Attendees at VoiceCon Spring 2007 had access to seven Unified Communications sessions-two breakouts per day on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday plus the UC Executive Summit on Thursday morning.

Attendance at these sessions was strong, and those attending had a lot of questions for the panelists. Overwhelmingly, the questions were about the specifics of decision making and implementation options, an indicator that VoiceCon attendees are actively engaged in UC planning and investments.

Here’s a quick summary of the sessions and the highpoints of each:

• Intro to UC: A panel from Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft offered their definitions and outlooks on UC. The panelists focused on the newer tools and capabilities, including desktop and mobile device interfaces, integration of voice and video with IM, improved communication with presence indications, and the availability of new software integration tools to link communication to business processes, via standard interfaces.
• Enhancing VOIP for Unified Communications: A panel from Aastra, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens reviewed the customer options either to add UC functionality onto existing systems or to implement new UC systems. Questions in this session focused on ROI and justification and on how to make a graceful evolution while capturing the benefits.
• UC Market Update: A review of the suppliers and the market status. Questions focused on interoperation between new and legacy systems, on vertical markets and related business process ROI, and on open standards in the market.
• Presence-Cornerstone of Enterprise Communications: A panel from Avaya, IBM, Microsoft and Mitel reviewed the status of presence capabilities. There was agreement on the immediate benefits of presence to speed business transactions and collaboration; however, the panel also agreed there’s much more to do to make presence more automated, flexible and consistently federated across groups and between enterprises.
• Upgrading the Desktop to Support Unified Communications: IBM (Lotus, SameTime, Workplace) and Microsoft (Outlook, Office Communicator) reviewed the UC-enabling status of their desktop solutions. The emphasis was on simplification of the user experience through product features. IBM also emphasized the increasing amount of integration of SameTime and Workplace with customer business applications.
• Merging Mobility and UC: A panel from Cisco, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia and RIM discussed the state of mobility-enabled UC solutions. The importance and differences of presence indication for mobile users was a key discussion point. Also, the panel uniformly agreed on the need for standard interfaces to mobile devices, to eliminate the costs and barriers caused by today’s diversity of devices and software platforms.
• Success Factors for UC: A professional services and system integration panel comprising INX, IBM Global Services and Cisco Customer Advocacy reviewed the elements of UC ROI and the key steps required for a successful implementation. Questions were asked regarding how to bridge the gap between the vendor’s product catalogs and the specific customer business process integrations and about what techniques are available and recommended for change management.
• The UC Executive Summit comprising Avaya, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Siemens, Microsoft, IBM and Cisco actively discussed the trends in the industry. All concurred that UC can be an applications and software overlay on customers’ existing communications infrastructure, with added value when the latest in IP Telephony is available to support UC.

No brief review can do justice to the level of detail and diversity of viewpoints presented in these sessions. If you were here, and you were one of the people asking questions, I hope you got the answers you needed to jump-start your UC deployment. If you weren’t here, be sure to subscribe to VoiceCon Communications eWeekly, if you haven’t already, and follow the VoiceCon podcasts and webinars in the coming months. The podcasts should include clips from some of these sessions, and the webinars can help answer some of your questions. Of course, nothing can replace the sort of focused immersion you can get at an event like this, so I hope to see at VoiceCon Fall 2007 and VoiceCon Spring 2008.

Marty Parker
Communication Perspectives and UCStrategies.com

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

Posted in Applications, Market Trends, Marty Parker, Unified Communications, User Devices |

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