3Com plans to re-submit its proposed acqusition by Bain Capital and Huawei Technologies to federal regulators. The company announced that its shareholders' meeting,scheduled for today, would be convened and then immediately adjourned, to be reconvened next Friday, March 7, to give company officials more time to work on a new arrangement.
Over the past year or so the industry has started talking much more about the concept of “communications enabled applications”. This can mean many things, but to me it’s the concept of taking the communications tools we use today, things like voice, messenger services and video, and embedding them into the desktop applications that we use on an everyday basis. The benefit for the end users is that we will be able to launch any communication tool without having to leave the applications that we use, making it much easier for us to work. The benefit to business process is even greater, in that many of today’s tasks are built of notification – response systems can be fully automated.
Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) had their Enterprise Forum in Paris last week, and we got to hear some interesting sessions, see some cool demos, talk to ALU executives and customers, and drink some good French wine.
Tom Nolle's post below brings up a statistic that'd be helpful for us to keep in mind as we look at Unified Communications, and it was echoed by a comment by one of our presenters in yesterday's VoiceCon webinar. Knowledge workers, according to Doug Michaelides of Mitel, make up only 20% of the U.S. workforce.
I'd like to welcome Tom Nolle, CEO of CIMI Corp., as another of our regular writers here at No Jitter. Tom is one of the best-known and respected analysts in IT/communications, and he was a longtime contributor, columnist and friend of Business Communications Review magazine. Tom's first post is below.
When I surveyed top enterprise IT executives at the end of 2007, one of their primary complaints about the network budget process was that “my people want to buy gadgets and not support business requirements”. Overall, 88% of these senior managers, usually CIOs by title, said that it was “difficult” or “impossible” for them to link network budget requests to business priorities. In contrast, only 43% felt that was the case for their computing and software budget requests.
Traditional PBXs famously have 450 features, or 500, or 250, depending on who's counting. The point is, there's a lot, and nobody can name them all off the top of their head. So vendors new to the PBX market tend, when their products only offer a dozen or two PBX-type features, to say you couldn't possibly need 450. Nobody uses all those features!
Hey this is pretty cool: Al Gore is joining John Chambers and Sue Bostrom in the VoiceCon Orlando keynote session Wednesday, March 18, 11 a.m. Eastern. Gore and Chambers will be speaking from remote locations while Bostrom will be on the VoiceCon stage at the Gaylord Palms hotel.
Naturally, we on the VoiceCon team are pretty pumped about this. By any measure, this is a big deal for our industry as well as for the show. I get the sense that Al Gore is a pretty busy guy, so the fact that he's decided to take time to address an audience of IT professionals is significant. Clearly we've reached critical mass with the idea that communications technology has a significant role to play in improving the condition of our environment, and in bringing many other societal benefits to all parts of the world.
We've had quite a bit on Green IT here at No Jitter, courtesy mostly of our resident environmentalist Matt Brunk, and we've also got a session at VoiceCon called "Saving Money with Green VOIP," which No Jitter's own Gary Audin is presenting. The Gore/Chambers/Bostrom session will take us beyond the idea of doing IT's job in a more environmentally-conscious way, into the ways that communications itself can help.
My title is taken from the name of one of the demonstrations set up at the Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) Enterprise Forum held in Paris last week. ALU used this year’s forum to launch its new enterprise marketing strategy, the Dynamic Enterprise. (Those who saw my post last month on the Genesys notion of the Dynamic Contact Center may see a family resemblance here – Genesys is a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent.)
How about leased crowds?
Comcast decided to pack this week's Net Neutrality hearing in Boston with employees and, er, independent contractors.
Check out the photo at the link. You know it was taken during a Comcast speaker's turn at the microphone.
In case you don’t remember, Statler and Waldorf are the two grumpy old men sitting in the balcony of the Muppet Theatre casting out words of wisdom.
A few days ago, I was asked for my opinion about the marketing hype vs. real benefits of Unified Communications, which I do struggle with. First, there really isn’t a clear definition of Unified Communications that I feel comfortable with and Eric Krapf made that pretty clear in Defining UC. So, for vendor speak or incentives to buy, I say pass until any vendor presents you with application-solution to your specific business problem that passes the finance guy’s approval for a positive quantifiable return. The gene pool seems to be limited whenever it comes to accountability and that’s the beef that finance has with the IT guys.
The high end of enterprise communications may be a death struggle among heavyweight incumbents and the established software players trying to muscle in, but at the SMB end, there's all kinds of new and different companies making their pitch, from integrations with Google Apps to this new company, Unison, which pitches its solution as a complete UC solution in a single server: PBX, email, IM, calendar, contacts, directory/presence, even antivirus/antispam (for the text communications, not voice). I got more details in a conversation with Rurik Bradbury, Chief Marketing Officer at Unison.
Siemens today confirmed its plans to lay off approximately 4,000 workers. Siemens described the move as "intended to accelerate the company’s transformation from a hardware supplier to a software and solutions provider to fit changed market conditions," and the details of the "reorientation" plan illustrate what exactly this entails.
The New York Times is reporting that Siemens Enterprise Communications plans to cut 4,000-7,000 jobs in Germany and Brazil, in hopes of bolstering the company's chance of being acquired. Siemens' enterprise business has been on the market for a year and a half, ever since the carrier division merged with Nokia.
First it was the address, then within 40,000 square feet, then 25,000 square feet and now 7,000 square feet for E911 location information. Slowly, some states are filling the hole left by the FCC, but not consistently. They are passing legislation against the wishes of enterprises, hotels, health care, banking and higher education institutions, your employers, because of the costs. Imagine the lawsuit that will be issued if these organizations choose not to implement E911.
Today, there is a huge difference among how devices plugged into your networks consume and manage energy. IT best practices do already dictate that inventory be kept on the IT assets of the organization. What’s likely missing is the power consumption and efficiency of each device. This is largely because IT administers all the wares, but the electric and cooling requirements are generally handled by Facilities. IT doesn’t normally pay the electric or other utility bills. So performance metrics are the gap and according to the Department of Energy (DOE), data centers account for 1.5% of total US power consumption, which is significant and still growing.
Here's another great post by Dustin Trammell over at VOIPSA about a practical concern in ensuring VOIP security: The need for VOIP hardware to have enough processing power so it can be upgraded as security demands require.
Over in the right-hand Feature column, we've posted an article from BCR by John Bartlett, on Telepresence. As regular readers have come to expect, John's our go-to guy on QOS and all other WAN-performance topics, and that makes up a major part of this in-depth article. The article also has a really useful table comparing features, prices and costs of the leading Telepresence systems. Check it out.
There are a few ideas that people keep bringing back to me one way or another, saying that QoS isn’t really needed, or only has a limited range of usefulness. These stem from a lack of understanding about the way QoS works. Lets take a look at these arguments and see where they fail.
Whenever I see the Apple iPhone commercials where people go wild about the “visual voicemail” feature, I can’t help but think to myself, visual voicemail has been available for years with unified messaging – what’s the big deal? Those of us who are familiar with unified messaging know that visual voicemail is indeed a great feature, but it’s certainly not new. So why the fuss? Is it because the iPhone is the first phone that provides this capability without having to subscribe to a UM service (generally about $10/month)? Or is it because UM has been so poorly marketed to consumers that most people didn’t realize that such a thing existed? Or is it because Apple is doing a great job of simplifying one aspect or capability of unified communications and making it accessible to anyone? Probably it’s all of these factors.
Fred Knight and I were sitting around the ole cracker barrel today, whittling and swapping yarns, and we got to talking about how the migration from TDM PBXs to IP-PBXs differs from the migration of basic IP-telephony to Unified Communications. Specifically, we were discussing whether the UC migration has the sense of urgency to it that IPT did, and what that might mean for everyone involved in the industry.
It doesn't look as though today's Microsoft announcement of a new interoperability approach will affect the company's Unified Communications products, specifically Office Communications Server 2007 or Office Communicator. A company spokesperson couldn't give me any more information than, "The announcement impacts the 'high volume' products which include Office, Exchange and SharePoint." By Microsoft product standards, OCS 2007 certainly isn't "high volume" (yet).
Via Dan York, we learn about an Internet Draft that tries to define what exactly a SIP Trunk is. We have to hope that if an agreed-upon definition of SIP Trunks emerges, that'll be one fewer excuse for carriers not to offer them ubiquitously.
3Com announced today that it has withdrawn the proposed private equity buyout of the company (by Bain Capital and Huawei) from the regulatory approval process. The company's statement appears to indicate that the stumbling block was the foreign-ownership component of the deal.
Starbucks’ decision to switch their Wi-Fi Hot Spot service from T-Mobile to AT&T was one of the first big surprises for this year. The bigger part of the story is the price. Wi-FiInternet access at Starbucks’ 7,000 locations will essentially be free. As the deal has been described, if you have a pre-paid Starbucks Card and use it at least once per month, you are entitled to 2 hours of free access per day. While this establishes a new price point for wireless Internet access, it also demonstrates the failure of yet another wireless business model.
Over at VOIPSA, Dustin Trammell offers a bleak assessment of VOIP Security in real-world products, basing his judgment on a recent Cisco advisory concerning a number of vulnerabilities.
About this: WSJ's blog reports on the down side of cloud computing.
Matt makes a really great point at the end of his post below: Communications folks, especially those who grew up in telephony, pride themselves on building networks and systems that are available 24/7. But one of the best ways to save energy is to turn things off.
Phantom loads are known as leaking power or the standby current consumed by any electrical device that is switched off. When electrical devices are switched off, it doesn’t necessarily mean that power consumption is zero, and herein is a problem for consumers or businesses in coming to terms with power, its utilization, efficiency and of course the bottom line.
I identified four parts of a QoS implementation in my blog on January 15th. Number four on my list is testing and monitoring. Lets take a look at why testing for real-time traffic is not only different, but so crucial to a successful QoS implementation.
I had a chance to talk this afternoon with Tony Shen, co-CEO of Aastra, about the company's acquisition of Ericsson's PBX business, and I also chatted with Allan Sulkin about the deal, and I came away from the two conversations believing that this acquisition was about Aastra picking up a good product line with a strong international play--at a bargain price.
Vendor consolidation is in full swing: Ericsson announced today that it's selling its PBX business to Aastra, which in 2004 acquired the former Intecom from EADS.
The key passage from Ericsson's announcement:
This article seems to hit the same themes as the latest Nicholas Carr brainchild: The idea that computing and computer applications are becoming utilities that live in the cloud and come to you as a service, just like clean water, power and other utility services. It's particularly noteworthy here in the light of Matt's post below about the joys and tribulations of trying to generate your own heat--an endeavor that Matt concedes still holds uncertain prospects of payoff.
Here's a VoiceCon eNews newsletter I did a couple of weeks back. Basically, I was arguing that the IP telephone desk set market would be a kind of transitional, comparatively short-lived market.
Not everyone understands the notion that fossil fuels are running out. In what seems to have been a political campaign for the last several years with each side citing their experts against the other's experts, I think the controversy is now diminishing and reality is sitting in.
In order to better understand the benefits of Unified Communications, I’ve started collecting customer examples and case studies of companies that have taken the first steps in implementing and utilizing UC. It’s early in my search for such examples, and I’d love to hear from you about how your company is using UC, how you’re identifying and measuring the benefits, and anything else you’re willing to share about your UC experience (including the good, the bad, and the ugly).
How do enterprises think about reducing energy costs? Is energy consumption part of the new equipment RFP process? How much has the greening movement entered into the IT and communications decisions of the enterprise? Certainly, the green movement has had a lot of attention due to many individuals like Al Gore. However, the green considerations became a prominent issue when Gartner put the IT energy considerations forward last fall as one of their “Hot Topics” for 2008.
Here's an interesting announcement on a product that integrates Unified Communications features into Google Apps.
Vocantas is a five-year old Ottawa-based company that describes their business as using “advanced computer telephony and speech technologies to create IVR solutions that enable organizations to automate routine telephone communications.” Intrigued by this positioning, I arranged an interview with Vocantas CEO Gary Hannah to understand what the company actually offers.
The rise of energy costs shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. Corporate users along with utility providers may not be prepared to handle what telecom and the enterprise users went through with divestiture:
Remember COG? (Centralized Ordering Group)
Cisco is putting together what sounds like a pretty cool telepresence-based keynote for VoiceCon, and they just announced that it's going to include CEO John Chambers. The details are still coming together, so for updates go here and scroll down to Wednesday, March 19.
Oh, and I'd better remind you that the Early Bird discount expires this Friday. Go here to register.
“From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic.... We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte…..”
These statements are part of the Discovery Institute report, “Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet, A “zettabyte” by 2015?” By Bret Swanson and George Gilder January 2008, . The report goes on to predict that the US Internet, not the world Internet, will be 50 or more times larger than it was two years ago, 2006.
Check out Brent Kelly's new feature in the right-hand column, comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 with IBM Lotus Sametime 8.0. Brent's giving a tutorial on this subject at VoiceCon Orlando 2008, and it's a hot area in which we're looking for some further big announcements in the VoiceCon time frame.
We've got a new podcast up, an interview with Gurdeep Singh Pall, who runs Microsoft's Unified Communications group. You can also get it in iTunes.
In my Breakthrough in Enterprise IM Interoperability? post I bemoaned the fact that at Lotusphere I caught wind of a way of using NEC or Siemens Enterprise Communications software as a means of connecting IBM Sametime and Microsoft Office Communications Server communities, but there was no demo to be found.
Pretty much every formerly-PBX vendor is now calling itself, at least some of the time, an "integration company." NEC Unified is doing that too, but the difference is that their President actually used to be a systems integrator.
One of the things that always gets me psyched for going to VoiceCon is the process of reviewing the presentations. You see intriguing things, condensed to Powerpoint-ese, so you get just enough of an idea of what they're going to say, so you tell yourself, "I gotta hear what this guy (or woman) says...."
Today's case in point is a presentation we got from Ray Carsey, who's VP of technology at Mountain America Credit Union, a financial institution in the Southwest.
Our friends at Vanguard Communications are in the process of putting together a very cool white paper on IP Contact Centers, which, unlike a lot of vendor and analyst white papers, they're making available free and without even having to cough up any info on yourself. It's over at their blog.
At the end of my last post I mentioned that there were some issues with bandwidth management that make it more complex than my simple explanation would lead you to believe. Rich wrote in and pointed out the issue of VPN’s encrypting the QoS tags, just one of the issues to be overcome.
A few weeks ago I wrote in I Still Feel Your Pain that service providers or enterprises implementing VoIP on converged networks will experience an erosion of benefits without the right management tools in the IPT enabled network.
One of my favorite, all time freebie tools is Ethereal, which I run on both my laptops for fieldwork, especially when deep trouble arises. First the confession: the first time an engineer told me that I had to sniff packets I wasn’t amused--that was in 1999. Afterwards, I love doing this and if you can’t guess why, then just think of what I’ve said before- “SERVICE COSTS MONEY” and besides, it’s great fun finding those disruptive culprits and getting paid to do so.
Anyone can call themselves a consultant. Finding the right consultant for telecommunications can be difficult. Definitely not all consultants are equal. Even issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for consulting services may not find the best consultant for the task. I have been offered compensation by both vendors and VARs if I were to steer the customer to their products or services. This is not ethical in my opinion and would eventually catch up to the consultant and harm the consultant’s reputation. You want expertise, but you also want individual attention, not a cut and paste effort that tries to fit you into a template.
ShoreTel and Enterasys plan to announce next Monday that they're partnering to deliver the voice and data components, respectively, of enterprise VOIP solutions. This deal may not involve the biggest market share players in their respective markets, but it's got some technically interesting components to it nevertheless.
Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, has traditionally been known as a contact center vendor, with its roots in CTI. Over the past few years, the company has slowly been transforming itself into an Enterprise Software provider. At its annual analyst conference in San Francisco last week, Genesys executives and representatives noted that the company is morphing from a pure play contact center player to a company that helps its customers provide great customer service across the enterprise. While Genesys continues to stay focused on customer service, more and more of its customers are focused on going beyond customer service to improving business processes as well. To that end, Genesys’ mission is to be a “Leading provider of enterprise software and best practices that enable best in class customer service, including sales, through interaction management customer service across the enterprise.” The company claims that now it is a contact ex-centric company, providing value to companies outside of the contact center as well.
When I read Nancy Jamison's writeup on the new NEC Univerge announcement, I wanted to know more about this concept of roles; it definitely sounded like a useful concept for Unified Communications.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to meet today with Jeffrey Kane, who's president of NEC Unified Solutions. It was an enlightening experience for a lot of reasons, most I think attributable to Jeff's own background, which is coming out of the Systems Integration/ERP world rather than telecom. I'll post soon on the big-picture issues that we discussed.
Probably the most exciting development in wireless LANs is the arrival of the new high capacity 802.11n radio link. While it holds the promise of a five-fold increase in raw transmission capacity, migrating to the new “standard” will impact a number of important areas in the network design. I put standard in quotes because we still don’t have a real 802.11n standard; the IEEE 802.11n committee probably won’t ratify the current draft until sometime next year. In the meantime, the Wi-Fi Alliance has developed a certification plan for products built to the Draft 2.0 standard.
When companies use the word unique, I jump. I always want to say: prove it. This week, when NEC’s Unified Solutions group announced that they had a unique communication model for helping companies unify business communications, based on a user’s role, that is what I asked them to do. I also asked them how they determined that it was a unique approach. Their answer made sense to me, yet I’m not going to get up on the roof here and yell that NEC has a unique approach just yet, as I have heard other vendors talk a lot about the end user and the types of end users that are or will be using unified communications applications. Additionally, in the last year or so, there has also been a significant shift in the industry to go one step further than UC by integrating business processes across the enterprise with UC applications to unify business processes, with the newly adopted moniker of communications enabled business processes (CEBP). I will proclaim, however, that NEC has a determined focus on the approach they are taking versus several other UC encampments. Let me explain.
One of the first things that you learn in any basic economics class is that when it comes to the economy, prophecies tend to be self-fulfilling. As folks begin to talk about the potential likelihood of a recession, they begin to act in such a way as to make one inevitable. Individuals, and corporations begin to limit purchases, reduce borrowing and investment, and look more carefully at future spending plans, to shield themselves from the potential effects of a slowing economy. This of course leads to a fulfillment of the prophecy as the counter-measures to protect oneself or one’s organization against a recession actually serve to make a recession more likely, and perhaps more severe.
Here's another interesting bit of research over at the bmighty site, this from an Information Week study on VOIP. Particularly noteworthy is the "Goals of Installation" chart.
According to the Census Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission, about 47.5 percent of the US population has registered with the federal Do-Not-Call list and this represents more than 150 million telephone numbers.
What does this mean to business?
Over at our sister site, bmighty, they've got an interesting white paper from Forrester Research, on how Unified Communications can help businesses. The research was sponsored by Cisco, so you need to keep that in mind when reading about the proposed solutions, but the Forrester data makes it clear that several key verticals have communications problems that UC (or something like it) should be addressing.
Definitely read Brian's post below. The headline is federation, but another major insight has to do with middleware.
The lack of federation between enterprise instant messaging systems has been the figurative thorn in my flesh for quite some time now. The fact that presence information can be shared among public IM services like MSN, Yahoo! Messenger, and AIM but not across Microsoft Live/Office Communications Server, IBM Sametime, Cisco Unified Presence Server, etc. has made absolutely no sense to me.
Last week I wrote about bandwidth demand. When designing a network to support voice and video, calculating bandwidth demand is the job of determining how much bandwidth will be required to support the proposed service and the expected calling volume.
Once again via the invaluable VOIPSA, comes word that some IETF members are exploring a more formal effort to pre-emptively deal with the nascent problem of SPIT (spam over IP telephony), with a proposed BoF session at the next IETF meeting. Enterprises and their vendors should support any effort to have defenses in place for this next generation of spam.
Our friends at Aberdeen Group are surveying end users about their plans for fixed-mobile convergence. You can take the survey here.
Last week Genesys held its sixth annual industry analyst conference in their home town of San Francisco. For those analysts (about 25 in number globally) that concentrate primarily on the contact center space, it’s a great way to kick-start the year. For Genesys, the meeting gave them an opportunity to review their 2007 performance (outpacing the market in growth), introduce new members of the executive team (including a new CEO, CFO and VP of Product Marketing), and showcase four users from a variety of verticals (utilities, telecom, and broadcasting).
Gary Audin as usual, does a great job at teaching and presenting the concepts that large enterprise must grasp when struggling with their IPT implementations. In his webcast with Psytechnics there are some interesting points to consider.
Well, it is finally happening. Time Warner Cable (TWC) is experimenting with an Internet charge structure that prices Internet usage by the gigabyte. The Washington Post reported in “Pay Per Gig” by Steven Levy,
on January 30, about the TWC Road Runner service. Beaumont, Texas will be the first trial for this metered pricing structure. Comcast says it is also considering the metered concept. Other broadband vendors are, so far, quiet on the metered usage subject.
At first glance, there would appear to be little gained by the UC community with a Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo. However, if you think about the importance of mobility in a UC world you can start to see some possibilities.
The trend to simplify Unified Communications (UC) pricing is continuing, which is a great thing for everyone involved. This trend was predictable, as suggested in the September 2007 BCR Magazine article, “De-Mystifying VOIP and UC Pricing Trends,” which described the progression towards bundling of UC components such as conferencing, mobility, presence/IM, and mobility elements with VoIP software packages.
There was a rumor going around that Adomo, one of the newest players to the UM market, has just shut its doors. The folks at Adomo called me put to rest these rumors and to say that they are indeed still in business but are restructuring the business from the sales and marketing end, and looking at alternative go-to-market strategies (which could likely mean partnering with a larger company to help take them to market, which I assume in all likelihood means that they are looking to be acquired). The company insists that its doors are open and the company is very healthy financially with a strong cash position. The Adomo folks said that there are ongoing deployments, and they are continuing development.
So Microsoft has made an offer on Yahoo. I'm not sure this affects the UC side of Microsoft's business a lot, but I'm scheduled to speak with Gurdeep Singh Pall of Microsoft later today for a podcast, so I'll ask him.
Several of us were wandering the halls at Lotusphere last week. Here are a couple of quick observations.
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
IT should encourage user's implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, and look for ways to integrate with Mobile UC. READ MORE »
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
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