A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This week’s issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco 2007:

“Early Bird” discounts still available. Register now for VoiceCon San Francisco, which focuses on enterprise IP Telephony, Converged Networks and Unified Communications. VoiceCon San Francisco will be held August 20-23 at San Francisco’s Moscone North Convention Center. Meet the industry’s market and thought leaders during in-depth tutorials, candid roundtable discussions and insightful panels. And the VoiceCon Exhibition presents ALL of the suppliers-equipment and services-in one location. Save up to $500 by registering today.

Having sat through innumerable vendor pitches over the years, many of which were incomprehensible, believe me, I take the phrase “searching for intelligent communications” very seriously. So when Avaya came out with a four-city road show entitled “The Search for Intelligent Communications” I couldn’t help but be intrigued. And with its merger announcement only 10 days old, I wondered who’d show up and what they would ask about.

Avaya sees intelligent communications as a function of the interaction between four fundamental technologies: IP Telephony, Unified Communications, Contact Centers and Communications-Enabled Business Processes. A quick trip to Avaya’s website reveals, not surprisingly, these also happen to be the company’s four major product/service categories and Avaya is using this series of workshops to present them in an overall framework and a cohesive, credible story.

The job of presenting that story to the New York City audience fell to Karen Mashima, Avaya’s senior vice president of strategy and technology, and she is certainly well suited to the job. She left 3Com to join Lucent, and ever since Avaya was spun out of Lucent, she has been instrumental in moving the company from its voice-only roots into today’s real world of IP-based multimedia, integrated and, dare I say it, unified communications.

Mashima began her discussion of technologies with IP Telephony, but quickly noted that Avaya would be de-emphasizing that term. Like other vendors, including Cisco, Avaya sees the migration toward IP Telephony as a fait accompli-”The next-gen IP technology is going in,” is how Mashima put it. True enough, but many of the people in the audience aren’t so far along with IP Telephony that they take it for granted.

The de-emphasis also reflects a positioning problem facing Avaya and other vendors with a PBX heritage: The phrase IP Telephony, according to Mashima, “…makes us think of voice, when what we’re really moving to is converged communications.” And central to that migration, she argued, is SIP, which delivers “multimodal capability and provides a common protocol for both enterprise and carrier/service provider networks.”

On the subject of UC, Avaya presented a number of case studies-health, manufacturing, contact center and company notification/emergency response-where the combination of voice, IVR, messaging, broadcast and presence/IM, enabled companies and public agencies to react more quickly and cost-effectively to dynamic situations. The UC conversation was inseparable from the Communications-Enabled Business Processes discussion, and the key capability Mashima featured was proactive response to dynamic situations.

In making her point, Mashima didn’t focus on new technology, but rather on how the combination of SIP-enabled IP communications and UC tools enable companies to react in ways they simply couldn’t before. Was it dramatic? No. But most of what happens to us and to our companies on most days isn’t dramatic either. If we can react more quickly, better and cheaper, that ain’t bad.

Another major point Mashima made regarding UC was that none of the vendors could deliver UC’s potential on their own. Accordingly, she highlighted Avaya’s partnerships with Microsoft, IBM, Nokia, RIM, Polycom and Tandberg, and discussed the importance of Avaya’s acquisitions of Traverse and Ubiquity. From there, she implored the audience to “demand open technology and standards” and to “treat communications as a strategic asset.”

Avaya’s devotion to open technology and standards is, no doubt, sincere. Indeed, pressed between Microsoft and its control of the desktop and Cisco and its control of network infrastructure, openness is not just a “nice to have,” for Avaya, it is arguably a matter of survival. There is, of course, no small irony in this as historically, like all PBX vendors, Avaya’s infrastructure was decidedly not open. But that was then, this is now, and Avaya’s interests and those of its customers actually may be in closer alignment than in years past.

When it comes to enterprises treating communications as a “strategic asset,” I wish Avaya well. Like other utilities, communications is ubiquitous and is taken for granted until the network fails. Then everyone goes nuts, the system gets fixed, life returns to normal and communications fades from center stage. This cycle seems never ending.

Avaya is betting that initiatives like Communications-Embedded Business Processes can put communications in the limelight. On the one hand, that seems right-CEBP shows how communications can be embedded into still more applications and how it can change how work gets done.

But if communications is such a strategic asset, why wasn’t there a strategic buyer for Avaya, rather than investment firms who, if history is any guide, are likely to chop staff, cap investment and eventually sell the company, in whole or in parts. Mashima asserted that wasn’t the plan, that Silver Lake Partners and TPG Capital “do not intend to split or flip” Avaya. I hope she’s right, and that the two firms will find a way to combine intelligent communications with intelligent stewardship of a company that plays a critical role in our industry.

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, Business Communications Review

Posted in Architecture, Fred Knight, Market Trends, Standards, Unified Communications |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.