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Enterprise Connect Notebook

Some random ruminations now that I've had time to look over the notes I jotted down at Enterprise Connect last week.

Siemens Enterprise announced OpenScape Cloud Solutions. This is the commercial version of the cloud service that the company announced at VoiceCon 2009. Back then Siemens Enterprise said it would load OpenScape Voice and OpenScape UC, its software-based PBX and unified communications platforms, onto Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. The company did this in fairly short order, making the software available for third-party developers. But Siemens Enterprise stopped short of launching a commercially available version that let you and me (or rather your company and mine) start buying seats. The OpenScape Fusion developer’s sandbox remains available on the Amazon cloud, but for a service that SMB and enterprise customers can actually subscribe to, Siemens Enterprise has instead deployed multi-tenanted versions of the OpenScape Voice and OpenScape UC software in Level 3 and Interoute data centers. The reason for veering away from the Amazon cloud was the need for a more secure environment with WAN facilities and PSTN connectivity, according to Ross Sedgewick, Siemens Enterprise's director of global marketing, who I caught up with at the show. Siemens Enterprise channel partners are now being recruited to resell seats off of the cloud-based communications software, packaging this with consulting, connectivity, support and other services.

NEC announced "a new Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) software architecture" that is "a virtualized platform" that is a "Java application framework." Architectures, platforms and frameworks taken separately are enough to make my head spin...so I was dismayed to find them in the NEC booth ganging up on me all at once. Sheila has already addressed the new client interface, pointing out how it's reminiscent of Avaya Flare. I spoke with NEC senior vice president Todd Landry and here's how I make sense of the architecture/platform/framework: Just as Session Manager is at the heart of the new Avaya Aura architecture and Genesys SIP Server is at the heart of the Alcatel's new OpenTouch architecture, the new as-yet unnamed NEC architecture has the next version (version 8 to be released late in 2011) of the Sphericall software as the wizard behind the new NEC architecture's curtain. This is an interesting repositioning of the Sphere Communications software, which NEC acquired for $42 million in 2007. At the time NEC said it planned to leverage Sphere technology to develop an SOA framework for its various Univerge communications platforms. But now the Sphere software will form the foundation of the new NEC architecture, interworking with existing SV8000 PBXs and perhaps eventually replacing them. As an aside, another aspect of the version 8 update will be the jettisoning of Zeacom as Sphericall’s contact center platform. Instead NEC's BusinessConneCT, contact center software sold mainly in Europe, will replace it.

Microsoft didn't make a big announcement at the show. The company satisfied itself with introducing a number of customers that deployed OCS and then migrated it over to Lync. I tried to trick a couple of them--George Bedar, CIO of LA Fitness, and David Giambruno, CIO of Revlon--into telling me how difficult the OCS-to-Lync migration was, but they both looked at me like I had a third arm sprouting from the middle of my forehead, saying that the cut over was completely painless. Bedar had a particularly compelling story. He wanted to decommission an Asterisk-based PBX, considered Avaya and Cisco but wanted a single platform for IM and voice. He also wanted to leverage IT training investments in .NET and other Microsoft technology. In 10 months he completely replaced Asterisk with OCS...and then transitioned OCS to Lync, which is now the sole telephony platform for 20,000 users at LA Fitness. "Lync," he said, "is not a telecommunications system. It’s an application running in our [IT] environment."

Cisco made a number of announcements...a mid-market voice system, a smattering of video systems and end stations, a repositioning of Jabber as the client to replace its various existing comms clients. But never mind all that...tablets are sexy so let's talk about them instead. As Eric noted, Cisco cut the price of the as yet unreleased Cius tablet from less than $1,000 list to less than $700 list, with SVP Barry O'Sullivan saying he expects street prices near $600. This is likely due to price pressure exerted by the iPad 2, which will sell for a similar sum. Apple and Cisco have very different approaches to tablets, with Cisco adopting a "Tablets are for the enterprise" and "The tablet is the phone" philosophy and Apple taking a "Enterprise, schmenterprise...consumers can bring tablets to work or wherever else they want" and "If you want to talk then buy a freaking iPhone" stance. Yet Cisco sees the two as directly competing with each other. Cisco also pushed out Cius' general availability by a couple months. When Cisco announced the product last year GA was set for Q1 2011. Now they’re saying orders can be placed at the end of March, but the product won’t ship until May. It will be interesting to see if Avaya likewise caves in to price pressure and ratchets down the cost of the Desktop Video Device.