VoiceCon Orlando 2009 Coverage: Day Two

For today's keynote, Padmasree Warrior, Cisco's CTO, brought video greetings from Al Gore, last year's Cisco VoiceCon keynoter, but the bigger hit was probably Dr. Wong-even though he spoke in a language most of the audience probably didn't understand.

Dr. Wong was part of the Cisco Health Presence demo, which featured a kiosk that included Cisco TelePresence technology, together with health monitoring features including blood pressure, stethoscope, ear/nose/throat cameras, and other devices. The demo scenario actually began at a separate laptop, where Shawn Curtis of Cisco played the role of a network user wanting to find information on how to treat a bad back. Curtis was able to do a voice-enabled search on Alternative Medicine and use integration with the Cisco unified communications system to find first a Wikipedia page on Alternative Medicine, then a doctor-the aforementioned Dr. Wong, who happened to be located (at least in the demo scenario) in China. Since Dr. Wong only spoke Cantonese, the system read his language preferences and Curtis's, and translated between them.

Since this was a trade show demo, the scenario had its fanciful references to Shawn's purported fear of acupuncture and the like, but Padmasree Warrior brought it all back to the idea that systems like this, which enable remote health care, are not only practical today, but in use: She noted that more than 700 patients have been seen with this system as part of mental health care that's being given to victims of the huge earthquake in Sichuan province, China.

Earlier in her keynote, Warrior had played a short video from former Vice President and Nobel laureate Al Gore, who had participated in last year's keynote. Gore made reference to the many changes that have taken place in the past year, and lauded the "green stimulus" efforts that are under way.

So after the demo and video and talk of social networking that Warrior had opened with, she posed the central question: What is the business value of all this? Her answer was that, at Cisco, collaboration doesn't end with technology, but that its purpose is to encourage employees to think about working in a different way. And though collaboration based on unified communications can be a cost-saver, the value goes beyond the money saved-it's the way that collaboration and UC can free up talent, i.e., employee time and energy, to use in ways that improve the business. Collaboration also allows for a "boundary-less" organization with greater potential for customer intimacy.

The road ahead, according to Warrior, is made up of the following elements:

* Demonstrating cost savings and ROI

* Focus on productivity to free up talent

* Providing a differentiated experience for your customer

* Start transitioning to being a boundary-less organization

Practicing what she preached, Warrior had asked her Twitter followers, in the weeks leading up to VoiceCon, for their opinions on the future of collaboration. She said she received hundreds of suggestions, and when her speech was finished, she sent out the following tweet on Twitter right afterward: "Just finished VoiceCon keynote. Thx to all the tweeps for collaborating with me on this. Cisco believes in boundaryless orgs."

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Warrior was preceded on the keynote stage by Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy, who also used a social networking demo, in his case to highlight Avaya integration with Facebook within its new Aura framework. The Facebook integration combined Avaya's Intelligent Customer Routing application with audio and video for a remote shopping application. In the demo, Brett Shockley of Avaya Professional Services "friended" a consumer electronics firm, which was able to access his profile information to suggest products and give a demo based on a particular interest of his-namely, to use the cool new high-def television to display the vacation photos he'd also posted on Facebook. He was able to interact via a video link to complete the transaction.

The idea here is that enterprises that seek new ways of interacting with customers and new means of improving employee productivity wind up surviving economic downturns and coming out ahead. In setting up the demo, Kevin Kennedy described how the winning companies of the 1980s included the likes of Apple and Lotus, which, as he put it, "relentlessly sought productivity improvements."

As with Padmasree Warrior's talk, the message was that productivity enhancements aren't just a nice to have, but something that fundamentally enables a business-and its employees-to move to the next level.

Kennedy also stressed the practical value of IP communications in economic hard times too, of course. He cited a global banking customer that used Avaya to cut costs with SIP routing and trunk sharing, international calling over the company intranet and simplified application development. The result was a 70% reduction in server footprint via datacenter consolidation, $1 million savings on operational expenses, and a 65% reduction in carrier costs.

Kennedy exhorted the crowd to persevere through the difficult environment, saying, "Yes, these are tough times, but history will show us that better times follow."

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Just to wrap up with some data points from Fred Knight's conference opening. Fred cited Wainhouse Research statistics that show an IP communications transition that's very much still in progress. Just one-third of enterprises have 50% or more of their desktops converted to IP, while just under half of enterprises in the survey had rolled out IP telephony to no more than 20% of desktops.

In other words, today's opening session showed that while the infrastructure layer is still going in, the applications and business processes to leverage it are following rapidly behind, and no enterprise can afford to focus only on one, to the exclusion of the other.

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Tomorrow, Microsoft and IBM will deliver the morning keynotes, and Siemens is up in the afternoon. Our report on that will be coming to you then.