While at a VoiceCon reception Monday night, I had a chance to meet Thomas Behnke, Manager of Global Managed Network Services Architecture and Strategy for Kraft. During a VoiceCon Orlando 2009 keynote, Tom talked about a pilot unified communications program Kraft was undertaking in one of its Chicago facilitates.
In a session at VoiceCon San Francisco on Monday, Which Mobile Device Will Win in the Enterprise--Blackberry, iPhone, or ???, Tom discussed a current project, the development and implementation of Kraft's latest "Office of the Future" Initiative. It combines un-assigned seating in an open workspace with enhanced unified communications capabilities. The goal is to untether Kraft Foods employees while providing them with the flexibility to determine which tools they use to improve their productivity and reduce operating expenses.
Tom's answer to the question in the session's title, at least in the US, has been the iPhone. Tom is quick to ask prospective communications vendors the degree to which they support and deploy their apps on the iPhone, in the App Store. But Kraft is a global company, and what works in the US doesn't necessarily work elsewhere. On the mobility front, for example, Kraft is considering Nokia handsets in Europe in addition to iPhones due to the vagaries of iPhone carrier relationships.
The global nature of Tom's responsibilities and challenges led to what was for me the golden nugget of my meeting with Tom. In the past month, Kraft has become an Avaya Aura Session Manager user. Fellow No Jitter blogger Blair Pleasant and I were quick to begin bombarding Tom with questions about the hows and whys of the deployment. Here are some of the tidbits we learned.
* SIP trunking among locations, and the savings it can deliver, is the initial benefit Kraft is hoping to gain from the deployment. Today, Kraft is running Avaya Aura in just two locations, and closely monitoring trunk usage and the number of minutes that can remain on-net.
* Kraft started with the "easy" locations, defined as already running S87X0s and the latest Avaya Aura Communications Manager software. If Aura Session Manager proves out here, Tom will likely be more willing to undertake the more complicated task of adding locations with aging DEFINITYs and non-Avaya locations.
* Over the years, Kraft has installed different vendors' PBXs in individual countries. Avaya (or its predecessor companies AT&T or Lucent) was a typical choice in the US, Nortel in Canada, a variety of local vendors in Europe--you get the picture. The Avaya Aura story of being able to consolidate all of these into a single network architecture has clear appeal to Kraft.
If things continue to go well, and the hoped-for savings in trunking and off-net-minutes are realized, I wouldn't be surprised to see Tom back on the VoiceCon Orlando stage in 2010.
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