individual plans to develop plug-ins for the Wave platform.

Ed Laczynski, CTO of L-Tech, a Google partner, and a beta user of Wave, said in an interview he's impressed with the performance so far.

"The gadgets are really cool, and fact that you can watch people respond in real time is also nice," Laczynski said. "Google borrowed from everything ‘Web 2.0' in Wave, and also solved a big problem with Gmail around collaboration. You just want to communicate, but now you have to pick the medium for different types of communication. Wave let's you get a quick answer without having to choose."

Laczynski said he expects developers to begin right away designing customer support for enterprise users and CRM applications for Wave. He said his company "has gadgets and robots in the works right now for the product." He cautioned that Wave's complexity and multiple use cases might actually prove to be a detriment as in targeting consumers, however.

"It's a complicated product, and it appeals to technical people, but taking it out to consumers, the messaging needs to be more simple," he said. "There is so much that it can do, but past 100,000 users, if you want grandma to use it, Google needs a clear adoption path and to be able to communicate why people would want to use it." 

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A new Synergy Research Group report on the global market for collaborative applications found vendor sales down across the board for the first quarter of 2009 in both the enterprise and SMB market segments. The report said collaboration application vendors notched sales of $913.3 million for the first quarter. Avaya, Cisco and Siemens were the top three vendors in the enterprise category, and ShoreTel, Cisco and Avaya lead the SMB category.

Though Synergy said these companies were in a strong strategic position in their respective markets, the report also found that the top six vendors in both segments saw quarter-over-quarter sales declines. The report also noted a growing interest in managed UC offerings as small business suffer decreased credit availability, and it reported that price points for UC offerings are declining slowly as competition in the space increases.

For more:
- see the Synergy press release here 

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The IP telephony endpoint market will be affected by the economic downturn - despite the fact an increasing number of enterprises are recognizing the benefits of both IP desktop phones and enterprise soft clients.
That's the conclusion of Melanie Turek, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, which has just released its latest global study of the sector's enterprise market.

D2 Technologies, an embedded IP communications software company, announced that its VoIP technology now processes more than 40 billion minutes of VoIP traffic per month in various devices. D2 attributed its robust traffic numbers to more system-on-a-chip vendors, hardware manufacturers and mobile companies embedding its vPort VoIP solution into new products.

The company's vPort has been embedded in carrier CPE equipment, enterprise UC devices and next-generation processors, D2 said, and the solution provides the devices with features beyond just VoIP.

"VPort is available on the widest array of SoC's and ODM/OEM platforms in the industry," said Doug Makishima, D2 vice president of marketing, in a statement. "As a result, manufacturers are using vPort to more quickly and affordably deliver new VoIP-enabled communications devices to market--and, as a result, enabling D2 to establish the 40 billion processed VoIP minutes per month benchmark." 

For more:
- see the press release here 

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