There's always an element of tea-leaf-reading to the first morning of VoiceCon: What does tutorial attendance say about where the crowd--and thus the industry--is at?
The biggest crowd for this morning was in Gary Audin’s "Basics to Best Practices" tutorial, which is basically a first-course for those looking to either learn about IP telephony, or at least get a better understanding of how it works (and how it may sometimes not work). We also had a good crowd in Robin Gareiss's and Irwin Lazar's tutorial on business cases for IPT and UC, which wasn’t surprising at all.
So will this be more of a meat-and-potatoes show? As customers hunker down in tough economic times, are they just trying to do more of the same, and hopefully spend less, get more and avoid costly mistakes? It’s something I’ll be watching for in sessions throughout the week.
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When it comes to product announcements, one of the highest-profile debuts was Avaya Aura. There are multiple No Jitter blogs on the release (go here here and here); this is Allan Sulkin's bottom line on Avaya Aura's key new element, called Session Manager:
Session Manager takes a significant step forward in leveraging two industry standards, SIP and SOA, for simplifying the integration of multi-vendor networks for purposes of call routing and applications fulfillment.
Recognizing that few customers have a network consisting of one vendor’s voice communications system platform, Avaya developed Session Manager expressly to operate across vendor boundaries to benefit large enterprise customers with national or global networks. It is product that satisfies customer needs with ‘everything and everywhere’ requirements using SIP signaling standards and a SOA standards framework for applications design and operation. Session Manager leverages SIP trunking to minimize customer transmission costs by reducing the number of inefficient trunk circuits, centralizing operations management with fewer staff, and deploying applications across a larger universe of potential stations users. This can result in hard dollar savings to customers at a time when every dime and quarter of expense outlays are being analyzed. Many customers are currently wasting vast amounts of money by failing to take advantage of recent (and some not-so-recent) developments in optimized networking configurations. These customers need to take a look at Avaya’s product portfolio, especially the new Session Manager, and re-evaluate their networks at the earliest possible moment.
Recognizing that few customers have a network consisting of one vendor’s voice communications system platform, Avaya developed Session Manager expressly to operate across vendor boundaries to benefit large enterprise customers with national or global networks. It is product that satisfies customer needs with ‘everything and everywhere’ requirements using SIP signaling standards and a SOA standards framework for applications design and operation. Session Manager leverages SIP trunking to minimize customer transmission costs by reducing the number of inefficient trunk circuits, centralizing operations management with fewer staff, and deploying applications across a larger universe of potential stations users. This can result in hard dollar savings to customers at a time when every dime and quarter of expense outlays are being analyzed. Many customers are currently wasting vast amounts of money by failing to take advantage of recent (and some not-so-recent) developments in optimized networking configurations. These customers need to take a look at Avaya’s product portfolio, especially the new Session Manager, and re-evaluate their networks at the earliest possible moment.
*** Two of Microsoft's early VoiceCon announcements had to do with partners--Aspect and Polycom. With the latter, Microsoft announced that it was handing over its RoundTable conference room videoconferencing system to be resold, distributed and supported by Polycom, which is renaming the product the Polycom CX5000.
RoundTable was introduced as one of the hardware components of Office Communications Server 2007 deployments; it's a conference phone that features a 360-degree video camera. It's designed to be deployed on a conference table and uses an algorithm that swivels the camera to point at the active speaker and transmit this image to the participants of the videoconference. Those participating in the conference room plug into the RoundTable unit via USB cables, and others can join remotely via Microsoft Live Meeting or OCS.
The product is being turned over in its current form to Polycom, and the two companies are still discussing just how they'll work together on future development, according to Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate VP of Microsoft’s UC Group. "That would involve what kind of IP [intellectual property] would need to be transferred, but that’s not what we’re announcing today," Gurdeep told me.
In that same interview, I had a chance to speak with Sunil Bhalla, senior VP and GM of Voice Communications Solutions at Polycom. "It really is a strong message about deepening the relationship between Microsoft and Polycom," he said. "Since we offer a whole range of voice devices on OCS, and also since our current video platform, the HDS platform, as well as the RMX2000, are tightly integrated to OCS, this really makes us the only company that makes a complete lineup of integrated voice and visual solutions for OCS 2007."
I asked Gurdeep why, at OCS's release two years ago, Microsoft built RoundTable itself, while at the same time it was releasing reference designs for OCS desk phones--the Tanjay line that Polycom, LG-Nortel and others have been building. "The intent always has been that we focus on software and software interfaces, and have the expertise of the ecosystem really fill in," he said. "In this particular case, it was just a timing issue. We happened to have engaged at the right time with Polycom around Tanjay phones, that we could actually effect that."
Sunil added:
One of the reasons why it just made perfect sense for Microsoft to own it and build it was because of the tight integration required with all of the Microsoft open software platforms, both the Live Meeting and the OCS. But it really made sense for them to have it in their labs and work it integral to their team as it evolved. And now it's at a point where it’s deployed, there are over 1,000 customers who are actually using it; it was the right time to transition it.
So here's the phased approach going forward. The first objective we have, together with Microsoft, is to make sure we get it out to as many places and as many customers as possible. We'll be launching it on April 13. It'll be available in 27 countries at launch, which is more than what Microsoft had it available. So expanding the reach is really the first objective. As we are doing that, we are actually engaged in deep discussions with the Microsoft team so over the next 30 days we will really have agreed to a roadmap that we will then begin evolving this device beyond where it currently is.
So here's the phased approach going forward. The first objective we have, together with Microsoft, is to make sure we get it out to as many places and as many customers as possible. We'll be launching it on April 13. It'll be available in 27 countries at launch, which is more than what Microsoft had it available. So expanding the reach is really the first objective. As we are doing that, we are actually engaged in deep discussions with the Microsoft team so over the next 30 days we will really have agreed to a roadmap that we will then begin evolving this device beyond where it currently is.
Microsoft's other partner-related announced centered around the one-year anniversary of Microsoft’s partnership and equity investment with Aspect. When I talked to Michael Smith of Microsoft and Mike Sheridan of Aspect, they highlighted Aspect's creation of a global UC services practice, as well as Aspect’s rollout of OCS to 850 of its own users who are relying on OCS for all their voice capabilities ("We took their phones off their desks," Mike Sheridan said.)
Besides these users getting voice functionality exclusively from Microsoft, Aspect's OCS deployment--of OCS R2--will save the company $1 million a year in audioconferencing cost elimination, Sheridan said.
Finally, I asked Mike Sheridan about Nortel. Specifically, I wondered if Aspect was targeting Nortel contact center customers with the pitch that you could get an Aspect solution for your contact center while also enjoying a tight Microsoft relationship—a closeness of relationship that Nortel has been able to boast with its Innovative Communications Alliance with Microsoft.
Mike Sheridan said that, while Aspect is naturally trying to win Nortel customers, it’s not a straightforward pitch. He said he reminds his salespeople: "These [customers] are smart people that made the best decision they could at the time, and to tell them they went out and did a dumb thing is probably not the best idea."
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ShoreTel's main VoiceCon announcement aims at bolstering the vendor's attempt to move up-market into larger distributed enterprises. The new ShoreTel 9 release extends the failover capabilities of the company's signature distributed-switch appliance architecture. According to Kevin Gavin, VP of marketing at ShoreTel, the new Release 9 lets users apply N+1 redundancy of the ShoreGear switches across a network of distributed sites. In earlier releases, users could deploy N+1 redundancy only on a site-by-site basis; if you wanted complete resiliency, you needed as many backup switches as you had sites. With the new Release 9, users can fail over to a redundant ShoreGear switch at another site, so the enterprise needs to deploy fewer redundant switches across the network.
Also improving the distributed resiliency is the ability to deploy the voice mail function within the flash memory of the ShoreGear switch. In previous versions, enterprises could either deploy a centralized voice mail server for the network (an option that remains), or distributed servers on a per-location basis, to protect against WAN failures. The new release eliminates the need for servers to handle voice mail at remote sites for customers choosing the distributed option.
The larger message that ShoreTel is going to push at VoiceCon is that it's a vendor that can meet the needs of customers well into the medium-size range of enterprises. Kevin Gavin told me that he’s not claiming ShoreTel can handle a 20,000-user deployment, but he pointed out that the company has more than 50 customers with over 1,000 lines deployed, and is "very much a player in that mid-size market." He conceded that ShoreTel is widely perceived as a smaller-system player only, and he called this perception a "bad rap."
ShoreTel continues to be profitable, Gavin pointed out; he said the goal is to take advantage of situations like Nortel's uncertain future to get into more accounts and increase its brand awareness, which he conceded is "not where we want to be" yet. The vendor will announce some "major telecom distributors" as partners in the coming weeks, he said.
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Meanwhile, while ShoreTel continues to push up in scale, Acme Packet's main VoiceCon product announcement focused on moving down, with the introduction of a session border controller (SBC) for distributed sites. The new Net-Net 3800 supports up to 500 media sessions, covering the distributed sites as a complement to the company’s Net-Net 4250, 4500 and 9000, which support from 32,000 to 128,000 sessions and serve the centralized datacenter/central office market.
According to Seamus Hourihan, VP of Marketing and Product Management, having an SBC scaled to the branch office size gives the enterprise the option of deploying SIP trunks at each location, versus centralizing the SIP trunking at the main location (as described in this recent No Jitter post: http://tinyurl.com/crc8wj). "Because of the [lower] pricing around SIP trunking, we’re seeing organizations with hundreds or thousands of remote sites looking at SIP trunking-enabling those locations," Seamus said.
Of course, for this distributed SIP trunking model to work, SIP trunks will have to become available ubiquitously from the major carriers--i.e., AT&T and Verizon in the U.S. SIP trunking continues to be a topic of high interest here at VoiceCon and on No Jitter, at least partly because of the perception that the service, which promises savings over PRIs, is still not being made readily available by the major carriers. Later this week, David Rohde of TechCaliber Consulting will be moderating a session on SIP Trunks and will be grilling the carriers on availability, among other issues. It'll be interesting to see what comes out of that session.
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So those are just a few of the highlights from Day One of VoiceCon Orlando 2009. Tomorrow we open with keynotes from Kevin Kennedy, President and CEO of Avaya, and Padmasree Warrior, CTO at Cisco. We also have end user keynotes from Angel Wingate, assistant VP in the Office of Information Technology at Duke University, and Thomas M. Behnke, manager, global network services architecture and strategy at Kraft Foods. We'll report on those tomorrow.
