Tony Rybczynski of Nortel suggested that possibility during Don Van Doren's Intro to UC session this morning. His point was that enterprises need to start framing their purchase decisions in terms of UC capabilities rather than as simple telephony replacement procurements.
In San Antonio, TX this week, Genesys is hosting its largest G-Force user group ever – 1,300 attendees from 32 countries. Over the next few months, the company will take this show on the road to Berlin, Bangkok, two locations in China and Australia, so hundreds if not thousands more will participate in the annual event. As a self-proclaimed contact center techie, I most looked forward to the product roadmap presentation and I wasn’t disappointed.
Edgar Masri is out as CEO of 3Com, but the real news is that his replacement, Robert Mao, will be based in China. I think that tells you all you need to know about where 3Com sees much of its future, as I discussed in this post from VoiceCon.
Regarding Eric's post, "Will UC Cut Costs?" and the customer disconnect: Should we should not be surprised? Gartner only lends credibility to what many of us have known since the term UC was created.
As I mentioned below, Gartner has a new report out in which they surveyed 300 organizations and reached the conclusion that Unified Communications' value is in increasing "business agility," rather than in saving money. That was based on actual experiences of early adopters.
Here's a neat trick: A Microsoft Unified Communications guy gets up on the podium and, referencing those "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" ads, he positions his product as the Mac. Well, we're here in Vegas where Penn & Teller hold court, as does Lance Burton, a magician who's one of those only-famous-in-Vegas guys. So maybe you can't blame a speaker for trying a little sleight of hand for himself.
I'll have some longer, more in-depth posts on some cool stuff I heard today at Interop, but for now I've got time for just this quick observation, from Al Baker, VP at Siemens, on the subject of SIP trunk availability.
Regular readers know that we get some of our best analysis and data courtesy of Wainhouse Research. Wainhouse has launched a survey of Unified Communications attitudes on the part of channel partners. This is an important topic and Wainhouse's efforts on this topic will help us all understand how the channel is approaching UC. So if you're involved with the channel, please go take the Wainhouse survey.
The U.S. is the biggest source of security threats in the world. So says the Sophos “Security Threat Report Q1 08”.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
Enterprise customers are becoming more aware of Unified Communications (UC) applications and issues. However, I find many still compartmentalize UC as a futures-only consideration that doesn’t have much bearing on current PBX/ACD investment decisions. After a recent client engagement, I am convinced every enterprise should be armed with a UC Strategy before making a major PBX/ACD decision. Let’s take a closer look at this case study.
On the heels of the aforementioned Gartner study, Infonetics has a report out on Unified Communications, and they reach largely the same conclusion, that the value is in productivity rather than cost savings. However, the Infonetics view seems to tie UC adoption more closely to the legacy environment nonetheless.
Gartner has a press release out on its latest UC findings, and there's some interesting stuff there. I have to say, I think they really get it in terms of identifying the key challenges and pitfalls as we move into the critical time for UC adoption.
While some ISPs want to control and limit the customer’s traffic, other ISPs keep adding faster access speeds. Qwest just announced two new higher speed services, Qwest Connect Quantum and Titanium. Is Platinum is not a good enough name now? Will we be seeing Galactic service soon?
The three key network specifications for real-time (voice and video) traffic are packet loss, jitter and latency. Whenever I talk to folks about these, they understand the packet loss issue and they worry about the latency issue, but there is often little discussion about the jitter. So I wanted to tackle the jitter topic here and lay out both why jitter is a problem and some of the issues around how we measure it in the network.
There continues to be a lot of discussion of the technology of VoIP and IP Telephony (IPT). There is nothing wrong about technology, but buying or leasing an IP PBX is as much a business decision as a technology decision. Since the IP PBX is not a yet a commodity product, there are lots of hidden gotchas, difficult to understand SLAs, odd pricing models and maintenance considerations.
One of the best features at VoiceCon is the case studies presented by enterprise executives, and VoiceCon Orlando 08 was no exception. All the keynotes featured customer success stories, and the keynote by Dennis Schmidt of Bank of America was a detailed description of how the Bank has migrated to over 100,000 IP Telephony ports.
We've been talking to our friends at UCStrategies.com as we prepare for VoiceCon San Francisco, and one of the things we're trying to get our arms around is how the organizational challenges will play out as enterprises move from TDM to IP telephony to Unified Communications.
Some ISPs are very much against regulation. So are some politicians. It appears that the ISPs say there is no problem. My thought is that regulation seems to come after the abuse is obvious. Should we wait for the abuse? Is it here now? Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) noted,” To whatever degree people were alleging that this was a solution [regulation] in search of a problem, it has found its problem”. As you work at home or on the road, how frustrating will it be when your large up- or download is either significantly delayed or blocked? What about the emerging voice, video and Web conferences, will they work acceptably?
Hardy Myers, CEO of AVST, made a great point in today's Webinar, regarding the importance of interoperability in IP-telephony and, even more so, in Unified Communications.
Vendors, take heart: If the attendees of VoiceCon Orlando are representative of the large-enterprise market (and they are), these folks don't yet expect the recession to dampen their spending on communications.
Next week, I'm going to a show called Interop. You've probably heard of it; it's the big show in Vegas that doesn't feature Celine Dion, Elton John or water. I chair the VOIP and UC tracks for Interop, and we've got some interesting stuff coming up that I'll be blogging about here.
Last fall, at the New York Interop, our outfit did a sub-conference called VoiceCon At Interop, but lately I've been wondering if we shouldn't do something for the event we produce, on the order of Interop At Voicecon.
Word’s already out that the OCGD rates are rising worldwide. Panic sets in with folks and cut-and-run are what some consider or do, when they get their next power bill.
Sound like a story?
Will Siemens Enterprise’s announcement of OpenScape Contact Center and Microsoft’s strategic alliance with Aspect lead to widespread LCS/OCS integration in contact center solutions? That’s the $64,000 question in my mind these days.
OpenScape has been the brand associated with Siemens’ market-defining unified communications solutions for over 5 years. With an announcement today, that brand gets extended to the company’s contact center solution.
My post on Telepresence cost generated a lot of comments and questions about the cost data, so I thought I would go to the source to address them. I spent some time on the phone with Andrew Davis of Wainhouse Research. Andrew makes is living tracking the video conferencing industry and so he is the go-to guy for this kind of data.
Am I the coolest guy you know or what? I just bought one of Apple’s new MacBook Air laptops. Actually my other laptop (a 12” Powerbook G4) flat out died after several years of hard service, and I was getting tired of lugging that thing around anyway. I had gotten the smallest PowerBook Apple made because I really only use it when I’m traveling, and the smallest is also going to be the lightest. However, the thing was still as heavy as lead.
Unified communications solutions continue to evolve, and while the initial crop of UC applications was rooted in call center environments, UC apps have now branched out into other areas of the business. But it's already clear that for a growing number of knowledge workers, the key benefit will be mobility.
At Dimension Data’s Analyst Conference,UC was a hot topic. While currently a very small part of Dimension Data’s business, UC is playing an increasingly important role.
Over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Melanie Turek presses for companies to be more aggressive in replacing the inconveniences and indignities of air travel with more video meetings and remote work.
Shortly after Fred posted about the carriers and UC, I had a chance to talk with Mike Marcellin, VP of product marketing for Verizon Business, about Verizon's view of unified communications. While Mike's take was certainly aimed at showing a bit more proactive a stance on Verizon's part, the carrier didn't come across as anywhere near as aggressive in pushing UC as are the leading CPE vendors.
Over at our sister site Information Week, David Berlind has an extensive look at interoperability in the email world. It's a great, detailed piece that I think provides us with some cautionary thoughts when it comes to Unified Communications and interoperability.
Well it appears that AT&T’s takeover of the Starbucks Wi-Fi Hot Spot service has begun. I had made reference to this in a post titled Wireless Pricing Factors: Leverage and Convenience back in February regarding new mobile service pricing. The big story was not that AT&T was taking over the 7000+ Starbucks Hot Spots, but rather that Internet access was now going to be free (at least for 2 hours per day) for anyone with a Starbucks card that had been used in the past 30 days.
This is a sexist piece of crap, right? I mean, I get the part about tricking people into giving up information to prove that they're not careful enough about security. But the chocolate bar stuff? Give me a break.
In the western Lonesome Dove, Cap’n Call said it best: “There ain’t no excuse for bad behavior”--and reminding the IT guys that this was the moment after the character Captain Woodrow F. Call delivered a severe beating to an offending bad guy.
Here's this week's VoiceCon eNews:
Telecom used to be part of the facilities department. Is it time to put it back there?
That might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Maybe it's more accurate to say, You can take Telecom out of Facilities, but you can't take Facilities out of Telecom.
This post was contributed by Jason Alley of Vanguard Communications.
We need to spend more time empowering agents to seek the truth about successful customer interactions rather than relying on magic metrics to deliver delighted customers, cost savings and increased revenue. Too often, the reality in our contact centers is that we believe:
When considering wiring for new buildings or adding on to existing spaces, I think the time to seriously consider wireless is now. The guys buying and trading copper see the precious commodity hitting $10,000 a ton.
The reason is energy, demand and energy. Energy costs continue to rise, demand isn’t slowing and energy shortages continue to befall those that have untapped supplies or those that do have copper available but they just don’t have enough energy supplies to produce copper in order to keep up with the global demands.
The "Global Information Technology Report 2007-2008” has just been published by The World Economic Forum (WEF). The U.S. ranks 4th, in a tie with Singapore, behind Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland in the report’s [Internet] Networked Readiness Index (NRI). That is up from 7th place in the previous report. Does this mean that the U.S. internet is up to supporting significant Unified Communications traffic? Not necessarily?
In September 2006 market-leading self service vendor Intervoice acquired the assets of Nuasis, a fledgling SIP-based contact center solution provider. Part of the rationale behind the acquisition was that the Nuasis NuContact solution would allow Intervoice to participate in the market transition from TDM to IP-based technology, already in full swing in the PBX market by then but still emerging in the contact center.
There’ve been lots of changes at Intervoice in the past few years – it’s a different company than the old stodgy IVR vendor it used to be. There are new products, new services, new leadership (for the most part), and new excitement. Intervoice offers products and solutions in both the enterprise and enhanced network services arenas. On the enterprise side, its focus is on “creating new opportunities for customers by delivering natural, intuitive ways for people to interact, transact and communicate.” On the network side, Intervoice provides solutions for “people to people” communications, including voice mail, video mail, SMS, etc.
This is the VoiceCon UC eWeekly newsletter for this week, written by Fred Knight, GM and Publisher of No Jitter and VoiceCon GM and conference co-chair:
Amid all of the UC-focused presentations, demos, exhibits and debate that took place during VoiceCon Orlando, I was struck by the relative silence from one group that, you'd think, would be playing a critical role in UC's evolution--the carriers and service providers.
After my previous post, which compared power demands for TDM and IP phones, Eric wrote me and asked, "Doesn’t an IP-PBX on a server draw less power than a TDM PBX? Is this outweighed by the multitude of phones?"
The bottom line is: IPT is good, TDM is better and Hybrid is Best for power--- to a certain port/device size.
Part of the ongoing conversation about telepresence is about its high cost, which includes both the initial cost of the telepresence suites or endpoints, and the ongoing cost of the network and services to support it. Telepresence suites can cost $300K plus, and the cost of the service and network can be as much as $18K/month per location. Ouch. But let’s take a look at what this really means to the enterprise.
The telephony manufacturers are quick to point out what they are doing to reduce energy consumption of IP telephones. What they aren’t discussing is, what are you truly saving in energy over what you had before?
I was the moderator and presenter with Jim Davies, CTO of Mitel
on March 11, 2008 of an on-demand webinar and podcast: “Discover the Green of Technology”. We both covered a number of useful tips on energy savings from the data center to the desktop. I cannot go through all of the many recommendations, so I have taken a few of the nuggets from the presentation to highlight in this blog.
We've posted a new feature in the right-hand column by Amsterdam-based Bob Emmerson, a longtime convergence writer and analyst. I'm delighted to have Bob's byline on our site.
We’ve had more than a lion’s share of businesses moving manufacturing operations to China well over the past decade, yet this trend may change. China isn’t energy rich and currently isn’t an economy engine designed for sustainability or green initiatives. Wal-Mart is actively trying to move its Chinese suppliers into sustainability.
Last year in March 2007 I posted a blog, “Another Hit to the Cabling Budget; Electrician Shortage = Higher cabling Costs” at . In that blog I wrote “By 2014, the U.S. requirement for electrical workers will increase to more than 734,000. This is a figure of 78,000 more electricians then are currently employed in the field.”
One of the trends we started noticing almost as soon as IP-PBXs reached a reasonable level of maturity was the tendency of colleges and universities to ditch their telco Centrex systems in favor of the new CPE, usually motivated by impressive cost savings. The down side for the university IT/telecom departments was that they could no longer resell the service to students as a profit center.
Having seen Marty Parker's presentation for tomorrow's (Wednesday, April 9) VoiceCon Webinar (register here), I'm more convinced than ever that we've got an opportunity to take the Unified Communications discussion to a whole new level. And if you're the type who derides the focus on networking technology as "plumbing," boy, you're going to love it when we start delving into directories.
Some rather sobering stats were issued from our friends at Canalys: In less than a year Apple has apparently become the #2 smart phone developer in the US. That puts iPhone right behind the Blackberry in terms of the number of smart phones in people’s hands. No wonder phone makers are falling over themselves to come out with iPhone knock-offs.
Over at our sister site, the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Melanie Turek has some interesting thoughts about VoiceCon, based on a conversation with IBM's David Marshak. There's some good insights about presence, and a noteworthy focus on video.
On the VOIPSA blog, Dan York offers some concerns about the way VOIPShield handled its recent announcement of the vulnerabilities it had found, an announcement that just happened to be coupled to a new product release.
There’s too much clutter in SMB/E networks. Specifically, there are too many appliances, boxes and wares of every kind creating more troubleshooting endpoint nightmares and they do contribute to unnecessary latency, wasted power consumption and higher costs. This remains my eco-friendly argument to move “stuff” over to the cloud and to consolidate onsite hardware.
Going into the CTIA Wireless show in Las Vegas last week, it appeared that Sprint's beleaguered Xohm WiMAX service might finally be getting some impetus. The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post both reported on rumors that Comcast and Time Warner were considering making investments totaling $1.5 billion in Xohm. Intel Capital and Google have long been rumored to be interested investors, so financially-strapped Sprint might finally have the funding it needs to get its WiMAX project back on the track. There was speculation that Sprint was working behind the scenes to close a deal so that CEO Dan Hesse could announce it in his keynote address at the show.
There are utility incentives and rebates that will help reduce energy costs. These will vary by utility and location. New incentives are constantly being added to these programs. Some utilities are even saying they want enterprises to buy less power because of the construction costs associated with new generation and transmission facilities. Here are some incentive program types that should be investigated:
It’s not often a press release pops into your inbox with the name of your college Alma Mater in the lead, but such was the case last week. Meru Networks announced that Barnard College in New York will install its (pre-standard) 802.11n gear in residence halls after a product test pitting Meru’s wireless LAN solution against Cisco’s.
I have been working with a number of enterprises deploying telepresence solutions over the last year. So I had to jump in and post my thoughts on the issues raised by Tom Nolle and Eric Krapf in their recent posts! I have a different view on a couple of key points, so here we go.
We’ve been hearing a lot about Unified Communications and the contact center lately, especially in light of the agreement made between Microsoft and Aspect. Hopefully we’ll start seeing more companies implementing UC in the contact center to provide improved customer service and attain the coveted “first contact resolution,” or FCR.
Something wonderful happened at VoiceCon Orlando a couple of weeks ago. Well, actually lots of wonderful things happened, but my focus in this newsletter is on what took place during a session on the VoiceCon main stage--a discussion and agreement between IBM and Microsoft about presence federation.
Taking off on CEO Lou D'Ambrosio's VoiceCon theme of "Democratization of Unified Communications," Avaya this week announced some packages aimed at enabling telecommuting for small-medium businesses, which they define as sub-100 and 100-1,000 users, respectively.
Do you know what your Power Factor is? And more importantly, do you know how you can raise it?
Power Factor is a Department of Energy-promoted measure of how efficiently you're using power (explained here). DoE says, “low power factor is expensive and inefficient.” Low power factor reduces your electrical system’s distribution capacity by increasing current flow and causing voltage drops.
It's not exactly the cellular Centrex service that some of us have been advocating, but it's a start: Verizon announced at CTIA that it'll be offering, as a service, integration of PBXs and PDAs. The flagship Blackberry offering is based on Ascendent PBX-PDA integration (RIM acquired Ascendent two years ago.
We've posted a new podcast interview with Steve Timmerman, VP of marketing at Shoretel. You can get to it here.
I’ve been a fan of Voxify’s Speech-enabled Automated Agents for a long time, so yesterday I sat in on a webinar that they did with one of their premiere customers, Continental Airlines. I’m not going to rehash the whole webinar, but I have to say that it was really worth listening to, and therefore blog worthy. Why? It is blog worthy because of the breadth of useful customer-centric applications Continental has deployed, the quality of those applications, and most importantly, thanks to Voxify, some are customer-accepted proactive outbound applications. This last point cannot be emphasized too much – outbound calls that customers want to get.
Last June in a blog on VoIPLoop I discussed a new venture between Nortel and IBM whereby Nortel would develop an SMB communications solution for the IBM System i. The solution, now known as Nortel Software Communication System 500 (SCS 500) is alive and well, working in controlled introduction sites. Nortel tells me that general availability is imminent, by the end of April 2008.
Stop me if you've heard this one (via Fred Knight):
Digging to a depth of 1,000 meters last year, French scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years. The French came to the
conclusion that their ancestors had a telephone network centuries ago.
VOIPShield, a VOIP security company, says it's found some 80 vulnerabilities in Avaya, Cisco and Nortel IP-telephony gear, and another 44 vulnerabilities in the SIP protocol. More detail on each vulnerability is spelled out in the Research section of VOIPShield's website. According to the website, the vendors are working on fixes for their respective vulnerabilities, and in cases of 3 vulnerabilities rated as "critical," patches are already available.
Following up on my Telepresence piece, I've been trading some emails with Marty Parker about the role that mobility will play in Unified Communications, and how video will fit into that picture of mobile UC. Marty pointed me to a company called Myvu, which makes "personal media viewers," i.e., glasses that let you view video from your portable media player (iPod, etc.) without anyone else seeing.
Here's my weekly VoiceCon eNews. Go here to get them emailed to you earlier in the week:
Inspired by the Al Gore-John Chambers VoiceCon keynote (video here), a lot of the bloggers at No Jitter have been addressing the relative importance and efficacy of telepresence. As usual, Tom Nolle had probably the most interesting take, and one that drew quite a few comments (here). Tom picked up on something that ought to have been obvious from the start about telepresence, yet it’s something that I haven’t seen remarked on too widely: Many users report being disappointed in the inability to use a whiteboard effectively in a telepresence session.
Fritz Nelson of TechWeb TV talks with Tom Minifie of AVST. Tom explains AVST's perspective on what Unified Communications is.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t post “YAVR” (yet another VoiceCon recap) given the tremendous job done by Eric, as well as my fellow NoJitter bloggers. This was my seventh VoiceCon, with my first being the infamous blizzard of 2002, which coincidentally was the last time the conference was held in Washington D.C. before moving to the warmer temperatures of Orlando.
We've posted a new feature in the right-hand column from Lisa Pierce of Forrester Research, one of the top analysts in this market. Lisa looks at some Forrester data to draw conclusions about where IP telephony adoption is at, and where it's headed.
We're hosting a Webinar April 9 on the topic of automated provisioning (go here to register), and Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting and UCStrategies.com (and, of course, VoiceCon and this blog site too) is going to be our featured analyst. Marty's very psyched to do the event, which I think will open up another aspect of the Unified Communications conversation.
I had a chance to sit down with three Polycom execs at VoiceCon, and they laid out a portfolio of products and new announcements that buttresses the company's standing as the leading vendor-independent supplier of IP endpoints using all relevant media and interfaces--voice and video, wireline and wireless.
This post was written by Jason Alley, lead consultant at Vanguard Communications.
Last Tuesday night I called to see how my kids were doing at their grandparents’ house over Spring Break. I was amused to discover my call had interrupted a fiercely competitive Wii bowling tournament…that my parents were willingly participating in! Those that know Bob and Erin Alley know they are far from the video gaming type. Or so we thought...
Something that was overshadowed in all the hullabaloo over Cisco’s TelePresence marketeering at VoiceCon is that Marriott is deploying HP Halo in a bunch of its hotels around the world. It’s a fantastic move, really. Many companies will simply not have filled a large enough piggy bank to buy the incredible experience of this incredibly expensive immersive video solution. Instead they’ll be able to rent a telepresence room at a nearby business-class hotel and meet with colleagues at similar facilities in other cities or overseas.
JUNE 2008 MAY 2008 APRIL 2008 MARCH 2008 FEBRUARY 2008 JANUARY 2008 DECEMBER 2007
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VoiceCon makes its European debut 14-16 October, 2008, with Johan Krebbers of Shell keynoting. More information HERE
The PBX is not dead. But it is on an evolutionary path towards a new incarnation: Federated Communications System or FCS READ MORE »
SIP trunks could save money and deliver better feature/functionality to IP telephony. But there have been obstacles to overcome. READ MORE »
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