You could sum up Siemens CEO Jim O'Neill's keynote in a word: Possibilities.
O'Neill brought a demo of Siemens' potentially groundbreaking deal to run its OpenScape software on Amazon Web Services, a deal that could bring cloud computing to public communications.
And during Q&A, O'Neill, while maintaining the necessary proprieties, confirmed that acquisition would continue to be a part of the Gores Group private equity firm's strategy for Siemens. And while he of course didn't confirm reports that Siemens is bidding to acquire Nortel Enterprise Solutions, he did say that Gores Group sees "huge companies that were formerly worth billions of dollars, are worth less today," and that such distressed assets are Gores' stock in trade as a turnaround artist.
So both the Amazon/cloud computing story and the prospective Nortel buyout are in the proof of concept stage. But they're each tantalizing possibilities.
Of course, the Amazon partnership was the more fleshed-out of the two during O'Neill's keynote. While O'Neill stressed that the demo was a prototype, not an in-place system, it clearly demonstrated what communications in the public cloud could look like.
With Siemens OpenScape software running in the Amazon cloud, a user could sign up for service via a portal, and literally check off the services and provisioning that they wanted: SIP trunks, delivering video or Web collaboration applications, on specified devices, billed to a customer account or even a credit card. Such a portal could even download a softphone or Web client to the user, or assign him or her a phone number.
It's a compelling vision, and one that O'Neill conceded during Q&A is not here yet. When VoiceCon GM Fred Knight asked O'Neill if the public network cloud is ready for prime time in terms of security, reliability, and other critical characteristics, O'Neill replied, "I don't know if the cloud is ready for prime time today. I think it will be a year from now."
It's worth noting that Siemens hasn't delivered a VoiceCon keynote in awhile, and as the company's new CEO, this was O'Neill's debut on the VoiceCon stage. So he also spent some time laying out Siemens' core ideas about UC and the enterprise communications migration from a strategic level. O'Neill identified four key points about UC:
* UC is not a one-vendor solution.
* UC delivers tangible business benefits.
* New media will define enterprises' competitive advantage
* Enterprises should make selective investments that can immediately reduce costs while positioning enterprises for economic growth.
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Microsoft's Gurdeep Singh Pall
Get rid of your desk phone and don't buy any more PBXs.
That was the Microsoft message delivered by Gurdeep Singh Pall at the morning VoiceCon keynote today. He wasn't exactly that blunt, but he was close-and he used props.
He opened his keynote by recounting the preceding year for Office Communications Server, highlighted by the announcement of Release 2 at VoiceCon Amsterdam last fall. He called OCS a platform that includes telephony and said, "That means replacing the voice infrastructure you have in the enterprise." In other words, Microsoft appears to be done with offering read-between- the-lines answers to the question of whether OCS is meant to displace legacy PBXs.
And at the end of his keynote, he held up a Netbook PC and a desktop telephone and said, "One day your CIO is going to ask you-I have $300 I can give you for a device to put on your desk." You'll have to choose whether you want the computer that can also be a phone, or the device that Gurdeep, in a reprise of an earlier put-down, called a "Brother word processor-sorry, desk phone."
In between, Gurdeep not only derided single-function desk phones as akin to the word processors of yesteryear, he also assailed unnamed vendors who sell systems that they call "unified communications," which are in fact nothing more than IP-PBXs that represent little advancement over the previous TDM generation. "I can call myself Tiger Woods," he said by way of analogy. "But I can't shoot 10 under."
He also brought up a parade of OCS end users, including two that came out together, Gary Grissum of BNSF Railway and Michael Browne of Sprint, who each have replaced a subset of their PBX infrastructure with OCS voice. Both spoke the new lingo of the OCS voice user, referring to their old PBXs as "aging infrastructure" (Browne) and "aging installed base of legacy PBX and voice mail systems" (Grissum).
"It's essential that we modernize those systems," Grissum said.
Grissum said BNSF evaluated Cisco, Siemens and OCS before choosing the Microsoft platform, preferring the "seamless integration to the desktop and the Office suite." He also said the company saved $200,000 by replacing its old voice mail system with unified messaging in Exchange, and, more interestingly, gained 30 minutes- handling time per event which is the kind of "hard" productivity savings that companies are looking for out of UC.
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IBM's Bob Picciano
IBM's keynote will certainly go down as the best April Fool's joke of the day. In the midst of the company's Sametime Unified Telephony demo, the blue screen of death popped up-every demo wrangler's (and event producer's) nightmare. Then a friendly message popped up, proclaiming "April Fool's: VoiceCon 2009."
The serious part of the keynote came from Bob Picciano, who was celebrating today as his first anniversary as GM of IBM Software. Picciano stepped back for much of the hour and let the demo do the talking, as IBM showed off multi-vendor interoperability, escalation of a chat from IM to video, and voice mashups.
Interspersed were some key data points and updates:
* In the area of Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), a Nissan dealership used Sametime to shorten sales and ordering cycles by four days, another example of a productivity gain that's easily quantified. In the area of hard-dollar savings, Celina Insurance saved $3 million in staff and telephony costs in the contact center. And a grocery retailer boosted margins by $750,000 a year by identifying issues in the supply chain that were causing spoilage or failed delivery.
* IBM announced a Sametime Unified Telephony validation program with 14 charter partners: Cisco, Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Mitel, Siemens, Avaya, NEC, Sprint, Dialogic, NET/Quintum, Psytechnics, Jabra, Plantronics and Polycom.
* CEBP partners including SAP, Genesys, Interactive Intelligence and Cognos.
* Integration with IBM's LotusLive service for hosted services.
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Tomorrow we wrap up with a series of VoiceCon Summits: Unified Communications, Cloud Computing and a User Forum. We'll report on those tomorrow.
