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.

*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.

In May 2007, Microsoft published the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Telephony Integration White paper, outlining various deployment scenarios, including remote call control (RCC). RCC is the PBX integration mechanism that initially shipped with Live Communications Server 2005 and Office Communicator 1.0, and uses a protocol known as uaCSTA (user-agent Comput¬er Supported Telecommunications Application), a telephony API into OCS.

Unfortunately, Microsoft, its partners and customers have discovered that, in addition to not delivering a compelling user experience, RCC requires a good deal of systems integration work, making it a very expensive solution, often costing more than OCS itself.

Microsoft has been advising customers and partners that it will no longer support RCC for new customers in Wave 14, although it will continue to support customers that have already deployed RCC. Knowing that it has to find a viable alternative to RCC, Microsoft is in discussions with various partners to determine the best approach toward integrating OCS with a customer’s existing PBX/IP-PBX. Microsoft is currently evaluating various scenarios and is expected to reach a conclusion soon, and I will be hosting a podcast with Microsoft later this month on www.ucstrategies.com to announce the new strategy.

VoiceCon presents unique opportunities, because the segment of the industry it covers is so much in flux. During the ‘90s, the opportunities for this type of networking were limited, because the PBX industry looked like the old computer industry – vertical stacks with each vendor providing everything from call control to phones. Now that the industry is becoming much less vertical, it’s clear that no single vendor can provide a complete solution – UC imposes the requirement for multiple vendors and system integration support.

But how do potential partners find each other? How can a small vendor get in front of a large vendor, and how do large vendors know which small vendors to invest time with? And how can the right people get involved in the conversation at the right time?

My friends at UniComm Consulting, Marty Parker and Don Van Doren, tell me they are often asked to help customers analyze and then justify a new IP-PBX within the UC context. Their clients recognize the importance of UC, but often have been told to start by upgrading their existing phone system. I understand this thinking — it took me some time to really understand that UC isn’t just about a new phone system – it is about “communications integrated to optimize business processes,” a definition you’ve seen repeatedly on our UCStrategies.com website and this newsletter, and heard in numerous VoiceCon keynote addresses at since early 2007.

Does a major vendor have a gap in its product offering that can create an opportunity for your company to capture? If a major vendor plans to enter your market space, would a strategic alliance with them give you the runway you need to reengineer your product line or company? A good example is Microsoft’s upfront acknowledgment that it would provide call control as part of OCS. Even though most PBX vendors view Microsoft as a competitor in call control, some have been making sales over the past 18 months by working as a partner with Microsoft even as Microsoft works on adding more PBX-like functionality to the next release of OCS and the PBX vendors reposition their product line.

With the economic downturn, many enterprises need to achieve a 12 month or less payback, and I believe that best way to accomplish that goal is via UC-Business Process (UC-B) – integrating communications into a business process. By focusing on UC-B, vendors can show their customers cost savings, but also help them gain a competitive advantage and improve employee productivity.

A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by PROGNOSIS:
In the face of flat or shrinking budgets for 2009, IT managers will be tasked with cutting overheads and maintaining service levels for applications including IP telephony. The good news is that specialized IPT management solutions will actually help [...]

It’s important to keep in mind that the UC market is in the early phases of its evolution, and that until we educate C-level and line-of-business executives, and get the analysts and consultants to use the same terms in the same way, this market will not mature as quickly as it should.

While they understand what UC is all about, many vendors are not ready to change their business models to support what they know is looming on the horizon: Lower-priced PBXs that are an element of an enterprise communications model rather than PBXs as standalones existing unto themselves. This puts most IP-PBX vendors in an awkward position: They need to continue selling expensive PBX solutions while they add products and services that will offset lower prices once PBXs become a call control feature server in a UC environment.