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In a recent issue of UC eWeekly, Fred Knight wrote about the need for UC interoperability and the challenges of getting there (article).
I concur that interoperability is critical; indeed, UC can’t achieve its potential without it.
It’s ironic that UC is coming into the market at a time when there’s a groundswell of grumbling about being “too accessible.” Cell phones, mobile email and the growth of IM can be seen as just the next generation of the pager – communications technology that puts the recipient at the mercy of the sender. Viewed in this way, UC promises to carry intrusions to new heights of sophistication.
A key problem is the current incarnation of “presence” capabilities. What most people understand of presence is based on the model of the IM “buddy list.” It’s only a list of names, and the individuals behind those names are responsible for setting their presence status, usually as a manual step. When this isn’t done frequently or well, annoyance ensues.
There are three problems with the current presence model, and better interoperability addresses each of them.
*In the most beneficial UC applications, what’s needed isn’t a specific person, but rather someone with a particular skill or knowledge. When I have to get information to complete a task, I don’t need Mary (who was helpful last time), but anyone with the required information. But buddy lists aren’t organized by skill. More subtly, the inputs needed to populate and update skill sets will come from many different systems… and that requires interoperability.
*Status in many current presence systems is largely a manual process, and a pain to update. First, our status and availability changes continually, even if we are working at our desk. Do we change our status each time? Of course not, and therefore currently presence indicators are too much of an approximation. Second, information about what I’m doing right now comes from many different systems – desktop applications, phone system, maybe even my car. All have to feed into one system to automatically update presence status; once again, the need to interoperate.
*My availability is contingent on who’s trying to reach me, and the urgency of the contact, as well as what I’m doing. We need much more sophisticated rules and policy engines than are generally available today. And, for them to be effective, these engines will have to interoperate with a broad spectrum of systems that will communicate caller identity and urgency.
Many different systems from different manufacturers will be providing presence-impacting information. These will operate within a single enterprise, as an innovative way to link companies with customers, and to connect various companies comprising a supply chain. Interoperability of all these systems will be critical.
We have seen how interoperability or lack thereof has impacted technology adoption. Just contrast the acceptance of email vs. voicemail. Voicemail was hampered by inadequate AMIS and VPIM standards reluctantly cobbled together by the suppliers. Its original conception was verbal interactive messages (think, “verbal email”) with forwarding functions, distribution lists, etc. Inability to interoperate helped relegate its use only to answering telephones. By contrast, email’s interoperability lets you send a message to anyone on the planet. The result was that email usage exploded, despite the fact that typing is a lot slower than talking.
Unless interoperability is thoughtfully addressed, UC will be seen as an annoyance by many people. Like voicemail, it will be relegated to its lowest effective use – just setting up communications with your buddies. Interoperability is key to enabling those process-altering applications where the most significant ROI opportunities reside, and therefore to transforming how better communications helps get work done.
What do you think? Drop me a line at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post your thoughts, ideas and reactions on NoJitter.com.
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Unified Communication and Collaboration in the 2.0 Enterprise
This is “Collaboration Week” for me, with participation at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston (a production of TechWeb, which also produces VoiceCon), and at two IBM-sponsored customer seminars on the topic of Collaboration 2.0. There are some pretty important themes stemming from these events that provide insight to the future of business communications for many knowledge-based jobs and related enterprise processes. There are some evolutionary links with UC, too.
I’ll offer Wikipedia’s definition to get started: Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together (for) intersection of common goals – for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature – by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. The emphasis, for me, is on recursive, intellectual process, sharing, learning and building consensus. Let’s proceed from there.
The Enterprise 2.0 Conference highlights the progress in collaborative tools. Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Quickr are leading collaborative workspace examples, along with enterprise portals for process-based collaboration, both within the enterprise and with external customers and partners. Social networking shows up as an enriching element of collaboration, enabling willing participants to find, be found and communicate; Lotus Connections, Twitter, Facebook, Google and others receive plenty of mention in this category.
The IBM seminar highlights a continuum across three types of collaboration: Ad Hoc, Activity Centric and Formal. Ad hoc is collaboration that occurs at a moment of opportunity as one person seeks advice, information, confirmation or network building with another, usually in presence-based directories or social network settings.
Activity Centric collaboration focuses on the steps that occur in a business activity, but on an episodic basis more than in a formal process, e.g. when a development engineer needs to collaborate with the product manager to clarify customer preferences. The collaboration could take many forms, from a live conversation, to a blog or wiki post, to a presence-driven IM or Group Chat.
Formal collaboration is the stuff of enterprise portals and embedded communications, delivering both optimized and standardized workflows with self-documenting features for compliance and audit purposes. HR hiring processes and health care physician consultations are two good examples.
The “2.0” element is visible throughout this topic, as the products and services increasingly support “mash-ups” of information and tools for fast creation of purpose-centric interfaces. Also, users can typically reconfigure their environment and incorporate widgets and gadgets to match their personal preferences.
So, how will all these collaboration solutions intersect with UC? For the advanced knowledge workers, who ‘live’ in collaborative processes, we will see “communications integrated to optimize (collaborative) business processes,” our UCStrategies.com definition of UC. Communications will start, proceed and end within the context of a collaborative workspace or social network. Certainly, this is happening already in SharePoint, Quickr and Connections, as well as in Cisco’s WebEx Connect.
Also, it looks like the collaboration tools will deliver more of a continuous communications model that blends a real-time and near-time mix of blogs, wikis, feeds, social spaces, group chat and click-to-communicate with traditional communication tools such as audio/video conferences, meetings, e-mail messages and memos. Despite the many examples of voice and video conferencing systems being touted as collaboration platforms, it seems more likely that conference calls will be a need-based element of Activity-based or Formal collaborative processes, primarily for milestone meetings or similar coordinating events.
What might all of this mean for us? In the past ten years, communications suppliers were often asked about integration of their products with mail, contacts and calendars in Exchange or Domino; in the next ten years, expect integration with collaborative workspaces and social networks, too. Just continues the interoperability theme raised in last week’s UC eWeekly — http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2009/06/uc_needs_intero.html.
Might be interesting to see some collaborative integration between VoiceCon and Enterprise 2.0? So, what do you think about this entire collaboration topic? Please let me know at mparker@unicommconsulting.com.
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We all know that Unified Communications (UC) is creating new options for user communications within business processes. These changes are beginning to significantly affect the types and numbers of telephone sets being deployed, and in our consulting practice we see the following three types of changes.
* A shift to mobile devices: When customers examine the use cases for specific employee categories in their enterprise, they often find that some employees are almost entirely mobile, seldom sitting at a desktop on a regular basis. As a result, some enterprises are choosing to use only the mobile device to support the user’s business communications. When that’s the decision, dial plans need to be carefully considered: Some enterprises include the mobile devices in the enterprise dial plan using IP-PBX station numbers and software to route calls to and from the mobile devices via the enterprise communications system. Others only provide the mobile device and the appropriate phone number on a corporate contract so that the device, the information on the device and the phone number all belong to the enterprise, should the employee change status.
This issue was discussed during the User Forum at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. Karen Bailey, Voice and Communications Services Delivery Executive at Wells Fargo described the One Phone practice used in the former Wachovia unit of Wells Fargo. Basically, staff can choose to have either a desk or a mobile phone, but not both. You can watch the video of that user forum at http://www.voicecon.com/orlando/.
* A shift to soft phones. Two major trends add momentum to the growing use of soft phones as the preferred primary or sole user interface for enterprise communications. The first is the convenience of “click-to-communicate” capabilities available in new UC software clients. Whether the software client is provided by the IP-PBX producer (e.g. Avaya one-X, Cisco Unified Personal Communicator, Siemens OpenScape or almost every other provider) or by the desktop software provider (e.g. IBM SameTime, Microsoft Communicator and a few others), the effect is to launch and conduct communications from within a software program. Sometimes, users still want to have the desk phone ring for voice communications; others, though, become comfortable with a wired or Bluetooth PC headset for the conversational portions.
The second trend is the move to virtual offices. This is a big money saver — with metropolitan office space costing around $27 per square foot per year and average office space at about 220 square feet per employee, an enterprise can avoid as much as $6,000 in office costs per year by enabling employees to work from home. The preferred solution in that case is clearly the soft phone. Even if the user wants a desktop phone, it will likely be an existing home phone to which the soft phone routes the voice media stream via the PSTN.
* A slow, emerging shift to Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) and related application interfaces. Increasingly, all the communications tools needed for certain employee use cases are being built into application software and portals accessed from PCs and mobile devices. Of course, using services oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services, these tools can be provided by the previously mentioned vendors that provide soft phones, but the tools may not correlate directly to a phone number on a PBX. Many examples of this exist, including recent panelists at VoiceCon Orlando from JJ Food Service, Global Crossing and Abilene Christian University, who described the integration of communications into the business processes for route drivers, service engineers, college students and professors.
Just recently, Allan Sulkin posted an excellent feature on NoJitter.com highlighting a 22% year-to-year decline in quarterly “line station” shipments for the top six suppliers. The feature attributed those declines primarily to the economy, with some questions about the effect of the “Other” category, such as Open Source solutions. But the economic downturn may be masking a more impactful and longer term shift from traditional telephones and their “line station” shipments to new UC modes.
If you’re an enterprise buyer, consider the three alternate approaches outlined above. If you’re a communications systems provider, check where your phones are, and possibly shift your new offers and solutions to participate in these alternatives.
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Microsoft Integration with PBXs
As Microsoft developed its initial Unified Communications strategy, it recognized the need to provide a complete solution and support products and services from other vendors. To that end, Microsoft partnered with various hardware vendors such as Polycom for phones, NET for gateways and Jabra for headsets. Microsoft also made several acquisitions to enhance its software portfolio, including media-streams.com, which became the basis for the real-time voice communications/call control component of its Office Communications Server (OCS) offering.
Microsoft made it clear from the beginning that it intended to provide a complete collaboration and communication solution, which includes the role traditionally played by a PBX. Microsoft also recognized that it would not have a complete and competitive call control solution in the short-term (3-5 years) and, even if it did, customers would not scrap a recently purchased phone system. This situation continues even as Microsoft moves to a more complete call control solution as part of its next major release – Wave 14.
Microsoft’s UC strategy continues to include support for integrating with other vendors’ call control solution and phones. OCS integration with third-party switches means that these switches can work side-by-side with OCS. OCS integration partners include all of the usual suspects –Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, ShoreTel, Siemens and others.
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.
Despite rumors that Microsoft is going to reverse its position and no longer interoperate with other PBXs/IP PBXs, Microsoft is working diligently to ensure that customers can leverage their existing switches with OCS. Of course, Microsoft wants OCS to be the primary phone system in the enterprise, but it understands that it cannot dictate that enterprises get rid of their existing systems.
If your organization is considering Microsoft OCS as part of your UC strategy, you should continue to move forward, knowing that Microsoft will soon advise the market about how it intends to work with partners and enable customers to use their existing phone systems while working with OCS. Stay tuned.
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UC at Interop
While UC has been on center stage at VoiceCon for the last few years, Interop is a different event. UC has been more of a sideshow at Interop – and that’s not a criticism. Interop is aimed at a different, broader audience, and the IT world is wrestling with a wide range of issues besides UC – cloud computing, security, virtualization, all nuances of network design, and appropriate planning and actions to take during the current downturn.
That said, if you wanted an update on UC, Interop had a broad menu from which to choose. Eric Krapf put together an impressive lineup of sessions for the track, although I do have one criticism. The track title lumped VoIP and UC together, even though I and many others have argued that it’s important to disaggregate the two. Still, the sessions Eric put together were well-attended. Marty Parker’s day-long tutorial focused on how to create an enterprise UC plan, and got excellent reviews. Eric moderated a packed, standing-room-only session on next generation communications architectures that featured analysis and commentary by IBM, Siemens and Cisco.
Michael Finneran herded a panel of suppliers including Sprint, Enterasys/Siemens, Varaha Systems and T-Mobile to discuss unified mobile communications. I moderated a packed panel session discussing the emerging competitive landscape, and managed to prevent fisticuffs from breaking out between IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Nortel. Following that session, I led a workshop in which Karen Bailey from Wells Fargo reprised her excellent presentation at VoiceCon.She joined me in a discussion about finding application payoffs for UC. And there was a session about UC and Enterprise 2.0.
The biggest UC announcement at Interop came from the keynote stage. Ann Livermore, HP’s executive VP for the Technology Solutions Group, was joined on stage byStephen Elop, president of Microsoft’s Business Division, to announce a partnership to jointly develop UC capabilities. This will greatly expand HP’s previous OCS managed services offerings, and is backed up by a new four-year, $180 million joint product and services development commitment.
The capabilities shown included a demonstration of international video teleconferencing via HP’s Halo running through Microsoft’s Office Communicator client on an HP laptop. Other product initiatives include HP’s development of USB desk phones, and optimization of ProCurve servers to run Microsoft’s OCS, SharePoint and Exchange.
One of the biggest opportunities in the announcement is the plan to expand and train HP professional services staff to offer assessment, architecture planning and design, and implementation and support services. The most important UC applications initiatives for enterprises will come from embedding UC capabilities into business processes, and the planned skills investment by HP and Microsoft will be important to support such opportunities. The development of an ecosystem of integrators, architects and implementers will supplement enterprise internal capabilities, especially as the UC market continues its ramp-up.
Of course, there have been many “partnerships” among the UC vendors over the past few years, and it’s reasonable to question how important and how deep this alliance will really prove to be. Backing their words with a substantial investment is one indicator. Perhaps this is also a strategic counterpoint to the IBM-Cisco relationship. However, it’s less clear how this announcement significantly strengthens Microsoft’s plans to enter the telephony marketplace, although HP’s professional services strength could be of help. We’ll just have to see how this partnership develops.
All in all, Interop continues to be a great event, although UC is not the dominant theme. And, I have some good news to report: I passed through the gaming tables and slots with my wallet mostly intact!
How about you? What did you see at Interop? Write me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post your comments at NoJitter.com.
Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications, and a co-founder of UCStrategies.com
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon Virtual Event
VoiceCon Virtual Event, Transforming the Enterprise with Unified Communications, is complimentary to qualified industry professionals, and it’s open now!The program offers you in-depth information on topics including (but not limited to): SIP Trunking and the Role of SIP within Enterprise Networks, Architectures for Unified Communications Networks and the intersection of Social Networking and Enterprise Communications.
Anyone who has – or thinks they will have – skin in the UC game, as either a buyer or a seller, would do well to read Dave Michels’ post entitled “UC in the Clouds with Diamonds,” which appeared recently on the UCStrategies website.
Michels is of two minds about the role of UC in the cloud, and that doesn’t bother him one bit. It shouldn’t bother you either. They say that a good lawyer can argue either side of an issue equally well. If that’s the case, Michels would have made a fine attorney.
Rather than trying to forge what would be a forced conclusion, Michels delivers a dispassionate and informed analysis, first arguing why the cloud and UC are largely incompatible, then countering with why it makes sense to join your UC strategy with one aimed at optimizing the emerging set of services lumped under the “cloud” rubric. If that sounds confusing the fault is mine….Michels’ writing is clear as a bell.
Readers of this newsletter may recall an edition I penned about a year ago, called “Where Are the Carriers?” Only 12 months ago, there was much less talk about the cloud in general, and discussion about how the cloud would intersect with UC was virtually non-existent. Given the importance of the carriers as significant providers of communications services and products, their relative quiet about UC was notable – and a problem.
Flash forward to today…….the cloud is all the rage. So, have the carriers stepped up to the plate on UC? Well, still not so much.
To be sure, there’s been progress. Just this week, Sprint issued a press release entitled, in part, “Unified Communications Enabled by Sprint Now Available…” but it’s less about UC than it is about Sprint playing catch up on connectivity. The core of the announcement is that Sprint will connect three of its services — MPLS, SIP Trunking and Mobile Integration — to three important UC systems: Cisco’s Call Manager, Microsoft’s OCS R2 and IBM’s Lotus SameTime IP Telephony.
Forgive me, but what I found most notable about the release is that Sprint is rolling out SIP Trunking – customers have been growing impatient for that service for some time, and not because they can’t wait to implement UC. But I’m still not sure just when and where Sprint intends to make SIP Trunking available – when I searched on “SIP Trunking” on Sprint’s website, the results came back empty.
A visit to AT&T’s website produced similarly unsatisfying results. My search for “Unified Communications” came back with information about how I could tie together aspects of my business using “….audio, web, and video collaboration tools.” Not much new there.
Verizon’s website was only marginally more useful. At least a set of offerings appeared when I clicked on “Unified Communications and Collaboration,” but apart from familiar conferencing services, the list was the standard set of carrier services it’s been selling for years.
The fact that the carriers remain lethargic about moving into UC may create opportunities for both the equipment and software providers as well as non-traditional service providers. Cisco (via WebEx), Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and Mitel have all raised their profiles with hosted and/or managed services, there’s increasing signs that Google intends to step up its enterprise offerings, and Skype seems much more serious about addressing business customers as well.
A year ago, I asked “Where are the Carriers?” when it came to UC. I’m still waiting for an answer.
What do you think? What do you hear when you ask the carriers about UC? Drop me a line at fknight@techweb.com or respond to this post at www.nojitter.com.
I recently gave a presentation to a user group about unified communications, and I was asked the following intriguing question: How do we get our workers to use the UC functions and capabilities they have available to them? Here are some tips for getting users on board.
First, you need a sponsorship team and a project sponsor at the earliest phase of your UC journey. The sponsorship team should include line of business owners, IT and telecom managers and a sampling of end users, from the administrative staff to CXOs. End users, especially business managers who understand where communications bottlenecks and breakdowns exist, need to be an integral part of the UC planning process — the earlier they can be brought into the planning process, the better.
The sponsor is key, and by identifying the best uses and users of UC, the sponsor can encourage proper usage of the solution, leading to better results. It’s vital to have a project “champion” – someone who internally promotes usage of the UC solution. This sponsor should help choose the initial applications and business processes for UC, as well as the users to be involved in the initial deployment. The sponsor should be a line of business leader, to ensure that UC will be adopted in modes that work for the business operations.
Next, it’s important to get buy-in from the top – if C-level and other executives use the UC capabilities, others in the organization are more likely to as well. These executives can set an example and drive adoption for the rest of the organization.
Get people excited about UC, and Dimension Data provides a great example. The company initiated a fun, online animated campaign aimed at getting its employees curious and excited about their internal UC deployment. The animation included hints about the upcoming UC rollout, such as “Looking for a convenient place to strategize with your coworkers, look no further than UC,” concluding with “Look for more information next week when the journey continues…”
Dimension Data followed up that campaign with online end-user training delivered to every worker on how to use UC capabilities and functionality. Not only was the uptake of UC extremely high, the end users knew what they were doing and why they were doing it.
This Dimension Data example highlights the most important issue - training end users. A colleague and I did a “before and after” survey of end users at a large company that had implemented UC. The results were significant but not surprising: Training sparked usage, and usage produced benefits. About 60% of the end users increased their usage of checking presence status before calling someone from “often” to “always,” and the training taught them about new capabilities that hadn’t known existed on the system.
Start with pilots to get user feedback for improvements. Virtually every company that has implemented UC has found that user uptake is often viral. Once people see their colleagues or counterparts in other departments using UC, they want to find out more about it. And the more people in your organization using UC, the more useful it becomes – the more people to collaborate with, share presence status, etc.
To sum up, in order to motivate end users to use their UC capabilities, begin the process with a sponsorship team and head cheerleader, get your CXOs to set an example, get users throughout the organization excited about UC, and provide the training necessary to encourage proper usage of the solution. Enjoy the journey.
What do you think? What’s your experience been with building support and usage for UC? Drop me a line at bpleasant@commfusion.com or respond to this post at www.nojitter.com.
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CEBP Comes to Life
VoiceCon Orlando 2009 clearly demonstrated how customer and supplier creativity in applying UC to business processes is continuing unabated. In virtually every customer presentation, we heard how new Unified Communications capabilities are enabling business process optimizations — delivering “Communications Enabled Business Processes” (CEBP) solutions. The activity in CEBP is in addition to the many forms of productivity gains and cost savings available from standard UC solution packages.
Below are some of the specific examples:
* Duke University is using its new IP Telephony system as a platform to improve health care access and physician interaction in its Medical Center.
* Kraft Foods is integrating mobile, remote and office IP communications into collaborative processes to create virtual teams working both from remote sites and from innovative on-site workstation configurations; results are major savings in travel and facilities costs, as well as faster time to market.
* Karen Bailey, Telecommunications VP at Wells Fargo (formerly Wachovia), emphasized that new communications tools had to be linked to business processes improvements in order to justify the investments. She characterized the vendors’ communications middleware to enable these linkages as “getting there,” and cited a specific investor notification automation example.
* Avaya highlighted the CEBP catalog sales firm Crutchfield that is using Avaya Aura SIP technology to present products and take video agent orders through FaceBook – pretty creative.
* Microsoft had four customers live on stage during its keynote and all of them highlighted the business benefits they were achieving. For example, BT featured an advanced notification application for their mobile managers to accelerate business decisions.
* IBM highlighted collaboration effectiveness, featuring the time to market gains at Colgate Palmolive.
All of these examples, and more, can be seen in the keynote videos accessible on the VoiceCon site.
Even more application richness came out in “Communications-Enabled Apps in Action”, a customer executive breakout panel. The executives provided details of applications that have impacted directly on major business challenges or opportunities.
* Steve Margolis, MD, Chief Medical Informatics Office, Orlando Health, pointed to the communications-intensive business process of patient discharge, which had required nursing professionals to make 15 to 25 phone calls per discharge for coordination and notifications. Using a Nortel IVR system with speech recognition capabilities, Orlando Health has automated that process and posts the results to the Health Care Information System.
*Arthur Brant, Director of Network Services, Abilene Christian University, showed how ACU adapted its Alcatel-Lucent My Teamwork system to create a very innovative student application portal for the iPhone and iPod Touch, allowing students to access class schedules, assignments, account balances and campus events. Instruction has improved, too, as students can participate in interactive polls during classes to provide feedback to the professor on their learning progress. Student retention — and revenues — are up.
* Wayne Porter, GVP ETI-Network Services, SunTrust Banks, showed a video of the bank’s adaptation of Cisco Unified Video Advantage to bring experts immediately into contact with branch office customers to consult on and sell specialize financial products, such as home equity loans, resulting in improved service and revenue increases.
VoiceCon Orlando 2009 certainly demonstrated that both Unified Communications and the advanced UC CEBP applications are important and growing factors in our industry. Thanks again to all the customers for bringing these important examples to us! I am sure there will be more and even better cases at VoiceCon San Francisco 2009, November 2-5, 2009. See you there!
This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by No Jitter
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Conferences and trade shows present opportunities at multiple levels. Of course, there’s the formal program, which at VoiceCon, has morphed from a focus on PBXs to its present concentration on VoIP and UC. VoiceCon sessions – both breakouts and keynotes – provide great information and case studies about the various technologies, hardware, software and apps that comprise a modern enterprise communications solution.
But, there’s another kind of information exchange and networking that takes place at VoiceCon and any other event that’s worth its salt. The formal term for this exchange is schmoozing — where two, three or however many vendors get together and discuss whether and how they can work together, everything from distribution agreements to mergers and acquisitions.
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?
You’d think that’d be easy, but trust me, it isn’t. And that’s why at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, the UCStrategies.com team decided to host a wine tasting to help vendors network, and I want you to know that the fact that I live in Napa Valley and love great wine had NOTHING to do with that decision!
We actually had two vendor-only wine tastings — one for senior executives and another for senior level directors and managers. We screened the invitation list to make sure the small vendors would be good potential partners for the large vendors. We launched this set of wine-tastings at VoiceCon Orlando 08, held another two tasting at VoiceCon San Francisco and again in Orlando last month.
And there have already been results — major vendors have announced partnerships with many of the smaller vendors we introduced them to at last year’s wine tastings. And it’s clear that our decision to have two separate tastings was right — strategic partnerships require interaction at multiple levels.
One success story is Psytechnics, an IP voice and video performance management company from the UK. I was introduced to the Psytechnics by a person at Microsoft, who recognized that the industry would benefit if there was one performance management system used in a multi vendor UC environment — and they all are. This is the type of project I love: Helping a small company while helping the industry. Psytechnics now has relationships with Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and several others that will be announced in the coming months.
The message here for vendors is clear: Leverage VoiceCon for more than reaching enterprise customers; Network with potential and existing strategic partners from both the vendor and channel communities. If you would like advice on how to network at VoiceCon or any other conference send me a message jburton@ucstrategies.com
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VoiceCon Orlando 2009 — The Future is Now
VoiceCon Orlando ended about two weeks ago, and some excellent summaries have been written about its featured themes, issues and announcements (see www.nojitter.com). For what it’s worth, here are my two cents.
Orlando 2009 was the 19th edition of VoiceCon, and my time in the industry goes back even further (I know, you’re right: I should be dead by now!). And for all that time, convergence has been kind of a Holy Grail. Well, VoiceCon Orlando made clear that, finally, it’s almost within our grasp.
During the 1980s we started to see the deployment of integrated/converged transport facilities (T1 followed by Frame Relay, ATM and then IP), and by the mid/late 1990s, capabilities for integrated/converged switching became available. At VoiceCon Orlando 2009, on both the Exhibition Floor and in the Conference sessions, we saw tangible and meaningful examples of integrated/converged applications, and that means the troika is finally complete — converged transport, switching and applications.
It’s taken 3+ decades to reach this point and the process hasn’t always been pretty. We’ve seen great companies fall, new ones arise and promising companies go bust, and all this has taken a major toll on IT organizational structures and personnel. But here we are and, in a curious twist of fate, at precisely the time when the economy has gone into the tank.
Now I’m not suggesting that there’s any cause and effect between those two, but it’s impossible to separate the economic times we’re in from the shifts in technology that are changing our expectations for enterprise communications.
And the good news is that VoiceCon Orlando showcased the availability of communications and collaboration capabilities that the industry has been talking about for decades, at precisely the moment when almost every company is acknowledging that the old ways of doing business simply won’t do. In short, it really is a remarkable point in history: The means to fundamentally change how we communicate are at our disposal, and the incentives to change couldn’t be more obvious.
Despite being a relative newcomer on the scene, UC has already played a significant role in getting the industry to this new plateau. The power of UC is that previously separate elements — voice and voicemail, text and IM, presence and email, conferencing and video – can be combined across both wireless and wireline domains. So UC presents a framework that enables us to stop thinking about “voice” or “data”, “messaging” or “video” and, instead, focus on overall “communications” – providing our organizations with the ability to reach whoever they need to reach when – and how — they need to reach them.
During VoiceCon Orlando, it was clear that the industry had shifted to this new, expanded mindset. Enterprise speakers, consultants and vendors all expressed this change in perspective. However, one key take-away from VoiceCon is that before the promise can be fulfilled, there is a lot of hard work to do on architectures, interoperability, integration issues and the development of new tools for managing and troubleshooting converged networks, systems and apps.
My hope is that during the coming months and at future VoiceCons, we’ll hear less proselytizing about the virtues of UC and more showcasing of the software, systems and applications that were so tantalizing at VoiceCon Orlando 2009.
What do you think? What are you seeing in your organizations or hearing from your customers about the gap between what convergence and UC offer and what’s actually available? Drop me a note at fknight@techweb.com, or post a comment later this week at www.nojitter.com.
