There's been quite a bit of back-and-forth here (and here and here and here) about customer attitudes regarding Unified Communications. The root for all of this discussion was a Forrester Research study. Henry Dewing, Principal Analyst at Forrester, wanted to weigh in on the way our bloggers have looked at his company's study, and to offer his perspective. Here's what he had to say:
I always wanted to create a headline without words. This is my chance. You have heard of Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS), but Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) may be new to you. MPLS has been available for a few years. VPLS was announced by Verizon in March 2007. AT&T and Qwest are also beginning to offer VPLS, which is a new service for both the service provider and enterprise, so the experience level is low. It is now possible to consider either or both of these services for VoIP calls among sites.
There has been a lot of talk of late regarding developments in mobile operating systems. The most recent event was Nokia’s announcement that they will acquire the remaining stake in the Symbian mobile operating system and create the open source Symbian Foundation. That will put Symbian, the most widely deployed mobile O/S, in the open camp along with Google's developing Android and Linux Mobile (LiMo). The former is supported by the Open Handset Alliance and the latter by the LiMo Foundation.
So, as Eric Krapf noted yesterday with, “What’s Really Hot in UC”, we have a debate going on whether customers are confused or not about Unified Communications.
The evolving Unified Communications industry is reshaping the communications marketplace. The changes create challenges for some vendors and opportunities for others. The legacy vendors are scrambling to revise their business models, and all of the major vendors, both legacy and emerging, are looking at how to flesh out their UC product portfolios.
VOIPShield has released a new raft of vulnerabilities that it found in IP telephony systems from Cisco, Avaya and Nortel (announcement here; vulnerability details here). Unlike its previous such announcement, VOIPShield has this time coordinated the release with the affected vendors, avoiding the criticism it faced the last time, when VOIPShield went public with the vulnerabilities before the affected vendors could address all of them.
We've got a new feature in the right-hand column by Bob Emmerson, our Europe-based correspondent, on Mobile UC. Bob's Euro-centric perspective is useful when it comes to this issue, because, as he notes, European 3G celllular networks are more broadly deployed than their U.S. counterparts, and so we therefore have a little better idea of how they can support Unified Communications.
One area where IP telephony has the potential to make a clear impact is in the hospitality industry; most vendors have a solution or set of solutions for this market. One example is Avaya’s new SIP iPhones from Teledex, which let hotel guests experience visuals, which hoteliers should appreciate. Adding the visual to the phone isn’t just cool, but it provides interlinks to the hotel’s services, moving hotels beyond selling rooms at rack rates, beyond just staying competitive, and to potentially greater profitability by adding all the trimmings offered by the hotel and surrounding area of interest to their guests.
Marty Parker and Fred Knight have had an interesting back-and-forth on the issue of whether users are confused about the value of Unified Communications, whether they're deploying UC, and generally how big a deal UC is *today*. Marty is bullish; Fred more skeptical.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
UI prototyping is critical for contact centers implementing new agent desktop technology. This posting will review why prototyping is important, why it is often overlooked in the contact center, and what steps can be taken to facilitate effective prototyping.
Enterprise voice and unified communications planning has to consider an important reality: there are a lot more people outside the enterprise than inside, and those people include important customers and suppliers. Reaching those users demands reliance on public communications facilities, and that means that trends in carrier voice and other collaborative services will impact enterprise VoIP and UC planning.
While thousands of people were in Vienna last week for the Euro 2008 games (soccer, football, whatever you call it), some of us were there for Siemens Enterprise Communications’ Global Analyst Conference. The location was amazing, the pastries to die for, and I now have a new appreciation of Austrian wine. But the focus of the trip was to hear Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) discuss its progress to date, how it’s moving forward, and how it will succeed. And despite the many (too many) questions about the company’s future vis a vis a merger and/or acquisition plans, there is no new news to report – as Brian Riggs reported, all SEN would say is that they are “In advanced stages of talks with potential partners” (emphasizing the plural “partners”).
My last blog discussed using an overlay versus using a converged network for telepresence. For either approach, the next step is to analyze the bandwidth demand of the telepresence and determine which links of the network are required to support that demand. Telepresence is a bandwidth-hungry application, so getting this right is critical to supporting high-quality video interactions.
This past Thursday, June 19, Fred Knight asked the question, “Where’s the Beef?” in response to an article in Network World reporting on uncertainty about Unified Communications (UC) in “a recent survey of 2008 networking plans from Forrester Research.” Forrester represented that there is “confusion about the value” of UC, even as they report that 27% of the firms have or are deploying it and another 57% are piloting or evaluating it. Pretty unusual to have 84% of the respondents involved with UC if there is such “confusion about the value.”
Now that Apple has introduced a more functional and enterprise-friendly iPhone 3G, we now face the question of whether this is the mobile device that finally gets Apple into the enterprise market. The new iPhone does address some of the shortcomings of the original, but is this a true enterprise device or a consumer gadget with some enterprise trappings? Having looked over the specs, I go with the latter assessment: it’s a consumer Web surfing gadget.
First the disclaimers. Hosted Asterisk, IMHO is something to consider only if you are SOHO or very small businesses that don’t have capital for either a TDM key-system, small Hybrid or low end IP-PBX and even then, you’d better know exactly what you are getting into. First impressions and attitude are everything. Never, regardless of how small or big you are, ever, put your dial tone on the line and get into that “we are committed” way of thinking if too many indicators or red flags sound off. You will likely have a bad experience that will stick in the users’ minds for a long time afterwards even if you are successful, and usually you’re just more accepting because you bought off on the concept.
After months and months of research, I’ve finally completed and released my new UC market study, creatively called “Unified Communications 2007-2012” – chock full of market numbers and forecasts, vendor profiles, information on what UC is all about, how it’s being rolled out and adopted, what some of the challenges are, etc. At 150 pages, it covers a lot of territory.
In the early 1980's the fast-food chain Wendy's created a classic ad that took on its nemesis, McDonald's. Three elderly ladies waddle up to a food counter and, after admiring the size and fluffiness of the bun, are dismayed to find that there is precious little too be found--or eaten--within the bun. The "Where's the Beef?" line was born and it has been part of pop culture ever since. You can see the original ad here.
The cost for VoIP/IP Telephony service calls is 150% more than every other category of IT technology--higher than cabling, software, servers, PCs, you name it. This translates into $449 for the average service professional work order as compared to the next highest work order cost of $282 for wiring and cabling followed by software at $255. This is according the report just published by OnForce covering the first quarter of 2008. The report, “State of the IT Industry Report”, covers a wide range of analysis, by locations and IT categories.
I’ve been seeing and hearing about one significant change in the delivery of telephony systems to customers. Distribution is providing the installing company (Interconnect / VAR/Dealer) with staging services to save time and money, and to avoid costly mistakes on deploying IPT systems. Distribution, for a small fee (I’m not exaggerating) will pre-configure the IPT system with the necessary licensing, firmware updates and other initial configuration requirements that are necessary to get the system initially up and running for each customer.
Regular readers of No Jitter know that some of our best content comes from our friends at Wainhouse Research; their feature on Videoconferencing tops the column at right.
Wainhouse is doing a Web-based survey, and could use your help. So if you use or plan to use Unified Communications, take Wainhouse Research's annual UC survey. You'll be entered to win prizes, and you'll receive survey highlights. Wainhouse is giving away $50 Amazon.com gift certificates to 10 randomly chosen survey takers. So please take a few minutes and help out by going to www.wainhouse.com/nojitter
It’s common knowledge that Siemens AG, the Munich based conglomerate that spun off its carrier systems division into a joint venture with Nokia, has been seeking suitors for its enterprise division as well. Nortel and private equity firm Cerberus Capital are the companies whose names most often come up these days and June has been the month when the wedding bells were widely expected to ring. Plans have apparently changed at bit.
This week Siemens Enterprise Networks held their annual Global Analyst Meeting in Vienna, Austria. Sixty-plus analysts are spending two days hearing product, marketing, and services updates liberally dosed with presentations from Siemens customers and channel partners. While many of these outside speakers understandably hail from Siemens stronghold in Europe, one US customer made the long trip from the Chicago area to Vienna.
The issue of security for IP telephony is, if not well understood, at least satisfactorily grasped by professionals in the IT/telecom and security organizations today. There's the gamut of potential problems, which will be serious challenge if and when they actually materialize—like spam over IP telephony (SPIT), eavesdropping, voice phishing and the like. And then there are the problems we see in the wild today, which mostly involve exploits against IP "data" networks that affect the voice traffic running on those networks; basically, when a denial of service or other attack brings down the IP network, it now takes voice traffic with it, or at least it can. Experts like Mark Collier of SecureLogix and the VOIP Security Alliance say such exploits are the real danger for now.
Random blog day continues: Here's a post from Microsoft blogger Moz, about the recent survey that found many workers would take a pay cut in return for being allowed to telecommute. Moz makes the not-unreasonable point that telecommuters should get paid more, not less, since they save the company money. Which raises the larger question: Just who is telecommuting supposed to benefit?
Here's your big-think for the day: A guest post at John Roese's Nortel blog by Andrew Lippman, who was a founder of the MIT Media Lab. Some really interesting musings on the concepts of identity and context, how they interact, and how these concepts, which are continually changing throughout the course of each person's day, might be embodied in our communications.
Chalk up another entry into the "desktop high-def/telepresence" market, as Tandberg announces its E20 "video VOIP" phone, featuring CD quality audio, DVD quality video, and CxO-quality price tag: $1,499 for this baby. Of course, when Cisco is listing its "personal" Telepresence system for almost $34K, Tandberg looks like a bargain.
The boss as asked you to deploy telepresence and your job is the network. The first decision to make is: Do we implement an overlay network or converge the telepresence traffic on the data network? An overlay network means a new set of LAN and WAN connections dedicated to the support of the telepresence traffic. A converged solution means carrying the telepresence on your current network and just increasing the bandwidth where necessary. Which is the right approach? It depends on your enterprise. There are three key topics driving this decision; let’s take a look at them and evaluate the tradeoffs.
In several posts I’ve made mention of the Power-Save capacitor that we have been installing on sites including our own office. We’ve logged our site data including a unit installed at one of our technicians’ home for three months.
What’s really interesting is my site is consistently down 18%, and my tech’s home is down 17% on power consumption.
The UC market continues to grow rapidly. Microsoft and IBM are reporting tens of millions of licenses shipped for Microsoft's OCS and IBM's Sametime, while Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, Shoretel and Siemens are all shipping impressive UC solutions.
In the early years of IP telephony, E-911 was a major worry for enterprises, because of the portability issue: IP endpoints didn't necessarily register their physical location, so 911 calls from those endpoints could go to a public safety answering point (PSAP) other than the one serving that physical location. These problems aren't necessarily solved within the enterprise, but location solutions have emerged, and the industry is turning its attention to the new capabilities that IP can bring to 911. Among other things, the U.S. Department of Transportation has launched a Next-Generation 911 project.
Newcomers to the enterprise real-time communications market--Cisco in the late 1990s, Microsoft in the past couple of years--have had to make the case that the change they were bringing to the market was urgent. Perhaps paradoxically, this was because the real-time communications market moves so slowly. As our old friend Hank Levine wrote last week: "The historic tendency in the voice world--unlike, say, PCs--is to ride the gear until it drops, which is more like a decade than the five years it takes to depreciate it fully."
Via Forbes.com, Charlie Giancarlo told Reuters today that he won't consider the Avaya president/CEO job on anything but an interim basis.
The Lou D’Ambrosio news from Avaya certainly drew a lot of attention. With that attention, new insights emerge, as is often the case.
One of the commenters on yesterday's D'Ambrosio story makes a good point: "Companies like Avaya/Nortel/Cisco are comfortable being considered 'legacy voice' against Microsoft and IBM.....as long as you label THOSE companies as LEGACY software providers. Let's run real time applications in Vista with proprietary protocols.... that will work..."
A big concern among iPhone users is the AT&T exclusivity agreement –remaining in force for at least another five years. Apple users not happy with AT&T--and I’m one of them –not really loyal to AT&T, but feeling more stuck, still want freedom of choice when it comes to carriers. I want the benefits of my iPhone but I sacrificed staying with a carrier that I liked, being Verizon, because my Apple desktop is glued to my iPhone.
Judging by the Comments to my original story on Lou D'Ambrosio's resignation from Avaya, and from some email I've gotten, there seems to be a feeling that I was casting doubt on the stated explanation for the resignation. I certainly wasn't doing that.
A commenter on my Unified Communications blog at Information Week (where I moonlight) made an interesting argument, drawing a parallel between Avaya now and Seagate Technologies in 2000, when it too was acquired by Silver Lake Partners. The basic argument is that if things go for Avaya the way they went for Seagate, Avaya's got a bright future ahead of it.
I agree with Eric Krapf’s earlier post and with the Avaya press release, that in roughly two years as CEO, Lou D’Ambrosio has, “shaped a compelling strategy, built a strong team, and led the company through important technology transitions…”
My first thought is to pause for a moment and support Lou in a rapid return of his health.
Then, what about Avaya?
As Eric pointed out, leadership changes are afoot at Avaya. Lou D’Ambrosio has stepped down for medical reasons, Charlie Giancarlo has stepped in as interim CEO, and the company has stepped up its search for a permanent leader.
Here's the letter that Lou D'Ambrosio sent out to Avaya employees today as he stepped down as the company's CEO and president:
Avaya today announced that Lou D'Ambrosio (left) is stepping down as CEO for unspecified "medical reasons," and that Charlie Giancarlo (right), who left Cisco late last year, will step in as interim CEO and President while a search is conducted for D'Ambrosio's successor. Giancarlo left Cisco last December to move to Silver Lake Partners, the private equity firm that acquired Avaya in mid-2007.
Nemertes Research recently wrapped up interviews with over 130 IT executives representing approximately 117 enterprise organizations in which we asked participants about their views on unified communications as well as their plans and drivers for adoption.
My previous blog, “Is Your Network Counterfeit – Part 1?” discussed the discovery by the FBI of considerable counterfeit network equipment. The security of the counterfeit equipment does not seem to be an issue, YET. I worked in military intelligence R&D. The best intrusion is one that is very difficult to detect.
Telepresence crashed the Unified Conferencing party about 2 years ago with fabulous promises of high-quality at-a-distance conferences that make you believe you are in the same room. The quality of the HD video images, the stereo wideband sound, the carefully designed rooms, colors, lighting and furniture all combine to provide a very compelling and useful service. But this application either requires a dedicated network, or requires a very careful QoS and bandwidth design to be supported on the enterprise network. Many enterprises who jumped in early are struggling to get this right.
This week I was in Dallas, where Nortel assembled a small group of analysts in conjunction with Nortel Global Connect, an event sponsored by Nortel’s enterprise user group. Nortel spent a day and a half with us discussing its enterprise strategy and products, and how the company is progressing and transforming.
A decade or so from now, we'll look back at these early days of Unified Communications and smile at the "quaint" ways businesses used these emerging capabilities. Today, most of the buzz and most of the usage of UC is around "user productivity" applications.
Here's an interesting video that our sister site Internet Evolution put together, featuring interviews with Marty Parker of UCStrategies and Bruce Morse of IBM:
Global Connect 2008, the annual Nortel Enterprise customer conference, was held this week in Grapevine, TX. Nortel reports that attendance was up 41% over 2007 – making for a very happy team of Nortel executives.
Hre are some comments on Eric's IPT deployment piece ‘What’s Your Biggest Concern?’ My law firm, Levine, Blaszak & Boothby, and our consulting affiliate, TechCaliber Consulting, are doing a bunch of these deals now for Fortune 100’s, so I have both interest and experience.
As IP telephony continues to roll out and begins to scale in many enterprises, what are the real challenges? According to the Yankee Group, some are what you'd expect, some maybe not.
Today Syntellect Limited, a division of Enghouse Systems Limited (TSX: ESL) acquired Fluency Voice Technology Ltd. of London, England. Syntellect is well established player in the VoIP contact center space, which is rapidly converging with UC within the enterprise. The Fluency acquisition broadens their contact center offerings and complements their ability to deliver speech-enabled contact center and other communication solutions. Fluency Voice is a 7 year old company that delivers both hosted and on-premise packaged speech applications for contact centers. They also do custom speech applications as well.
Last year, I noted in Costco Wants In Too that vendors are doing anything to gain market share in the IPT space. I can’t fault Costco for that, but what I can’t help is even though the gear is good- in these spaces, it almost always is installed poorly. Sure they get a deal, but is it really a deal after it’s been installed- maybe one year later?
The N.Y. Times headline on May 9, 2008 read, “F.B.I. Says the Military Had Bogus Computer Gear”. This headline did not make me feel comfortable. The idea that the equipment, mainly Cisco knockoffs, have been employed in government networks should alarm not only the network operations staff, but the security people as well.
The metrics used in call centers are often analyzed and then acted or reacted upon. The data in the form of abandoned calls, dropped calls or lost calls pretty much means the caller hung up. Why the caller hung up isn’t always because they are impatient, though recent statistics from Dimension Data’s 10th edition Contact Center Benchmarking report reveal that Call abandon rates – due to long hold times – increased in the past year by almost 127%, going from 6% of calls to nearly 14% of calls.
Tucked into the press release on Cisco’s new Mobile Services Architecture is this line:
Mobile Intelligent Roaming facilitates seamless handoff of dual-mode mobile devices between Wi-Fi and cellular networks based on availability, real-time network information and user location.
Converged WAN links carry a combination of data, voice and video traffic intermingled. Because these applications use the bandwidth in very different ways, they can interfere with each other when bandwidth is limited, as is often the case in the WAN access link. In my last post we looked at how these traffic types are different. Now I want to talk about how they interfere with each other and how we can manage that interference, especially in the WAN.
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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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