Ongoing coverage of VoiceCon San Francisco 2009
TUESDAY HIGHLIGHTS
* Nortel Customers Need Not Worry, According To VoiceCon 2009 Panel
* Check Out VoiceCon SF 2009 Photos
* VoiceCon TV: Watch live-streamed sessions and archived interviews and sessions
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
* Avaya Aims For Voice 2.0
* Users Key To Unified Communications
* Measuring Avaya Nortel Deal's Impact
* DAY ONE COVERAGE: Click here
Ongoing coverage of VoiceCon San Francisco 2009
TUESDAY HIGHLIGHTS
* Nortel Customers Need Not Worry, According To VoiceCon 2009 Panel
* Check Out VoiceCon SF 2009 Photos
* VoiceCon TV: Watch live-streamed sessions and archived interviews and sessions
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
* Avaya Aims For Voice 2.0
* Users Key To Unified Communications
* Measuring Avaya Nortel Deal's Impact
* DAY ONE COVERAGE: Click here
Dr. Alan Baratz's opening keynote today aimed to give Avaya's vision for what Baratz called "Voice 2.0," and the idea that grabbed me and a lot of other people was Baratz's take on the future of the end devices that knowledge workers will use when they're in the office.
Baratz said that 75% of the CIOs that Avaya talks to want to get rid of the desk phone, and leave workers with PCs and mobiles as their voice communications devices. Yet Avaya has also found that 75% of users say they don't want to get rid of their phones. So Avaya needs a device strategy.
That strategy, said Baratz, should involve "totally reinvent[ing] what the phone looks like, going forward." What he has in mind is a "chameleon" device that could act--in one potential iteration--as an executive terminal supporting video and conference speakerphone use as well as basic calling. Or it could be a contact center desktop or A/V controller for a conference room. The point is, the hardware would be the same, and its device identity would be based entirely on software.
This being a visionary keynote address, Baratz had a lot of ground to cover, so he moved on to discuss other aspects of Avaya's vision, much of which you can find in this blog I wrote last week previewing the talk. But I had a chance to interview him later in the day for our new VoiceCon TV video endeavor (you can view both the video of Baratz's keynote and our sit-down interview by going to the VoiceCon TV page and registering).This "chameleon" thing was what really caught my fancy and I asked him to elaborate. At this point it's really more of a concept than any actual product, but the idea makes sense: The notion is that users want to keep their phones because the phone is always on and can deliver real-time performance that PCs are not good at replicating. To illustrate one aspect of the idea, Baratz took out his iPhone during our interview and suggested that a "chameleon" device could essentially be a deskbound iPhone--that is, a computing device driven by a touch screen and, potentially, locally resident apps in addition to the capabilities that would reside in the system, but with the performance features of a phone.
Such a device wouldn't satisfy those CIOs that want to get rid of a device, Baratz conceded; if you have this "chameleon" communicator, it's not like you still don't need a PC and a mobile device. But it could at least answer the demand for a desk station that is more flexible and smarter than the average desk phone today.
VoiceCon GM Fred Knight had a couple of minutes for Q&A at the end of Baratz's keynote, and Fred homed in on a tension that was discussed in Monday's session on the future of the phone: The more functional the device, the more expensive; while the simpler the device, the easier it is to justify an investment in "lifeline"-level telephony--but is that really worth it?
If nothing else, I think it's really a great thing for the industry that Avaya is trying to pry open everyone's minds in thinking about real-time communications devices. Over the past five years, the amount of innovation and cool development in the world of mobile communications has been impressive, while the desk phone--which lots of people still have and lots of people evidently want to keep--hasn't changed at all. There's really no reason at all why that should be, other than that the industry wasn't really trying.
If Avaya and others are going to start trying to do some real innovation, maybe there is a future for the desktop communications device.
***
Next page: IBM keynote
In our second keynote of the day, IBM's Bruce Morse homed in on four key principles:
1.) Many communications modalities (not just voice)
2.) Simple, flexible and easy to use--In other words, communications systems have to do a better job in situations like, for example, the classic audioconference situation where people join sporadically over the first 5 or 10 minutes of the call and everyone is continually asking, "Who just joined?"
3.) Communications in context--Communications should be delivered right into the work environment people actually use--other applications, etc.
4.) Cost effective and pragmatic--You shouldn't have to replace infrastructures that still work; you should be able to use that money to invest in new capabilities to build on top of those existing systems.
For IBM, of course, the approach that satisfies these four requirements is embodied in Lotus Sametime Unified Telephony, which rolled out earlier this year. These principles also underlie IBM's belief that, as Morse put it, "Users Rule," and the much-vaunted "consumerization of IT" is here to stay.
Furthermore, Morse cited statistics that claim that more than $650 billion is wasted every year because people can't get information or communications that they need to make critical decisions. Not to mention the wasted productivity that you see in situations like the audioconferencing example above.
Morse's four points are pretty solid. Sametime Unified Telephony is still pretty new to the marketplace, so we have yet to see whether a middleware play like IBM's will win over enterprises that have been used to seeing providers of the underlying platforms as their strategic partners.
