VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly Issue 127, September 15, 2009
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of UC eWeekly is sponsored by Empirix
SIP Trunking Services provide many benefits for enterprises over current, legacy ISDN trunk lines, including significant cost savings, access to new services, and integration with existing IP based services and business applications.  [...]

VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly Issue 126| September 2, 2009
A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
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This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco
 
Register now and save up to $900 off the regular price for VoiceCon San Francisco to be held November 2-5, at the Moscone North Convention Center.  For more information visit [...]

There’s been a lot of buzz in the past few weeks about UC Pricing, stimulated by Allan Sulkin’s post on NoJitter.com about Avaya’s bundling of the one-X ® licenses with both new and upgraded PBX user licenses (see No Jitter post). The buzz following that post was mostly about how it’s easier to discount software compared to hardware (though a poor strategy, IMHO) and about how this will misstate the actual UC market results. Both interesting but wait, there’s more.

First, this should not be any surprise. Back in September 2007, we wrote an article in Business Communications Review magazine on this topic — “De-Mystifying VoIP and UC Pricing” — and the market has been following the forecasted track (view article). As noted in that article, the PC-based solutions from the desktop software providers started the trend by including IM and Presence, conferencing, and mobility services in their licenses. In 2007, those items were priced separately by the PBX systems providers, but, as forecasted, are increasingly being included in the price of the base PBX user license. So, on track to the forecast.

Every Monday morning, at 11:00 AM PDT, the UCStrategies team has a conference call to discuss what’s going on in the industry. We spend the last 10-15 minutes doing a podcast on topics of interest, and this week, the topic was about the site – www.ucstrategies.com — and some changes we plan for the near future. We also discussed how enterprise customers are using the site to help develop their UC strategies, and here’s a link

One area that we will be adding to the site is information and analysis on cloud/hosted computing for the UC and SMB markets. I have been following the evolution of the cloud/hosted market, and it is finally at a stage where the technology and service have matured to the point where it should be considered, particularly for small and branch offices.

If, on the other hand, you see UC as part of the ongoing evolution of communications technology, and as part of the never-ending transformation in how that technology gets used, half full would be right, and not a bad thing.

That’s my perspective after reading an impressive two-part article on No Jitter by Brent Kelly– see “Do You See What I See Shaping UC?” at www.nojitter.com. Brent has done all of us in the industry a service by compiling a list of 10 issues that present the good, bad and the ugly about UC.

Among the good:

*UC is expected as part of a communications offering: UC is table stakes – no one can compete without a full complement of UC capabilities.

* While UC technologies continue to mature, they’re stable, they integrate with back office elements such as corporate directories, calendars, office productivity applications and they interface with voice — the most common communications medium of all.

You may be asking yourself, what is a “solutions integrator?” We created that term to describe companies that sell and integrate UC solutions – including VARs, interconnects, telecom dealers and system integrators. From the vendor perspective, this group is called “the channel” or “channel partners,” but from the end user or enterprise perspective, these are the people who not only sell them the voice and data products needed for a UC solution, but also help put the solutions together, tying them together with the organizations’ existing systems (telephony, data), desktops, devices (wireless, wireline), and perhaps most importantly, applications.

In the past, the job of resellers, VARs, interconnects and telecom dealers was essentially to sell products or “boxes” (PBXs, phones, voice mail systems, etc.), and in some cases they would also provide some related software applications.

The situation today is much different, with the focus on applications first, requiring an understanding of the customers’ business, business processes, workflows, etc. As you’ve heard countless times by now, Unified Communications is: Communications integrated to optimize business processes. It’s the job of the solutions integrators to do this integration, and this is a different type of activity than simply selling boxes.

Today’s solutions integrators must understand various work modes in the context of the business processes that are being performed, e.g. is the work primarily customer-facing field work (sales, service), or on-site process-centered mobile work (health care, retail, manufacturing, distribution), or on-site or virtual office desk-based work (financial services, enterprise support departments), or flexible location information or knowledge work (development, marketing, consulting, management)? The solutions integrator must then be able to convert that information about the processes and the roles within those processes into designs that specify the best communications modes and applications and support those choices with the best UC software, hardware, devices and procedures.

Customer attention has shifted from “What is UC?” to “How do we buy and implement UC?” as seen at VoiceCon and Interop, on UCStrategies.com, and in consulting and analyst engagements. It’s hard to find a pure VoIP procurement – almost every RFP includes UC as the main theme or as a justifying application. The program for VoiceCon SF 2009 is evolving to address this with hands-on technical content.

And, as reported last December (“The Year in Review: Part 2”, ), UC case studies continue to proliferate, with over 800 cases UC cases visible. An increasing number are in the CEBP category, as the vendors provide increasingly rich APIs and their systems integration partners enable communications to optimize business processes (“CEBP Comes to Life”).

As a business strategy, UC will have to be front and center for the New Avaya. The company will have great products for IP Telephony in both large enterprises and SMBs, as well as for Contact Center solutions. But those are mature markets from which much of the value has already been extracted. Just making a bigger version of either company’s historical business seems to have little chance of producing a breakout or enough synergies to fund the investors’ expected return. Therefore, new value propositions will have to pave the way.

The New Avaya strategy will need to emphasize UC to create the revenue growth required for success, especially as non-traditional competitors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Webex, Google, RIM and others move aggressively to capture the emerging UC revenue and profit streams.

There’s no doubt that the cloud offers some important benefits, many of which McMillan describes in his post. And there’s also no question that there are successful cloud-based services that enterprises are buying and using; Salesforce.com and Amazon’s EC2 come to mind.

But when it comes to porting over enterprise communications and IT operations, it seems that the key question is whether the cloud is a long-term play or merely a response to short-term budget belt-tightening. Timeshare systems disappeared and Centrex’s enterprise market share continues to shrink because of two inter-related issues: First, cost — enterprises found that the total cost of renting exceeded the cost of ownership of IT facilities, equipment and personnel. Second, flexibility and responsiveness – the owner of the cloud determines what capabilities will go into the cloud, when upgrades will occur and when new capabilities will be added. The pace at which an enterprise’s requirements change, however, won’t always fit with the cloud owner’s investment schedule.

*I think one of the biggest general misconceptions is - you have to have an IP-PBX to implement UC. The UC Strategies team recommends analyzing what UC application(s) you would like to deploy and then determining the requirements for call control. You may find that you can leverage existing TDM and IP PBXs. IBM’s strategy is to deliver a rich and consistent end user experience across multi-vendor environments by leveraging the customer’s existing equipment, whether TDM or IP PBXs.

*Sametime is not a Lotus Notes offering, i.e. it is not required to use Notes at all in order to use Sametime or SUT. I personally think this has been a big marketing challenge for IBM. Many think you need to be a Notes shop to implement Sametime. According to IBM, approximately 1/3 of new Sametime customers are Outlook/Exchange shops.