Free VoiceCon Webinar: “Controlling OPEX in Enterprise Communications”
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET

IP telephony provide organizations with the opportunity to use new technology to reduce the cost of running their communications systems. But actually realizing the savings requires careful planning and ongoing monitoring, management and troubleshooting. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research will describe the structure of operational costs in hybrid and all-IP deployments and the financial impact of using automated management systems. She will be joined by Dr. Fiona Lodge of webinar sponsor Prognosis.
Register Now!

If you’re in a conference session, and an Ethernet switch vendor tells you to use 10/100 instead of Gigabit wherever you can, you must be in a session on Green IT.

In this instance, it was an Interop session on “Deploying a Green IP Telephony Network,” and the speaker was Harpreet Chadha, senior director, product management at Extreme Networks. And besides the idea of curtailing (or at least not expanding) bandwidth, Harpreet suggested selectively powering down at least a portion of the IP phones in a given office when they’re not in use. He sketched out a scenario for a 200-person office that operates 9–5, Monday through Friday:

• Identify 150 non-critical desk phones
• Power down at 6 PM each evening, restart at 7 AM the next morning
• Power down over the weekend

The obvious result is that the company saves 75% on the cost of powering those phones during the down hours, and the more power-hungry the phones, the more the savings. Harpreet noted that the phones can be brought up sequentially over a period of time, so as to avoid overwhelming the DHCP server with a flood of registrations as they re-boot at 7 AM. However, in response to audience questions, he agreed that there does need to be a mechanism developed to override or otherwise deal with the fact that having the phones down could be a problem in a 911 situation for employees who are present after hours.

Another point of debate came up in response to the panel’s APC representative, Domenic Alcaro, who’d cited the statistic that datacenters consumed 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006, at a cost of $4.5 billion; and that this consumption represented about 1.5% of the U.S.’s total electricity use.

The question was, essentially: So if our industry cuts its power consumption, say, by one-third, we’ve only taken 0.5% out of the nation’s power usage—is it worth it?

Well, besides saving the industry a billion and a half dollars, it’d take about 20.3 million tons of CO2 out of the environment. Simon Gwatkin of Mitel, in his presentation for the Interop panel, noted that the average household creates 5.5 tons of CO2 per year, so you’re eliminating the equivalent of 3.7 million households’ worth of pollution if you cut datacenter power usage by one-third.

Obviously, one industry isn’t going to solve the problem, but everyone can make a contribution, and when it comes to IT, we can be part of the solution beyond just cutting our own power consumption. I was talking with Fred Knight about an Interop session he attended in which a power company representative described the various economic incentives that the power generators themselves have to use technology in order to more closely monitor residential power consumption, and adjust dynamically.

It seems as if this is where the “smart home” movement should really be going. It’s not about the house playing your favorite music as soon as it senses you walking into the room—although in Vegas I also talked to Agito Networks about how they use location-tracking technology to force cellular-WiFi handoffs, so the technology is really a lot closer than you might think.

Instead, it’s about being able to schedule things like dishwashers to run in the middle of the night, during off-peak times, so that the power company doesn’t have to fall back on incredibly polluting energy sources to meet peak demand.

If we think differently about energy, we can use less of it and can deploy information technology to use it more wisely and efficiently. It should work….

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

Free VoiceCon Webinar: “Controlling OPEX in Enterprise Communications”
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET

IP telephony provide organizations with the opportunity to use new technology to reduce the cost of running their communications systems. But actually realizing the savings requires careful planning and ongoing monitoring, management and troubleshooting. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research will describe the structure of operational costs in hybrid and all-IP deployments and the financial impact of using automated management systems. She will be joined by Dr. Fiona Lodge of webinar sponsor Prognosis.

Register Now!

Gartner has a new report out (press release) in which they surveyed 300 organizations and reached the conclusion that Unified Communications’ value is in increasing “business agility,” rather than in saving money. That was based on actual experiences of early adopters.

The disconnect came when Gartner checked on expectations of those who hadn’t yet deployed UC. “By contrast, lower total cost of ownership and lower equipment costs were the top two expectations of UC among companies that have yet to deploy it,” the company reported. The release went on to quote Gartner research VP Steve Blood as saying, “It is evident that there is a significant difference between the expectations of UC and its actual benefits. We recommend that organizations build a business case based on enabling mobility and agility rather than on reducing IT department costs.”

That jibes with what the UCStrategies.com folks say: The big money is in time to market, time to sales, improved business processes in whatever form it takes. Hardly anybody seems to be buying the time-savings-equals-money-savings argument any more.

So we seem to have the classic “aspirational/perspirational” divide, to borrow a term from Chris Thompson of Cisco. And the question is, during a recession, will an enterprise allow itself the aspirational spending for improved business processes, or will it grab for that low-hanging fruit in the form of maintenance/service/support costs, conferencing and international toll savings, that basic IP-telephony offers?

The latter option so often tends to get positioned as a kind of failure—a failure of imagination, or will, or ambition. But there’s no reason that “aspirational” spending shouldn’t be a harder sell in bad economic times, especially when the “perspirational” deployments will not only save money now, but can lay the groundwork for the aspirational gains in the near- to mid-term future.

Another critical part of achieving those gains, however, is organizational issues. I addressed this in a blog post at No Jitter last week, and Gartner highlights it as well. In fact, the market research firm goes as far as to say that, “more than 80 per cent of appropriate organizational changes, including procedures, policies and compensation, will lag behind technological change through 2011. For example, many IT departments will continue to be organized separately around voice, networking and mobility, and some may not even have control of mobile budget.” Adds Steve Blood: “Nowhere is the effect of this organizational lag more apparent than in how the convergence of voice, data and applications is affecting organizations.”

A lot of things are going to slow down the effective deployment of Unified Communications. One is the purchasing environment and the business case issues. This organizational challenge is another one. Not surprisingly, this was the case with basic IP telephony infrastructure as well. We’re hearing some indications that enterprises are engaging on the organizational issues of UC, but the challenge is even more complex than the basic voice-data bifurcation that had to be dealt with a couple of years ago, when voice over IP first emerged.

So enterprises should begin to explore Unified Communications now, even if they don’t intend to buy right away. Such engagement is critical if enterprise IT departments are to understand their own members’ roles in deploying and managing the technology whenever we do end up making the transition from perspiration to aspiration.

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

BCR Training in Information Technologies—Essential Training
Get vendor-neutral education in technologies essential to your career Public classes in a city near you:

• Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications
• Introduction to Telecom: Voice, Data and Video
• Convergence I: Understanding Data and IP Networks
• Convergence II: Preparing for CompTIA Convergence+ Certification
• Voice over IP and IP Telephony
• VOIP II: Deploying and Best Practices in the Enterprise
• SIP Essentials

Plus more than 30 programs that can be brought to your site. Learn more: www.bcrtraining.com

Next week, I’m going to a show called Interop. You’ve probably heard of it; it’s the big show in Vegas that doesn’t feature Celine Dion, Elton John or water. I chair the VOIP and UC tracks for Interop, and we’ve got some interesting stuff coming up that I’ll be blogging about at No Jitter.

Last fall, at the New York Interop, our outfit did a sub-conference called VoiceCon At Interop, but lately I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t do something for the event we produce, on the order of Interop At Voicecon.

Obviously, I’m not talking about transplanting the Interop show into VoiceCon, but old-timers remember that Interop was originally a show about just what its name suggested: Interoperability. In the broader networking world, interoperability is no longer the hottest issue going; but in the IP-telephony/Unified Communications world, interoperability is suddenly all the rage.

The buzz began at VoiceCon Orlando last month, when Microsoft and IBM representatives shook hands and agreed to test interoperability between OCS and Sametime. We also found that attendee evaluations called out interoperability as a key issue that folks want to see more programming on.

So I’ve decided to start exploring this issue more deeply by writing an extensive, in-depth feature for No Jitter. I’m hoping to complete the interviews soon and post the feature early next month, but the first challenge has been to define just what we’re talking about when it comes to interoperability. What has to interoperate with what?

Marty Parker of Unicomm Consulting and UCStrategies.com gave me a great list as we prepared for a webinar on interoperability that AVST is sponsoring this week. Here are the areas of an IPT/UC implementation where Marty says interoperability is a critical issue that needs to be resolved:

• Number plans
• SIP and QSIG and PRI
• Federation
• Networking diverse PBXs
• Networking diverse voice mail
• Unified Messaging
• User Interfaces and Client
• Mobility voice and data channels
• Communications Management and Reporting tools

I also did an interview last week with Mun Yuen Leong, who’s CTO at Avaya, during which Mun Yuen broke the interoperability challenge down into three layers:

• The infrastructure layer, where SIP is the key standard;
• The presence federation layer, where SIP/SIMPLE and XMPP are the standards;
• The application layer, where it’s SOA and Web Services standards.

You can (and I expect I will) get down into the weeds of the interoperability standards, but I think the bigger question is what’s at stake at each of Mun Yuen’s layers, or each of Marty’s focal areas. And the question is best posed in the negative: What will happen if we don’t have interoperability at the infrastructure, presence federation or application layers? What will be lost if diverse Unified Messaging systems can’t exchange messages among themselves, or with certain other types of communications platforms?

Pretty clearly, lack of interoperability is where we’re at right now, pretty much across the board. (Note that lack of interoperability doesn’t necessarily mean lack of standards.) What we need to understand is what is going to change about the communications world that would make vendors decide to be open instead of being closed. What that comes down to, ultimately, is whether a critical mass of vendors see it as being in their economic interest to be open instead of being closed (or being open in name only).

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

BCR Training in Information Technologies—Essential Training
Get vendor-neutral education in technologies essential to your career Public classes in a city near you:

• Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications
• Introduction to Telecom: Voice, Data and Video
• Convergence I: Understanding Data and IP Networks
• Convergence II: Preparing for CompTIA Convergence+ Certification
• Voice over IP and IP Telephony
• VOIP II: Deploying and Best Practices in the Enterprise
• SIP Essentials

Plus more than 30 programs that can be brought to your site. www.bcrtraining.com

Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there?

That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it’s more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can’t take Facilities out of Telecom.

We’ve recently had a lot of great posts on our No Jitter editorial website discussing various aspects of convergence at Layer 1, from energy costs to cabling (see, for example, Matt Brunk here, and Gary Audin here). The common thing they note is that the true commodities—not bits and bytes, but the things that push the bits and bytes out of the boxes and get them to their destination—those commodities are getting more expensive, with no reason to expect a reversal of the trend. So how do you build into your planning a way to use less of them?

For energy (leave aside the social/green aspect, focus on cost), Matt has written about the need for Energy Star standards, like you have for household appliances, for servers and other power-sucking IT gear. And Gary’s post cited above discusses protocols for using energy more efficiently in IP phones. Gary has also written about using power costs as a factor in deciding where to site primary and backup datacenters.

Now, that won’t always play out ideally. The folks I wrote about last week, the hosting company PosTrack, had to balance the desire to locate where power is cheaper (Joliet, IL, in the exurbs), vs. needing to locate where they could efficiently make high-bandwidth connections to the big fiber backbone they needed to access; this second requirement landed some of their gear in a cage at a Level 3 datacenter high above downtown Chicago, where costs are high.

The issue of site surveying and selection even gets down to the local level; as Matt writes in his post on the “Copper Storm,” you may even want to look at configuring your wiring plan and placing closets and IDFs/MDFs in ways that let you use the least amount of expensive copper.

The other solution that Matt addresses is wireless. With the 802.11n standard promising 100+ Mbps bandwidth, this could theoretically be a solution. And you’d think that, even if you weren’t comfortable going completely wireless, you might at least consider not cabling certain parts of new facilities, or not upgrading cabling where you otherwise might, especially if you can arrange to have your more mobile workers or office hotelers located in this area. On the other hand, deciding not to cable is a pretty long-term decision, so you’d really want to make sure you’re right before you go with it (or go without it, I guess).

Though I wasn’t serious at the beginning about putting Telecom back under Facilities, the connection still needs to be made. If you can figure out a way to save facilities costs by the way you configure a deployment, it’d be nice if you could capture that savings for your own budget, and use the funds to pilot higher-layer technologies. However, this would require the financial managers to forgo the short-term facilities savings for the promise of bigger productivity or competitive gains driven by stuff like unified communications. They’d have to buy the idea that UC is worth the cost of deploying.

For that matter, so would you.

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

Mitel delivers flexibility and simplicity in smart unified communications solutions and applications for organizations of all sizes. Combined with a full range of managed services that include voice and data network design and traffic provisioning, custom application development, and attractive financing options, Mitel is reinventing how successful organizations gain competitive advantage by easily collaborating and communicating over distance and time with customers, colleagues and partners.

Visit us at www.mitel.com

One of the trends we started noticing almost as soon as IP-PBXs reached a reasonable level of maturity was the tendency of colleges and universities to ditch their telco Centrex systems in favor of the new CPE, usually motivated by impressive cost savings. The down side for the university IT/telecom departments was that they could no longer resell the service to students as a profit center.

I had a chance last week to visit with a company here in the Chicago area that’s trying to reverse that trend. PosTrack is a Joliet, IL-based company that was founded more than 20 years ago by Don Heidrich, who still serves as the company’s CEO. Don started the company as a software vendor making point-of-sales systems, and has expanded over the years into a variety of other application development areas, and most recently (about 5 years ago) got into the hosted services business; they’ve gained Enhanced Information Provider regulatory status (similar to CLEC status) and now provide hosted service to K-12 districts and higher education institutions in 37 states.

The company’s partners at Siemens wanted to show off PosTrack’s latest implementation, a Siemens HiPath 8000 (or OpenScape Voice, as the product is now called) that resides in a cage that PosTrack rents out inside Level 3’s datacenter in downtown Chicago. PosTrack’s main operation in Joliet runs the company’s legacy HiPath 4000, which eventually will migrate to an 8000 platform, but having the space in Chicago provides physically redundant operations, to bolster PosTrack’s hosting credentials. It also lets PosTrack use 1 Gbps fiber to hook directly into the massive Level 3 backbone, again in redundant spots at Level 3 facilities in 2 Chicago locations. “We’re all about the survivability,” remarked Tony Brncich, a PosTrack VP who joined Don Heidrich on our datacenter tour.

PosTrack offers 5 main hosted services:

• SIP trunking—They’re one of the good guys in this respect; Tony Brncich observed that the large carriers, who have been dragging their feet on full SIP trunk availability, “don’t like us” on this score.
• Unified messaging—The PosTrack guys said this has been especially appealing for K-12, because it lets teachers have more up-to-date dial-in messaging capabilities, without having to do a lot of retrofitting to facilities in older school buildings in order to implement converged CPE.
• Unified Plus—A variant of the previous offering that adds outbound dialing, an important application for schools that may have to notify parents of closings, etc., as well as for universities looking to build more effective emergency-notification systems.
• Hosted IP-telephony—This is the full hosted OpenScape Voice platform.
• Mobility—This is the one that Don Heidrich thinks is going to become really big. It’s targeted at colleges and universities, and provides a dual-mode cellular/WiFi smartphone, which works internally on the Wi-Fi when the students are on campus. Besides the potential savings to students on their cellular costs—both voice and text/Internet–the service provides multiple channels for the aforementioned emergency notifications. And in these emergency scenarios, it offers a better option for students to call out to loved ones and classmates. Tony Brncich noted that in the recent shooting at nearby Northern Illinois University, “The weak link there was the cellular network,” which quickly maxed out its capacity and blocked outbound calls to and from worried students and parents. Having a VoWiFi-to-Internet outbound calling capability avoids this. That’s particularly useful because many large universities are located in secondary market, where cellular coverage is especially thin, Don Heidrich noted.

PosTrack’s hosted service also potentially gets the university back in business as a telecom reseller. Tony Brncich said PosTrack sells the mobility service to the university for $40-$50 per student, and the university charges the students whatever it sees fit. Given students’ devotion to wireless and near-indifference to landline, this kind of service could have potential. If your university IT department is interested in getting back into the business of being a telecom provider, that is.

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

Customers Rank ShoreTel Number One in IP Telephony Satisfaction
Customers who purchased any phone system rated ShoreTel their top pick FOUR years in a row*. Read the analyst report comparing Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and ShoreTel.
*Download the Nemertes Research Report Summary, “Building the Successful Virtual Workplace: VoIP Review: Products, Services, Architecture,” March 2007.

Inspired by the Al Gore-John Chambers VoiceCon keynote (video), a lot of the bloggers at our No Jitter site have been addressing the relative importance and efficacy of telepresence. As usual, Tom Nolle had probably the most interesting take, and one that drew quite a few comments. Tom picked up on something that ought to have been obvious from the start about telepresence, yet it’s something that I haven’t seen remarked on too widely: Many users report being disappointed in the inability to use a whiteboard effectively in a telepresence session.

Whiteboarding has become a pretty standard expectation for many people who do multi-party multimedia conferencing, and so it’s not surprising that they’re not satisfied with simply looking at the whiteboard that’s in the other folks’ conference room without being able to add their own contributions. As Tom mentions, this is a function where higher-resolution images certainly make for less user dissatisfaction, but it’s still not optimal.

And to me, it raises a more basic question: What’s really the point of telepresence? If it’s to make the meeting as much like an in-person gathering as possible, what’s the best way to do that?

I don’t know if anyone’s written a gospel of telepresence. Is it telepresence dogma that the screens must project what’s in front of the camera in the opposite room, as a more or less static broadcast? Does it break some telepresence fourth wall if you, say, integrate a whiteboard function as a picture-in-picture display that everyone can contribute to and see?

The message that John Chambers and Sue Bostrom—and, frankly, that Al Gore—put out at VoiceCon, is that Cisco’s Telepresence offers a stunning (Gore used the word “spectacular”) rendering of the participants in a meeting. And indeed it does. But is realism enough?

Cisco, after all, purchased WebEx, an acquisition that brought along a lot of very intriguing network-based possibilities. But WebEx also brought along a more obvious tool: a very robust meeting application, an interface that millions of people are familiar and comfortable with. I hope Cisco is working on ways to integrate the seemingly pedestrian capabilities of WebEx conferencing with the magic of high-definition video for a more complete telepresence package.

The Cisco telepresence keynote was preceded by Mike Rhodin of IBM, whose keynote included, among other things, a Second Life-like conferencing app demo. As I blogged at the time, these two demonstrations sort of bookended the idea of next-gen conferencing technology, as far as I was concerned.

I think Cisco, HP, Polycom, and any other vendor that’s thinking in terms of “telepresence”—i.e., a high-end, high-cost (to be blunt) meeting system—shouldn’t just see the technology as an attempt to make the pictures life-like. They should be thinking about making the experience life-like, and that doesn’t necessarily mean only realistic pictures; it means a realistic experience, and experiences take place not only in the eyes and optic nerves, but in lots of parts of the brain that combine them in ways we don’t understand (or need to understand, for our purposes).

For example, collaborating on a big, wall-mounted whiteboard is something you can do when everyone’s physically in the same room; but when there are two or more rooms, it feels not at all unnatural for people to use a computer-based interface to collaboratively mark up a work space of some sort. You could kind of kludge this together now, by having people bring their PCs to a telepresence meeting and concurrently get on a WebEx conference or internal social networking site; but the more elegant solution would be to incorporate it into a telepresence room.

One final note: Several of the other VoiceCon speakers took some swipes at the steep ($300K per room) price tag that telepresence carries. That’s fair enough—as far as it goes. But everyone knows telepresence is expensive. Tom Nolle notes that, in his experience, the folks who pay for the full telepresence experience are more satisfied than those who try to cobble together a “telepresence-lite” system.

So the question for your enterprise is whether, even at its steep price tag, telepresence can add value and ROI. And the followup question for the vendors is: How could it add even more value?

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Unified Communications And Collaboration—IBM Calls It UC²
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM calls it UC².

What can you say about a week when you heard from everyone from Allan Sulkin to Al Gore, where you saw Microsoft and IBM representatives shake hands and promise to work toward interoperability, and where the CEO of Avaya, Lou D’Ambrosio, summoned communications decision-makers to help save the country from recession?

I have never had a joke fall as flat as when Fred Knight asked the final Locknote panel what our takeaway was from the show, and I said, “The robe from my hotel room.” In keeping with the “green” theme of Al Gore’s Telepresence keynote, I am recycling that joke here. I’m doing it for the children!

But my actual takeaways were these two themes: Interoperability and Integration, which also happened to be 2 of the “I” words that Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft highlighted in his Wednesday keynote. There was a lot of talk about both of these topics, and after a few days’ rest, here’s where I think those themes were advanced.

In terms of Interoperability, the big moment was the on-stage handshake between Eric Swift of Microsoft and Pat Galvin of IBM (see our No Jitter blog entry). This was a significant moment because we at VoiceCon/No Jitter, as well as Jim Burton of UCStrategies, the co-moderator of the session, plan to hold these guys to it. It’s put up or shut up time, and if they don’t come through, that’ll tell us something, as well, about how closely the reality of Unified Communications can be expected to align with the hype.

And it’s not going to be just Microsoft and IBM. We extend the invitation to all of the other companies to play. But, frankly, Microsoft is considered to be the company most likely to perceive a benefit in not interoperating, so all eyes will be on them. But while we’re at it, I’d love to see some Cisco and Avaya gear working together—and I mean something beyond Avaya software running on a Cisco telephone.

If it turns out that the key companies in the industry want merely to pay lip service to the idea of interoperability, we hope it’ll be a benefit to you for them to reveal that bedrock position sooner rather than later, so you can adjust your expectations accordingly. On the other hand, if we’ve taken the first steps down the road to true multivendor interoperability, then we’re really onto something.

The integration issue turned up especially in relationship to the contact center. Hopefully we’re getting beyond the idea that everybody should be a de facto contact center agent. This model has its uses, but I thought the smartest keynote came from Avaya’s Lou D’Ambrosio, who illustrated not how to bring the enterprise into the contact center, but rather how to bring the contact center into the enterprise. It seems a very wise, efficient use of resources to make your contact center agents the virtual equivalents of your sales agents—to me, this is truly virtualizing the enterprise. Avaya also showed examples of automating the process as well, by integrating bar code readers and other in-store technology.

One of the things we keep hearing is that Unified Communications will segment into industry verticals, with separate solutions being developed for health care, retail, etc. The Avaya keynote showed something of how that could work.

I’m proud to say that at VoiceCon Orlando last week, everybody delivered. Dennis Schmidt of Bank of America gave a detailed, compelling, passionate account of his journey through IP telephony as a customer; Al Gore roused the audience with his commitment to using technology as one tool to help solve the global warming crisis; and our array of vendor keynoters and, most especially, end user speakers, offered concrete success stories and innovative ideas.

I’m going to be thinking about—and blogging about—last week for some time to come. I hope you’ll join in the conversation. 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

Well, we actually made some real news on the last day of VoiceCon. Microsoft and IBM agreed to do interoperability testing of their UC systems and to demo or report on or replicate the results at VoiceCon San Francisco, which takes place next November. What exactly that will entail—which products, features, etc.—will have to be hashed out in the coming weeks. But hopefully the handshake between Microsoft’s Eric Swift and IBM’s Pat Galvin that we saw in today’s opening session will represent the beginning of a new era in Unified Communications.

Interoperability took the main focus in this morning’s opening keynote session, which was a discussion among Unified Communications vendors about UC and the migration to software architectures. There was, of course, the obligatory Microsoft-bashing. In fact, what led up to the Microsoft-IBM accord was a challenge from Pat Galvin to Eric Swift’s claims that Microsoft OCS is standards-based, and that they’ve worked with other vendors to help them comply with Microsoft’s published specifications for interacting with OCS.

“If you’re open and standards-based,” Galvin said, “why do you have to publish specs at all?”

Surprisingly, there was some defense of Microsoft on this score. Christian Szpilfogel of Mitel pointed out that, when it comes to standards like SIP, “a lot of this stuff was simply undefined,” so Microsoft had to set some parameters.

But Mark Spencer, creator of the open-source PBX Asterisk, and CTO of Digium, didn’t let Microsoft off the hook that easily. Citing the example of the LDAP standard and the Microsoft Active Directory product, Spencer asserted, “Microsoft starts out down a path of open standards, and then veers off down a different path because it suits their business purposes.” He insisted that Microsoft wants interoperability in UC now because it’s the newcomer in the market, and he said, “It’s not so much the about the standards you have today, but to always have a commitment to open standards.”

Spencer compared partnering with Microsoft to snuggling with a bear: “It feels warm and fuzzy, but what happens when she wakes up and gets hungry?”

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

The Nortel Portfolio—Enterprise Transformation with Unified Communications
Nortel provides the solutions and services to transform your business. The key elements in the solutions are an interoperable network, a highly featured and reliable communications server, a strong award winning application set and lastly a complete offering of clients where users communicate on any device. Customers have experienced increased productivity and strong ROI using Nortel unified communications solutions. Come by VoiceCon Booth 1011 or visit www.nortel.com/uc123 to learn more about Nortel Solutions.

Fred Knight, VoiceCon conference co-chair, introduced this morning’s Telepresence-based keynote session with Al Gore and Cisco CEO John Chambers by noting what a remarkable panel it was. Fred told the audience: “They didn’t choose VoiceCon. They chose you.”

Having the Nobel Laureate and former Vice President on a panel with the CEO of Cisco was a statement to this audience that communications technology has a role to play in solving the climate change problem. Gore opened the session with a recap of the challenge facing the world because of global warming, and closed with an appeal that this generation leave its children a legacy of solving the crisis, rather than leaving behind a devastated planet.

TelePresence has obviously caught Gore’s attention, and he suggested that he plans a role for the technology in his own efforts to bring international leaders together to work on climate change. He described the system’s quality as “spectacular.”

One question to which Gore gave a somewhat surprising answer was on the issue of balancing innovation and regulation. The question was posed by session moderator Lawrence McGinty, who’s Science Editor of London-based ITV News (and who appeared from London via Telepresence), and Gore focused not on regulations that governments should impose, but rather regulations they should eliminate.

Specifically, Gore said countries should stop subsidizing carbon-emitting technologies. His example was when he learned, on a visit to India, that the government there subsidizes citizens’ purchase of kerosene. Innovative solar-powered systems are available and people prefer them when they get these systems, Gore said, but it’s not surprising that people stick with the subsidized, polluting power source.

Gore proposed that the U.S. reduce direct taxes on businesses and individuals, and replace these with a carbon tax that would create incentives to reduce emissions. To applause from the nearly 3,000 in attendance here, Gore said, “All of our choices would be instantly clarified if we put a price on carbon.”

For his part, Chambers emphasized the need for investment tax credits to foster innovation in new energy technologies to complement the ability of networks and information technology to replace carbon-emitting energy use in the near term.

His message: We can change the world and grow the economy at the same time. “We know how to make dreams come true in Silicon Valley,” Chambers said.

1. “The virtual workplace is here to stay.”
2. Collaborative business process will streamline company operations.
3. The new generation of workers will bring new expectations as to how they’ll be able to communicate at work.
4. Interoperability and open standards are a must.
5. There will be new models for how we “meet.”

To illustrate this last point, Rhodin and his demo crew showed an application that IBM built in conjunction with a newly-announced business partner, Forterra, which creates “virtual worlds.” The demo (which resembled the look and feel of Second Life) showed the two demo presenters’ avatars entering a meeting room, joined by a worker connecting in remotely. To find this other person and conference him in, the avatars went to a rolodex on the conference table, looked him up and dialed him in. A business card popped up for him and could be brought up throughout the teleconference, and the card turned green when the remote worker was speaking. That’s useful for those conferences where you’re never quite sure who’s speaking—my only quibble: A rolodex? Even I don’t use a rolodex any more, and I’m an old guy.

In many ways, this demo was the exact opposite of the Gore-Chambers telepresence session. The IBM conference room didn’t exist in physical space, the avatars had that funky motion and at one point one avatar was able to hop up onto the conference table from a standing start. And yet both technologies are part of the same transformation that’s under way in communications. Neither is something you’re going to be rolling out to your entire end user base anytime soon, but they clearly tell us a lot about where the technology is headed for that generation coming behind us that Al Gore asked us to keep in mind.

Tomorrow VoiceCon concludes with keynote panel discussions on Unified Communications and user case studies. The show has been chock full of nitty-gritty technical discussions as well as futuristic projections. I encourage you to head over to our editorial website, No Jitter, for more complete ongoing coverage.

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

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.

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.

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.

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair