You’ve seen all the news on the Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN) spinout into a Joint Venture with The Gores Group. As an independent consultant to enterprise customers, I’ve spent most of my time thinking about what this might mean to them--the customers. Three words come to mind: Change, Focus, and Innovation. These may seem contradictory, but maybe not so much.
Skype is a free Internet based telephone service that many enterprise employees access and use. Some enterprises use Skype for internal use. One French and U.S.-based company used Skype for their development team’s collaboration. So should an enterprise allow Skype on their internal network? Not necessarily according to Blue Coat Systems, a security and WAN optimization vendor.
It will take a while for all of the ramifications of Siemens Enterprise Networks’ (SEN’s) 49-51% partnership with the Gores Group to become clear, but the outcome in the wireless space is pretty straightforward. In any combination of this sort the dreaded s-word, “synergy”, will quickly enter the discussion and in the wireless space there is some obvious overlap between Siemens and joint venture partner Enterasys.
Last week Juniper announced that Microsoft executive Kevin Johnson has been named the new CEO of Juniper Networks, ending the 12 year Kriens era. Scott Kriens’ tenure saw Juniper’s meteoric rise, where it did the unthinkable and took router market share from 800 pound gorilla Cisco. Juniper succeeded on the strength of its technology, but under Kriens, was never able to break away from competing purely on technical strength.
Suppose we depend on web sites like Google, Yahoo and others for supporting the enterprise business instead of or in addition to the private enterprise sites? How far would you go in this direction? There are issues of privacy, security and compliance. What about availability, disaster prevention and recovery?
Business Week has the Alec Gores interview for its article on Gores Group's Siemens acquisition and joint venture. The article highlights the financial straits that SEN was in before the acquisition: Almost $1 billion in losses last year, declining market share, stiff competition from incumbent and new vendors. Even more revealing is Gores' hints about how he'll go about fixing SEN.
Despite the respectable amount of coverage of The Gores Group acquiring majority ownership of Siemens Enterprise Communications, one aspect of the newly formed joint venture that no one seems to be examining in much detail is SER Solutions. SER is the contact center solution developer that has been in the Gores portfolio of companies since early 2006. In setting up the joint venture, Gores plans to combine SER with Siemens Enterprise and Enterasys to build a powerhouse of communications, networking and contact center solutions.
During this morning's Siemens press conference, Gores Group representatives stressed their track record in turning around technology companies, citing as a prime example one of the companies that will be part of the new Siemens Enterprise (SEN) joint venture: Enterasys. I just had a chance to talk with Enterasys CEO Michael Fabiaschi, and I started by asking him how Gores group turned Enterasys around and made it profitable.
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No Jitter has been following this breaking story since early this morning, specifically Eric Krapf and Allan Sulkin. I’ll now add my perspective fueled by an interview today with Siemens Enterprise Communications Chief Operating Officer Thomas Zimmermann.
One of the goals articulated by Siemens since the beginning of its quest to find a partner for its enterprise business two years ago was to strengthen Siemens’ market position in North America. How will the joint venture with The Gores Group achieve that?
Allan Sulkin was kind enough to send me his thoughts on the Siemens Enterprise (SEN) deal this morning. Allan knows SEN as well as any analyst out there; here's what he says:
9 AM Eastern: Press conference is under way; they're doing it from Munich, in English.
Joe Kaeser, CFO of Siemens AG, opens it up. "We were not interested in a quick sale."
Gores Group has majority stake in new joint venture. Gores assumes managerial responsibilities; Siemens has 2 board seats and super-majority rights.
JV will have right to use Siemens logo.
Investment will be to acquire technology providers and facilitate the transition from hardware to software.
As if the Siemens news wasn't enough, Alcatel-Lucent announced today that its CEO, Pat Russo, and Chairman, Serge Tchuruk, are resigning. Russo will stay on until a new CEO is named, and Tchuruk's resignation is effective October 1.
Updates throughout the day on this as well.
Confirming last week's rumors, Siemens announced today that its Enterprise Communications division will be acquired by Los Angeles-based private equity firm The Gores Group. One of the most intriguing parts of the deal is that Gores Group, which we noted last week also owns Enterasys, is going to combine Siemens Enterprise, Enterasys and another one of its portfolio companies, SER Solutions, which makes contact center systems, into a joint venture.
This entry was written by Mark J. Fletcher, Product Manager, E911 Emergency Services for Nortel, and was edited by Gary Audin.
What if 9-1-1 does not work? What if the location is incorrect? Suppose you implement 9-1-1 and E911 in one office because the law says so but not in another office because there are no E911 regulations? Does an enterprise create more liabilities with uneven 9-1-1 and E911 deployment?
Panasonic issued a memo to its dealer base stating:
Effective September 1, 2008, we are changing the way we provide telephone technical support for the following products:
That Human Latency post of mine has earned me another rebuke, this from Art Rosenberg. Art writes:
Last Wednesday, Eric Krapf wrote that, "Human latency, for those not buzzword-current, is the time it takes for workers to move from one communications channel--say, email--to another one--say, the telephone--to respond to whatever issue they're dealing with." He was writing about latency to reinforce the view of Zeus Kerravala, who is puzzled about the slow adoption of UC and is, "...not fully convinced that desktop based unified communications dramatically alters the way I work." Zeus goes on to say that switching between modes of communications is more important in mobility situations than at the desktop
A majority of the enterprises I have worked with on telepresence solutions have offices distributed around the globe. To connect these far flung offices, the enterprises need a carrier who can provide the high bandwidth and high quality transport that telepresence demands to all these global locations. The best solution is a single carrier who can provide an MPLS link to every office. This isn’t always possible.
If you want to read an absolutely brilliant discussion of a key technical/security/policy issue around SIP in general and SIP trunking in particular, check out this VOIPSA blog post by Dan York.
Response Point, Microsoft’s other approach to VoIP, has its first Service Pack (SP1) available. SP1 was announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2008 in Houston TX. I first discussed Response Point in my blog, “Microsoft’s Response Point, Good for the Enterprise?” Response Point is Microsoft’s software based small IP PBX.
There’ve been some interesting discussions recently about the role of presence in unified communications, and of course I want to put in my two cents. I strongly agree with what Zeus and Irwin wrote about presence (yes, sometimes analysts agree with each other) - presence is key, it is core, it is the dial tone of the 21st century, yada yada.
On Nortel's VOIP Security blog, Stephen Varty of the company's R&D labs has a post explaining why eavesdropping on VOIP calls may not be as easy as you think.
Mitel's 2007 acquisition of Inter-Tel seems to have bolstered both its product portfolio and its channel at the SMB end of the market. I had a chance to chat with Doug Michaelides, VP of global marketing at Mitel, and Asif Rehman, the company's director of solutions marketing, and they pointed to Mitel's recent announcement of a new SMB package, as well as to specific progress in expanding Mitel's channel.
We've recently posted 2 new in-depth features in the right-hand column: One on SIP Trunking by Marc Robins, managing director of the SIP Forum; and one on the evolution and future of the PBX by Allan Sulkin of TEQConsult. Check 'em out.
E-Discovery has been growing concern for the IT organization. E-discovery is now a concern for the communications manager as well. In my previous blog, “VoIP, E-Discovery and the Law”, I discussed what e-discovery is for voice communications, and the ramifications that ensue when the enterprise does not adequately prepare for the possibility of providing electronically stored records, including voicemail and voice recordings, to satisfy a court.
Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research dropped me a note about my recent newsletter/post about human latency. With his characteristic insight, Brent made some points about what's really at issue here, and he graciously agreed to let me share them with you here:
Various media outlets are quoting German newspaper reports that the new front-runner to acquire Siemens Enterprise Communications is The Gores Group, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm that also is a part owner of Enterasys, the LAN/WAN switching company. Gores Group, together with Tennenbaum Capital Partners, another private equity firm, acquired Enterasys in 2006.
Zeus makes some valid points about the whole "human latency" issue around Unified Communications. Human latency, for those not buzzword-current, is the time it takes for workers to move from one communications channel--say, email--to another one--say, the telephone--to respond to whatever issue they're dealing with. UC gets touted as the way to automate these multi-channel transitions, saving time and therefore money. For example, you get an email, and can see, within the email, the correspondent's current presence status, availability on various communications channels, and you can invoke the appropriate channel to respond without leaving the email program.
There's an interesting nugget buried in this article about a recent Gartner report on the IP contact center market. According to the Gartner report, in 2007, for the first time, IP agent stations out-shipped TDM stations for the contact center.
Our friends at Wainhouse Research have released a new report projecting major growth in the videoconferencing market over the next five years. If you want to understand why that's happening, I'd refer you to this No Jitter feature by Brent Kelly of Wainhouse.
When it comes to e-discovery in the enterprise, are you implementing risk management or risky management? Since December 2006, the e-discovery laws mean enterprises can no longer claim that having to find old documents and e-mail is an unreasonable burden.
LAN/WAN switch/router vendor Foundry has agreed to be acquired for $3 billion by Brocade, the storage powerhouse. CRN and Light Reading have the overall analysis. In terms of the enterprise communications market, this doesn't have a huge impact, but it's worth a note. Foundry has been an exhibitor at VoiceCon, and has teamed up on multi-vendor partnerships aimed at putting together the pieces of an enterprise communications infrastructure, as recently as this past spring, when they joined with Mitel and Sun in just such an announcement at Interop.
Unified communications (UC) has been around as a market category now for a number of years. I wrote my first report on this topic in 2003 and I know I wasn’t the first author to do so. So, UC has been a market in the making for over five years now, and despite the industry hype and age of the market, adoption of UC has remained sluggish. However, I do think the oncoming number of “mobile UC” solutions will act as a catalyst for adoption of UC as, in my opinion, mobile UC provides much more value than traditional desktop based UC and here’s why.
Technology, according to Gerald Celente, Founder of The Trends Research Institute:
It’s a quickly spreading worldwide epidemic that will get much worse. All colors, classes, creeds and races are addicted and they can’t break the habit. Before 2008 ends, the TechnoSlave trend will be so pervasive and so deeply embedded into the fabric of society that Old World communication styles will be seen as quaint and ridiculed as stupidly boring by the high-tech "hip."
Here's another interesting article about UC ecosystems, from a website that covers the Microsoft ISV (independent software vendor) community. The article itself probably won't tell you a lot you don't already know about the basics of UC, but I thought it was worth a read to pick up on the perspective that you get of how the folks who supposedly will be building a lot of the new UC apps view the whole marketplace. I also thought these paragraphs near the end of the article were telling:
Our discussions here about the state of UC deployment and the market's growth have included a lot of skepticism, but here's one positive data point: According to our sister site, Computer Reseller News, IT solution providers showed almost 10% Y/Y growth in their UC-related revenues from 2006 to 2007, ranking UC behind only virtualization and mid-range servers (!) among top technologies in this sector.
In the slides for next Tuesday's webinar on Performance Management for IP Telephony (register here), Dr. Mike Hollier of Psytechnics has a great section where he discusses the importance of making sure your ability to measure performance keeps pace with the technology you're deploying. Since network management and monitoring deployments always seem to lag the core technology they manage, it's good to know where you're going--that is, what you'll be needing to measure and control in the next deployment phase.
Here's some more data to toss into the fray in the ongoing discussion about UC adoption, though with a slightly different approach. In reporting on 2007 worldwide IP-PBX line shipments, Nora Freedman of IDC notes that Unified Communications, particularly the new packages from Microsoft and IBM, didn't slow down growth for IP-PBX stations. The IDC release on the study took a pretty provocative tone, too:
During the past several weeks after announcing to MAC users that Apple would be redoing the former DOTMAC and adjusting hosted accounts for users to the new MobileMe, I received a notice earlier this week that the transition is complete.
As we've begun discussing the program for November's VoiceCon San Francisco conference, Fred Knight and I have been looking for ways we can program sessions around the issue of communications' role in saving energy. Since energy costs appear to be on a permanent upward trend, it seems clear that enterprises will have to take a fresh look at this problem from all its various aspects, and it's inevitable that communications technology will be the preferred solution in at least some of the situations.
The fledgling WiMAX market took another shot in the chops Monday when Intel introduced the new Centrino 2 chip. While it will include 802.11n capability, notably absent was the long-promised WiMAX support. What makes this all the more notable is that Intel has been the big promoter for WiMAX. If they’re slacking off on WiMAX, who’s left? At some point you’ve got to wonder when someone’s going to notice that the king is running around in less than his Jockey shorts.
Convergys announced today that it will acquire Intervoice. Those of us in the enterprise voice communications space are well familiar with Intervoice, perhaps less so with Convergys. Who are they, why are they buying Intervoice and what does this acquisition say about the IVR/voice portal space?
Sheila's on the case, and promises a post on the latest bit of contact center/IVR/UC consolidation.
So you’re deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 for corporate instant messaging. You’re deploying the Office Communicator client on desktops and laptops, but want end users to have access to it from their mobile phones as well. No problem: That’s what Mobile Office Communicator is for. It lets buddy lists appear, not just on PCs, but on smart phones as well. As long as your smart phone is of the Windows Mobile variety.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch says voice mail is dead and he wants it to go away, right now. The post and comments are laced with typical tech-media overstatement, straw men and sweeping generalizations, and he falls victim to the belief, common in the tech world, that everybody's just like him, right down to the person answering the phone in a law office or mom-and-pop retail store.
The constant high-bandwidth barrage of packets created by a telepresence system can be too much for some routers and switches to handle. This can be a final-hour unwanted surprise for a telepresence deployment, so it merits some early investigation. Let’s look at why this happens and how to avoid having the headache this problem provides when it appears at the trials stage.
AOTMP (Association of Telecommunications Management Professionals) is based in Indianapolis, IN. Long ago, the telecom business during the late 1970’s and early divestiture years was pretty nutty and with good reason. Companies sprang up promising to get telecom expenses under control, and in those days shaving pennies off your long distance rate meant something. Teletron was one of those companies serving large enterprises with early TEM (Telecommunications Expense Management) solutions. Before this period, most companies just paid the bills on time without any analysis since telecom was considered “just another utility.” Back then many folks just assumed that the bills were right.
Fred Knight and Marty Parker have had a bit of a debate last month on UC adoption and whether or not there’s really any “there” there (See What’s Really Hot in UC). I thought I would weigh in given that I’ve spent the better part of the last six months managing a project to benchmark enterprise adoption of UC that involved our team of analysts conducting in-depth interviews with almost 120 end-user organizations on their UC adoption plans. (I provided some early insight in last month’s post; see The State of Unified Communications 2008.)
Those who have attended my "State of the UC Market" sessions at VoiceCon for the past several years know that I've deferred a market report and forecast until the shape of things became clearer. Well, that study, called "Unified Communications 2007-2012," is now completed, and I wanted to share one of the many highlights.
We've just posted our latest podcast, an interview with Steve Guthrie of CA. Steve spent much of the interview talking about the role that configuration errors play in causing problems in IP telephony implementations. This hearkens back to the maxim, "The major cause of failures are fingers," explained to me by Terry Slattery of Netcordia a couple of months back.
Just when the retailers thought it would be in vogue to hawk telephone systems alongside Ebay where pretty much anything sells, Dell Computer is on the act too, selling what they advertise as “Affordable Enterprise-Class Phone Systems by Fonality.”
Unified communications (UC) has been a hot topic in the vendor community for the past couple of years, particularly with the traditional communications vendors. The majority of positioning that I have seen around UC positions VoIP as the foundation and then UC being the “stuff” that gets built on top of VoIP. I do believe this was conventional thinking for quite some time but this “old school” thinking needs to stop or UC will take years to reach its potential. Also, it’s just flat out wrong. Presence, not VoIP, should be thought of as the foundation for UC.
I have to second Sheila's comments about Aspect's acquisition of Blue Note. The folks behind Blue Note were some of the sharpest people around when it came to leveraging Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) for communications, and Blue Note's Fergal Glynn spoke on this topic at VoiceCon from the time we first started scheduling it as a session. I was kind of expecting that Blue Note would eventually get snapped up by one of the big platform vendors, though upon closer examination this wasn't so likely. Like Sheila, I think Blue Note brings some pizzazz to the industry as a whole, and their position in any acquisition was likely to be comparable to the role Sphere assumed when it was gobbled up by NEC last year: Cutting edge, SOA-based technology with the potential to start moving a legacy vendor to a new level in a single stroke.
Kudos to Aspect Software for bringing some excitement to an otherwise slow post-holiday news week. (As I recall, they served a similar purpose when Concerto acquired Rockwell just after Labor Day in 2005.) Kudos also because this is not your typical ‘down-cycle in the market’ acquisition of an aging customer base. Instead it brings sexy new technology that SVP Mike Sheridan says will allow Aspect to accelerate the company’s stated strategy to bring UC and the contact center together.
Love and hate seems to best describe the attitudes toward the many automated attendants used to front end the modern era business. The feelings aren’t just here in the U.S.A. but extend globally, and I think even to a greater degree of harshness.
On his blog, renowned security expert Bruce Schneier recently picked up on an article about a Verizon Business study questioning the conventional wisdom that the major security threat to enterprises comes from within, not from without. Schneier explains why this makes sense, and why it's also a highly constricted view of the problem in any event:
Siemens corporation finally confirmed rumors and reports of nearly 17,000 job cuts/restructuring. This announcement was made by the Siemens parent company, a conglomerate that manufactures myriad products including medical and energy systems. It's unclear at this point whether or how the cuts affect Siemens Enterprise communications; I'm in pursuit of answers on that score. But the (accurately) reported size of the layoff made it a topic of considerable interest within our industry over the last week, so we'll follow up to determine any impact on the Siemens communications company.
Afternoon update:
The headline of this Gigaom post was what first caught my eye--"Five Nines on the Net is a Pipe Dream". Not really going out on a limb with that one. But the post goes on to link to a NYT article that features the website downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Downforeveryoneorjustme seeks to answer the eponymous question for any website whose URL you type into its simple, Google-style interface. Can't get to Amazon or wherever? Type the URL in and learn whether that website is actually down, or if the issue is on your end of things.
There was some a little nice give and take on this site about the relative value of a VoIP systems developer delivering a unified communications solution with its own home-grown IM presence. The chat centered around ShoreTel 8 and its support for Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 corporate instant messaging platform. I thought I’d chime in with my two bits.
Your WAN service provider is a critical component of a telepresence deployment. Much of the responsibility for delivering low packet loss, low jitter traffic to your locations around the globe lies in their hands. The instrument that allows you to manage their delivery is the Service Level Agreement (SLA) and it needs to reflect the critical nature of delivering telepresence traffic properly. Here is what I think your SLA should specify.
The term skills-based routing entered the contact center lexicon some 10 years ago. In June, as part of its announcement of release 3.0 of Interaction Dialer, Interactive Intelligence coined a new term, skills-based dialing. Understanding what the term means and if the capability was unique to Interactive Intelligence required discussions with both Interactive Intelligence and some key competitors.
A study from the Uptime Institute reveals that most data centers would max out electrical capacity and cooling capabilities during the next 12-60 months. According to the Uptime Institute, 1U server space costs $1,600 per year in facilities costs, and $700 of that cost is just for electricity.
Fred Knight and I had the opportunity to travel down to Huntsville, AL, last week to visit with the folks at Digium, the company founded by Mark Spencer, creator of the Asterisk open source PBX. What we found was a company that appears to be making the familiar tech industry passage from a young startup focused on breaking new ground, to VC-funded company on the IPO track, focused on execution and building its market.
Via Abner Germanow of IDC, here's a cool application that shows something of the potential of Asterisk, Unified Communications and social computing. The application is called The Service Guy, and it lets people call a single referral number and get connected to services they need right away.
Yesterday, Tim Bakke, Microsoft UC Practice Manager at Avtex, sent some interesting comments on the continuing dialogue over the adoption of UC, beginning with Fred Knight’s “Where’s the Beef” and continuing to yesterday’s “The UC Debate: Forrester Weighs In.”
Tim had some great observations:
Telepresence is an interactive real-time application, which means it is delay sensitive, loss sensitive and jitter sensitive. This sounds familiar: it is just like VoIP, with the one difference being that it has huge bandwidth requirements. VoIP is treated as the highest priority application in the QoS hierarchy, but it uses relatively small amounts of bandwidth. How do we deal with an application that requires very high priority and might be consuming half or more of the bandwidth on a link?
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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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