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At VoiceCon San Francisco last week, I had a chance to speak with Jim Burton about his role as intermediary in the talks between Microsoft and IBM on presence federation. Thinking about that conversation now, I kind of wonder if maybe Jim shouldn’t put in his name for Secretary of State in the new administration. Sounds like the negotiations were as complex and delicate as a lot of international diplomacy.
As we reported on No Jitter last week, Jim’s efforts ultimately succeeded, and Microsoft and IBM now say they are about to make good on their promise to implement inter-domain presence federation between Office Communications Server (OCS) and Lotus Sametime. The work does not cover federation between Microsoft’s MSN instant messaging and Sametime; MSN is a different division of Microsoft and this would have complicated the process of negotiating interoperability, beyond where it could have gotten done in the seven months the vendors had between VoiceCon Orlando, when they made their commitment, and VoiceCon San Francisco, where they announced success.
I wrote a feature earlier this year about the many obstacles that stand in the way of real, meaningful interoperability in enterprise communications, and last week’s Microsoft-IBM announcement addresses just a fraction of this universe. Inter-domain federation can, as the name suggests, link two separate enterprises, which will be useful for the many vendor and partner relationships that large enterprises rely on. But the real critical piece, and the bigger technical challenge, is intra-enterprise federation.
And in that area, all eyes are, once again, on Microsoft. During the VoiceCon session where the inter-domain agreement was announced, IBM’s Pat Galvin made it clear that he doesn’t feel the job is done. “As far as IBM is concerned,” Galvin said, “this process is only half complete.
“I hope that Microsoft starts participating in the intra-domain [work],” Galvin concluded.
IBM, together with Cisco, has taken the lead on trying to solve intra-domain federation, and we were fortunate to have Jonathan Rosenbaum of Cisco on the VoiceCon UC panel. Jonathan, along with Avshalom Houri of IBM, was one of the original co-authors of the IETF draft on intra-domain federation (available here http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-simple-intradomain-federation-02 ). Not surprisingly, Jonathan joined the call for Microsoft to be more active in the intra-domain effort–though Microsoft’s Eric Swift, probably wisely, refrained from shaking any more hands after the initial introductions were over.
I’m beginning to wonder, however, if the key isn’t interoperability, but interworking. Here’s what I see as the difference: Interoperability would be the ability to plug any SIP/IP communications device into any other, and have them work together. That’d be terrific, of course, but for all the reasons I outlined in the feature article referenced above, it’s more complicated than just presence federation–and presence federation is pretty complicated, itself.
Interworking would be at once a more modest and potentially more useful goal. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to be communicating over diverse overlay networks–not just a mix of TDM- and IP-based communications in the enterprise, but more importantly, public cellular as well. If an enterprise could tie together all of these diverse components, it could exercise greater control over its cellular costs (and assets, such as phone numbers) and provide more efficient communications to its mobile workforce. The core of such an interworked systems is…well, it’s a PBX, probably an IP-PBX.
This isn’t as fancy as a presence-enabled, business process-integrated, unified communications system, but I’d argue it has more practical value in the near term. It helps you take costs out your network and serve the immediate needs of your workforce. It lets you slow-roll your TDM-to-IP migration in a tight investment climate, while still opening up collaborative technologies that also save on costs, such as conferencing in all its media.
So interoperability is good if you can get it. Interworking is something you need–and can get.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
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Like its counterpart session last March in Orlando, today’s VoiceCon UC Summit made interoperability news: Pat Galvin of IBM and Eric Swift of Microsoft announced today that the two vendors had achieved inter-domain presence federation between Office Communications Server (OCS) and Lotus Sametime. You can read more on No Jitter.
There was other interesting discussion in this summit as well, most of it focused on one of the main watchwords for the week: Cost savings. Panelists from Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, IBM, Siemens and Mitel all agreed that cost was the overriding concern for enterprises; Mark Spencer, founder and CTO of Digium noted that in open source, “The sell is all about cost savings.” He recounted the story of an unsuccessful procurement in which the customer refused to believe Digium’s open source Asterisk solution could be delivered at the specified price. That’s not an attitude he expects any customers to take these days.
The other trend that many of the executives on this panel anticipate is great use of managed and hosted services as a way to deal with capital constraints. Paul McMillan of Siemens pointed out that “easier acquisition”–i.e., lower costs–would be crucial. Another factor arguing in favor of managed services, McMillan noted, was that if enterprises go through headcount reductions next year, they could wind up owning too many user licenses; a leased service would avoid this cost.
Now, here are some VoiceCon thoughts from our good friend and partner from UCStrategies, Marty Parker:
***
“On the User Forum Summit (featuring four end users), my take away summary is:
Key points by all four customers:
VoIP is just another application. The extreme case, of course, was Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, which had a 3Com telephony application running on the IBM System i. Virgin MegaStore’s OCS/Cisco combination was a close second. Beckmann Coulter, a health care company that uses Siemens HiPath 4000, is more aligned with traditional PBX architecture, though on open servers, and the Washington State Employees Credit Union’s ShoreTel is most proprietary, though still an application.
Phones were not the topic. Many are using softphones and mobile phones in place of or in conjunction with desktop phones. All of them talked about phones as just something the user plugs in, especially for branch offices and home workers.
All of them said it was easy and doable. Beckman Coulter, of course, said it was “big”, but not difficult.
All of them were able to get staffing consolidations after the transition was complete, though at Beckman Coulter that was in the branch office organizations, not in the IT team.
Related to that was mention of the change of the vendor support model, with minimal or no “truck rolls” in the IP world.
Notable by absence of mention was the network. Not one of the customers indicated they had made a significant investment in their network just for the purpose of VoIP. (Amazing to me, given the Cisco conversations I hear.)
However, for Unified Communications applications, there was “not so much” mentioned by these customers. Each of them had some ideas of where they would go with UC, but the UC investments were not built into the VoIP transition.
As to the Keynotes, I’ll suggest these two points:
IBM: Intriguing demo of the ease and cleverness of the Sametime environment, enabling user creativity, but the tools were not translated into specific business applications. It left a feeling of a hard-to-justify and even harder-to-support investment, rather than a transformative, easy-to-use tool for business process streamlining. A missed opportunity, I’d say.
Kaiser-Permanente: A fabulous presentation of how a vision-driven enterprise can combine their strategy and their technology, including communications as integral to the processes, to make major breakthroughs for their customers (members), employees (clinicians), and their industry overall. In that context, it was interesting to note there were few boundaries on the definition of Communications — it certainly included voice and video, and also embraced IM, SMS, e-mail, web sites, call centers, kiosks, mobile phones and more. Clearly, they are packaging the technology to provide a “personalized” experience.
***
To close out from the co-chairman’s point of view, I’ll admit that, given the economy, we came into this VoiceCon not knowing what to expect–tumbleweeds in the aisles of the show floor? As it turned out, attendance was strong and interest was high in the booths. Likewise, session audiences were engaged and as skeptical and probing as ever.
Attendance was especially strong in the Unified Communications sessions, which certainly isn’t new at VoiceCon, but it has led Fred Knight and I to finally conclude that UC is the core of the conference, not just a technology overlay on the voice over IP that dominated a few years ago. I don’t think anyone thinks about deploying an IP-PBX anymore without asking themselves, “Then what?” Not everyone has an answer yet, but knowing that there needs to be an answer may be what will motivate people to keep coming to VoiceCon. At least that’s what Fred and I are going to shoot for.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
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Phil Fasano was well positioned to give a business-level view of communications technology in his VoiceCon San Francisco keynote this morning. Fasano is senior VP and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and he said at the outset that “information technology is the differentiator” in the health care market, where Kaiser uses technology to drive prevention, which in turn is the engine of cost reduction for health care providers.
Prevention is the “single focus” in everything Kaiser does, and by automating all patient records, the company was able to use this massive online resource as the source for communications that go out proactively, reminding patients about needs around prescription refills, follow-up, etc.
The transition to IP communications did involve some concrete technology transition and attendant cost savings. Namely, Kaiser went from:
450 PBXs to 60
250 messaging systems to 60
150 wireless voice systems to 0
150 IVR systems to 15
120 ACDs to 15
The result was a 7%-10% savings on telephony costs.
During Q&A, Fred Knight asked Fasano how he built the IT organization for this effort. Fasno responded that Kaiser’s 6,000-strong IT organization includes Business Information Officers who are “absolutely aligned with line-of-business officers,” one of the most direct such associations we’ve seen among VoiceCon end user speakers. As for the bulk of the IT staff, much of these are “focused entirely on the technology,” and an ongoing effort is made to keep them focused on members’ needs and how members want to interact with the company.
Finally, Fasano said Kaiser tries as much as possible to standardize to as few vendors as possible, adding, “The price tag of variability is high.” When Fred Knight harkened back to this statement during Q&A, and asked if it was at odds with the notion that Unified Communications requires multiple vendors, since “no one can do it all,” Fasano said it’s prudent to spread your risk by avoiding reliance on a single vendor. But, he added, he believes Kaiser has too many vendors in some areas, and his goal is to consolidate down to 2-3 major vendors in each major technology area.
***
This morning’s vendor keynote was provided by Bruce Morse of IBM, whose most compelling demo came when his demo team built “voice mashups” on the fly. This was accomplished in a Web Services environment where IBM was able to take feeds from anything from Domino servers to Excel spreadsheets to create a mashup in which the user can more effectively track developments with a customer. Specifically, the scenario featured a news feed customized with the names of companies, who in the demo are those that the end user sells his product to. The user then adds to the mashup a spreadsheet where the user would have his contacts for each of these companies, as well as a link to the directory in which their phone numbers are stored.
The result is a mashup where the user clicks on a piece of news about the customer company–presumably one that suggests a sales opportunity–and clicking on the news feed brings up the information for the contact at that company.
The context for this demo was in Bruce Morse’s presentation of IBM as a company that can enable communications and collaboration that yields business value. In addition to the mashup demo, Morse showed capabilities within Lotus Sametime that let users share screens and do screen grabs within their Instant Messaging interface, and others that let users find colleagues who are “experts” in particular areas by linking into Lotus Connections social software. Being able to link into Connections from the IM interface lets the user find out not only how to reach someone in a contact list, but what communities that person belongs to in the Connections system, which may give an idea of where that person’s expertise lies.
***
So we wrap up tomorrow with panels on UC Architectures and Mobility. We’ve been fortunate to see strong traffic on the show floor, which we hope is a sign that, as difficult as times are, enterprise decision-makers are committed to keeping up with market developments and understanding what’s out there.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
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Microsoft’s entry to the market has changed the way enterprise communications decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.
Betsy Frost Webb, Microsoft’s GM for Unified Communications marketing, talked up the need to focus on the organizational impacts of UC, then brought out two enterprise end users who are living through those impacts: Michael Terrill, convergence project manager at Boeing, and Michael Keithley, CIO at Creative Artists Agency.
Terrill stressed the importance of having a steering/governance body that includes representatives from at least the following organizations: Messaging, Desktop, Security, Legal, Telecom, Data. “Make sure you really build an inclusive team,” he said. He said patience is critical on everyone’s part as they learn to deal with differences in terminology, language, acronyms and the like.
Keithley had an interesting take on the inclusion of traditional telecom folks in the new endeavor. Telecom had been part of Facilities, but made the transition to IT. Previously, for the telecom team, “Dialtone was the only thing that mattered,” he said. “We embraced them, took them under our wings.” Now, he said, those telecom people feel very much a part of the IT team, they make more money and are happier.
Both users have been pretty aggressive in their adoption of UC. Terrill laid out the following timeline that Boeing has experienced:
2006–IT did a market survey to consider suppliers
2007–Concept and feature demos
2008–Rollout to 200 users on Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.
Keithley noted that CAA, the well-known Hollywood talent agency, which employs 1,000, has always “tried to push the envelope on technology.” He said presence is critical feature for his company–not surprising when you picture the image of the ultra-mobile, ultra-connected Hollywood talent agent.
Terrill, for his part, said mobility and virtual workforce/home worker considerations leads him to see traditional desktop telephones as “less strategic,” and he hopes to be “investing less in those fixed-function appliances.” The one stumbling block: Those users, many of whom represent a “cultural challenge” as they remain attached to their traditional devices.
The concluding advice from both men was to have a clear vision of where you want to go with UC. Terrill’s recommendation was, “Think through what your overall strategy is,” and Keithley added, “It’s all about business value.”
Betsy Frost Webb brought out Eric Swift of Microsoft for an OCS Release 2 demo of audioconferencing, and then she concluded by rattling off some statistics: More than half of the Fortune 500 have licensed OCS; 1,000+ customers are using Roundtable, Microsoft’s snazzy 360-degree, tabletop-based videoconferencing endpoint; and Microsoft has 2,000 partners in its UC ecosystem. She also asserted that there are “companies that are bypassing an entire generation of PBX technology” to go straight to OCS. This would have been maybe the most newsworthy item of the whole speech–if she’d given any details.
***
Earlier, one of the providers of that very-much-alive generation of technology, Avaya, was on stage in the person of Charlie Giancarlo, the company’s acting CEO. Giancarlo will step up to chairman of Avaya at the end of this year and be replaced as CEO by Kevin Kennedy, who’s currently head of JDS Uniphase. So this could be the last we see of Giancarlo on the VoiceCon stage–at least for a little while.
For his speech, which opened the conference this morning, Giancarlo took the theme of “The Age of Business User” (46 in the case of this business user, but that’s another matter). Giancarlo ran through many of the points that have become standard-issue, discussing focus on the end user, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the like. He did get a ripple of recognition in the crowd when he said, “Everybody talks about end users as if they know them. But it’s usually some version of themselves.”
But the part of Giancarlo’s speech that really resonated was when he put up a slide with an obviously recent picture of a board full of stock quotations, each lit up in the appropriate color for gains and losses: Just 5 green entries wallowed in a sea of red. His point: Now is a good time to be a private company, like Avaya.
Not being subject to the whims of an ugly stock market “really allows you to focus on the fundamentals,” Giancarlo said. Avaya doesn’t have to worry about rising or falling with this quarter’s revenue or earnings announcement. Giancarlo also brought some perspective from his days at Cisco when the high-flyer fell victim (along with everyone else) to the bursting of the tech bubble–not that he was underestimating the seriousness of the current situation, but, “I’ve been through nuclear winter–it was 2000 and 2001,” he said.
Even better, Giancarlo was willing to give hard numbers on Avaya’s performance–which as a private company, they’re not obligated to do. The tallies:
Revenue Base: $5.2 billion
Gross Margin: 48%
EBITDA: $772 million
Operating Cash Flow: $436 million
Cash Balance: $677 million
“We’re in very good financial position,” he assured the crowd.
Here’s hoping we all can say the same.
***
Tomorrow, we’ll have keynotes from IBM and from an end user, Kaiser Permanente. We’ll bring that report to your email inbox this time tomorrow.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
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The economic news seems all bad these days, and Nortel’s announcement of 1,300 layoffs and a $3.4 billion quarterly loss hung over the opening of this year’s show like a San Francisco fog. Or at least we thought it would. What we’re finding, however, is that the crowd here–which we’re expecting will equal last year’s San Francisco event–is all business.
Judging by the breakdown in morning tutorial attendance, the big concerns among our attendees haven’t changed: People gravitated to Brent Kelly’s updated session comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 with IBM Lotus Sametime; they also went for David Bryan’s SIP Tutorial, which once again got great reviews; and our new tutorial, with Nemertes Research examining business cases for IP telephony and Unified Communications, was another strong draw. Somewhat surprisingly, we had a light crowd for Gary Audin’s tutorial on saving money for the enterprise by saving power. My take is that, while this is a worthy topic and Gary is a perennial favorite among speakers at VoiceCon, the subject–or at least the need for knowledge on the subject–still isn’t as urgent for this group as our core technology topics remain.
I also had a chance to do some podcast interviews today, including a chat with Jim McQuaid of NetQoS, a management software vendor which, as the name suggests, provides reporting on voice quality in an IP telephony network. Mostly, when people talk about voice quality in IP telephony, it’s of the “Can you hear me now?” dilemma: Just how lousy does the other person sound, and how lousy might you sound? But as Jim and I discussed, there’s another whole issue around quality for telephony, and that’s the question of time to dialtone, post-dial delay and the like. This is another element of the frustration factor, and one that NetQoS can report on.
“The expectations remain those that were set up by the Bell System,” Jim said. We’re willing to wait somewhere between 5 and 12 seconds, “and then we think: This is not working.”
“Human impatience,” Jim observed, “is a renewable resource.”
Tomorrow morning we’ll start the main conference program, opening with a keynote from Charlie Giancarlo, interim and, in fact, outgoing CEO of Avaya. Charlie was named interim CEO earlier this year when Lou D’Ambrosio stepped down for health reasons, and Charlie made it clear that Avaya would hire a permanent replacement. That individual, Kevin Kennedy, currently CEO of JDS Uniphase, has now been hired, and so tomorrow will represent Charlie Giancarlo’s first and last keynote as Avaya CEO. Charlie will be followed by Betsy Frost Webb, GM for Unified Communications Marketing at Microsoft–who we can expect to offer further information on the Office Communications Server Release 2 that was announced last month at VoiceCon Amsterdam.
We’ll follow up with a complete report tomorrow.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
