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.  However, many significant challenges can prevent organizations from realizing the true benefits of SIP Trunks.  Our upcoming webinar will explore the current state of the SIP Trunking market and deployments, the challenges affecting widespread adoption and test methods for mitigating these obstacles. Register now!

Ava-Tel? Nor-Vaya?
The dust may have settled on the auction of Nortel Enterprise, but it’s going to take a while longer for the dust to settle on the deal itself. What’s public so far is the barest of outlines, and as we all know, the devil is in the details.

What’s clear is the price: $900 million, plus another $15 million to create an employee retention pool. What’s not clear is whether anyone who doesn’t already sit inside Nortel’s executive suites can dive into this new pool.

And of course, there’s the issue of the courts. There’s been noise from some quarters that this deal will violate anti-trust guidelines. If you haven’t already done so, check out the coverage of the anti-trust debate on NoJitter.com. Trust me, you’ll learn enough about the Herfindahl Index to last a lifetime. All I can add is that with Microsoft and IBM already in the enterprise communications market and cloud-based approaches led by Google and Skype starting to close in, whatever advantage Cisco and Avaya may enjoy is likely to be short-lived.

The potential legal pitfalls also include rumblings from Verizon, which let it be known that it will try to quash the deal unless the acquiring company makes certain stipulations about servicing and upgrading already-installed systems. Its reason– hang on to your hats here: National security. Turns out that the feds own a lot of Nortel gear, much of it bought via Verizon, which now contends that if that gear can’t be properly upgraded or serviced, national security will go down and terrorist threat levels will go up. Oh, and by the way, Verizon wants to make sure that the feds to don’t make it responsible for upgrading all those systems on its own.

Verizon is just the tip of the distributor iceberg that could determine whether Avaya’s buy succeeds. Nortel arguably had the strongest distribution system among the traditional voice vendors, and although many have either defected or no longer exclusively carry Nortel products, that network is among Nortel’s most potent assets. The extent to which Avaya can retain or re-instill loyalty among those folks will be key to a successful outcome.

From a more narrow UC perspective, a rapid and positive resolution of this deal would be good for the market. As if the economy hasn’t been enough of an obstacle, having Nortel’s fate finally decided removes a major FUD factor. As Marty Parker noted when Avaya’s stalking-horse bid first became public, Nortel has a strong UC portfolio, including the MCS 5100 conferencing system and Diamondware, but it has been unable to overcome the rising tide of doubt about its continued viability (see NoJitter’s blog entry).

And even though its competitors probably won’t agree, the market also will be well served if, over time, Avaya’s acquisition is successful. Given the track record of acquisitions of this size, the odds are not in Avaya’s favor; any way you look at it, integrating these two companies and making decisions about which Nortel products to support going forward, will not be easy or quick. But, if you’re a UC customer, there is a bottom line: It’s better to have more rather than fewer viable competitive suppliers.

Before closing, I want to let you know that beginning next week, we’ll deliver the UC eWeekly e-newsletter in a new format. Since many of you also subscribe to our VoiceCon eNews, we’ve decided to consolidate the two into one weekly, HTML newsletter. The same writers from VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com will continue to share their analysis and perspective, and we’re all grateful for your long-standing support of our efforts.

As always, let me know what you think about the Avaya-Nortel deal or any other topic in enterprise communications by sending me a note at fknight@techweb.com or posting on www.nojitter.com.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.com

And now for some shameless self-promotion:

Unified Communication Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.

Early Registration Savings for VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 Expire September 25, 2009.

Special offer for VoiceCon eNews subscribers: 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. 
Register today with VIP Code: CNEFVC04.

Copyright (c) 2009 CMP Media LLC, 999 Oakmont Plaza Dr., Suite 100, Westmont, IL 60559. All Rights Reserved. CMP Media, Business Communications Review, BCR, VoiceCon and associated design marks and logos are trademarks or service marks owned or used under license by CMP Media LLC and may be registered in the United States and other countries. Other names mentioned may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

==============================================================

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 the VoiceCon website.

 

Register today with VIP Code: CNEFVC02

==============================================================

More on Expert Agents and UC

One of my favorite topics is unified communications with contact centers and the role of expert agents. Expert agents are subject matter experts within (or even outside of) an organization that can help full-time contact center agents provide faster and better responses to customer inquiries, resulting in the elusive “first contact resolution,” or FCR.

As the UCStrategies team discussed in this week’s podcast, the use of expert agents isn’t new. I’ve been talking about it since the CTI days of the 1990’s. But what is new is how technology –notably UC with presence and instant messaging — make this easier.

UC helps contact center agents get the information they need right away. In a contact center scenario without UC, if the agent doesn’t know the answer or have the information needed to solve a customer’s problem, they will either transfer the caller to someone else (who may or may not have the information, and may not even be at their desk), or take down the customer’s phone number, do some research and then call back the customer – possibly hours later. The result isn’t always pretty.

Today, with UC tools like presence and IM, when an agent needs additional information, they can use presence to see which subject matter experts are available, and send an IM to ask an available expert for information while on the call with the customer.

There are, however, still several problems with this scenario. First, you have to identify the outside experts who can best provide the information needed. This should be based on the skills and expertise of the experts. Next, how do you ensure that the experts are not being overburdened with requests from contact center agents while trying to do their “real” jobs? Some companies assign various experts to be available certain times of the day, letting them schedule and manage their time better.

Another challenge is ensuring that the interactions are managed, tracked, recorded, reported on, etc. the way regular contact center interactions need to be. In one scenario — when the contact center agent remains on the call while the expert joins in — this is relatively simple. In other scenarios, the contact center agent will transfer the call and then drop off, leaving the customer in the hands of the expert. My recommendation is to keep control within the contact center by having the agent remain on the call, even when an expert is brought into the conversation. This way, the interaction still can be recorded for quality purposes, and the same reporting and management tools used in the contact center would be applied to the expert agent interaction. This also eliminates the need for companies to purchase additional licenses for the expert agents in terms of recording and reporting.

Most important, companies need to re-evaluate their goals in terms of customer service. Are they focused on answering as many calls as quickly as possible, or are customer satisfaction and customer intimacy the goals?

If the latter, then the organization needs to make it clear that customer service is the responsibility of the entire organization. This will be difficult for established companies, as it means changing the corporate culture as well as the roles and responsibilities of every employee.

But it can be done. I’ve always believed that the hurdle for utilization of expert agents is less about technology than it is about people management. As more companies embrace UC with the contact center and expert agents, expect to see new job functions emerge, like Manager of Customer Satisfaction, with responsibility beyond the contact center to the entire organization. The result should be more loyal and satisfied customers.

What do you think about tying expert agents to your UC initiatives? Share your experiences and thoughts with me at bpleasant@commfusion.com or respond to this post at www.nojitter.com.

Blair Pleasant

COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

=======================================================================

And now for some shameless self-promotion:

Unified Communication Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail: http://www.ucstrategies.com/

In addition to Unified Communications, VoiceCon offers another weekly e-newsletter — VoiceCon eNews – which presents opinions and analysis of the trends in enterprise IP Telephony, converged networks and unified communications. Sign up for VoiceCon eNews at http://www.voicecon.com/orlando/index.php?priorityCode=MLYTVC02

Copyright (c) 2009 CMP Media LLC, 999 Oakmont Plaza Dr., Suite 100, Westmont, IL 60559. All Rights Reserved. CMP Media, Business Communications Review, BCR, VoiceCon and associated design marks and logos are trademarks or service marks owned or used under license by CMP Media LLC and may be registered in the United States and other countries. Other names mentioned may be trademarks or service marks of their respective owners.

=======================================================================

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 Register today with VIP Code: CNEFVC02  ==============================

UC Pricing Reflects Broad Adoption

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.

Second, this is being done for a very practical, customer-centric business reason: UC functions offer new value. Most of the toll cost savings were captured early on in the VoIP cycle, so those are not major investment justifiers at this point. However, UC functionalities are definitely enabling new savings-based and business-based justifications. Well-known examples include:

* Travel avoidance using web conferencing, and video conferencing where needed.
* Toll and cellular savings by avoiding calls either to voice mail using presence or altogether using IM.
* Cellular savings using mobile portals to deliver information.
* Office space savings by enabling remote, “virtual office” workers.
* Improved customer response and business speed with improved options for mobile personnel.
* Business acceleration and improvement by applying UC to optimize business processes.

The UC features, sold on their own, can generate savings for enterprises, but that does not help sell PBXs, which vendors still need to “pay the rent.”

Which brings us to the third point: Many PBX channels are not well-prepared to sell UC solutions. Here’s where bundling gets sticky, since a bundled offer provides no added commission for either the channel or the sales reps, unless they are skilled at identifying advanced applications that justify professional services as part of the implementation. Perhaps those channels with call center expertise or vertical market VAR skills can adapt to create a strong UC position, but the mainstream, high-volume PBX channels may not have embraced UC selling and are certainly constrained from developing those skills in a tough economy. Customers tend to buy from those channels that best understand the business applications of any technology, and that is true for UC as well.

In parallel, UC solutions from desktop software suppliers and from mobility suppliers are selling well. Indications are that suppliers such as Microsoft, IBM and RIM are running ahead of plan. A growing number of case studies indicate that enterprises are willing to change their business processes based on the new UC capabilities. The desktop and mobility suppliers have channels focused on realizing those improvements through both basic UC functions (UC-User Productivity or UC-U) and through the higher value UC system integrations (UC-Business Process or UC-B).

So, the buzz about bundling of UC functions with IP-PBXs is no surprise; it reflects the cost savings and business benefits that UC can produce, and is a competitive necessity for all types of communications suppliers. All this is a real indication that UC (and UC beyond VoIP) has arrived, since every type of communications system supplier is including it in their offers.

If you’re an enterprise telecom, IT or LOB manager, this is good news, but requires some discretion. Free things provide you with easy options, but you will want to focus on actually realizing the business benefits — i.e., on how creative the suppliers and the enterprise customers can be with the new UC technology. We’ll be highlighting real enterprise customer case studies again at VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 – you’ll want to be there to hear more first hand.

What do you think about bundling of UC software with PBXs? Let me know at mparker@unicommconsulting.com.

Marty Parker, Principal, UniComm Consulting LLC

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by NEC

Healthcare organizations are facing significantly increasing challenges – the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-quality patient care.  Register today for the free live webinar and receive additional insight to UC in Healthcare.  www.necunified.com/uchealthcare
==============================

The UC Cloud

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.

Microsoft and IBM have been talking about their UC cloud computing offerings for several years and while there have been a number of solutions offered by partners, the first complete product offerings from these two vendors won’t be available for another year or so. IBM introduced its cloud computing concept at Lotusphere in January 2008. I found it very compelling in that it provides the customer the flexibility to balance how much and where they want services to reside – on-premise or in the cloud.

Mitel has been working on a somewhat similar concept. It has developed a virtualization strategy that allows customers to place Mitel communications software anywhere they want by building internal clouds.

Siemens is working with Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud computing platform. They demonstrated the product at VoiceCon Orlando in March, and it looks like Siemens has gone a long way in solving the distribution problem of selling into the SMB market.

Over the next few years we will see major carriers around the globe jump on the bandwagon and offer UC cloud services. Some will partner (and already have) with Microsoft and other major vendors, while others will integrate the best-of-breed components for their offerings.

While some major UC vendors have been developing their cloud computing strategy (and products), a number of startups also have been delivering solutions in the space. Most started as hosted PBX services and have added basic UC-U — click-to-communicate features like presence and instant messaging. One of their challenges is addressing the UC-B market by helping customers integrate communications into business processes.

Call Tower is addressing the UC-B market by vertical markets, and has developed several on-demand UC solutions. Thinking Phone Networks works closely with its customers to integrate communications services into the customers’ business process.

The biggest challenge for many smaller vendors is getting on the radar screen of potential customers. They are small companies with limited marketing budgets, and that’s why the team at UCStrategies.com will be providing insight and analysis to help customers of all sizes develop a UC Strategy. My colleagues Dave Michaels and Art Rosenberg have already posted articles on our site.

I am sure that I’ve overlooked a number of UC Cloud vendors, and I hope they’ll get in touch so we can get to know what’s being offered. If you have been developing a cloud-based UC strategy, contact me at jburton@ctlink.

Jim Burton, CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by Virtual VoiceCon On-Demand…”
The first-ever VoiceCon Virtual Event, “Transforming the Enterprise with Unified Communications,” is now available on demand.  In the span of just six hours, this virtual event will enable you to collect a wealth of information to help guide your decision-making process as your enterprise confronts the issues and the potential of Unified Communications.  Top sponsors included Alcatel-Lucent, Interactive Intelligence and Sprint.  To further explore this successful event and how it can help you transform your enterprise, visit http://www.voicecon.com/virtualevents/
==============================

UC – Glass Half  ???

So, is the UC glass half full or half empty?  If you believe that UC is a disruptive, revolutionary technology that will turn businesses – and the communications industry – on their collective heads, you’d have to vote for half empty. The pickup simply hasn’t been there.

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.

*There are multiple entry points – and associated costs – for deploying UC……it’s not an all-or-nothing procurement, architecture or implementation process.

*Prospects for hosted UC appear very strong, in part because of another important long-term trend — virtualization.

*UC isn’t going away….it is becoming part of the permanent landscape of communications and IT.

Among the bad/ugly:

*Despite all that’s been written and discussed, the market remains confused about what  UC actually is…..like beauty – or porn – the definition remains in the eye of the beholder.

*A lot of UC elements are finding their way into enterprises for free – particularly IM and presence. Will that change? Who knows, but it’s not likely to happen quickly and it may never happen to a significant way.

*In large part because of the two points immediately above, UC is not a high priority, either within IT or end users.

It’s clear that UC already has had a dramatic impact on the vendor community. Microsoft and IBM have used UC as their vehicle into the market, Cisco has expanded its lead in part because it has relabeled itself a UC –rather than an IP-PBX – provider and both traditional vendors and new entrants will use UC as their rallying cry to promote next-gen architectures, products and services.

As for UC’s impact on enterprises, that story is still unfolding. For the past year or two at VoiceCon, we’ve presented IT executives who describe their migration to UC – what’s worked, what motivated the deployment and what have been the results. What I have found particularly noteworthy – and positive – is that, with few exceptions, these executives don’t speak breathlessly about UC . Instead, they take a very matter-of-fact tone: UC elements or a broad UC solution made sense, took work to pull it off, there were some surprises, but UC is – or is becoming – a regular component of the IT/communications toolkit. We’ll be presenting more of these case studies at VoiceCon San Francisco.

To the extent that enterprises that have adopted UC have found that it solves the problems it was intended to solve and at a cost and level of effort that is commensurate with the benefits achieved, UC is already a major winner.  Those who expect more may well be proven right, but not for a while.

What do you think? Are you a glass-half-full or half-empty person when it comes to UC? Drop me a line at fknight@techweb.com or post your thoughts, ideas and reactions on NoJitter.com.

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by NEC

Healthcare organizations are facing significantly increasing challenges – the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-quality patient care.  Register today for the free live webinar and receive additional insight to UC in Healthcare.  www.necunified.com/uchealthcare
==============================

Solutions Integrators and UC

The UCStrategies team has been planning its next UC Summit, which brings together “Solutions Integrators” with vendors and consultants to explore how we can all work together to help grow the UC market, and of course, everyone’s financial prospects.

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.

To do this effectively solutions integrators need new skills, new contacts at their customers and prospects, and most importantly new ways of working with customers to identify the best applications opportunities. The relationship between the organization and the solutions integrator is key, and also different than in the past – it’s not just a matter of determining how many PBX lines are needed, or how much storage space is required for voice mail messages. For a UC deployment to succeed, enterprises must work together with their solutions integrators to identify how UC can best be utilized within the organization, and how to make this happen. We would expect the solutions integrators’ primary UC vendors to provide them with the tools and proper training to enable this level of performance.

End user organizations and solutions integrators need to work together to understand the impact that a UC solution will have on the company’s business (of course with the help of an independent consultant). For example, implementing conferencing and collaboration tools will inevitably lead to a more collaborative work environment, which will likely impact the organizational structure of the company. These types of considerations may seem out of the realm of a reseller, but it needs to be examined by a solutions integrator when helping customers implement unified communications.

What this means is that companies should look for and work with a solutions integrator that can not only sell a shiny new IP-PBX, but can work together with the company to identify and understand the impact a UC solution will have on the individual workers and the company as a whole, ensuring that the implementation is successful for everyone involved.

What do you think about this new category? Drop me a line at bpleasant@commfusion.com or respond to this post at www.nojitter.com.

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by IBM

Requirements engineering for mobile telecommunications technology development.  Requirements engineering is a vital process that helps companies manage complex requirements, improve team collaboration and ultimately produce high-quality products more cost-effectively. This white paper explores requirements engineering and how it affects product development and engineering in the industrial segment. It also discusses the best practices and benefits of requirements engineering, and how they can help technology manufacturers within telecommunications overcome today’s quality and cost challenges.

http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;216663090;38698395;x

============================

Unified Communications Coming of Age

Depending on when you want to start counting, UC is either 2 years old (big announcements at VoiceCon Orlando 2007), 6 years old (first Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) for UC in 2003), or a decade old (earliest UC products).  Whatever the number, UC is now coming of age. 

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“).

UC is driving vendor revenue growth across the board.  While it’s difficult to tell how much UC is being shipped by the IP-PBX suppliers, since most bundle their UC offers with the PBX pricing, here’s what we can see: 

* Mobility continues to be a major growth vector.  RIM with Blackberry Enterprise Server and the new Mobile Voice System, reported annual revenue growth of 80% in their fiscal year ended Feb. 2009, “…driven by strong sales in both enterprise and consumer markets…”.

* Conferencing systems appear to be doing quite well based on the major savings available from travel avoidance and business process improvement.  On top of that, collaboration technologies, including both public and enterprise social networking, are the new vehicle to facilitate projects and meetings.  

* Software-based UC, especially IBM Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), seem to be receiving major uptake as enterprise communications platforms, with apparent triple-digit annual growth percentages. 

* Application vendors ranging from SAP and Oracle to Salesforce.com and McKesson (healthcare information systems) are embedding PC-based and mobile device-based communications controls into their application packages, often using UC vendors’ APIs (above).  

* Investment continues aggressively in UC Software-as-a-Service, ranging from SMB offers (CallTower, 8X8, Google, and many more) to enterprise offers (Cisco WebEx, Siemens OpenScape, Microsoft LiveMeeting and OCS 2007, IBM Sametime and Quickr, Google Enterprise, Skype, and others). 

* There are plenty of UC ancillary devices and endpoints.  Polycom, Plantronics, and Logitech all have major product offerings in the UC market space.

* UC Gateway providers are reporting positive uptake both for interfacing UC systems to traditional PBXs and for SIP gateways to the digital backbone carriers. 

* Analysts are reporting separately on the UC market, including continued annual Gartner MQs.  A recent Gartner report on cost optimization sees the greatest value coming from programs that “enable innovation and business restructuring, and implement process improvement.”    UC can directly contribute to these goals. 

All of these are signs that UC is coming of age and showing continued growth – even in a tough economy, even though traditional PBX station line shipments are in steep decline, and even as industry consolidations continue.  As you’ve read in the VoiceCon UC eWeekly for almost three years, UC will integrate communications tools (whether a phone, a PC or a mobile device) into the user’s environment, applications, and business processes.  As enterprises re-evaluate priorities for expenditures, UC projects are still making the cut because they can deliver convenience, cost savings, competiveness, and opportunities to restructure how business gets accomplished. 

We hope to see you at VoiceCon San Francisco 2009, where more examples of UC moving into its maturity in the communications community will be discussed and on display. 

So, what do you think? As you think about the fit between UC and your business and communications plans, is UC maturing and evolving quickly enough? Drop us a note at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or mparker@unicommconsulting.com or post a comment on NoJitter.com.
Marty Parker and Don Van Doren, co-founders and principals of UniComm Consulting, LLC

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by NEC

Healthcare organizations are facing significantly increasing challenges – the ongoing pressures to improve operating margins while meeting the increasing demands for high-quality patient care.  Register today for the free live webinar and receive additional insight to UC in Healthcare.  www.necunified.com/uchealthcare
==============================

UC in an Avaya + Nortel World

Monday’s news was Avaya’s stalking horse offer to buy Nortel Enterprise Solutions, forming a “New Avaya”. Here’s my take on the Unified Communications (UC) implications of the potential deal, including business strategy, customers, product lines, channels and services.

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.

However, customers will first want to know what’s happening to their existing installed base systems and whether their favorite products are going to go forward or be replaced. Thus, there’s a risk that UC will stall out in the New Avaya conversation for the coming year(s).

New Avaya will need to be extra energetic to keep the UC product story at the forefront of the customer discussions, budgeting, and decision-making for both 2010 and 2011; indeed, the UC story should be the centerpiece of its roadmap. It will have the largest enterprise telephony installed base in the world on the acquisition date, but if those customers don’t buy and deploy UC, the New Avaya will not be the leader three years from now.

So, what UC products and services will New Avaya offer? In polling my UCStrategies.com associates, we picked the following:
*For Conferencing and Collaboration, we recommend the Nortel product line. The MCS 5100 is already a complete, solid multi-media conferencing system with audio, video and web conferencing services on a platform that can work with almost any PBX. This will make MCS 5100 easy to adapt both to the Nortel Meridian and CS1000 installed base systems and to the Avaya Definity and Communications Manager installed base systems. MCS 5100 could be enhanced with some of the presence federation that Avaya has been developing.

In addition, Nortel has two great assets here: Diamondware, which provides 3D positional voice technology and brings life-like sound to virtual web and voice communications; and Web.Alive, a secure virtual world platform for collaboration, assisted E-Commerce and virtual learning and training applications. This level of innovation is critical to meet the rapid advancements in Collaboration we are seeing in the market.

*For Mobility, we recommend the Avaya product line. The Avaya one-X Mobile Edition extends enterprise communications functions and dial plans to essentially every mobile brand and network, supporting Palm, RIM, iPhone, Java, Windows Mobile and Symbian devices. Also, this will seamlessly integrate with the call coverage options of the likely IP-PBX winner, Avaya’s Communication Manager.

*For Desktop integration, we would choose the Nortel software, because it’s ahead of Avaya in partnering with both Microsoft, via the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA), and IBM. This is the toughest area to predict, since Avaya has fiercely promoted its one-X solution for the desktop, while cautiously integrating with Microsoft and IBM products. Nortel clearly recognizes that the hundreds of millions of desktops running the Microsoft Office suite (Outlook, SharePoint, Office Communications Server, et al.) or the IBM Lotus suite (Notes, Quickr, Sametime, et al.) are here to stay. An embracing view of presence, with excellent interoperation with Microsoft, IBM and many other presence sources, also will be key, favoring the Nortel alliance approach. Hopefully, both for themselves and for the UC industry, New Avaya will find a way to build on the Nortel alliances.

*For Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), we choose the Avaya Aura architecture for integrating multiple communications platforms and potential new SIP-based applications, but would preserve and extend the Nortel Agile Communications Environment (ACE) as the best of the application development and integration engines. To date, most Avaya tools for CEBP have been rooted in its highly functional call center technologies (e.g. the Application Enablement Server – AES), but ACE offers a more UC-centric approach focusing on click-to-call, IM, location and presence.

All of this will need to be backed by a channel strategy that emphasizes the professional services value of UC, especially in the enterprise market segments. There will immediately be too many channel partners for the consolidated New Avaya product set, leaving those partners open to conversion to other vendors’ offerings. But, if New Avaya can rapidly energize, train and support the combined channels in the growth opportunities of UC – both in products and in higher margin pro services — this could ignite the growth fires that New Avaya will need.

In summary, if the Avaya acquisition of Nortel goes through, the New Avaya will have a huge opportunity to emphasize UC from the outset. It will have the right building blocks and have relationships with a huge customer base. Leaving the UC emphasis for later, until after the integration and the IP-PBX product line rationalization, could place New Avaya in the lead of a declining telephony market, while non-traditional competitors capture the UC applications of the future. We’ll bring you the front-row observations as the play unfolds.

What do you think of this pending deal, and how will it impact your planning for UC? Share your thoughts with me directly at mparker@unicommconsulting.com, or post on NoJitter.com.

Marty Parker, Principal, UniComm Consulting LLC

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco

Register now and save Big for VoiceCon San Francisco to be held November 2-5, at the Moscone North Convention Center. 

Register today with VIP Code: CNEFVC02 
==============================

Is UC on Cloud 9?

I was struck by a recent post on NoJitter.com, authored by Paul McMillan, who directs UC Strategy at Siemens Enterprise. Paul’s post, “At the Intersection of Cloud Computing and Unified Communications,” argues that UC can ride the momentum behind all-things cloud to get into the enterprise much quicker than has thus far been the case.

He writes, “The same concepts that will make the cloud attractive for enterprise customers deploying line of business applications can be applied to UC…. the complexity surrounding UC can be greatly reduced when it is ported to the cloud….Customers can avoid the up-front financial, human and time-related costs associated with implementing a UC pilot or initial implementation. UC software can be ported and provided as a running instance in the cloud with a front end that allows for the sign up, provisioning and ongoing management of your running software instance. User templates can ease the burden of configuration.”

Paul has been around a long time; he has a deep technical as well as market background, and he discusses prospects for both UC and cloud computing in measured terms. Without disagreeing with his overall point, however, it seems to me that there’s more to the story.

We’ve seen attempts to deliver UC and cloud computing before. Before there was UC there was CTI, and before there was cloud computing there was timeshare computing and, in voice, there was – and still is – Centrex.

Like UC, CTI promised and, in some cases, delivered, important capabilities that unified disparate elements in communications and computing. CTI enjoyed its principal successes in contact centers, because of the economics – speeding up call handling paid off in the call center being able to handle and process more customers. Outside of the call center, however, CTI never got off the ground. The costs, primarily the system integration costs, proved too high for general business users; the ROI simply wasn’t there.

CTI’s limited success holds an important lesson for UC. As Don Van Doren and I have written about in recent issues of this newsletter, the longer interoperability remains a UC “futures,” the longer UC’s fate will remain uncertain.

McMillan suggests that the cloud may help ease that problem when he writes: “Amazon’s EC2 cloud has well over 450,000 developers accessing APIs and SDKs to build innovative new applications across a variety of markets. Just by providing a UC SDK to the cloud a company can gain access to a multitude of external resources innovating on its platform. The amount of time, effort and expense to do this organically is significant.”

The question for any enterprise, however, is whether any of those 450,000 developers is producing anything that the enterprise needs and, if not, would they be willing to do so? And how long will it take and at what cost?

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.

So, the way in which the cloud and UC play together will have much to do with how each enterprise perceives UC and the reasons for deploying it. If, for example, it’s about presence and messaging, the cloud may be a great choice. But if, as many argue, UC delivers the biggest ROI when it is integrated into business processes, I wonder if the cloud will be selected as the deployment path and, if so, how long it will take for the new cloud-based, UC-business process to migrate back down to earth.

What do you think? Are you looking to integrate UC with a cloud strategy? Drop me a line at fknight@techweb.com or post your thoughts, ideas and reactions on NoJitter.com.

This issue of UC Weekly is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco

Register now and save Big for VoiceCon San Francisco to be held November 2-5, at the Moscone North Convention Center.  For more information visit our website.

Register today with VIP Code: CNEFVC02

==============================

IBM Delivers Sametime Unified Telephony Early
At VoiceCon in Orlando IBM announced it planned to ship Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT) in July of this year. On June 23 IBM announced general availability of SUT and indicated it had already booked sales to close out the quarter – congratulations.

On occasion I use my UC eWeekly contribution to help clarify misconceptions in the market.  I have heard a number of rumors regarding IBM Sametime and SUT I would like to clarify along with some general UC misconceptions:

*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.

*I have heard that some of IBM’s competitors are telling prospects that IBM is a hardware company and only sells software to drive hardware and services. My guess is most customers understand IBM’s business model and know they are in both the software and services businesses, and those are profitable.  IBM software, including Sametime and SUT runs on many vendors hardware and interoperates with many vendors’ gateways and appliances.

*There is a debate in the UC market about the difference between products based on open standards vs. those based on proprietary technologies. IBM emphasizes that they developed SUT based on industry open standards.  Some other UC producers use proprietary technologies in their solutions and claim this delivers better functionality.  Like most issues they both have pluses and minuses.  This point will take more explanation and I will cover it in an article on UCStrategies.com.

*IBM’s Sametime is very scalable, based on the IBM documentation and reference cases.  Brent Kelly, of Wainhouse Research, illustrates this in his VoiceCon Tutorials, “Choices in Unified Communications: Comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server to IBM Lotus Sametime.”  Of course, this will result in a lower server count than for many competitive options, primarily for larger enterprises. 

IBM’s release of SUT is another important milestone for the UC industry for several major reasons. With SUT, IBM expands the functionality of Sametime to incorporate real time enterprise communications in a single system.  With SUT, it will be possible for employees in some use cases to rely entirely on IBM Sametime with SUT to meet their enterprise voice communications needs.  For all the other use cases in the enterprise, SUT can interoperate with the customer’s installed or new PBX systems – TDM or VoIP – to provide the a consistent enterprise-wide communications interface.  This may, of course, raise the question of whether IBM is trying to replace the PBX.  As we have said many times in the UC eWeekly, innovators in any new market usually focus more on delivering new functionality than on replacing the incumbent solutions; this appears to be the case with IBM SUT, as well. 

The shipment of SUT with Sametime provides an expansion of IBM’s capabilities for “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”   IBM has a well-known, positive reputation for delivering the integration of software applications into their customers’ business processes.  With this addition of real-time communications, we should expect to see an uptick of UC applications, installations and resulting case studies from IBM, especially in the Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) category of UC.  

SUT provides another excellent solution to choose from – and competition is good for any industry.  We wish them good fortune in their launch.