The Unified Communications industry is increasingly becoming user focused, so it was appropriate that today's opening plenary session at Enterprise Connect Orlando 2014 focused heavily on how to deal with users: What they really need, what's really helpful, and how to get useful communications into their hands.
Tomorrow's Cisco keynoter, Rowan Trollope, joined the panel and declared that, "Deployment is dead. It should be adoption, not deployment"--this in response to the persistent issue that seems to come up in industry forums, of how to "get" users to use the technologies that are built or bought for them at work.
Trollope likened the enterprise communications industry to the toy industry: "You've got parents and kids, buyers and users." That analogy might help enterprise technology managers, if nothing else as a reminder when patience seems likely to run thin.
All six of the panelists--Troy Trenchard of Avaya, Cisco's Trollope, Giovanni Mezgec of Microsoft, Martyn Etherington of Mitel, Todd Landry of NEC, and Torsten Raak of Unify--agreed that the technology that's put into users' hands has to, as Mezgec said, "Just work." But moderator and Enterprise Connect GM Fred Knight challenged the panel, saying that "just work" doesn't only mean the device has to work for the end user.
"When is your stuff actually going to work together?" he said, to spirited applause from the crowd. "Or even, when will it work together--better?"
Rowan Trollope responded that Cisco's vision for a more interoperable communications future lies in the Web and APIs; that, he said, is why Cisco is a strong supporter of WebRTC, having among other things elected to open-source its H.264 video codec technology so it could be included in WebRTC implementations. Tthough that move could equally well be seen as another volley in the standards wars, trying to give H.264 a leg up on Google's VP8/VP9 video codecs for WebRTC).
Mitel's Martyn Etherington pointed out that, with Microsoft Lync gaining significant traction in the market, his company's strategy of positioning its products as "playing nice" with Lync provides the kind of story and value that enterprises are looking for.
One of the other questions around user adoption centered on those crazy kids, the Millennials. The panel members all paid the ritual homage to this generational cohort and what they purportedly want out of the communications in their work place. But individual panelists soon dug deeper into the issue. Etherington said Mitel has done primary research under an initiative it calls "Work 3.0," and found that, contrary to popular belief, when you ask Millennials, you find that most don't necessarily want to work remotely and use the latest technology to do so. "They like community," he said.
That rang true with something a contact center consultant once told me: That young people who end up working as call center agents prefer to come into a facility to work, rather than being remote agents--when you're young, you don't just want to be stuck by yourself all day, you want to go places where you're going to meet other people your age. It's the old folks who want to work remotely and make other people leave us alone.
Asked about their companies' future technology directions, most emphasized the cloud as a key focus; Microsoft's Giovanni Mezgec stressed the company's drive to integrate Lync and Skype with other Microsoft technology resources like Bing, that provide the kinds of information and analytical capabilities that can generate a greater role for context in future enterprise communications. That's been a focus of Gurdeep Singh Pall, who's returned to the role as leader of the Lync/Skype business unit, and who will also return to the Enterprise Connect keynote stage on Wednesday.
Before that, though, Rowan Trollope will get the stage to himself tomorrow morning for the Cisco keynote, followed by Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy. .
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