A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:
UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail: www.ucstrategies.com
Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to accomplish a task—to create and calculate spreadsheets. Everyone who needed to do these sorts of calculations immediately understood the benefit once they saw it in operation.
Similarly, the tools of UC—including presence, click-to-call, click-to-chat, single identity access to any device—provide an easy-to-understand way for individuals to improve their ability to communicate with others, to improve individual productivity.
We all know and have benefited from how PC use has exploded in ways that were difficult to envision in the days of VisiCalc. The reason for this explosion is that armies of software developers took advantage of standard operating systems and the “horizontal” layering of components, connected through published specifications and interfaces. They created an array of software applications each designed to fill a specific personal or business requirement.
We are in the midst of opening up the proprietary, vertically-integrated communications industry in a way similar to how the computer industry evolved over the last two or three decades. The future is a horizontally-layered industry with open standards, published interfaces and new armies of ecosystem developers. They will bring to market a vast array of specialized solutions, each tailored to the specific communication requirements of a particular job, industry, or business relationship.
As readers of this column know, the UCStrategies.com team sees the use cases for UC in two broad categories: One category focuses on communications to enhance user productivity; the other concentrates on communications integrated into business processes. Many of the user productivity cases leverage the initial UC tools, just as VisiCalc leveraged the Apple II and then the early PCs. And just as early VisiCalc functionality presaged unimaginably varied PC applications, today’s UC tools will evolve to provide a vast, rich set of applications for both individuals and for enterprise business processes.
All this came up at Interop last week, when I was discussing possible UC sessions and topics for VoiceCon San Francisco (Nov 10-13) with Fred Knight, VoiceCon’s GM/Co-Chair. One of the sessions will be a discussion of what’s available in the marketplace from various suppliers. Marty Parker, my partner at UniComm Consulting who designed the session, envisioned presentations describing specific UC tools that can enable specific business process applications—e.g., collaboration acceleration, or connecting quickly to the right resource to resolve a problem.
Fred wants the vendors to show what is in their UC portfolio, without being tied to specific applications—let the VoiceCon attendees see what’s available and decide on how best to use them. Both approaches have merit in this rapidly developing environment.
My view is that the “user productivity” approach to UC can be successful and an important step, but the industry is already beginning to integrate communications into business processes and business applications. Developers aligned with suppliers are using plug-ins, SDKs and toolkits to fundamentally change the nature of communications. Software residing within a business application, workflow process or web portal is automatically initiating communication to the right person, using the best available method. It’s software—not an individual—launching the communications.
VisiCalc was the harbinger of a revolution that moved far beyond spreadsheets. Using today’s UC tools to improve user productivity presages a similar, vast revolution in which software-controlled or enhanced communications will be embedded in most business processes. Buckle up!
What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
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The UCStrategies.com team has been differentiating between the two types of Unified Communications: UC User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC Business Process (UC BP).
UC-UP focuses on personal productivity and features like “click to call,” while UC-BP focused on integrating UC with the organization’s business processes and applications, impacting the business and the way in which certain processes get done. We’ve been preaching that while both elements are important and enterprises can focus on either or both, the more significant ROI will come from the UC BP side. Still, many enterprises have begun on the road to UC focusing on the User Productivity elements—how UC impacts individual users and teams or workgroups—and there are significant benefits to be gained by going down that road.
My colleague Nancy Jamison and I are in the process of conducting a UC End User Productivity study, which we expect to publish on UCstrategies.com in June. Rather than talking primarily with the IT managers who are responsible for implementing and running the UC systems, we’ve been talking with the people who actually use UC; we’re trying to find out whether and how it impacts their day-to-day jobs.
Of course, it’s always a challenge to find users willing to talk, but those that do seem to be really happy campers—they LOVE their UC systems. In fact, when asked “What would you do or how would you react if your UC system was taken away from you?” we got similar responses from all the respondents so far, ranging from “I’d scream” to “it would be painful” to “I can’t imagine working without it.”
Several respondents liken UC to email—it’s hard to identify the time savings, but it’s a tool that eases communications and helps you better do your job. Whether UC saves you 30 minutes a day or 3 hours isn’t the point—it helps improve productivity and effectiveness. As one user noted, “It’s still challenging to quantify these benefits…. It helps productivity in a subtle way from a numbers standpoint, but in the end it’s obvious that you’re getting things done more quickly.” Another told us, “I’m much more effective in being able to deal with business issues in a real time manner.”
So, do you really need to prove a hard ROI to justify purchasing and implementing a UC solution? Yes and no. The audiences I’ve polled during, for example, the VoiceCon UC Roadshow in 2007, swung from answering overwhelmingly yes to overwhelmingly no. My general impression from talking to IT managers who have recently taken the plunge into UC is that most have done so without having hard ROI data to back it up. Perhaps we’ve reached a point where enough people and companies understand the value of UC and how it helps improve productivity and effectiveness, and thus the bottom line.
I’m still looking for more enterprise end users to survey, so if you’d like to participate (anonymously—all information is being aggregated), please contact me at bpleasant@commfusion.com
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:
UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.
One of the best features at VoiceCon is the case studies presented by enterprise executives, and VoiceCon Orlando 2008 was no exception. All the keynotes featured customer success stories, and the keynote by Dennis Schmidt of Bank of America was a detailed description of how the Bank has migrated to over 100,000 IP Telephony ports.
On one afternoon at VoiceCon, a series of sessions was devoted exclusively to case studies in selected vertical markets—Higher Education, Finance, Government, Health Care and Manufacturing. All my client and customer contacts were buzzing about those sessions for the rest of the conference.
Earlier that same afternoon there was a breakout session focusing on Communications-Enabled Apps, which presented interesting Unified Communications success stories. Here are highlights from that session:
Karen Dean, Director of Global Voice Communications at Black & Decker, gave two powerful examples of “communications integrated to optimize business processes”—our UCStrategies.com definition of UC. In one case, Black & Decker created and automated an out-dial notification and self-service status-checking application to notify its customers when tool repair was complete. This reduced the days outstanding by 72%—from 39 days to 11 days. In the other case, Black & Decker created a new device that is attached to valuable machinery and incorporates both GPS (Global Positioning System) and cellular technology to report unauthorized movement (usually theft) of the equipment. One Black & Decker customer was able to recover $237,000 in stolen equipment in less than two months.
Ms. Dean went on to describe the philosophy B&D used when approaching these innovations: Focus on business value; work across organizational boundaries; don’t underestimate the need for change; and train and hire for the needed skills. The needed skills mentioned by Karen include the ability to understand business processes and how to apply communications technologies to accelerate the business, and how to appropriately leverage the assets of both vendors and integrators.
Rif Kiamil, IT Manager from J J Food Service in the UK, presented another powerful UC example. The company focuses intensely on the speed, efficiency and quality of its customer services, and used call center agent desktop software technology to put a smart “portal” application on the mobile phones of all their route drivers. This gave the route driver immediate access to the resources of the office staff when needed, and the office staff could determine where the driver was at any point during the day and whether the driver was available for a call or interruption or was busy with a customer. The application also included location information, via the GPS features of the mobile device, to be even more accurate in their customer service management. The returns were significant in both improved customer service and in shaving minutes per day from the deliveries and services.
Michael Fuqua, SVP Global Information Services at Global Crossing, described how Global Crossing has integrated UC into its network provisioning operations to achieve significant ROI. Michael showed the actual network engineer PC screens (i.e. the provisioning “portal”) into which Global Crossing has integrated Presence, IM and click-to-call. With those tools, network engineers no longer have to call around to find assistance on problems; instead, the application software uses presence to find an available engineer with the right skills and authorizations to work on the problem and opens up an IM chat session to work the issue. If voice communications is then needed, either party can click-to-call. Overall, the benefits have been significant—problems take less time to resolve, customer service has dramatically improved and network engineering staff cost per transaction has dropped significantly.
Devante Vargas, IT Manager from Kuepers Inc, Architects and Builders, described how UC has enabled dramatic growth for this mid-market firm. Prior to UC, the firm depended on traditional, manual methods to communicate with field personnel, to coordinate projects and to manage problems or issues. With the UC tools for easy access to mobile personnel via find-me and follow-me features, the company has been able to grow beyond its local area, since they can keep in touch with remote locations and project teams. The new conferencing tools also allow Kuepers to assemble the project teams flexibly in either planned or ad-hoc mode, to keep the business flowing. Overall, Kuepers credits the UC initiative with contributing to its 400% growth in just four years.
The good news is that these customer success reports are not isolated instances; there are dozens more examples that provide guidance on how to proceed with Unified Communications.
VoiceCon proved again that it’s the place to meet and to hear about progress, experience and successes in our industry. Hope to see you at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, November 10-13! In the meantime, let me know if you have any UC stories—successful or otherwise. Drop me a note at mparker@unicommconsulting.com or or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:
UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.
Unified communications solutions continue to evolve, and while the initial crop of UC applications was rooted in call center environments, UC apps have now branched out into other areas of the business. But it’s already clear that for a growing number of knowledge workers, the key benefit will be mobility.
CTIA estimates there are 255 million cellular telephone subscribers in the U.S. versus roughly 180 million wired telephone lines. While several million young Americans now get along without a wired telephone, the dependence on mobile communications is even more prevalent in business. For outside sales and support personnel, in particular, the cell phone has become their primary phone, and even people who move around within a company’s headquarters or campus are often reachable only via cell phones.
However, there are still vastly different capabilities between fixed and mobile environments. Wired connections can access an expanding array of features that allow fast, convenient multimedia communications through an integrated portal that provides real-time presence capabilities. When they shift to the mobile, however, they revert to a communications environment that has changed little since the 1980s, except for the fact that they can “cut the cord.” Just ask any mobile user who has had to dial two or three voicemail systems to retrieve messages and then log in to retrieve email.
UC vendors are waking up to the fact that mobilizing the UC experience is becoming critical to user adoption. The most basic element of mobile UC is fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) or the ability to integrate cellular service with wired or wireless private networks and to pass calls transparently between them. When done right, FMC yields both management improvements and functionality benefits. Wireless analyst and NoJitter correspondent, Michael Finneran, has written a comprehensive white paper on enterprise FMC that is available on the UCStrategies website.
For example, productivity increases when people can be reached at a single number and access their messages on a single voicemail system. However, the organization also benefits as it maintains control of the telephone number—business contacts call the office number and the call is then extended to the user’s cell phone.
That latter capability is extremely important. If an employee leaves the company, employers want that person’s contacts to continue calling that same number. Otherwise those business contacts may follow that person to his/her new employer.
But the cellular carriers have been slow to implement FMC solutions and, to date, FMC only addresses the most basic service—a phone call. The simple reality is that traveling employees and mobile workers need more.
The IP-PBX vendors are beginning to respond. In a typical configuration, a user is equipped with a smart phone, Blackberry or PDA that provides access to presence-enabled corporate directories, the corporate dial plan and other features like visual voicemail (i.e. the ability to view voicemail messages on the device’s display and play them in whatever order you choose). These solutions depend on a software client installed in the smart phone/PDA that communicates via a cellular data service with a server on the IP-PBX. The IP-PBX capabilities are made available on the device by using the cellular data network as a signaling mechanism.
Even with these solutions, however, the industry still has a long way to go. Eventually, we’ll see a fully-functional mobile device paired with a desk phone. The mobile device will register with a presence server, indicating that the user is accessible via a wired network, WLAN network or cellular network.
A Bluetooth interface in the mobile device will play a key role, automatically registering with the desk phone when the user enters the office. That registration will signal the server to deliver calls to the desk set and automatically change the user’s presence status as well. The full range of desk set features will transfer to the mobile device whether it’s operating on the WLAN or the cellular network, and the range of options for the mobile user will eventually include text and video as well as voice.
Users love mobility, and in our dynamic business environment these capabilities will help to increase the productivity of our most valuable workers. For UC to expand throughout an organization, a fully featured mobility solution will have to be part of the package.
What do you think? Have you seen or heard about mobile UC apps or capabilities that you believe move the bar? Drop me a note at jburton@ucstrategies.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by BCR Training:
BCR Training in Unified Communications
BCR Training presents “Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications,” a 2-day workshop presented by BCR Training and Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, Communication Perspectives, will enable you to build a strategic plan and presents the options available from all the vendors. For complete course outline, dates and registration details go to www.bcrtraining.com
Amid all of the UC-focused presentations, demos, exhibits and debate that took place during VoiceCon Orlando, I was struck by the relative silence from one group that, you’d think, would be playing a critical role in UC’s evolution—the carriers and service providers.
To be sure, AT&T and Verizon Business have made announcements relative to UC. Last November, for example, AT&T completed its acquisition of Interwise, a web-based conferencing service that will enable AT&T to complement its video offerings with web-based collaboration and its messaging services. And indeed, those two elements—conferencing and messaging—dominate the UC offerings on AT&T’s website.
Meanwhile, on Verizon Business’ site, you can find a new service, the Integrated Communications Package, which was announced last August and is available to customers of Verizon’s IP Centrex service. The Integrated Communications Package, according to Verizon, “…provides a dynamic hub where employees can access voice mail, control incoming and outgoing calls, manage their online presence, send text messages, and synchronize contacts and calendars.” Future plans call for integrating ICP “with Verizon Business’ portfolio of advanced audio, net and video conferencing services, and contact center services.”
A visit to the SprintBiz website yielded zero—no heading or product group called Unified Communications and nothing turned up when I put on a search for “Unified Communications.” Indeed, no matter where I clicked, Sprint seemed to always take me to a page that was pushing cell phones.
Of course, all of the carriers distribute IP-PBXs and UC offerings from the equipment vendors, so they’re not shut out of the game. And as the industry migrates toward more software-intensive communications architectures and products, presumably, the carriers will find themselves distributing UC application packages that run on the hardware platforms they’ve installed.
The question, however, is whether the carriers intend to become more active participants in the UC process. So far, there’s no evidence that they intend to do so.
Part of their hesitancy reflects the low-key role they’ve played in the overall migration from TDM to IP. Lisa Pierce, VP at Forrester Research, has written a terrific article that we’ve posted on NoJitter.com which sheds light on the lack of market pick up of hosted/managed IP Telephony services (see “The State of North American Business Customer Adoption of IPT and VOIP”).
Lisa notes, “Use of managed VOIP services is unchanged from 2006. Overall year-over-year adoption trends were flat…. 6% of North American enterprises already use managed VOIP services, 8% were ‘very interested’ and 25% were ‘somewhat interested’. As for current users, size doesn’t matter, but industry does—with 12% of manufacturers and 11% of utilities as the heaviest current users. For those who indicated they were ‘very interested’ in using managed VOIP services, companies in the media, utilities, and finance and insurance sectors express the most interest—at 11%, 14% and 13% respectively.”
Lisa goes to identify a number of inhibitors the service providers face, but one, in particular, caught my eye: “…overall enterprise interest in managed and hosted IP telephony services lags considerably behind use of other managed network services, such as managed MPLS “which has a 35% adoption rate in North America. It’s entirely possible this reflects lingering enterprise customer perceptions about legacy Centrex services—whose capabilities distinctly lagged those of major brands of digital PBXs. Many service providers have done very little to date to fully disprove the same problems won’t apply to IP Centrex. And on WAN VOIP, the business case is still much easier for international calls than it is for domestic calls.”
I think Lisa has hit on a critically important point: The carriers have yet to demonstrate that they will deliver modern services in an IP-Telephony/UC world. Since Digital Centrex couldn’t match digital PBXs, why should customers believe that IP Centrex will keep pace with IP-PBXs loaded with UC capabilities?
In the past decade we’ve seen the carriers jockey for position against the cable companies and move into entertainment video. In the wireless market, we’ve watched as they’ve hyped the latest gadgets. And we’ve listened as they’ve argued ad nauseum against net neutrality. The one thing we haven’t heard or seen is a concentrated push to create products and services that meet the changing needs and business realities of their enterprise customers.
UC is still a nascent marketplace, with no clear leaders or even a clearly defined set of capabilities. If there was ever an opportunity for the carriers to re-assert themselves in the enterprise communications market, this is it.
What do you think? Send your comments to me at fknight@techweb.com or post them here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.com
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UC Strategies:
UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail: www.ucstrategies.com
Something wonderful happened at VoiceCon Orlando a couple of weeks ago. Well, actually lots of wonderful things happened, but my focus in this newsletter is on what took place during a session on the VoiceCon main stage—a discussion and agreement between IBM and Microsoft about presence federation.
Presence is the foundational element of unified communications. It provides visual indication of user-set status in a few basic states—on-line, off-line, away or busy. More robust or “rich presence” can aggregate and provide information about availability, location, skills, roles and other attributes. From these sets of information, users and/or business process software can determine whether and how best to contact individuals or members of skill groups, to find the “right” resource in the most efficient way.
Presence servers aggregate and publish availability information, while incorporating constraints imposed by policies, preferences, privacy concerns and security issues. Because presence will provide core functionality in emerging UC applications, many suppliers want to “own” and control the presence server. That’s caused some jockeying for supremacy, along with claims and counterclaims of: “We’re more open than you are!”
Innovative presence products and ideas are emerging from Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Jabber, Microsoft, Siemens and many other suppliers. Software and mobility providers are joining in as they see expanding application opportunities to provide or access presence information. Each enterprise, and its employees and value-chain partners, will have different sources of and uses for this data. And it’s clear that presence will need to span a multi-vendor environment, even before companies extend UC connectivity to partners or customers. Therefore, federation, the term for this exchanging of presence information, is essential.
Federation standards have to be open, robust and fully bi-directional. While some standards initiatives are already underway (e.g., SIP/SIMPLE, XMPP), these cover only the basics, they have yet to be fully adopted and they rely on suppliers to agree to provide the underlying data. It’s tempting for Supplier X to provide basic information to Supplier Y’s applications, and more complete information to its own. But that approach will stifle the innovative development that can bring transformative business changes, and inhibit UC from reaching its full potential.
At the VoiceCon Orlando session called Software-based Architectures and Unified Communications, Jim Burton, my colleague and co-founder of UCStrategies.com, brought up the subject of presence interoperability to a panel of suppliers. During the ensuing discussion, Jim asked the “Are you open?” question. Eric Swift, of Microsoft, and Pat Galvin, of IBM, engaged in some light sparring on the subject, and then Pat challenged Microsoft to join in development of full, standards-based interoperation. Eric Swift accepted the challenge. Jim had them shake hands on this agreement. Then co-moderator and VoiceCon GM, Fred Knight, offered to feature a demonstration of open, fully-featured presence federation at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, and all agreed.
Of course, the devil is in the details. There are many ways that federation will have to work: Between servers in different companies; between servers within the same company; within a network of servers; between enterprise servers and public IM services (e.g., MSN, AOL, Yahoo!); and between servers and other systems that are a source or user of presence data. There are other possible configurations as well.
Each of these has its own wrinkles, and various models can be envisioned: master-slave, peer-to-peer or the use of a neutral third-party service (think, DNS) at least for intercompany federation. And, while the notion of fully open federation sounds appealing, some difficult and critical hurdles need to be overcome—sound technology, scalability, reliability issues, security and privacy concerns among them.
In the aftermath of the handshake on the VoiceCon stage, subsequent discussions have led to an agreement for IBM and Microsoft to start with the easiest configuration—federation between their equipment in an inter-enterprise deployment. Frankly, this won’t be much of a stretch, and demonstrating equipment interoperability won’t fully solve the issue. Suppliers also have to agree to make available all information across the link. We also need for these or subsequent demos to include a broader spectrum of suppliers.
But, this is an important beginning. The industry can build on this handshake and make open, federated presence a reality.
What do you think? Send your comments to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post them here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications, and a co-founder of UCStrategies.com
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of VoiceCon UC eWeekly is sponsored by IBM:
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.
VoiceCon Orlando 2008 was held last week—and it did not disappoint. The discussions and interactions between and among speakers, exhibitors and attendees clearly showed that Unified Communications is on everyone’s mind, and that the industry is moving from defining UC to evaluating and implementing UC solutions.
In the conference’s concluding Locknote session in which I participated, Fred Knight asked the panel of analysts/consultants about our key takeaways from the conference. It was hard to decide between the many important topics and discussion points—including the growing role of video, collaboration and mobility, as well as the importance of presence and the work that remains in terms of federation and interoperability, and the many new product and partnership announcements made during the show.
All of these are important and deserve to be discussed, but my biggest takeaway was the notion that there is no one right way to do UC, and that companies need to think about the two main types of UC solutions and benefits: Those that focus on user productivity and those that focus on improving enterprise business processes. There are a variety of approaches and each end-user company will go about selecting and implementing UC products and solutions according to their needs, goals, existing infrastructure, business processes, etc.
My discussions with vendors and customers at VoiceCon confirmed my belief that the majority of companies start off on the road to focusing on User Productivity—integrating the various communication modes, while adding presence to the mix to enable click-to-call or click-to-communicate capabilities.
After trying this out for a while, many companies then move on to find other ways in which UC can be utilized within their organizations. This generally involves communication-enabling business processes. However, some companies understand the value of UC in optimizing their business processes and focus, from day one, on business process integration.
It’s critical to recognize that there are essentially two types of UC solutions—one type provides benefits to individual users, and the other provides benefits to the enterprise as a whole. The UCStrategies.com team has defined two types of UC and benefits under the UC umbrella—UC-User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC-Business Process (UC-BP).
The personal productivity benefits of UC are important and help workers to be more efficient and effective at doing their jobs, in addition to providing increased worker satisfaction. During the VoiceCon User Forum, Mike Connelly, Vice President of IT/CIO, FranklinCovey, noted that users want to know “what’s in it for me” when their company implements UC and changes the way they work. He stated that UC needs to provide value to end users and that in general they don’t really care if you save the company lots of money; people want tools to help them do their jobs better.
While I agree with this assessment, it’s important to recognize that the real ROI comes from linking UC to the company’s business processes and enterprise goals. Early adopters of UC are transforming their businesses and, as a result, saving thousands or even millions of dollars. Business process integration and transformation deliver the real ROI and impact of UC. Personal productivity tools that provide users with better communications management, while nice, won’t necessarily convince your CIO or CFO. Instead, enterprises need to look at how UC provides benefits to the enterprise as a whole, especially in terms of changes to the business processes that will reduce costs, increase sales and improve customer service.
There were many other takeaways from VoiceCon—so keep reading NoJitter.com and UCStrategies.com for additional insights and analysis.
What do you think? If you attended VoiceCon, what were your main takeaways? And if you didn’t attend, which approach to UC sounds most likely for your enterprise? Please send me your thoughts at bpleasant@commfusion.com or post them here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of VoiceCon UC eWeekly is sponsored by IBM:
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.
There’s impatience in the air, a sense that something big is coming. No, I’m not referring to the fact that this long, cold, dreary winter appears to finally be coming to end, although honestly, spring can’t come fast enough.
And I’m only partially referring to VoiceCon Orlando, which starts next Monday. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t wait for VoiceCon to begin, as I know it’s going to be our most exciting event ever.
But what’s really got me pumped is what I believe VoiceCon Orlando is going to trigger—what will follow: The enterprise communications market is going to look much different.
In the more than two decades that I’ve been covering communications, networking and telecom, there have been more attempts than I can count to raise the level of the playing field. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, there was much talk about moving communications out of the “back office,” to make it more visible as a tool to increase revenues, improve customer satisfaction and create competitive advantage. And to be sure, progress was made, as a result of voicemail, IVR systems and the rise of modern call centers.
Then in the mid-90s, as the influence of the Internet and Web began to be felt, there was another surge of enthusiasm as we recognized that these technologies would create new ways to link companies to their customers, suppliers and partners. And that enthusiasm has proved justified: Web-based commerce has revolutionized both retail and wholesale purchasing habits, and is in the process of rewriting the ground rules for the advertising industry. And from the vantage point of this seemingly endless 2008 political cycle, we see the Web transforming political fund-raising and journalism. Whether all these changes make life better or worse is for historians to decide, but it’s clear that the dollar impact of these changes is in the multi-billion-dollar range.
Closer to home, the enterprise communications community finds itself in the early stages of its own transformation. It’s important to point out that the seeds of this transition were planted some 20 years ago, as voice and data communications took the first tentative steps toward unification, a process that sped up once IP Telephony appeared on the scene. All of enterprise communications is—or soon will be—integrated, not only in terms of voice and data, but also tightly within overall IT.
Now, enter UC and the migration to software-based architectures, which create a fundamentally different framework for evaluating and deploying communications systems, technologies and applications. While many of the details of this new framework remain sketchy, the outlines are coming into sharper focus. My buddies at UCStrategies.com made an important contribution a couple of years ago when they defined UC as “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”
The key words, of course, are the last two—business processes. They move communications out of the technology-for-its-own-sake mindset, and harness it to the way the business operates. There’s no single path to achieve that goal, and the UCStrategies team has done some excellent work elaborating on this theme in recent issues of this newsletter (see Don Van Doren’s observations in “Unified Communications in 2008” and Jim Burton’s in “Two Paths to Unified Communications”).
This idea of communications migrating into the business mainstream is receiving attention from others as well. Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. and one of the most astute analysts of our industry, made the following observation in a recent blog on NoJitter.com. He wrote: “The biggest budget share goes to the organization that has the strongest connection to the business value proposition that justifies spending in the first place. The old days of ‘connectivity’ or ‘convergence’ making an executive sign a big check are over. If networking executives want to get traction for their spending plans they need to find a way to get into the business zone.” (See Tom’s full blog here: “Completing the Budget Circuit”)
What’s said, seen and done during VoiceCon Orlando next week will demonstrate just how far the industry has come in this transition from back-office to mainstream, and to reorienting its internal compass from hardware to software, applications and to what Nolle refers to as the “business zone.” I believe that when VoiceCon Orlando 2008 concludes, there’ll be justification for pride about the progress that’s been made, but there’ll also be a more realistic understanding about the length of the journey that lies ahead.
What do you think? Drop me a note at fknight@cmp.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.com
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of VoiceCon UC eWeekly is sponsored by Nortel:
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It’s not yet spring, but the Unified Communications neighborhood is blossoming with announcements and new things to see at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, which starts less than two weeks from now. There’ve been three big announcements just this week from Siemens, Microsoft and Cisco.
Siemens Enterprise Networks made a big move by introducing the new OpenScape Unified Communications Server. This software package provides a complete, SIP-based communications platform that can interoperate with any existing telephony or IT environment. This platform supports the new Version 3.0 of the proven Siemens OpenScape UC application, providing a rich personal communications management tool. It also works with the OpenScape Voice Application, a new version of the HiPath 8000 software, and with the OpenScape Video Portfolio, which includes High-Definition (HD) cameras, speakerphones and displays.
Siemens continues to emphasize the openness of its solution both for customer use in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and as the enabler of interoperation with Microsoft’s Office applications, IBM’s Lotus applications and numerous other enterprise application packages. All this is available in Medium Edition for under 1,000 users, Large Edition with up to 100,000 voice users and 20,000 advanced UC users, and Hosted Edition for flexible consumption up to the Large Edition scale. Per user pricing is very attractive, with list prices ranging from $73/user for the basic package to $202/user for the complete suite of UC functionality. (Note the alignment with industry pricing trends described in a recent post on NoJitter.com.)
Several highlights jump out. First, Siemens has made it possible to buy an enterprise-wide UC solution made by a proven communications systems company, yet independent of the existing infrastructure. Second, it is offering a software-based solution as both an on-premise and hosted solution through major providers. In other words, Siemens has made adoption of a high-quality UC solution as easy as possible.
The hosting trend was underlined by Microsoft’s announcement that the Microsoft On-line Services formerly available to organizations with 5,000 or more users are now available in hosted format for organizations of all sizes. At the annual SharePoint Conference, Bill Gates announced, “With Microsoft Online Services, businesses can deploy software as a subscription service, from servers they manage on-site, or a combination of the two, depending on their specific needs.”
The expanded offering includes Microsoft Exchange 2007, Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 and the previously available Microsoft Office Live Meeting. These three, as well as Microsoft Office Communications Online, continue to be available to larger organizations.
Again, this makes adoption of Unified Communications, including the Live Meeting conferencing and SharePoint collaboration tools, very easy, either as a hosted or in-house combination of services.
Cisco’s announcement is really a UC enabler. The new Cisco Aggregation Services Router 1000 (ASR 1000) is built on a blazingly fast Cisco-designed QuantumFlow processor, that contains forty (yes, 40) cores and 1.3 billion transistors. All of that processing speed can be harnessed to support “Unified WAN Services.”
The router supports throughput of 5–20 Gbps, while also supporting services that previously required external appliances or other units, including Integrated Security (line-rate encryption and embedded VPNs), Application Intelligence (bandwidth management, QOS, application optimization), and Non-Stop Communications. The latter is impressive, as Cisco is offering either virtual machine software redundancy or hardware redundancy for instant failover and on-the-fly software upgrades and application module enablement.
Cisco emphasized that its new router will significantly ease deployment and operation of high-performance, multi-application enterprise WANs, which sure sounds like a UC environment to me. Of course, this would lower the costs of both acquisition (i.e., fewer separate systems or appliances) and ownership, including the point that the ASR 1000 would cut power consumption by over 50%. Connectivity to distributed sites and branch offices also was a major point of emphasis.
All of these new offerings, and I’m sure many more, will be on display at VoiceCon Orlando 2008. I hope you will be there and, in the meantime, I’d like to know what you think about these new announcements and progress in the UC scene. Drop me a note at mparker@UniCommConsulting.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence:
See us at VoiceCon Orlando, Booth #935. Also plan to attend our Leading Edge-ucation Session “Beyond Cost Savings: The Real Value of VoIP,” Tuesday, March 18, Room 2, 5:15 p.m.
Interactive Intelligence was formed in 1994 and today is a global provider of unified business communications solutions for contact center automation, enterprise IP telephony and enterprise messaging—all-in-one solutions used in 3,000 organizations worldwide.
The UCStrategies.com team holds a weekly conference call to discuss “the state of the industry.” Last week a few members of the team were out attending UC conferences in Europe and Asia, but as we discussed our takeaways from those events, we found ourselves talking about the two ways in which enterprise customers view unified communications.
Blair Pleasant observed that most enterprise customers she has recently spoken with think about UC in terms of “click-to-call.” She went on to explain that click-to-call is evolving into easy access to any communications—click-to-communicate—via features and services found in a range of communications silos, including enterprise telephony, e-mail, voice mail/unified messaging and instant messaging, and audio, video and web conferencing. In other words, one path to UC focuses on integrating these various communication silos.
The other path to UC is via business process integration. Marty Parker and Don Van Doren (UniComm Consulting) explained that in their consulting engagements, most clients start with a discussion of how to ensure that a new technology acquisition—e.g., a PBX—supports a future unified communications environment—i.e., integrating (unifying) the communication silos. Marty and Don reported that while few if any clients initially consider the issue of integrating communications into business processes, once they understand the advantages of the business-process approach, most quickly become converts.
As I was listening to the conversation, I began seeing another way to view the paths to unified communications—horizontal vs. vertical. The horizontal path focuses on integrating communication modes, channels, and devices; it is the “click-to-communicate” approach, and delivers personal and team/workgroup benefits. Put another way, it’s what we’ve called UC’s Personal Productivity benefits.
The vertical path takes a broader view, and involves integrating communications into business processes. This can deliver enterprise-wide benefits—e.g., better customer service or faster sales cycles—but the key is that it is based on specific business processes. Some refer to this path as communication-enabled business processes (CEBP).
The UCStrategies.com team has been preaching a definition of unified communications: Communications integrated to optimize business processes. That definition covers both the horizontal and vertical paths to UC.
What I find interesting, however, is that enterprises continue to focus on the horizontal path, even as the major UC vendors and the emerging body of case studies detail the benefits to be gained from integrating communications into a business processes. To be sure, the “click to communicate” capabilities can deliver a decent ROI and make life easier for end users, but the vertical path—integrating communications with business processes—not only can deliver a great ROI, it also can help transform how a business runs and improve competitive advantage. Indeed, some enterprises that have embraced this vertical model report that ROI was not even a factor in their go/no-go analysis, because the improvements to the business processes were so compelling.
The UCStrategies.com team is in the process of developing a document to help enterprise customers understand the two paths to unified communications. Look for it on our website www.ucstrategies.com and on an upcoming UC Friday issue of NoJitter.com: www.nojitter.com.
In the meantime, what do you think? Are you a fan of the horizontal or vertical approach? Drop me a note at jburton@ustrategies.com or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.
