No Jitter is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

  1. Home
  2. IP Telephony Crosses the Chasm

IP Telephony Crosses the Chasm

I thought the most noteworthy thing Jorge Blanco said to me in our podcast interview was that we'd "crossed the chasm" from TDM to IP telephony. We had our interview before I received Allan Sulkin's annual Market Review article, and I was a little skeptical of Jorge. But Allan's article pretty much convinced me that this wasn't just a case of a vendor blowing smoke.
Eric Krapf
Eric Krapf
January 31, 2008

I thought the most noteworthy thing Jorge Blanco said to me in our podcast interview was that we'd "crossed the chasm" from TDM to IP telephony. We had our interview before I received Allan Sulkin's annual Market Review article, and I was a little skeptical of Jorge. But Allan's article pretty much convinced me that this wasn't just a case of a vendor blowing smoke.

I thought the most noteworthy thing Jorge Blanco said to me in our podcast interview was that we'd "crossed the chasm" from TDM to IP telephony. We had our interview before I received Allan Sulkin's annual Market Review article, and I was a little skeptical of Jorge. But Allan's article pretty much convinced me that this wasn't just a case of a vendor blowing smoke.Here's the relevant figure from Allan's article:

In terms of Avaya's agenda for 2008, Jorge said customer needs are falling into four broad categories:

  • The "infrastructure-centric" level, i.e., "Getting voice, video and data not only onto the network, but with a robust set of communications applications for them, to be leveraged by the end user."
  • "Workforce productivity," which is really the basket in which Avaya places the applications and capabilities that people are calling Unified Communications--but in the narrow UC sense that excludes bringing communications into business applications that previous weren't or couldn't be communications-enabled (more on that 2 bullets down).

    Meeting this challenge has to do with bringing together different communications functions, whether within Avaya's platform or, more likely, in an integrated way with multiple desktop and system-level components: "We're definitely looking at how do we enable the workforce itself to be able to operate anywhere-more importantly, for a business to deploy that resource to wherever it needs to be to perform a variety of different functions, from customer service to service delivery to back-office operations."

  • Customer service (i.e., contact center)--This remains an area where Avaya is the clear leader, and Jorge said they're building upon their existing capabilities. "We have extended the portfolio to provide, for example, an analytics component, that allow the customer to not only collect data, but in real time begin to gather intelligence as to, What are the gaps in performance, What are the natural connections that perhaps the business is not seeing and executing on, and [then] connecting it to the customer service space."
  • Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)--This was a big push for Avaya last year, and here's how Jorge described it:

    CEBP is really where we see technologies like our VXML engine and voice portal, our application enablement services that begin to expose not only the more traditional CTI capabilities, but the Web Services componentry that is needed to connect these types of services to other types of apps. And, obviously, leveraging SIP and SIP extensions for end to end capabilities.... So it's really taking the entire environment and making it much more available end to end to a client, so they can integrate onto the rest of the business infrastructure.

    Jorge acknowledged that this last bullet point is maybe 5-10% of the marketplace today; "Everybody else is kind of wrestling with, OK, how do I do what we are now calling basic unified communication-voice, video, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and deliver that to my end users?"

    Finally, in my interview with Jorge, I figured I'd better give him a chance to dispute Allan Sulkin's market numbers showing Cisco passing Avaya for market share leadership in station shipments. He declined to do so, saying, "I'm in no position to question Allan's numbers. Definitely, Cisco is our number one competitor, and I think that they will remain so for the forseeable future."

    I think he's right about that.

  • "Workforce productivity," which is really the basket in which Avaya places the applications and capabilities that people are calling Unified Communications--but in the narrow UC sense that excludes bringing communications into business applications that previous weren't or couldn't be communications-enabled (more on that 2 bullets down).

    Meeting this challenge has to do with bringing together different communications functions, whether within Avaya's platform or, more likely, in an integrated way with multiple desktop and system-level components: "We're definitely looking at how do we enable the workforce itself to be able to operate anywhere-more importantly, for a business to deploy that resource to wherever it needs to be to perform a variety of different functions, from customer service to service delivery to back-office operations."

  • Customer service (i.e., contact center)--This remains an area where Avaya is the clear leader, and Jorge said they're building upon their existing capabilities. "We have extended the portfolio to provide, for example, an analytics component, that allow the customer to not only collect data, but in real time begin to gather intelligence as to, What are the gaps in performance, What are the natural connections that perhaps the business is not seeing and executing on, and [then] connecting it to the customer service space."
  • Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)--This was a big push for Avaya last year, and here's how Jorge described it:

    CEBP is really where we see technologies like our VXML engine and voice portal, our application enablement services that begin to expose not only the more traditional CTI capabilities, but the Web Services componentry that is needed to connect these types of services to other types of apps. And, obviously, leveraging SIP and SIP extensions for end to end capabilities.... So it's really taking the entire environment and making it much more available end to end to a client, so they can integrate onto the rest of the business infrastructure.

    Jorge acknowledged that this last bullet point is maybe 5-10% of the marketplace today; "Everybody else is kind of wrestling with, OK, how do I do what we are now calling basic unified communication-voice, video, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and deliver that to my end users?"

    Finally, in my interview with Jorge, I figured I'd better give him a chance to dispute Allan Sulkin's market numbers showing Cisco passing Avaya for market share leadership in station shipments. He declined to do so, saying, "I'm in no position to question Allan's numbers. Definitely, Cisco is our number one competitor, and I think that they will remain so for the forseeable future."

    I think he's right about that.

    Meeting this challenge has to do with bringing together different communications functions, whether within Avaya's platform or, more likely, in an integrated way with multiple desktop and system-level components: "We're definitely looking at how do we enable the workforce itself to be able to operate anywhere-more importantly, for a business to deploy that resource to wherever it needs to be to perform a variety of different functions, from customer service to service delivery to back-office operations."

  • Customer service (i.e., contact center)--This remains an area where Avaya is the clear leader, and Jorge said they're building upon their existing capabilities. "We have extended the portfolio to provide, for example, an analytics component, that allow the customer to not only collect data, but in real time begin to gather intelligence as to, What are the gaps in performance, What are the natural connections that perhaps the business is not seeing and executing on, and [then] connecting it to the customer service space."
  • Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)--This was a big push for Avaya last year, and here's how Jorge described it:

    CEBP is really where we see technologies like our VXML engine and voice portal, our application enablement services that begin to expose not only the more traditional CTI capabilities, but the Web Services componentry that is needed to connect these types of services to other types of apps. And, obviously, leveraging SIP and SIP extensions for end to end capabilities.... So it's really taking the entire environment and making it much more available end to end to a client, so they can integrate onto the rest of the business infrastructure.

    Jorge acknowledged that this last bullet point is maybe 5-10% of the marketplace today; "Everybody else is kind of wrestling with, OK, how do I do what we are now calling basic unified communication-voice, video, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and deliver that to my end users?"

    Finally, in my interview with Jorge, I figured I'd better give him a chance to dispute Allan Sulkin's market numbers showing Cisco passing Avaya for market share leadership in station shipments. He declined to do so, saying, "I'm in no position to question Allan's numbers. Definitely, Cisco is our number one competitor, and I think that they will remain so for the forseeable future."

    I think he's right about that.

  • Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP)--This was a big push for Avaya last year, and here's how Jorge described it:

    CEBP is really where we see technologies like our VXML engine and voice portal, our application enablement services that begin to expose not only the more traditional CTI capabilities, but the Web Services componentry that is needed to connect these types of services to other types of apps. And, obviously, leveraging SIP and SIP extensions for end to end capabilities.... So it's really taking the entire environment and making it much more available end to end to a client, so they can integrate onto the rest of the business infrastructure.

    Jorge acknowledged that this last bullet point is maybe 5-10% of the marketplace today; "Everybody else is kind of wrestling with, OK, how do I do what we are now calling basic unified communication-voice, video, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and deliver that to my end users?"

    Finally, in my interview with Jorge, I figured I'd better give him a chance to dispute Allan Sulkin's market numbers showing Cisco passing Avaya for market share leadership in station shipments. He declined to do so, saying, "I'm in no position to question Allan's numbers. Definitely, Cisco is our number one competitor, and I think that they will remain so for the forseeable future."

    I think he's right about that.

    CEBP is really where we see technologies like our VXML engine and voice portal, our application enablement services that begin to expose not only the more traditional CTI capabilities, but the Web Services componentry that is needed to connect these types of services to other types of apps. And, obviously, leveraging SIP and SIP extensions for end to end capabilities.... So it's really taking the entire environment and making it much more available end to end to a client, so they can integrate onto the rest of the business infrastructure.

    Jorge acknowledged that this last bullet point is maybe 5-10% of the marketplace today; "Everybody else is kind of wrestling with, OK, how do I do what we are now calling basic unified communication-voice, video, conferencing, collaboration, presence, and deliver that to my end users?"

    Finally, in my interview with Jorge, I figured I'd better give him a chance to dispute Allan Sulkin's market numbers showing Cisco passing Avaya for market share leadership in station shipments. He declined to do so, saying, "I'm in no position to question Allan's numbers. Definitely, Cisco is our number one competitor, and I think that they will remain so for the forseeable future."

    I think he's right about that.

    • Tags:

    News & Views