Top 10 Things to Know When Choosing A Unified Communications Solution
The advantages of today’s unified communications are growing, and there are more choices than ever when deciding on a solution. The convergence of voice, video and data communications working from a shared IP-based infrastructure allows businesses of all sizes to make calls, send messages or join video conferences.
Before you buy, read this Cisco white paper to see the top ten differentiators you should consider when deciding on a unified communications upgrade.
Sheila McGee-Smith did a No Jitter post last week on a recent study done by Cisco’s IBSG (Internet Business Solutions Group), an internal strategy consulting group. The headline and main takeaway from this study, which Sheila covered, related to the idea of the “mobile cloud,” i.e., the potential for mobility services and functionality to reside in the cloud. But Cisco also provided a wealth of data from the survey that gives a pretty detailed look at what mobile customers are doing with their smartphones, what they’d like to be doing, and how consumer uses and users differ from those devoted to business.
Just to take one interesting slice of the research, I want to look at some of the responses Cisco got when they asked about use of video on mobile phones. They surveyed both consumers and business users for the research, and found some gaps between the two classes of users, as you’d expect. One was in the desire to use video conferencing on mobiles: About half the business users said they’d be interested in this application, while less than 40% of consumers did. More popular activities were email, online shopping, and social network updates.
Asked what apps they currently use on mobiles, almost 40% of business users said they do video calls, while consumers were less than 20%. Recording and watching videos rated higher, above the 50% range, for both consumers and business users. Within the next two years, more than 80% in both categories of user expect to be recording and watching videos on their mobile phones.
Mobile video conferencing is poised for significant overall growth in this two-year time frame, according to Cisco’s survey, increasing from less than a quarter of users now to more than three-quarters in 2 years. Since the earlier question showed mobile video conferencing skewing toward a business user base, this is definitely an issue that enterprise network managers will want to keep a close eye on.
The big question for enterprise managers is: Assuming these user expectations are borne out, will this additional videoconferencing traffic affect the enterprise network? Clearly, people seem to adopt communications applications much more quickly on mobile devices than on enterprise systems—sometimes because the feature isn’t available in your decade-old PBX, sometimes because people don’t use functions that may be available even on a newer system. Will people who shun everyday use of desktop video on installed Microsoft OCS systems be the same individuals who do make video calls on their mobiles on a regular basis? And if they do make mobile video calls, will those calls mostly be to other mobile users—in other words, entirely off the enterprise grid? Or will mobile-to-desktop video calls load up enterprise networks and create problems for performance?
Finally, will people tolerate the kind of video performance on their mobiles that they tolerate when it comes to voice? I find it hard to believe that anyone will put up with video calling that looks as bad as many cellular calls sound. I know 4G is supposed to solve this, and maybe it will—maybe.
On the consumer side, we hear about the possibility for video-enabling contact centers, but the Cisco research left me with the impression that consumer real-time interactive mobile video will not take off as quickly in the near term, so this is likely to be a niche function, at most, for contact centers.
If Cisco’s survey is right, mobile interactive video is coming—the task now is to figure out what exactly that will entail.
This issue is sponsored by Follow No Jitter’s coverage of Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
No Jitter is the enterprise communications industry’s daily source for analysis and insights on the events and tech trends of the day. This week our experts dissect Google’s latest move into the communications space. Find out what it means for your enterprise.
When I first read about Cisco acquiring a small start-up called Versly, which enables collaboration within Microsoft Office documents, the word that sprang to mind was “PostPath.” That was the company whose email server could speak native protocols to Microsoft Outlook, in theory allowing Cisco to sneak into Microsoft shops with an email product for customers who didn’t want to disrupt their Outlook-based end users, but were open to an Exchange doppelganger on the server end of things.
That $215 million acquisition turned out badly for Cisco, which shut down the cloud-based email offering it was building off of PostPath, just two and a half years after announcing the purchase. The Versly deal also comes on the heels of Cisco’s abandonment of the Flip video camera product and its exit from the building energy management space. The company is struggling with focus and new market penetration in the wake of its well-publicized troubles, so the question obviously is whether this latest move makes sense in the new context.
In one way, it’s a better bet than PostPath, if for no other reason than dollars and cents; the financial terms of the Versly deal were not released, but Versly reportedly only had some nine employees, so it’s hard to believe Cisco could have paid anything like what they shelled out for PostPath. So the risk is a lot lower.
In announcing the Versly acquisition, Cisco stated:
“Versly’s software will be integrated into a variety of Cisco’s collaboration offerings including Cisco Quad, Cisco Jabber and Cisco WebEx. For example, users will be able to receive automatic notifications within Cisco Quad when the content of a document has changed, escalate from simply reviewing a document to an instant messaging session through Cisco Jabber, or initiate a web conferencing session from a presentation through Cisco WebEx.”
I think that given the likely small risk involved, Cisco was wise to make this move. Collaboration within office productivity applications is rapidly becoming table stakes for just about anyone who wants to provide either office apps or collaboration capabilities. The more people use Google Docs, or Microsoft 365 or Lync with their Office, the more it will seem ridiculous not to be able to collaborate with the author and other relevant contributors in real-time, within the document; or to be notified via other portals if changes have been made while you were logged out of the office apps.
Enterprise technology organizations who don’t want to see office productivity apps get consumerized the way so much else has been, will want to integrate their standardized office app platforms with the collaboration systems that are tying together other apps and interfaces within the enterprise. Those “standardized” office apps might be run in-house, or they might actually be a hosted cloud-based service like 365 or Google Apps; but they’ll be “internal” in the sense that their governance is overseen by the enterprise rather than the user acting as an individual.
Ultimately, what the PostPath saga reminded us was that the execution is critical, so there’s no guarantee that Cisco will make headway in the market based on its Versly acquisition. But the move was well worth making for Cisco.
This Week’s UC Weekly
Market Confusion? More like Frustration!
When I speak to vendors and even to some consultants, I often hear that customers who seek solutions in communications and collaboration are “confused,” and that the primary cause is disorder within the market. There are, according to this narrative, too many choices, and with UC creating entirely new options for architectures, lead vendors and paths to implementation, not to mention the crappy economy, customers are pulling back and laying low.
I’m not so sure. For one thing, customers aren’t monolithic. While some enterprises have, for a variety of reasons, stopped or seriously slowed spending, quite a few have continued along their communications and collaboration migration paths. Last week Frost & Sullivan reported that the enterprise telephony market had grown 14.4% in 2010 compared to 2009. Now there are some caveats with that finding — telephony is only one segment of the enterprise C&C market, 2010 was a bounce-back year and it’s far from clear that 2011 will produce similarly positive results. But Frost & Sullivan’s findings demonstrate that when enterprise purse-strings are loosened, buyers know what they want and they proceed accordingly.
The market confusion argument falls short on other levels as well. While it’s true that there are more choices today than there were just 12 or 24 months ago, most of the customers I speak with welcome that development. It gives them more leverage with the vendors, it creates more opportunities to respond to the rapidly evolving end-user requirements for UC, social apps and mobility, and in a time when career paths within IT seem impassible, it creates windows for personal development and advancement.
More importantly, what I hear from customers isn’t confusion, its frustration.
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On No Jitter, we’ve got two great posts on this confluence of events and its implications. Tom Nolle and Dave Michels draw many of the same conclusions about last week’s events: The relevance of Apple in the players’ decision-making; and the importance of the mobility and cloud trends. Dave asks a really provocative question: If the desktop PC is no longer worth HP’s effort, what does that imply about the future of the desktop phone? Is the phone more critical when there’s no PC on the desktop and you need some hard-wired communications device to be handy? Or is HP’s move just more evidence that the whole world is going mobile, via tablets and smartphones, and all desk-bound devices are doomed?
Dave wisely avoids the absolutes, saying the PC’s not reached the end of its life span. But both he and Tom Nolle point out that the tablet is rapidly displacing PCs for many good reasons. Dave points out that mobile computing platforms promise to help end users in their never-ending quest to wrest control of their computing lives from IT departments. Tom points out that applications are, in his elegant phrase, “moving cloudward,” and that tablets (or at the very least, thin-client desktops) offer the inexpensive support model that’s a natural fit for the migration to cloud-based apps.
So how are the core UC vendors to respond to the trends exemplified by Google-Motorola and HP’s latest move? Cisco, for its part, is trying to go with the flow of tablet adoption, while not risking its huge and fast-growing installed base of IP phones. In this article, I described the thinking of Cisco’s Tom Puorro, who oversees the UC Manager product portfolio. Short-term, Puorro is bullish on IP phones, but he also assured me that long-term, Cisco absolutely does not intend to, in another nice phrase, “go down swinging” as an IP phone die-hard. Cisco’s answer is Cius, the tablet that promises to restore a large measure of IT’s control over security and policy, while also providing the mobility and portability that make it easy to give the user not only a consistent interface, but literally the same interface wherever he or she happens to be.
What’s interesting is that both Tom Nolle and Dave Michels think HP is missing an opportunity by killing off webOS. In his article, Dave suggests that HP could have made webOS into a generic platform for vertical business applications—“NursePad,” as Dave dubs the potential health care-focused iteration.
Tom Nolle went one farther in an email to me following up on his column: “I do think that Avaya should buy WebOS and maybe even the whole HP tablet/phone business. If they don’t then they’re in a position of having a UC strategy that has to evolve to something beyond conventional handsets, and no real product for it to evolve to. If they bought WebOS and made it open-source, then focused its feature evolution on the ‘UC cloud’, they could give Android a run at least in the UC space.”
The UC marketplace seems to be adding dimensions as non-traditional players, devices, and approaches invade the enterprise. A complex market will only get more complex in the coming months and years.
This Week’s UC Weekly:
What’s Next for Google, UC, and Mobility?
With the importance of mobility in UC, we’re watching the developments in Google’s planned acquisition of Motorola Mobility Holdings closely. While Google’s core focus remains on advertising, which accounts for 97% of its revenue, Google is such a big fish that when it jumps in the pool the water level is going to rise. Clearly the acquisition was primarily about strengthening Google’s position in the patent wars, but from a functionality standpoint the big question is: What’s Google going to do with Motorola and what will that mean to the UC&C market?
While many of Google’s gambits outside of its core business have failed to gain traction, the Android mobile operating system has been a resounding success. Gartner’s most recent market report on worldwide mobile smartphone sales puts them in first place with 43.4%, almost twice Symbian’s second place share and far ahead of Apple, who comes in third at 18.2%. Android handsets are made by Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony Ericsson and others, as well as Motorola, and activations are coming in at a rate of 600,000 per day.
Android is one of the three mobile platforms, along with Apple’s iOS and BlackBerry, being targeted by UC&C vendors. As I’ve noted in several past posts, the UC&C smartphone clients have languished, but the introduction of tablets has brought the mobile element back into the UC&C conversation. Both Cisco’s Cius and Avaya’s Desktop Video Device use Android, and if Cisco’s vision for the Cius come to pass, high-end desk sets and tablets may soon become one and the same.
Follow No Jitter’s coverage of Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.
No Jitter is the enterprise communications industry’s daily source for analysis and insights on the events and tech trends of the day. This week our experts dissect Google’s latest move into the communications space. Find out what it means for your enterprise.
Are Users Getting UC Benefits?
Art Schoeller and Onica King of Forrester Research have a new report out about Unified Communications end user adoption, and while they paint an overall picture of a maturing market and reasonable acceptance of UC both in technology organizations and end user populations, they do highlight a few noteworthy concerns.
Forrester surveyed end users and found that only 7% were “not interested” in UC at all—which is good news–though another 28% said they were “interested, but [had] no plans” to deploy. So you’ve got better than one-third of the user base saying that UC may be interesting (or may not be), but it’s not compelling enough to drive them to plan to use it.
In a separate survey, Forrester asked end users, “How much do you agree with the following statement about unified communications: ‘We aren’t getting all of the benefits we expected’?” This year, 23% gave that a 4 or 5 on a scale of 5, i.e., they agreed or strongly agreed; that’s the exact same percentage as two years ago, and last year the figure actually spiked up to 28%. “For a maturing technology, the trend of this response should have been downward, but instead it remains frustratingly flat,” Art and Onica write in the report.
Art was kind enough to write a guest post for No Jitter, offering suggestions for ways that IT managers (or Infrastructure & Operations, I&O, in Forrester parlance) can foster end user adoption of deployed UC technologies. What’s interesting to me is that they ascribe at least some of the lack of adoption to tendencies that we might be inclined to minimize or think are no longer a factor:
“One major concern voiced by end users is that real-time presence information will pose interruptions to their everyday work (much like e-mail was viewed in its early days.) Others may cling to stubborn ‘old communication methods are enough’ mindsets and revert to existing methods of communication when they encounter UC tools that they feel are too complex. Video conferencing in particular is often met with hesitation from end users. While many may object because videoconferencing puts them on the spot when it comes to their appearance, there are also those who simply feel uncomfortable on camera.” I’ve also heard several people say that, when you’re collaborating ad hoc with people you know well, video really isn’t necessary, and can be distracting if the quality is poor.
In his No Jitter post, Art suggests that tech organizations not assume that UC functionality is widely understood before it goes into the enterprise: “I&O professionals too often make the mistake of assuming that users are well-versed in UC. Even with all of the recent trends such as instant messaging and video as a free service, users aren’t necessarily comfortable with the exact tools that they will encounter.”
All in all, I think the Forrester report and Art Schoeller’s No Jitter post provide us with a healthy reminder that in many ways UC is this generation’s answer to voice mail in its time: The benefits seem clear and the technology isn’t all that hard to adopt, but some people just take longer to get on board with it—and the business case can be tough to quantify.
Free Virtual Event: SIP Trunking: Making It Happen Wednesday, August 17
11:00 AM–5:00 PM EST
In this Virtual Event, the industry’s leading experts on carrier service offerings and SIP Trunking configuration, management and troubleshooting will offer their in-depth analysis of the challenges and solutions that will ensure you capture the much-touted savings that SIP Trunking offers, as well as all the other benefits, while avoiding the pitfalls.
Among the topics we’ll cover:
• Case Studies: Implementing SIP Trunking
• Architecting Your WAN for SIP Trunking
• SIP Interoperability: How Real?
• Managing WANs with SIP Trunks
There’s a bit of a debate brewing in this newsletter and on No Jitter about the role of SIP Trunks in the network of the future. The latest contribution comes from Marty Parker, who writes this week on No Jitter about his belief that SIP Trunks are strictly a least-cost routing play, with not much more strategic importance, especially when compared with the enterprise’s need to deploy (and fund) Unified Communications. Marty cites two important factors that he thinks have been overlooked in the enthusiastic rush to SIP Trunking, at least as a concept if not in actual implementation:
Voice traffic over carrier trunks is on the decline. The number of voice minutes per user is being constantly reduced by the newer forms of Unified Communications…
SIP Trunks are a method of connecting voice traffic to the Public Switched Telephone network, not a platform for Unified Communications. UC systems send voice and other media (both peer-to-peer and conferencing) over the private enterprise LAN and WAN data networks and over the Internet. The UC systems may use SIP protocols, but only use SIP trunks for residual PSTN traffic to parties that are not on or federated with the UC systems.
Throughout the rest of the piece, Marty’s downplaying of SIP Trunks’ importance is tied to the fact that their purpose is to connect the enterprise to the PSTN, which as Marty notes in the two points above, is on the decline. However, I’d argue that this doesn’t make them unimportant, and it doesn’t mean they don’t have a strategic role to play going forward.
For one thing, the PSTN is likely to be around for some time yet, and enterprises will need a conduit to it, especially for their contact centers. True, there are indications that contact methods are moving to online media, both email and the Web, as seen in the Avaya survey we reported on recently. But even if, as that survey suggests, the share of customers that want to use voice in their contact with you falls from 70% to 50% — that’s still a huge chunk of your business.
Furthermore, the PSTN will always be needed so long as there’s not another common platform for ubiquitous connectivity. Many people would like to develop (and equip) that new common platform, but it’s getting to the “common” and “ubiquitous” part that’s going to be challenging. How did the legacy PSTN pull it off? Simple. Only one company was allowed to build and maintain it.
SIP Trunks are important today primarily because, yes, they promise cost savings — via least-cost routing, and also likely on rate arbitrage. I say: What’s wrong with least-cost routing and rate arbitrage? If it saves you money, you probably need a reason not to do it. (Though, as I noted here, Marty is of the opinion that the cost savings are actually quite modest.)
Still, which technology is the way of the future: TDM (in the form of PRIs), or IP (in the form of SIP trunks)? Eventually, there should be no discrete “SIP trunks” — you should just have your IP trunks, connected to an Internet that’s fully enabled for multimedia traffic handling and ubiquitous addressing. Right now, we’re not there; we’re in a transition stage, because of carrier business models, legacy customer base behavior, and enterprise migration paths as well.
In the early days of IP-PBXs, when the advantages of real-time IP communications were known but not even close to being realized, I heard someone say that, “IP-PBXs are a transitional technology. And they’ll be a transitional technology for the next 15 years.” I’d suggest the same is true of SIP Trunks, give or take your choice of longer-than-expected migration time.
For some more perspectives on SIP Trunking, be sure to check out the webcasts and sponsor information at our August 17 Enterprise Connect virtual event. Speakers will include Sorell Slaymaker of Unified IT Systems, our SIP trunking Implementation guru, as well as David Rohde of TechCaliber Consulting, an expert on procurements. We’ll also have presentations from Siemens Enterprise Communications, XO Communications, Acme Packet and Sonus Networks. To check out the schedule of webcasts and to sign up for free, go here.
This Week’s UC Weekly:
The Next Phase in Communications
In October last year I wrote an article that appeared on No Jitter titled The Next Phase in Unified Communications, where I discussed what I see as the 3 phases of UC evolution.
The first phase is UC for User Productivity (UC-U), best illustrated by the click-to-communicate concept. It has taken a number of years to evolve, but most vendors offer this capability today.
Phase 2 is UC for Business Productivity (UC-B), and it is what most vendors are promoting today. This is where the big ROIs can be found–integrating communications into business processes or CEBP.
Phase 3 will be UC-Analytics (UC-A), but it has not yet reached the broad market. UC-A adds analytics and metrics to business processes. We have started to see UC-A in contact center applications, where key performance indicators (KPIs) like average time in queue and first call resolution have long been used. Over time we will see these same type of analytics spread to many communication interactions from conference calls to instant messaging.
Real-time analytics will add a new level of value to UC.
