Four Conferences and a FuneralFour Conferences and a Funeral

In the past three weeks, I've been to four analyst conferences, including one in New Orleans where the tradition of jazz funeral processions is alive and well (and hopefully you got the reference to the movie "Four Weddings and a Funeral"). By looking at the similarities and common themes across these conferences, we can identify some key trends and industry directions.

In chronological order, I attended analyst conferences for traditional communications and networking companies Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE), Avaya and NEC, as well for relative newcomer CafeX Communications, which provides innovative customer engagement and collaboration solutions. While each vendor clearly had a unique story to tell, we heard some obvious similarities in the messages, too. The key topics heard repeatedly include application development and embedded communications, various approaches to the cloud, and advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), biometrics, bots, and more.

ALE, Avaya, and NEC are for the most part reinventing themselves as they move beyond UCC to new areas for differentiation. As a much newer player, CafeX isn't reinventing itself, but it is expanding beyond its roots to become an outcome-focused customer engagement and workforce collaboration solutions provider that helps companies transform the customer experience.

Connections, the New Communications
At these events, the term "unified communications" rarely got mentioned. Rather, the vendors focused on innovation and new technology solutions such as Internet of Things (IoT), software-defined or fabric networking, and other technologies. With the exception of CafeX, which introduced an enterprise collaboration solution following out of its January acquisition of mobile-first virtual meeting room provider Vayyoo, communications and collaboration took a back seat to other technology solutions.

CafeX introduced Chime Spaces, a collaboration workspace built to drive business process outcomes. Chime Spaces helps connect individuals within an organization, but more importantly, connects businesses with their customers -- banks with mortgage applicants, insurance companies with policy holders, attorneys with clients, and so on.

Indeed, along with innovation and disruption, "connections" seemed to be a key theme. For example, ALE's vision is "To deliver the customized technology experiences our customers need -- to make everything connect." NEC's vision is "Orchestrating a brighter world," which is about connectivity based on new business solutions, notably IoT, AI, biometrics, and data analytics.

Hybrid Cloud Rules
Not surprising, when discussing their cloud portfolios, ALE, Avaya, and NEC highlighted hybrid solutions as opposed to pure cloud offerings. While these companies all offer public cloud services (Rainbow, Zang, and Univerge Blue, respectively), they all emphasize hybrid configurations that support their existing premises-based or cloud solutions.

In fact, one of ALE's stated goals for 2020 is to be a "leader in hybrid communications." It operates the Rainbow cloud service as an overlay to existing solutions, whether its own or third-party PBXs. ALE calls Rainbow "the glue between PBXs and cloud-based applications," and notes that Rainbow will have minimum UC capabilities so organizations needing full-fledged UC will need to stick with its OpenTouch platform.

Avaya highlighted its Powered by Avaya IP Office cloud offering, which can be deployed in a hybrid environment. Partners hosting IP Office can use the Powered by cloud offering to move their installed bases to the hybrid model.

For its part, NEC noted that today's smart workspaces need smart (hybrid) architectures. The Univerge Blue cloud service relies on the company's Univerge 3C as the core UCC software; using the same software stream for both the premises and the cloud offering makes hybrid configurations possible. Businesses can install telephony equipment on-site and/or utilize cloud services according to their specific needs.

As a relatively new vendor with no legacy equipment or installed base to deal with, CafeX didn't focus on hybrid solutions. However, it did note that it will offer a pervasive video collaboration solution, called Chime Meetings, as a pure-cloud or hybrid solution.

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IoT, AI, and Beyond
Realizing that the glory days of UC are waning, several of the vendors are looking beyond UC to new customer experiences that include IoT, AI, and even biometrics. They are tying these advanced technologies in with UC capabilities to improve business processes, enhance the customer experience, and create new business models.

NEC centered its event on the theme, "Exploring the Smart Enterprise," which is based on integrating and combining the company's UC technologies with its broader IT portfolio. Smart Enterprise combines NEC mobility; fault-tolerant and high-availability server and storage; networking; and video solutions, as well as its biometrics, IoT, data analytics, and AI initiatives. NEC discussed its AI offering, NEC the Wise, which is a single source of data collection and analytics for providing predictions. NEC is working with customers in various verticals to create new ways of doing business. For example, using NEC's NeoFace solutions, stadiums can improve security, airlines can expedite passenger authentication, and hotels can provide special treatment to VIP guests as they enter a hotel.

ALE says it intends to be a leader in IoT, and notes that it has a clear development path toward that goal in IoT-enabled networks. ALE's Rainbow, which it describes as a relationship machine, ties in various identities, such as users, their mobile devices, third-party apps, and even IoT endpoints. Focusing on connections, ALE is providing IoT-enabled mobile campus networks, and is connecting communications with IoT devices and sensors on trains, in hospitals, at universities, etc.

Avaya showed a demo of how its Oceana Workspaces solution works with virtual reality partner Exp360 for the hospitality industry. A client uses VR goggles to get a 360-degree view of a hotel property, for example, and the agent can see the same view on his or her Oceana-enabled screen. The agent can push a new view to the customer, and through the VR goggles the client can initiate a with the agent.

And CafeX described how it will be using bots as part of its Live Assist real-time engagement solution, which is it offers as the preferred vendor for omnichannel capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365. The bots will listen in and provide proactive suggestions and information for agents.

All Things App-Related
At the various conferences, when we did hear about UCC it was in relation to communication-enabling applications or integrating communication capabilities into applications. Several of these companies offer communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS) solutions, which can help businesses embed communications into any application or create custom applications (to hear about how businesses are using CPaaS and APIs, come to my upcoming Enterprise Connect session, "Case Studies: Working with Communications APIs -- Tales from the Trenches").

ALE's Rainbow is not just a cloud communications service, it's also a CPaaS offering, and companies can use it to integrate presence, IM, chat, voice, and video with applications. ALE is providing a set of open APIs and will build its own connectors and also let application partners develop this on top of Rainbow CPaaS. Rainbow exposes APIs but when you make an API call, the call goes through the PBX.

Avaya Zang is a multitenant CPaaS offering, enabling customers and partners to build applications. Avaya uses Zang to create new offerings, and announced (or at least hinted at) several new Zang offerings, including Zang Spaces (persistent team collaboration), Zang Office (UCaaS), Zang Video (VaaS), and Zang Agent (CCaaS).

Avaya also offers Breeze, an application development platform tightly integrated with the Avaya Aura platform. The Exp360 VR application mentioned above was built on top of Breeze, demonstrating the power of this platform. Breeze allows developers to create snap-ins, or workflows that execute a business flow based on a trigger. One Avaya partner noted that "Breeze represents a whole new world to develop applications," and it "opens up a lot of opportunities to differentiate ourselves."

With Chime, CafeX offers APIs and a CPaaS solution to embed its capabilities in business applications and to allow customers to build upon their specific applications. The new Chime Spaces is an outcome-driven team workspace offering seamless, real-time, objective-oriented persistent collaboration spaces.

As you can see, while each vendor had a distinct message, collectively they shared some unifying themes. I expect to hear more about each of these themes at Enterprise Connect, coming March 27 to 30 in Orlando, Fla. And please come hear my sessions, "Case Studies: Working with Communications APIs -- Tales from the Trenches," and "Understanding the Differences in Cloud Architectures - And Why They Matter."

Learn more about cloud communications and communications APIs at Enterprise Connect 2017. View the Cloud Communications track here and the Communications APIs track here, and register now using the code NOJITTER to receive $300 off an Entire Event or Tue-Thu Conference pass or get a free Expo Plus pass.

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