VoiceCon Orlando 2010: Day TwoVoiceCon Orlando 2010: Day Two

* VoiceCon Renamed Enterprise Connect: Full info here
* Keynotes from Cisco, Avaya and Siemens

Tony Bates of Cisco, in his keynote this morning, made a point: "We're going to change the way people think about the contact center." Specifically, he described it as a transition "from contact center to customer collaboration." The idea that contact center agents should be collaborating with the customer seems natural, and it’s pretty much how people deal with customer service people when they’re in person — if I have a problem with a car or a piece of clothing or electronics or whatever, I take it to the desk at the store and show, point, describe, discuss. Using video and other display-type apps makes sense and I expect it'lll be an area where we see a lot of innovation in the contact center in the future.

You also need to extend this type of collaboration across company/partner boundaries, and that’s what Cisco’s pushing its Intercompany Media Engine as a solution for. It's designed to let people who don't have preconfigured session connectivity establish this kind of ad hoc connectivity the same way you do it on the PSTN. In fact, the IME uses the PSTN, for route discovery and establishment, as this blog post describes.

Cisco threw one final piece into the picture with its keynote demo: Using IME to connect users of Quad, the renamed Enterprise Collaboration platform that Cisco announced last year for social collaboration. This actually was a terrific way of demonstrating the power of the IME concept: That you "call up" somebody you do business with, and do a "call"with them that’s really an ad hoc collaboration session. You don’t need to be pre-configured on the same UC platform, you just connect.

Of course, IME runs on technology Cisco built and has submitted to the IETF for standardization. We’ve been through this before, and from Cisco Tag Swiching grew the widely accepted MPLS standard. Will enough of the industry be willing to buy into a technology that started with Cisco — even if blessed by the IETF as a true interoperability standard? That's the big question.

Read the liveblog of this keynote here

**

Kevin Kennedy's VoiceCon keynote address focused heavily on the company’s commitment to SIP-based systems, based on the Avaya Aura platform that was introduced a year ago at VoiceCon. Kennedy presented several case study examples showing both immediate cost savings as well the potential to decrease time-to-sales. Kennedy demo'ed a very cool voice-enabled smartphone application that allowed drag-and-drop conferencing and document sharing on the fly. There was even an ability to pull a couple of conference call attendees into a sub-conference via the GUI, with no traditional telephony-style (i.e., dialpad-based) call control commands.

Furthermore, he promised 4 major announcements of innovations during 2010, though he didn’t give any details. Clearly, though, Avaya's intention is to pivot from the focus of mid-2009/early 2010 — the Nortel acquisition and integration — and onto a focus on Avaya as a driver of the SIP transformation.

Read the liveblog here

***

Though this conference has been all about applications, the cloud, mobility and all the other big buzzwords, I'm also seeing a quiet reinvention of the phone. If you look at Dave Michels' feature on No Jitter, you’ll see a couple of examples of the new media station, IP communication device, or whatever you want to call it. Alcatel-Lucent also made a major announcement of just this sort of device.

Basically, what the industry seems to be groping towards is an iPhone or iPad or some hybrid of them, in a form appropriate to desktops. Something that has a rich GUI and touch-screen, the ability to run apps, and probably lots of interfaces for USB, Bluetooth and other devices.

Right now, most of these devices are fairly high-end: Closer to $1,000 for enterprise models, $250 or so for SMB type devices. And that’s probably not off base for a very rich, functionality desktop IP device that combines a phone’s always-on capabilities with the cool factor of smartphones and tablets.

These certainly won’t be replacing more traditional desksets — ever, because not every worker will ever need this kind of device. But they're a product category to keep an eye on.

***

In his keynote, Mark Straton of Siemens looked back to the history of communications architectures, and he started with Gartner’s much-noted-at-the-time 2005 projection that "The IP-PBX is a potential architectural ‘dead-end,'" and he pointed out that this turned out to pretty much be true.

And it's fair to point out that Siemens recognized this shortly after Gartner made the projection, and have been moving OpenScape, their core UC platform, towards the model of a datacenter-based application. It plays well into Siemens' big announcement at the show, which was a new OpenScape release that includes a major virtualization component.

It was an eventful keynote: Fog machines, 3D glasses, a Twitter-UC integration demo, and more. Read about it on the liveblog here