This issue of Enterprise Connect eNewsletter is sponsored by VoIP Conference & Expo 2010

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Cisco vs. Google (via Skype)?

In the new world of enterprise communications, we have the usual war of all against all, but we also have some specific pairings:

    * Cisco vs. Microsoft, to determine which can parlay its position as an enterprise-wide strategic vendor into the next-generation communications incumbency.
    * Microsoft vs. IBM, to determine which can parlay its strength at the desktop/email platform into communications leadership.
    * Avaya vs. Cisco, to determine who will take the leadership within the “legacy” IP-PBX marketplace, and to see which (if either) can leverage this position into a broader communications ascendancy going forward.

Our newest edition to the fight card is Skype vs. Google. The immediate battleground is free or sorta-free Internet calling, where Skype holds the incumbency and the current numerical edge—but where Google’s Voice/Gmail integration makes it an instant contender. But that’s only the most obvious battleground.

Skype is planning to go public in hopes of raising $100 million or so—though that IPO will be short-circuited if Cisco buys Skype, as the current rumor suggests. More about Cisco-Skype in a minute.

In Skype’s SEC filing that launched the IPO process, the company laid out its plans for how it intends to grow its business as a public company. “Our strategy has four key components,” they state: Those components are:

   1. “Continue to grow our connected and paying user base.”
   2. “Increase usage of our free and paid products and extend our relationship with our users.”
   3. “Develop new monetization models, including advertising.”
   4. “Broaden our user base to include more business users.”

Number 3 above is the one you want to pay attention to. Like a dummy, when I blogged about this filing, I focused on Number 4, because, hey, we’re all about business users. Say “business users” and my ears perk up and I come running like Angus and Foo when they hear the cat food cans being pried open. However, I should have emulated Angus in other ways; though a loving cat, his temperament and mien have been aptly characterized by my wife as “Nixonian.” I should have been more wary, suspicious even.

Because re-reading that SEC filing, it’s clear to me now that the first shot in this battle wasn’t fired last week, when Google rolled out its Skype-killer VOIP/Gmail integration. It was fired by Skype with its IPO filing. Skype wants to get more aggressively into the online advertising game. That’s Google’s turf.

Obviously, both sides have been planning their respective moves for some time. Both pretty much have to go the route they each are going. So then the question becomes, if Cisco does acquire Google, will this be the harbinger of a Cisco-Google war? That is, will all of Skype’s interests as an independent, public company automatically transfer over to Cisco? Or will Cisco not feel the need to press the online advertising revenue stream, perhaps even seeing it as a diversion from its core business? Essentially Cisco would be buying the Skype technology, customer base and market position, but not necessarily all of the business model.

This Week’s UC Weekly
Frustrating and Annoying, But Not Necessarily Bad

On a warm, muggy, late summer’s day, a not-so-young-man’s fancy turns, inevitably, to…..UC! What else??

Two recent posts on No Jitter are of particular interest. The first is by Melanie Turek, who provides important perspective about expectations for CEBP. Melanie writes, “CEBP is most advantageous when companies identify key elements of their processes and use communications to improve them in unique ways. But most organizations don’t have the time, know-how or patience to do that.”

That gets to the heart of the issue with CEBP and, by extension, to UC. It’s one thing for an enterprise to add IM or presence, even video, to the communications tool kit it provides to its employees. It’s quite another to undertake a major overhaul of key business processes and embed communications into those processes.

Read more »

This issue of Enterprise Connect eNews is sponsored by Interactive Intelligence

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Pushing Back Against the Carriers

Fred and Crystal and I have started working on the Enterprise Connect Orlando 2011 planning, which has meant a good deal of talk about what this program really should be, now that it’s called Enterprise Connect instead of VoiceCon. Over the coming weeks we’ll talk a lot about how that program is evolving, but I want to dwell for this week’s newsletter on something that we’ve observed in the past VoiceCon events.

Ten or 15 years ago, when our core audience was telecom managers, in the narrowest sense of that term—i.e., folks who bought and ran TDM PBXs—we always knew that their largest line-item expense, by far, wasn’t any sort of CPE, but rather was carrier services. Compared to those times, things are less clear nowadays; when it comes to wide area connections, technology boundaries have diffused if not actually dissolved. Most enterprise sites remain VOIP “islands” when it comes to connectivity with the external world, yet traffic internal to the enterprise can and generally is being carried among sites over WAN services that used to be considered “data” services. The emergence of SIP trunks will further integrate VOIP islands into the public IP telephony mainstream, but those SIP trunk deployments have been occurring slowly, for various technical and market reasons.

So at this point, we’re not as sure as we used to be about the precise share of the communications budget that must go to carrier services, but it’s clearly still substantial. And this brings me to the thing we have traditionally observed at VoiceCon, and that we are eager to see about in future Enterprise Connect events: Carrier services are critically important to the enterprise, yet sessions on these topics generally don’t draw as well as the CPE-oriented sessions.

This is something to watch in the future because, at least in theory, carrier services and network-based software functionality are going to be ascendant in enterprise communications in the future—this is the infamous “cloud”-based communications story, and it may not be happening yet, but everyone knows we have to keep an eye on it.

So given the wariness with which enterprise communications decision-makers have traditionally approached carrier negotiations and service elements, will our Enterprise Connect audience gravitate more toward carrier-focused content than they did in the past, during the VoiceCon era? I’m anxious to find out.

Strangely enough, it wasn’t ruminations over the Cloud that got me on this subject, but something much more mundane. On No Jitter this week, Matt Brunk wrote a short piece on something that got under his skin recently: Matt’s employees were being hit with charges from AT&T for text messaging on their iPhones. When Matt looked into the matter, he found that some of those charges were for text messages from AT&T’s own vendors, seeking to sell ring tones to Matt’s employees.

Matt has a small interconnect company, with just a handful of employees. If you’re a big multinational, think of how much money you’re spending for the privilege of having your carrier (whoever you use; I’m sure they all do it) hassle your employees with offers to sell stuff from which the carrier will get a cut. Galling. And very typical carrier behavior.

In the world of communications, you’re always going to be dealing with a carrier who’ll always be trying to work some angle to squeeze more money out of you. Pushing back on this may not be as sexy as a splashy new Cloud deployment, but I think there’s real money at stake.

This Week’s UC Weekly

Best-of-Breed Solutions

The UCStrategies team recently recorded two podcasts covering the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications. As I read through Gartner’s report, I was struck by a statement in the opening section: “Despite the emergence of complete UC portfolios, these are still in an early stage, and no vendor product adequately addresses all of an enterprise’s UC needs. As a result, a best-of-breed approach remains the surest way of ensuring adequate functionality…”

The situation Gartner described isn’t new, and it will never go away. Major vendors always have and always will have holes in their product portfolios that are best filled by best-of-breed products. These gaps almost always plugged by products from smaller companies, like the two that Gartner refers to in their “Market Overview” section: Polycom for conferencing and Applied Voice & Speech Technologies (AVST) for unified messaging (UM).

Best-of-breed vendors face two common challenges: market awareness and building relationships with the major vendors. In working with would-be best-of-breed vendors to manage those challenges over the past 20 years, I’ve found that there’s no magic, but instead it’s about the fundamentals, and that includes spending money on the right things at the right time.

Read more »

This issue of Enterprise Connect eNews is sponsored by NEC

Google, Verizon and Evil

Spoiler alert, at least for six-year-olds: There is no Santa Claus. Also, LeBron James wanted more money and thought Miami was a better place to make it than Cleveland (no judgment on my part, I’ve never been to either city!). And also, Google is a publicly-traded company whose first obligation is to its shareholders, not to you.

That’s right, “Don’t be evil” was a marketing slogan, not something a guy with a grey beard brought down from a mountain on a piece of carved stone. Besides, Vint Cerf’s facial hair is way too well-groomed for him to be mistaken for Charlton Heston.

We’ve got a couple of posts on No Jitter about the Google-Verizon Net Neutrality agreement, but we haven’t gone crazy with it. I think that’s probably because everyone else has pretty much covered the major angles, and I don’t know, maybe my bloggers and I just aren’t as emotionally invested in Google as others who write on the Web seem to be. Maybe, having been through the Telecom Act of 1996 and its subsequent depredations, we’re just totally jaded. In any event, if you want an excellent short summary of the developments, with lots of links, Michael Finneran does have that for you here, and Dave Michels offers his perspective here.

I tend to agree with Michael that this deal pretty much codifies today’s status quo: Weak FCC, a nod to landline neutrality, endorsement of wireless walled gardens. And Michael’s right that Google—even if you take them to be a champion of openness—just doesn’t have a lot of leverage at this point.

Remember, the FCC lost the Comcast BitTorrent case. Congress is a mess and really always is when it comes to passing major policy bills on an arcane subject like Internet regulation. The carriers have always been the smartest and most eager purchasers on Capitol Hill, or Capital Hill if you prefer. All that adds up to the carriers being able to do what they want to do. The only question is whether they want to press their advantage to the fullest, or try to take the edge off with some good PR. The Google deal is a good PR move by Verizon, even if nobody believes they’re doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.

For a view of some of the real pressure points in future Internet usage—at least on the wireline side—check out this blog post from last month by John Bartlett. John understands Internet traffic flow and performance as well as anyone out there, and he also knows what the wireline providers do, what they want to do, and what they don’t do in terms of Internet traffic policing.

The bottom line is that while it’s in everyone’s interest for the Internet to be open and accessible, so as to retain the network effects and innovation possibilities, the carriers are for-profit businesses and so is Google. Internet advocates aren’t well served by getting too emotionally invested in any company doing “what’s right.”

This Week’s UC Weekly

UC Is Going Mobile (and With Good Reason)

Applications are the raison d’être for unified communications, and one of the great opportunities for the technology comes in extending those applications to mobile devices. Frost & Sullivan’s Senior Industry Analyst Jeanine Sterling conducted a Webinar this past week where she discussed the results of their recent study on Premium Mobile Enterprise Applications.

The study was conducted with 300 US and Canadian enterprise customers equally divided between organizations with more than 500 employees and fewer than 500, and explored their existing and planned implementations for four premium mobile applications:
• Mobile Office: Email, PIM, intra-office communication, and collaboration.
• Mobile Workforce Management: Web-based tracking through GPS-equipped mobile handheld devices to locate and manage mobile field workers and their tasks.
• Next-Gen Fleet Management: Web-based tracking and cellular/GPS devices installed in fleet vehicles for vehicle location, geo-fencing, maps, engine diagnostics and sensors.
• Mobile Sales Force Automation: Extending corporate CRM/SFA backend systems to mobile phones for access to product, pricing, inventory, and customer data in order to perform contact management and order management functions.

Read more »

This issue of Enterprise Connect eNews is sponsored by Aspect

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Why Google Shuns Enterprise Communications
The big news last week was Google’s decision to discontinue Google Wave, its potentially-revolutionary UC service. I hate to say I told you so, especially because I didn’t tell you so—but I did kinda-sorta accidentally point in that direction.

A couple weeks back I wrote a blog entitled, “Dog Food, Kool-Aid, Google and Apple,” about a Web-based petition calling on Google to publicly release a softphone that it had been “dogfooding,” that is, rolling out to internal users. After watching a video demonstrating a leaked version of the softphone, I concluded that this was a product that nobody needed, and that it couldn’t matter less whether Google ever released it.

Google Wave may not have been in exactly the same situation—unlike the softphone, it did seem genuinely innovative and cool. But the bottom line was the same: It was a product that had no reason to exist, and it represented a foray into a market that Google didn’t need to be in.

Over at No Jitter, we have a couple of really fantastic short analysis pieces on the Google Wave decision: One by Brian Riggs, who highlights Google’s lack of commitment to the enterprise market, and one by Dave Michels, who happens upon the reason for that lack of commitment, which is something I think we should bear in mind as we think about Google in the enterprise communications market going forward.

Dave cites a quote from Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO: “Remember we make the majority of our money on advertising;” Schmidt goes on to explain why releasing and supporting the Android OS makes business sense: The mobile Web is a source of ad revenue. The corollary would be that Google Wave didn’t make business sense for Google because it couldn’t generate ad revenue.

Most big technology companies at their peak have one—and really no more than one—core mission, and everything they do either supports that core mission or gets jettisoned (or the company goes under). Cisco is in the business of selling switches and routers, and everything else they do has to drive bandwidth usage. Microsoft, when it was at its peak, was all about the Windows operating system, and everything they did was about forcing people to use Windows.

Google is in the business of selling ads. They’ve been doing lots of other things as they try to figure out what will offer more outlets for them to sell ads. Maybe they see themselves as potentially in some other business in addition to online ad sales, but they’ve already got an incumbent’s dilemma: They’re a public company that depends on ads for their revenue stream and hence their stock price. As Eric Schmidt said in the interview Dave Michels quoted, Android is a great platform for furthering this mission—and, ironically, so is Android’s chief competitor, the Apple iPhone. If Android didn’t serve this purpose, its future would be a lot less secure, no matter how successful it was as a mobile OS.

So here’s my prediction about what Google will do in the enterprise communications space: Whatever sells ads. Right now, that’s synonymous with saying that Google will not be in the enterprise communications space, because free communications supported by advertising is not something enterprises are interested in deploying.

Will that change? It might. Probably not by the choice of enterprise managers, but if, somehow, Google comes up with a successor to Wave that becomes a hit with end users and they choose to use it in droves (think Skype), enterprise managers will be forced to deal with it; they’ll have to come down somewhere in the continuum of accommodation/toleration/looking the other way. It would be a consumerization play, and we know that the enterprise immune system is defenseless against successful consumer technologies.

So when I say I don’t expect to see Google as a significant challenger in enterprise communications in the near or even mid-term, what am I missing?

This Week’s UC Weekly
Cautiously Optimistic on Social Media

An article I wrote recently for nojitter.com about social media and the contact center triggered a number of emails—some pro and other con—and so I’d like to expand on the topic and my outlook for the future.

Here’s my main thesis: While great new technologies are being introduced from many of the contact center and social software vendors, unless an enterprise’s “people and processes” are taken into account, the technology will not be implemented and utilized properly.

Case in point: CTI has been around since the late 1990’s, but in many cases it wasn’t properly integrated into the contact center processes, the people (agents) weren’t given the tools and training needed to utilize the technology properly, and the result was that the CTI market did not take off as expected.

Read more »

This issue is sponsored by ShoreTel

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Wisdom of the Cloud

Dave Michels’ lastest feature for No Jitter is entitled, “How to Cloud Telephony,” and the first thing I grappled with when I edited it was the headline: Is “cloud” the verb in that headline, as in, “how to make telephony more cloudy?” And does rendering telephony cloudier represent a promise—moving to this new architecture—or a threat, as when a particular prospect is said to be “clouding the horizon”?

Ultimately I decided to leave the ambiguity because the topic is still pretty ambiguous. “Cloud” is just like “unified communications,” in that it’s a hot term that is so vague that it truly can be defined any way the speaker chooses, and can be applied to whatever the speaker happens to be selling. It is almost empty of meaning, as far as I am concerned, and so Dave’s attempt to define the term “cloud” is valuable not for its potential to attain such an end, but for the ideas that get thrashed out in the process.

What I’ve settled on, at least for now, is that “Cloud,” at least as relates to telephony/communications, is only about make vs. buy, and not about technology at all. Dave may well disagree with me here, and probably a lot of you out there will disagree too, but to me that’s ultimately the only part of the concept that matters for enterprise decision makers. If a service provider, VAR, manufacturer, carrier, SI or anyone else comes to you and wants to provide you with certain functionality that doesn’t require you to purchase the infrastructure and software that hosts/runs that functionality, it’s cloud. And when they come to you with that offering, you don’t really care where they might be using virtualization, how many servers they’ve got, what their datacenter looks like. As long as you can get an SLA that promises metrics that meet your needs, and as long as you’re persuaded that they can meet that SLA, then it’s a pure build/buy decision.

And I think that’s one reason why these services have been slow to catch on in the communications sector, either among providers offering them or enterprises demanding them: For simple services, the build/buy decision was won by premises systems, and in more advanced, complex services, the reliability threshold hasn’t been met.

In plain-vanilla voice call control, the IP era’s clear winner was the PBX; Centrex, whether IP- or TDM-based, is effectively a non-factor any more. The build/buy equation was purely a cost calculation, and PBXs won.

But one reason that Centrex was only a cost decision is that Centrex, whatever its faults, could at least deliver on its SLAs. For the next generation of services, that reliability has not yet been proven. The question enterprise managers will have to ask themselves is what level of assurance they can have about reliability of the next-gen communications service they’re looking at. We learned first-hand, from talking to end user attendees at VoiceCon Orlando in March, that the risk is widely considered unacceptable today, and will continue to be viewed as such until proof to the contrary is offered.

Then, assuming the reliability hurdle is cleared for newer advanced services, you’ll get into the cost discussion, which will be a conversation about internal resources vs. external costs, capex vs. opex, various manifestations of vendor lock-in, and where business value is located in your enterprise.

That’s all in the realm of “public cloud.” Separately, you have the issue of “private cloud.” I would suggest that “private cloud” is a completely meaningless term. The term that Dave might use for this viewpoint of mine might be “cloud purist,” but it’s not out of devotion to some holy vision of the “cloud” that I make this distinction. Instead, it’s out of a desire to clear out some of the mess that’s been created with this term. “Cloud” is a useful way of describing the public, provider-owned infrastructure in which new types of services will live. Ideally, its internal mesh of connections and its exact contents should be as nebulous and hidden from an enterprise person’s view as the technology’s namesake. That’s why we’ve always drawn the network as a cloud—it’s a bunch of stuff that swirls together, the individual strands of its connections eventually proliferating to the point where you couldn’t make out a single strand. And yet it kept an overall coherence with definitive boundaries—demarcations, in old telco-speak.

And so if the provider earns your trust—and that’s a big if—it’s fine for you if they look like a cloud. Hopefully, your private network doesn’t look like a cloud to you.
This Week’s UC Weekly

So, What’s Not Changing?

I just returned from a west coast swing, and it included a visit with UCStrategies’ co-founder Jim Burton. Jim and I have worked together on conferences and articles for more years than either of us likes to admit, so it wasn’t all that surprising when, over a beautiful lunch with great wine, we realized we had reached the same conclusion about the current state of enterprise communications and collaboration: The breadth and depth of the changes impacting the business today exceed anything we’ve seen in our careers.

Even for an industry that prides itself on change, there’s virtually no element of the business that’s not in play. Of course, it all stems from the changes in technology—ever-more powerful chips enabling more sophisticated algorithms and processes, which in turn means that each form factor can accommodate higher and higher levels of functionality. Whether you’re talking about more bandwidth or Smartphones that can do everything but sing you a good-night lullaby, it’s all about the chips!

The irony is that chip technology has advanced to the point where the focus of the industry has shifted, from hardware to software. The evolution of communications/collaboration into a software-intensive business sparked a radical change in the cost models for both buyers and sellers, and that has led to a shake-up among the familiar vendors while offering previously unavailable paths to market to new players.

And as communications and collaboration become more tightly integrated within IT organizations, our part of the industry is being impacted by much broader market forces—from the “cloud” and video, to mobility and social networking. As the scope of our niche expands so do the interests of market giants like HP, IBM, Microsoft and Cisco, who are moving to leverage communications and collaboration to drive deeper into one another’s turf.

These dynamics form the core of our Business Communications and Collaboration Strategies Summit, which will run October 4-5 in Washington DC.

Read more »

This issue is sponsored by Business Communications Strategies Summit

The Business Communications Strategies Summit will be presented by ENTERPRISE CONNECT and NO JITTER, October 4 – 5 in Washington, DC

It’s the dawn of a new era in business communications and collaboration: New capabilities, higher expectations by management and your end users and a dramatically changing market landscape. The opportunities are enormous, and so are the challenges.

That’s why NO JITTER and ENTERPRISE CONNECT are launching a new event: The Business Communications Strategies Summit — to provide you with the information and relationships you need to build a strategic communications and collaboration plan for your enterprise. By developing a powerful vision and selecting the right vendor partners, you can drive this change and empower your users.

Request an invitation.

Enterprise Connect eNews: ShoreTel End Users Speak

I spent part of last week at ShoreTel’s partner conference in San Diego, and one thing they did was bring a few end user customers to talk with analysts about why they chose ShoreTel and their general situations regarding their communications evolutions. Several of the themes I blogged about regarding the overall ShoreTel focus also came out in this customer session.

The importance and increasing focus on international business were represented by Michael Macarthur, IT manager at Compassion Australia, a nonprofit. This is a pretty small enterprise—174 total employees over six sites—so they represent a size of user that ShoreTel has had some of its best success with. However, ShoreTel is anything but a household name in Australia, and Michael Macarthur conceded that he needed to educate his own management about the vendor he planned to use—especially since his plan was to get rid of a Cisco installment that still had a year’s depreciation on it. But the cost argument was compelling; even with writing off the Cisco PBX, Compassion Australia will save $48,000 over three years, Michael said.

He added that with the Cisco voice gear out of the network, he’s going to start phasing out Cisco data gear and replace it with less expensive HP switches.

At the other end of the spectrum, ShoreTel’s ongoing effort to move upmarket will be tested with the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society, an enterprise that provides long-term care to the elderly. Rusty Williams, VP and CIO of Evangelical Lutheran, said he has 17,000 users, which will comprise one of ShoreTel’s largest installations when the rollout is complete. The organization has 200+ locations in 24 states, and the ShoreTel system currently has been rolled out to 10 locations in four states.

It was ShoreTel’s channel partner, Black Box, that suggested the vendor to Rusty Williams, who said that, in his comparative analysis, scalability was the only area where ShoreTel didn’t place higher than the competition. He said he’s aware that he’ll be at the high end of what ShoreTel gear can do these days, but he expressed confidence, saying ShoreTel has done what they said they would and could do up to now, and so “They quickly won our trust.”

The referral from Black Box was an example of ShoreTel getting into a deal it might have been considered too small for in the past, and this “consideration rate” is the other factor that company officials kept coming back to throughout the conference. ShoreTel is planning to triple its spend on lead generation and branding next year over this year, in hopes of increasing the number of deals they’re invited into.

But it was pure serendipity that brought Colleen Jakes and the Minnesota-based TopLine Federal Credit Union in as a customer. Jakes found ShoreTel the new old-fashioned way: She Googled “how to install IP telephony systems” and came up with a white paper that happened to be from ShoreTel.

Interestingly, the big factor for Jakes was instant messaging support in ShoreTel’s Call Manager client (now renamed Communicator with the announcement of ShoreTel Release 11). The credit union’s ancient legacy email system was non-real-time, so employees had long relied on IM; she looked at Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS), but the price was out of her reach. The combination of ShoreTel’s ease of use and the IM feature made it the right choice.

Finally, another take on OCS came from Eric Simmons of Conceptus, a medical device manufacturer. Conceptus is “a big Microsoft shop” and has OCS/Exchange deployed for messaging. But Simmons balked at Microsoft’s suggestion that Conceptus could simply run its core call control through OCS. He said he asked his boss: “Do you really want to trust the revenue coming into the company” to OCS call control? Meanwhile, Simmons said he chose ShoreTel over other vendors because it integrated most easily with OCS.

Surely every vendor out there can put up a slate of satisfied customers to tell their stories. What Bernard Gutnick, senior director of product marketing at ShoreTel, did effectively was to pick customers who told the stories ShoreTel is trying to tell the market these days.

This Week’s UC Weekly
IBM’s Trojan Octopus

The Greeks used a Trojan Horse to get men inside the walls of Troy to help them win a war. Some vendors use a similar strategy to win market share by getting a ?lite? version, or part of a solution, into a customer?s hands in an effort to get them to upgrade to the complete solution later. For example, when you buy a new computer it comes with a number (often way too many) of lite applications. Some of these expire with time, others are missing features that make the product more useful. The idea is that if you use and like the product, you will upgrade to the full version or renew after a trial period.

Now, IBM has stretched the concept and created a Trojan Octopus for the SMB market (5-500 employees), with each arm going after a major market. Lotus Foundations is an all-in-one box that tightly integrates:
• Data backup: incremental, automated, unattended Real-time disaster recoverability
• Integrated Firewall, Anti-Virus & Anti-Spam
• Secure remote access
• Automated system updates
• Office Productivity tools including Symphony (Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and Office can be supported if desired)
• Email, calendar and contacts
• Central file & print management
• Unified Communications via IBM Sametime
• Voice communications and call control (IP-PBX software) from partners including Mitel, NEC, ShoreTel and others to be announced
• Vertical market applications
Read more »

This issue of the Enterprise Connect eNews is sponsored by Network Equipment Technologies

With the growing popularity of Unified Communications, businesses looking to migrate to Microsoft Office Communications Server are faced with a problem. How do they extend the useful life of their existing SIP Phones. Now, with SmartSIP from NET enterprises’ can extend existing SIP endpoints for use with Microsoft’s OCS. SmartSIP is an enterprise application built using Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API (UCMA) to address the interoperability of legacy SIP endpoints and Microsoft unified communications.

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Enterprise Connect eNews: Harnessing Social Networks

Siemens Enterprise made an announcement this week following up on their splashy VoiceCon demo of integrating Twitter with OpenScape; the new integration folds social media input into the contact center system, and is reviewed by Sheila McGee-Smith on No Jitter this week. Earlier on, we had coverage on social networking integrations from Avaya and Cisco (discussed by Brian Riggs) and Interactive Intelligence (discussed by me).

A common thread through these integrations is the value that social networking integration offers in helping enterprises respond proactively to events that may be developing among customers, which might in the past have gone unnoticed. The idea is that if a bunch of people are tweeting, for example, “iPhone” “antenna” and “problem,” you, as a customer-focused company, can hastily move to address the problem by calling a press conference in which your CEO points out how dumb your users are and how, in any event, your competitors’ products suck just as bad, before grudgingly agreeing to a trivial concession aimed at fixing the problem. Or, if you’re not Apple, I guess you’d take that data you gathered from the social networking input and actually try to fix the problem without the intermediate press conference step–and let users know you were doing so.

But of course this only gives the enterprise visibility into the world inhabited by social networking users, whose numbers may be growing, but who still don’t represent the entire customer base for most enterprises. And not all those who are on social networks use them to talk about products or services they buy or need or want. So gaining visibility into the world of social networks is just one area where such proactive campaigns can work.

One sliver of this week’s big Avaya announcement had to do with a contact center capability in which an enterprise could use speech analytics to ascertain that a certain “event” was occurring within its customer base—basically the same idea as the social networking triggers—look for certain words that recur and tie it all to CRM software that lets you go out proactively to other customers whose geographic location or other profile elements match the sources of the calls with the recurring terms. Then you can design pre-loaded proactive contacts that can be sent out to everyone who might be affected, according to the criteria you’ve set up.

Social networking is the hook in many of these contact center latest announcements, but just knowing what’s going on in the world of Twitter or other sites is not very useful. It’s being able to tie that notification into some action within your business systems that makes this a valuable function. And that’s the essence of Unified Communications.

This Week’s UC Weekly

Systems Integrators Again Key as UC Moves to the Cloud

Just over two years ago, we posted “VARs and SIs: The Arms and Legs of Unified Communications.” That forecast of the importance of VARs (Value Added Resellers) and SIs (Systems Integrators) for Unified Communications (UC) has proven to be right on target. Now, we’re seeing the logical extensions of that value in major industry moves.

The big news is that Dimension Data announced this week an agreement to be purchased by NTT for US$3.2 billion. This is in the same size category as Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx ($3.2B in 2007) and of Tandberg ($3.3B), both of which have been industry-shaping moves.

So what’s the meaning of this?

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The Role of Open Source

In his latest pricing and licensing column, Doug Carolus of N’Compass Solutions discusses Digium, Asterisk, and open source software as it relates to enterprise communications. As an aside, Doug provides the best thumbnail definition of “free” software that I’ve heard, and one that’s good to keep in mind when thinking about this category of product. Open source software is “free” in the sense of “free” speech — i.e., relatively unrestricted — as opposed to “free” in the sense of “free” stuff — i.e., it costs you nothing. Theoretically, Asterisk doesn’t cost you anything either, but as Doug demonstrates, actually obtaining it and following through all the way to deployment in an enterprise is not at all without cost.

Doug goes on to provide a detailed look at the various ways you obtain, deploy and maintain open source communications software, and suggests where the costs lie and what they can amount to. His column, together with John Malone’s ongoing work surveying the market share for open source, have got me thinking about the future of open source communications software in an environment where many people expect at least the basic functionality to become increasingly commoditized.

If voice and its related applications such as IVR become add-ons to business software and customer service applications, does that suggest that open source is likely to become more appealing to enterprises? Doug makes an interesting observation: Larger deployments of Asterisk are likely to be based on the open source software without prepackaging or customization from any Digium channel partner or other VAR/integrator: “These customers want the flexibility to build the system any way they want, not how the vendor packages it,” Doug writes. “This design flexibility is what appeals to the enterprise customers using Asterisk.”

It raises the possibility that enterprises may be increasingly drawn to open source communications software because they can more easily (and inexpensively) customize it to fit more appropriately into the business systems that are core to their processes, rather than dealing with more heavyweight, likely more proprietary communications platforms from the traditional, legacy voice/PBX providers.

On the other hand, one of the justifications for greater interest in communications via the cloud is that enterprises don’t even want to bother running the communications systems they already have or may need to retain in the future — so why would they want to bother acquiring or developing the expertise in-house that would be necessary to build a custom solution based on Asterisk or other open source communications software?

The other possibility is that this all shifts primarily into the hands of integrators/VARs, and you select this partner based on a range of considerations, among which the specific underlying communications platform they use might be one of the least important considerations. Price, prior relationship with the channel partner, channel partner expertise in the specific kind of technology integration or vertical industry might all rank higher than whether their solution is based on Asterisk, Cisco, Avaya, or whoever.

What’s intriguing, getting back to the initial point of Doug’s, is that the freedom of movement afforded by “free” software may be more important than any freedom from cost, at least for the large enterprise.

I want to close this topic with a pitch for you to help out with John Malone’s research on Open Source market share. John is continuing to build on his research and is running a survey on enterprise usage of open source software. If you have the chance, please go fill out the survey.

This Week’s UC Weekly
Is the Cisco Cius the Right Tablet for Mobile UC?

In the first of what we can expect will be many tablet plays by the IP-PBX and UC vendors, Cisco has introduced the Android-based Cius. With their fondness for cutesy two-syllable names the Cius (pronounced “SEE-us”- oh, how creative, how video-centric) might also have been called it the “Mitu” (pronounced “MEE-too”).

Once again it is Apple who is defining the mobile experience and capitalizing on the groundbreaking user interface they pioneered with the iPhone. By comparison, the Cisco Cius appears to have been developed using the “Cons” side of an iPad “Pros and Cons” chart:
• Apple goes “consumer,” so Cisco goes “enterprise.”
• Apple uses the iPhone OS, so Cisco goes Android.
• In what was probably the tipper for Cisco, the initial iPad lacks a video camera so the Cius can do video — like the next iteration of the iPad won’t have more cameras than a minivan has airbags.
I was not overly impressed with the idea of the tablet concept when the iPad was first announced, but having experienced it first hand, I am now convinced that tablets, at least “well designed” tablets, will be the next major hardware platform for enterprise users. The consumer uptake of the iPad has been monumental, but tablets will insinuate their way into the enterprise in countless ways. Yeah, the health care vertical will be part of that (okay, you’ve now heard that a thousand and ONE times), but that will be one market among thousands.

The real revolution will be seen as car salesmen, shop foremen, manufacturing supervisors and millions of knowledge workers make tablets their standard limited-input, “around-the-office” computing platform. Anyone who is carrying a laptop or a notebook (the paper kind) will soon be dropping those for a tablet. Video will likely be a minor factor, with utilization comparable to what we see on desktops, but only when the user is stationary (you can’t hold the thing steady when you’re walking).

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Cisco Cius and the Future of Proprietary Endpoints

The hot news last week was Cisco’s announcement of its Cius tablet, and after several days of post-announcement analysis, I think we’re getting a little better view of what Cius is and isn’t.

One thing that seems clear is that Cius is the first of many similar products from communications vendors. As I noted in this blog post, it looks like pretty soon a tablet form factor is going to be a check-off item for at least the largest communications vendors. HP is reportedly going to release a tablet based on the WebOS operating system that it acquired with Palm; RIM is believed to be planning a tablet, as is Avaya.

One interesting thing will be how each vendor approaches the tablet as a form factor. Cisco built Cius with the option for serving as the touch-screen to a desk-phone-centric docking station, and clearly Avaya could go this direction as well. It seems unlikely that RIM would, however — though it’s conceivable that HP could leverage its partnership with Microsoft and close relationship with Polycom to associate its tablet with a Polycom docking station and with Microsoft OCS/CS 14.

This gets us to the question of what these tablets are supposed to be for. Cisco is positioning Cius as a pure enterprise device — not a competitor to the iPad, at least for now — and is saying the target is vertical markets like health care. You can easily envision a tablet being a useful form factor for a nurse or doctor — it even kind of looks like a medical chart.

So maybe in a vertical market it makes sense to have a dedicated, enterprise device. But surely for knowledge workers with more general purpose tablet requirements, it doesn’t make any sense to make them use a vendor-specific tablet instead of the iPad that they would doubtless prefer — right? And they certainly don’t want to carry around two tablets. Marty Parker makes that case in this blog, and he’s clearly got the weight of history on his side — general-purpose computing devices have been the rule, and personal choice of mobility device is likewise becoming the trend in the enterprise.

But I want to circle back to the enterprise communications vendors — the Ciscos and Avayas. Among the companies with PBX histories, these are the first two to be clearly associated with the tablet market. The question is, will any others follow?

Marty makes a point almost in passing that I think the former-PBX vendors are going to have to consider: “The tablet is likely a transitional product. It is really hard to imagine that this user interface form factor is the ultimate, when we already see much more private and personalized wearable devices coming into the market and coming down in price.”

Cisco might be able to keep up in such a world, and HP too, but how much is it going to strain the R&D (and marketing) budgets of a Mitel or ShoreTel — and for that matter, an Avaya or Siemens Enterprise — if they have to start coming up with their own proprietary, branded end device/form factor as these devices proliferate? A phone is a phone is a phone — but as end device form factors proliferate, which vendors would really have the resources to keep up as providers of proprietary versions of these devices — assuming such a strategy were even the right one to pursue?

Put it down to another trend that’ll kill the proprietary endpoint.

This issue of eNews is sponsored by Sprint

Turn your desk phone and mobile phone into one with Sprint Mobile Integration.

Reduce costs, minimize complexity and improve worker productivity by integrating your wireline and wireless services. Learn how to effectively achieve this goal.

Respected consulting firm IDC examines the benefits, challenges and the choices available today that will allow you to successfully bridge your wireless and wireline services. Find out how you can simplify your communications strategy, save money and create a transparent environment.

Download this whitepaper now for all of the details.

Microsoft’s Mind- and Market Share

Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research knows Microsoft’s OCS/Communications Server 14 as well as anyone out there. For several years, Brent led a VoiceCon tutorial on OCS and IBM Lotus SameTime. Now that the big news is Microsoft’s third release of its flagship Unified Communications product—now just “Communications Server 14” or CS 14—we’ve got a real treat for you on No Jitter: An extended, in-depth look “under the hood” of CS 14 from Brent, who recently attended Microsoft’s Tech Ed event and got the full picture.

The article has a wealth of detail that I won’t even try to summarize; instead, I want to use this newsletter to discuss a portion of Brent’s conclusion that isn’t directly related to a review of the new product.

Every year, Wainhouse surveys its enterprise client base about its attitudes toward UC—what these users have actually deployed, but also where their thinking and preferences are about the different vendors and systems for prospective future deployment. It’s an excellent “mindshare” snapshot, and Brent includes the key chart from the 2009 edition of this survey in the conclusion of his CS 14 feature.

The 2009 findings are significant. Just about one-third of those surveyed—32%–are already using Microsoft OCS. Now, the new CS 14 release is all about making OCS a PBX replacement, and there’s no indication that prior-generation OCS users—such as those surveyed last year by Wainhouse—have made that transition. We’re talking about enterprises that have deployed OCS mostly alongside existing PBXs, and use OCS primarily for instant messaging and related UC functions.

In the Wainhouse 2009 survey, OCS far outstrips all other vendors’ UC systems—next-highest in deployments is IBM SameTime with 16%, followed by Cisco UPC at 11% and Avaya UC Suite at 9%. OCS even outpaces Skype, which has 17%, and “public IM clients” at 22%. In these two cases, it’s conceivable that there’s overlap with vendor clients—i.e., your enterprise could have deployed OCS, SameTime, or whatever, but also allow Skype or public clients. For that matter, I guess you could be using multiple vendors’ UC clients, though nobody wants to do that if they can help it.

The opportunities for vendors come in Wainhouse’s “considering/not considering” responses, and once again, Microsoft has a clear edge here. Here are the numbers:
• Microsoft: 37% considering/13% not considering
• IBM SameTime: 6% considering/51% not considering
• Cisco: 40% considering/27% not considering
• Avaya: 18% considering/48% not considering
• Skype: 7% considering/53% not considering
So clearly, this survey shows Cisco to be Microsoft’s main competitor for UC mindshare. IBM seems to be doing a respectable job holding its Lotus Notes base but shows little prospect for gaining market share in the next generation; the same could be said of Avaya. Skype seems to have maxed out.

As I noted at the top, Wainhouse is one of the best research houses out there and Brent Kelly is really a go-to guy on Microsoft’s bid to grab UC market share. Wainhouse is now conducting the 2010 version of this survey, and if you’re an enterprise, your help will make the data even better and the results even more valuable. You can go take the Wainhouse survey here; then we can all wait to see what the emergence of CS 14 has done to the marketplace.

This Week’s UC Weekly
UC and Etiquette

Technology can only do so much; sometimes, human nature has to play a role. There are times when a technology isn’t being implemented properly because of cultural or social issues, and there are many situations where we have to change our habits to accommodate new technologies.

In the early days of Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), there were examples of call center agents who received screen pops on their desktops providing them with information on the caller’s name and what they’re calling about, and the agents would answer the phone based on this information: “Hello, Mr. Jones, I see you have a problem with your credit card statement, and since you’re a platinum card holder, I’d be happy to assist you.”

Instead of rejoicing at this recognition, customers got flustered, wondering how the agent knew who they were, and the time it took for the agent to explain about screen pops eliminated the expected time savings that screen pops are supposed to provide. Some companies stopped using screen pops altogether, but generally most call center agents went back to using a neutral greeting so they wouldn’t alarm the callers.

In the world of Unified Communications, presence and IM, new etiquette rules are being developed, both formally and informally.

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