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?
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's the PDF of Blair's and Nancy's report on UC productivity (they'll be discussing that report during our webinar next Wednesday). Mostly what I think the report does is provide empirical data points to back up what most people have thought they knew all along about how users would use UC.
By now we've all heard about--or possibly experienced--the benefits of Unified Communications: Improved responsiveness, reduced costs, increased revenues, enhanced customer satisfaction, etc. Nancy Jamison and I recently interviewed end users to determine how and if UC is helping them be more productive and effective at their jobs, and while the interviews produced results we were expecting, it also uncovered hidden UC benefits, results that we weren't expecting.
Cisco made a major announcement today regarding their Mobile Services Architecture, and it represents a significant development in the wireless LAN market. Dubbed Cisco Motion, this multi-faceted announcement introduces both a product and a platform for the development of wireless communications-enabled business processes (CEBP).
I've been writing and thinking a lot recently about interoperability, and about the widespread expectation within the enterprise communications industry that real-time communications will move toward software-based architectures. That migration certainly is under way, and it's inevitable that, as voice and video traffic ride on IP networks, applications using voice and video will function in a fashion similar to "data" applications.
We've posted a new feature on interoperability here. One of the annoying features of our web design is that we don't (yet) have the ability to leave comments directly on the Features in the right-hand column. So feel free to use this blog post as the place to comment on the feature.
We asked that simple question in yesterday's VoiceCon webinar, allowing the audience respondents to decide for themselves what UC meant and was going to entail in their enterprise. The question--whatever UC will be in your company, is your IT organization ready for it? The answer, based on 97 responses: 60% said no. To me, that almost seemed low, given how nascent a technology UC is, and how sparsely deployed. In fact, according to data presented by one of the webinar speakers, Sandra Palumbo of Yankee Group, many companies are still learning about IP telephony.
I caught up with Chris Formant, president of Avaya Global Services, to get his perspective on HP's planned $13 billion-plus acquisition of EDS. I particularly wanted to get Chris's view because he goes back a long ways in the consulting business, and it turns out he was at PWC back when HP was trying to acquire that company (which wound up going to IBM) in 2002. Chris is very bullish on the HP-EDS deal.
When a new technology or application of a technology surfaces, there are usually many books published about the technology and how it works. Less frequently, there a books that do not tell you how to build the technology, but inform you how to operate and administer the technology. The latter case is Mike Finneran’s new book “Voice over WLANs, The Complete Guide”, published by Newnes, an imprint of Elsevier (Amazon link here). This is NOT a book for the hardware/software designer.
We've just posted our latest podcast, an interview with Chris Thompson, senior director of solutions marketing at Cisco. Chris and I discussed Telepresence, the economy and the role of Unified Communications in the enterprise.
Last week, Interactive Intelligence made some exciting product announcements and fellow-blogger Nancy Jamison has already skillfully covered those related to Customer Feedback Management. The other major piece of the story centers on integration with Microsoft Office Communications Server. Interactive Intelligence joins a field already populated with the contact center solutions of Nortel, Aspect Software and Mitel (and others?) but adds an aggressive edge to their story that reminds one of David and Goliath.
UCStrategies.com’s first annual UC Summit was a big hit – with resellers, system integrators, consultants, and vendors gathered together in a heavenly resort in Scottsdale for 2 ½ days of networking and education (and even relaxing in the sun for a little bit). Aimed at helping resellers/SI’s and consultants better understand some of the issues and trends in the UC world, and to help forge better relations between and among consultants, resellers, and vendors, the UC Summit certainly met its goals.
This post was written by Fred Knight, GM of No Jitter and VoiceCon.
We hear much about how Unified Communications will trigger massive changes in the enterprise communications markets and how it how it will be used to redesign and recreate business processes. But for that to happen, some changes have to be made in trenches of telecom/IT organizations--specifically the tools that are used when acquiring UC and related communications products and services.
This guest post was written by Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company, a high tech marketing consulting company.
Telepresence has really improved the video communications experience. High definition (HD) video conferencing has really improved the video communications experience. The life-sized, blur-free and crystal clear presentation of remote meeting participants, the directionally-synchronized artifact-free audio quality, excellent and flattering lighting placement, the clever mind-tricks of the curved furniture and simple session engagement mechanisms all make for an awesome, technology-transparent business meeting.
This could be big news in Unified Communications: HP is acquiring EDS at a cost of almost $14 billion.
Cisco today announced its next iteration of telepresence, moving both up and down in scale from its initial table-based system. As you can see in the photos with the release, the new designs are "personal", i.e., one-to-one; and double-rows for bigger groups.
WebMessenger, announced WebMessenger Mobile for Microsoft OCS, enabling enterprises to extend their investments in the Microsoft UC platform out to BlackBerry and other mobile devices. WebMessenger provides mobile real-time presence, IM, VoIP, and collaboration products for enterprises and mobile professionals. It also targets persistent group chat users who have alerts set up so they can act on new information or requests quickly and efficiently, and it provides other communications management solutions. For example, the company developed Message Alerts Enterprise Edition in conjunction with a large and very well-known financial services firm, using rules to trigger alerts and notify users when they get an important message or messages with specific words, for example.
Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to accomplish a task--to create and calculate spreadsheets. Everyone who needed to do these sorts of calculations immediately understood the benefit once they saw it in operation.
One last observation to wrap up my musings on the Microsoft-Aspect alliance. Tucked into the press release announcing the whole shebang was this curious line:
The never-ending saga that is WiMAX has thrown us yet another surprise.This morning’s papers bring news that Sprint and Clearwire will be combining (or “re-combining”) their WiMAX offerings still using the name Xohm. The combined company will take Clearwire’s name , though it will be headed up by Sprint’s CTO and long-time WiMAX booster, Barry West. More importantly, Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google, Bright House Networks, and Trilogy Equity Partners will jointly invest $3.2 billion in the new venture. The investments still falls far short of what will be needed to deploy ubiquitous nationwide coverage, and the target deployment date for the first major rollout has slipped from 2008 to 2010.
During last week’s Interop convention in Las Vegas, Cisco and Nokia announced a number of trials for their mobile unified communications solution, but the news included little in the way of new capabilities. The problem is that while most of the other fixed mobile convergence (FMC) solutions on the market can deliver an automatic hand-off; Cisco still must depend on the user to manually transfer the call. That automatic hand-off function is critical, because without it, there is no way of ensuring the users’ calls are being sent over the less costly WLAN option when they are within range.
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
Small-medium business VOIP adoption lags the large enterprise, so SMB is a target-rich environment for vendors. READ MORE »
Mobile UC isn't just a subset of Unified Communications. And although it's emerging quicker in Europe, it will soon affect enterprises everywhere. READ MORE »
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