VoiceCon Orlando 2008 Daily Update | Tuesday, March 18, 2008
For VoiceCon Orlando attendees and subscribers of VoiceCon Enews and VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly
Nortel is the sponsor of this VoiceCon Daily Update:
The Nortel Promise—Enterprise Transformation with Unified Communications
At Nortel we are driving people-centric collaboration to the speed of thought in your business. We see the data network being the foundation, so we’ve designed application-aware networks that deliver best in class quality of experience via reliable and secure networks and provide superior price/performance in increasingly commoditized interoperable networks. The result is Business Convergence, an alignment of IT communications and applications-infrastructure investments with business objectives. Come by VoiceCon Booth 1011 or visit www.nortel.com/uc123 to learn more about Nortel Solutions.
Today, the opening of the conference sessions at VoiceCon, featured a couple of major vendor keynotes—Lou D’Ambrosio, CEO of Avaya and Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate Vice President, Unified Communications Group at Microsoft. But I want to start with the type of keynote that’s become something of a calling card for VoiceCon and a perennial audience favorite: The end user keynote.
Dennis Schmidt, the driving force behind Bank of America’s gigantic IP-telephony rollout, described how they did it—and what they’re continuing to do. Though many enterprises have just a fraction of their endpoints deployed with VOIP, Bank of America is putting up some truly impressive numbers:
- Nearly 115,000 VOIP-enabled ports, with 220,000 employees eventually to be supported.
- The rollout is going at a pace of 60 branches deployed per week, and 1-4 enterprise office buildings deployed every weekend.
- A before-and-after picture that shows more than 500 PBXs, about 440 voice mail systems and some 6,300 key systems on the left side, consolidated down to just 52 clusters, which Schmidt is looking to reduce even further. Also, the project has enabled Bank of America to go from 100 long distance providers beforehand to “just a handful” now.
All of that consolidatory goodness has brought with it cost savings, in the form of centralized call control, patch management and release management, as well as remote troubleshooting capabilities, which adds up to maybe the most important number of all: A 15% reduction in per-seat overall cost where VOIP has been deployed, plus the ability to resolve troubles quicker.
Bank of America also launched an office hoteling program that it branded “My Work,” which the company hopes will further help it cut facilities costs.
So how do you get a program like this off the ground and keep it moving forward? “It’s significantly less about the technology and more intensely about the people and the processes,” in other words, organizational issues, Dennis said. He emphasized the importance of executive buy-in on the plan: “IT cannot be put into the position of negotiating this,” but has to be executing a plan that has support at the highest levels, he said. Also, transforming—i.e., integrating and cross-training—the teams is likewise critical.
On a personal note, Dennis has been a tremendous friend of VoiceCon the past several years, and it meant a lot to Fred Knight and me to finally get him on the big stage where he belongs, and we’re grateful to him for doing such a terrific job.
You can read a quick take on Lou D’Ambrosio’s keynote at No Jitter.com. D’Ambrosio put a strong emphasis on what he characterized as “The Democratization of Unified Communications,” which was another way of saying that getting UC technology into the hands of customer-facing employees is the best way for the communications industry to have a positive impact on the dismal-looking state of the economy.Actually D’Ambrosio didn’t hold back on this point. He posed UC-enablement as being the key thing that “you can do to turn around this economy.”
Indeed, D’Ambrosio’s tone was one of a general rallying his troops or, more relevant, a politician in visionary mode. It’s no coincidence that one of Avaya’s gimmicks in D’Ambrosio’s presentation was to use short clips of Hillary Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama giving “answers” to D’Ambrosio’s questions about what UC could accomplish. He ended, of course, with Obama’s call to action: “Yes we can!”
In terms of substance, Avaya plans to make this work by beefing up its software and services offerings, and coming to the market with “fully integrated reference architectures, codified solutions,” for Mobility and what they call the Intelligent Branch. These will comprise, for example in the case of the Mobility solution, video, VPN, speech access, one-number capabilities, and other features, packaged together into an offer that D’Ambrosio said would represent “the closest thing the industry has brought to a plug-and-play UC solution.”
One final cool thing: D’Ambrosio brought out Jorge Blanco, VP of Solutions Marketing at Avaya, for some demos, including one that integrated Avaya contact center/customer service technology with Second Life. That might seem futuristic today, but I wouldn’t bet against this being the germ of an idea that works.
Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft spent a good portion of his talk discussing video, and he spent a good portion of that discussion reminding the crowd of the $300,000 price tag that Cisco’s TelePresence typically carries. He also jabbed at Cisco’s vertically-integrated model of selling all the layers of a communications system. “What’s next folks?” he asked. “Are they going to be supplying tables and chairs to you? Are they going to be selling you the buildings? Actually, they already are with TelePresence.”The Microsoft answer is lower-quality video deployed to more desktops. By next year, he noted, Tandberg will be selling HD cameras for $300, and regular VGA cameras are already under $100; and then there’s Microsoft’s answer for group video, the $3,000 Roundtable product that captures multiple images in a 360-degree radius and broadcasts the image from the direction from which the unit is receiving audio input.
Singh Pall also announced a strategic partnership with Aspect Software that will give Microsoft a play in the contact center space; integration of Aspect’s contact center server with Microsoft Office Communications Server will let enterprises enable contact center agents with communications capabilities of OCS, such as instant messaging and presence (there’s more on this at No Jitter as well).
One of the interesting OCS use cases that Singh Pall highlighted was an integration with GE Healthcare, which makes medical imaging products. GE used Microsoft’s API to build an integrated interface that lets its images be displayed and transmitted within Office Communicator, the OCS client.
Several keynoters, speakers and folks I’ve chatted with casually have discussed the issue of green IT, talked about reducing carbon footprints, etc. That’s certainly because of tomorrow’s keynote session, which features Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore, appearing via TelePresence alongside Cisco CEO John Chambers, to discuss communications’ role in fighting climate change. In almost every respect, it’s going to be a session unlike any we’ve ever had at VoiceCon. If you’re not here on site, you can view a real-time streaming webcast that Cisco is providing.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
Posted in VOIP, Unified Communications, Tech Trends, Market Trends, Equipment, Architecture |
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