As usual, I spent my first morning here at VoiceCon doing podcast interviews (they'll be posted on the VoiceCon website shortly). I got some interesting perspectives on presence from Paul Lopez of NEC (details at this No Jitter blog post), and I also got some more data on contact center attitudes from Tom Chamberlain of Aspect (info about their announcement is here here and here).
As usual, I spent my first morning here at VoiceCon doing podcast interviews (they'll be posted on the VoiceCon website shortly). I got some interesting perspectives on presence from Paul Lopez of NEC (details at this No Jitter blog post), and I also got some more data on contact center attitudes from Tom Chamberlain of Aspect (info about their announcement is here here and here).One of the things I found useful about my briefing with Aspect is that they put some numbers to the notion of demand for contact center-UC integration, as you'll see in the last post called out in parenthesis above.
Tom also shared some more information with me at the show today. It's informal but useful. Aspect surveyed the attendees at a recent user group conference, and asked whether the contact center leadership met with the IT leadership regularly in the attendee's company. Tom said the rough breakdown was: 25% said formal discussions take place; 25% said informal discussions take place; and the rest don't know, which probably means these discussions don't take place.
Pretty much any conversation about Unified Communications gets around to the issue of putting together the applications people, the infrastructure people and the business people. The contact center is arguably the leading edge of UC, and so this meeting of the minds is particularly critical here: Getting the right technology into the contact center, to help the business, is a key integration challenge, and as Tom Chamberlain's user group survey suggests, we've still got a ways to go.
I also met with Chris Thompson, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing at Cisco, and we talked about a number of announcements that Cisco will make later this week, and of course we also discussed the Wednesday keynote session that will feature Al Gore and John Chambers in what Chris and the other folks at Cisco have dubbed the "Eco-Panel." Gore and Chambers will appear by Telepresence from Nashville and San Jose, respectively, and Cisco CMO Sue Bostrom will be on stage here to facilitate the session.
Chris offered me some insights as to how Cisco is using Telepresence here at the show, and I'm very much relieved after talking to him. We at VoiceCon-and, truth to tell, most others-never felt that Telepresence was going to replace face-to-face events like the one we're all at right now. And Chris explained how he thinks Telepresence can complement an event like VoiceCon.
At these shows, the big vendors typically have "whisper suites," where they offer NDA previews of some of their cool upcoming technologies and products. An event like this is great for a purpose like this-it lets the vendor preview an important new development with their most important customers. This year, Cisco has Telepresence in its "whisper suite"-but not just to demonstrate Telepresence itself. They're using the technology as a way to do their briefings for other products, and as a result will be doing double the number of presentations out of the suite, conducting many of them remotely with customers who can't get to VoiceCon. Chris said he's got some 3 a.m. briefings for customers in other parts of the globe, making him either an iron man or a glutton for punishment.
As for the conference stuff going on, Monday is always tutorial day, and this year, the big tutorials again were Brent Kelly's Unified Communications session and Allan Sulkin's RFP. I might be tempted to say this represents the future and the present, but actually both of these sessions are extremely practical looks at what's actually out there now. Allan of course solicits responses to a mock RFP for IP-telephony, and Brent's session this year compares Microsoft OCS 2007 to IBM Sametime 8.0. (Brent also has an excellent article on this topic at No Jitter.)
I'm expecting Unified Communications to continue to be a hot topic here, as it has been at the last three VoiceCons. And the vendors are certainly refining their pitches about what UC means and why you need it sooner rather than later. But most of our tutorials have continued to focus on what's real in IP Telephony, UC and converged networking: Issues like Security, SIP, SIP Security, and the elements of a UC RFP, among others. I think Chris Thompson of Cisco was right when he told me today that we're in a period where users may not stop buying, but the purchases will be "perspirational" rather than "aspirational."
And right now, I aspire to hit the show floor. Another update will come your way tomorrow, after we hear from Avaya CEO Lou D'Ambrosio, Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate VP of Microsoft's Unified Communications Group, and Dennis Schmidt, SVP of VOIP Program Management at Bank of America.
