Mobility played a prominent role at Enterprise Connect last week in Orlando, though the UC vendors' offerings do not appear to be playing a prominent role in lives of end users. While every keynoter flagged the importance of mobility in their product plans, I polled attendees in several of the sessions I moderated to find how many actually had one of the UC vendors' mobile clients on their phones. From the several hundred people I polled, I found a total of five users, and three of them worked for Cisco! The two real "users" volunteered that penetration in their companies was below 5%, and that most of those were in IT.
The mobility disconnect is difficult to fathom. In the "Integrating Mobility and UC" RFP session, 10-vendors presented their solutions for a set of mobility requirements I outlined for a 2,000-employee company. In the RFP I allowed for solutions that transferred some amount of cellular voice traffic to Wi-Fi. The solution cost had to include cellular usage, and the Wi-Fi discount we allowed paid for the total investment in the mobile UC solution in almost every case.
Basically what this means is that by making use of an existing Wi-Fi network for voice, you can not only get mobile UC for free, you can actually walk away with a lower total cost. We did specify that the WLANs were "voice capable", which in reality might not always be the case. However, the projected savings over the three-year life of the project left a considerable margin for WLAN upgrades.
All but one of the respondents proposed a solution that took advantage of the Wi-Fi savings, but there were some significant differences in the capabilities, particularly with regard to the range of handsets supported. Aastra and Alcatel-Lucent now provide dual mode capability in their basic telephony servers. Siemens has offered a dual mode solution called Mobile Connect for some time, though they proposed their WLAN capable OpenScape Mobility and Cloud Enabled Enterprise Mobility solutions. NEC America partners with dual mode supplier Varaha for their UC for Enterprise (UCE) solution, and ShoreTel, who acquired dual mode provider Agito Networks late last year, proposed that product, now called the ShoreTel RoamAnywhere client.
The solution that appeared most frequently was the RIM/BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (MVS), which was bid by RIM, Cisco, and Mitel. The newest version of the product (MVS 5.0) introduced last April supports dual mode devices, though without the automatic handoff between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. The MVS 5.0 configuration uses a back-to-back-user-agent (B2BUA) interface to the PBX system, and thus far only Cisco and Mitel have deployed it. The perennial complaint with the MVS is that it supports BlackBerry smartphones exclusively, and the RFP called for solutions that would support growing demands for iPhones and Androids as well.
The part of the RFP that caused the most difficulty was the requirement to support basic cellular handsets as well as smartphones. Everyone's got a smartphone solution, but I have clients where 80% of their mobile devices are non-smartphone models. Most respondents "punted" and linked in the basic phones with single number reach. However, those who bothered to do the math found that by upgrading those basic handsets to smartphones that were also Wi-Fi capable, the additional cost per user was only about $5 per month over three years once you factored in the cellular savings.
With Cisco and Mitel bidding the RIM MVS solution we might be seeing a new trend in mobile UC where the UC vendors realize that they can't prosper in mobility, treating it as a sideline and supporting it with little more than lip service. The bottom line is that users are a lot more interested in mobility than they are in UC, so the question is, who’s a "sideline" for whom?
There were a few other mobile announcements at the show:
* HP was showing off some new 802.11n-capable Wi-Fi access points including a couple of models (MSM460 and MSM466) that provide three-spatial streams. A three-stream model provides a 50% capacity increase over the more typical two-stream models.
* Enterasys Networks, a Siemens Enterprise Communications company, introduced some cloud-based solutions for their wireless LAN.
* Cisco announced they are changing the name of all of their UC clients to "Jabber," replacing such unwieldy names as the Cisco Unified Mobile Communicator. The first client to carry the new name will be a Mac version that will roll out this summer.
* Avaya was showing a cool registration system for voice over Wi-Fi handsets that are shared among shift workers. The user scans a bar code on the device, scans a bar code on their ID badge, and their extension is assigned to that handset for the duration of their shift. I just wonder if anyone looked at how long a bar code sticker lasts on a device you carry around in your hand all day.
* NEC was showing off their M155 DECT handset that was about half the size of the iconic Vocera voice over Wi-Fi communications badge. The M155 can hang from a lanyard around your neck and has a strap that allows you to wear it like a wrist watch--shades of Dick Tracey’s two-way wrist radio!
* While not mobile, Aastra debuted their BluStar 8000i desktop video system, with an absolutely gorgeous display and easy-to-use touch screen controls. The BluStar will work with any SIP-capable IP PBX.
All in all it was a busy week in Orlando, and with the emphasis on UC, video, collaboration, social media and other topics that went far beyond voice, it's clear we have made the transition from "VoiceCon" to "Enterprise Connect".
