In a briefing on the newly-announced Avaya Flare "video communications device," I asked Nancy Maluso, Avaya's VP of UC Product and Solutions Marketing, why the company is so assiduously shunning the "T"-word--why isn't this just a "tablet"?
She responded that, "Fundamentally, we want to focus on the experience. We don't want to be in the hardware wars."
Which is all well and good. Nobody is eager about taking on Apple in the hardware wars. But I think Avaya (and Cisco) are going to be in those wars whether they like it or not.
As I wrote here, there's no guarantee that end users will abide by the distinction between "enterprise" and "consumer" devices. They haven't in any other device market. Flare and Cius will be compared with iPad whether Avaya and Cisco like it or not.
There are other things to consider as we start to see "enterprise tablets" emerge. For example, Marty Parker has pointed out that these tablets are going to be "bandwidth magnets"--and Marty wrote that well before Avaya made its Flare announcement, insisting that it's making a video device as opposed to merely a tablet.
I asked some Avaya folks about this bandwidth issue this morning, before the big presentation, and they said Flare's video client will use less bandwidth than other videoconferencing endpoints--600 kbps-700 kbps--and that the bandwidth requirement will fall even further in future releases, when Flare will incorporate Scalable Video Codec (SVC) technology.
Still, every time Avaya says, "video," John Chambers smiles a little bigger. It's the VOIP trap all over again--Avaya is devoting a lot of product development and marketing dollars to building products that will load up Cisco data networks. Yes, I know, Avaya has re-committed itself to Nortel's data product line. Even if they succeed at this task beyond anyone's imagining, Cisco will still be far in the lead and Avaya will still be loading up networks that are primarily Cisco-made.
When I talked with Nancy Maluso about the Flare "experience," it seemed to me that playing down the tablet aspect does work to Avaya's advantage. Tablet form factors and touch-screens and interfaces where you "push" things around on the screen with your fingers are a big part of the "cool" factor of tablets, but, especially for business, there has to be more to it than that if you're going to justify plunking down upwards of a grand per device.
And as cool and unique as users may find the Flare "experience," that word, "experience," is really just a fancy way of saying, "portal," which is itself a recasting of the term "user interface." A great portal interface is kind of table stakes, though; the real value for Avaya is in the integration to its backend Aura/ACE systems anyhow. If an integration of voice communications with business process applications, enacted through the Flare GUI, radically changes a worker's job for the better, then Avaya's got a winner.
The example that Nancy gave me for this was the integration of billing software at a law firm. Law firms are going to continue to be big users of telephony; they talk to their clients on the phone, and will continue to do so. They need to bill those phone calls correctly according to client and case, and the system for doing so now combines voice and business processes very clumsily: The lawyer has to key in code numbers for clients and cases.
In the future, if the Aura software knows who the lawyer is talking to and finds those records without the lawyer needing to do anything; and gives the lawyer an easy-to-use interface for initiating and controlling the communication--again, that's a good thing no matter what kind of device you're on.
In the end, the big guys, at least, need to have a tablet because tablets are the hot thing. I think there'll still be a question about why you should get your tablet with a Cisco or Avaya logo, and pay 1K to 2K for it, rather than getting a generic Android tablet from a Samsung or Toshiba tablet that could run Flare or a Cisco client. The corollary is that, when Avaya comes out with Flare for PC form factors, I assume they're not going to release their own special laptop; you'll run it on your ThinkPad or Dell or (presumably) Apple notebook.
Another point is that tablets are a form factor that can help the transition away from desktop phones, at least for the knowledge workers who want such a transition. A tablet can be, essentially, a snap-on/snap-off phone display.
