The Challenge of Unifying Communications and Collaboration
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration.
Our next VoiceCon webinar (register here) poses a question that has made me think. The Webinar is titled, “Taming the Nomad–How to Accomplish More by Moving Less,” and its premise is that the ever-increasing desire for mobility may be tempered by the realities of the current energy situation. In other words, how do you plan for an environment where workers who used to take mobility for granted are now much more conscious of the amount they’re spending to drive or fly? And how can communications technology help you deal with this changing reality?
The webinar, which features Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research, proposes to examine the prospects for “giving employees a seamless, adaptive work environment” that could include:
“Working at home for 1 or more days a week without anyone knowing they are not in the office.”
“Working from the office INSTEAD of being mobile without losing the effectiveness of face-to-face communications.”
“Moving from office to home to remote office to clients sites seamlessly.”
“Integrating remote employees closer into the business processes (branch office employees in New York fielding morning calls from St. Louis and Denver before the call center in California is open).”
For the last several years at VoiceCon, we’ve taken it for granted that interest in mobility will continue its strong growth. Most of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, seems to support this conclusion. And yet, it’s equally clear that people are driving less–the U.S. Department of Transportation reported recently that Americans drove 4.7% fewer miles in June 2008 than in June 2007, and used 400 million fewer gallons of gasoline in 1Q08 than they did in 1Q07, a 1.3% percent drop. So people are cutting down on energy use.
The operative word, going forward, may not be mobility, but rather flexibility. And if that’s the case, the “productivity”-based arguments for Unified Communications may look less like a nice-to-have, and more like table stakes. Find-me/follow-me becomes a much more important capability; a UC client that looks the same on a hard phone, PC and mobile phone becomes a particularly useful thing to have; and social networking tools offer the possibility for people to collaborate in various channels depending on the type of device and the environment where the person is working at that moment.
However, such a new state of affairs would also mean that the user is accessing multiple networks characterized by varying qualities of service. If your base for everyday work is your house, VPN over broadband can re-create “office quality” pretty consistently. But if a lot more home-based users, scattered around the country, are plugging IP phones into that remote access network, is backhaul to a single VPN node going to give them the quality they need?
If the nearest company HQ is the place to go for a telepresence/video meeting, will there be enough bandwidth there? (Maybe so, if a lot of the workers now telecommute instead of going on site–unless they’re all VPN-ing into that site over the same access link, I suppose.)
Then there’s wireless. The quality of cellular voice calling is not getting better, and cell phones will continue to grow in importance–because even if people are sometimes less mobile, they’ll still want to use, as one of their baseline devices, something that permits mobility when they do need it. I don’t see the traditional digital cellular networks improving–but can VOIP over 3G and 4G deliver better quality?
The world is your campus. Good luck.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
The Challenge of Unifying Communications and Collaboration
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration.
In what is probably the first really interesting consolidation rumor I’ve heard in a long time, there are reports that Silver Lake, the private equity firm that owns Avaya, has approached Tandberg about acquiring that video-focused vendor (see my No Jitter post here: “Does Avaya’s Owner Want Tandberg?“).
This would be a complementary acquisition rather than a duplicative one; it’d be a vendor (or its owner) buying technology, rather than buying market share. In other words, it’d be the kind of acquisition Cisco does. Which happens to be a pretty successful model.
Indeed, a Silver Lake-Tandberg deal–assuming Avaya played into the scenario–would really set Avaya apart and would arguably make Avaya the most credible alternative to Cisco for enterprise communications. It’s getting harder and harder to escape the conclusion that video is moving from nice-to-have/status symbol, to critical element of a communications solution going forward (Irwin Lazar thinks so; see here: “Get Ready for Video (Finally!)“). Of course, video means lots of different things: Desktop, room, telepresence. All but desktop seem like a pretty good bet to take off for business purposes (also see this Wainhouse Research feature article: “12 Forces Shaping the Future of Videoconferencing“).
But if there’s another big winner in this scenario besides Avaya, I’d have to say that, in fact, it’s Cisco, on both the perception and the reality. In terms of perception, an Avaya-Tandberg mashup essentially validates Cisco’s big push into telepresence. I was among those who were very skeptical about telepresence; it just seemed too expensive and, frankly, over the top–with the lighting and the color design and the C-shaped table and all. But what the ensuing two years have taught us is that the telepresence room may well be the Apple interface writ large: It’s just cool, and it makes people go, “Ooooh” and “Aaaah.” Technologists discount this factor at their peril.
And of course Cisco wins big on the substance if video/telepresence rooms become a standard feature of corporate offices, because that’s gonna take a lot of bandwidth. In fact, that was one of the reasons I was skeptical of telepresence when Cisco first came out with it: It seemed like just too naked a ploy, too obvious an attempt to get people to upgrade their routers yet again. But damned if it didn’t work. Cisco just keeps figuring out ways for their competitors to sell more bandwidth and QOS for Cisco to provision.
A final aspect to watch is the competition/cooperation/partnership view of things. Cisco looms as the only real end-to-end choice, the one-stop shop. Microsoft could be this at the application layer, but you’ll always have Cisco in the network, where Microsoft is absent. The contrasting vision is, if not best-of-breed, at least multi-vendor. With the Siemens-Enterasys JV, there’s clearly an attempt to leverage new accounts for both vendors, at the same time that there’s a realization that Enterasys still needs customers beyond Siemens users, and Siemens users will have vendors besides Enterasys in their IP infrastructures.
Some enterprises may be truly all-Cisco shops, but going forward it’s likely that many will remain multi-vendor, whether intentionally or by circumstance (M&As, installed base not going away, etc.). For those enterprises, this week’s VoiceCon Webinar will address this conundrum, at least in the voice environment–it’s an hour-long discussion with Gary Audin of Delphi Inc. and Teresa Dixon of Unimax on Better Visibility and Control for Multi-Vendor Voice Systems.
Which raises a point about telepresence: If it does become business-critical, or at least something that every business has, there will be intense pressure on the vendors to make their systems interoperate, which they don’t today. Cisco may not be thrilled by that, but it will be driven by their own success.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon Webinars:
Free VoiceCon Webinar: “Better Visibility and Control for Diverse Networks”
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET
Nearly all enterprise communications networks are made up of diverse systems, from multiple vendors, managed by myriad systems and tools. If you can’t manage what you can’t measure, it’s equally true that you can’t measure what you can’t see. In this webinar, a leading analyst/consultant and a top technology vendor will describe how to bring a blurry management picture into focus.
Last week, Jim Burton wrote a piece entitled, “UC: It’s Not About Buying a New IP-PBX.” I agree with Jim, which is usually the smart thing to do, but at least to me–Jim may disagree–his mantra doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t buy a new IP-PBX. It’s just that the IP-PBX is not synonymous with Unified Communications.
I fully agree with Jim’s complaint that IP-PBX vendors are trying to grandfather their core systems into the status of “Unified Communications” equipment, because UC is the buzzword of the moment. If allowed to get away with it, vendors will call a basic PBX-voice implementation a “UC” system, with X number of end stations of “UC” installed–when in fact those end stations are what you and I would refer to as “telephones.”
And yet, that statement in itself is problematic. Is a Microsoft Tanjay phone–which Polycom, LG-Nortel and others are OEMing–not a UC station? It’s a phone, but it runs a UC client. Or what about a user who has the classic implementation that UC people have been talking about–they get a relatively simple IP phone for high-quality voice when they’re at the desk, but they also have a soft client and/or various telephony hooks into business apps on their PC. Is that person 1 UC station, or 2, or 3?
There’s no reason that you, as a customer, need to care about how vendors count UC ports, except to understand that these games will be what’s lurking behind the UC market numbers you’re likely to see coming out. Probably every vendor that answers your RFP will tell you they’re the market leader in UC, and will have some numbers or market research study to back up that claim.
But I digress. The issue is, given the fact that IP-PBX does not equal UC, should you forget about IP-PBXs?
I don’t think so. In his article, Jim cites Blair Pleasant’s list of the components of a UC solution, which are:
Presence
Messaging–IM, email, voice, video
Communications–Voice, data, video, VoIP/SIP, CTI
Conferencing–Web, audio, video
Information sharing–web chat, file sharing, document sharing
Business processes, applications, directories
Common user experience–Portal, desktop, mobility, speech
Rules engine–Business rules, priorities, and permissions for routing, notification, and other tasks
And Jim notes that this list does not include IP-PBXs. But on the other hand, you have to ask yourself: Could you run your business today only on products that are commercially available in these categories?
The answer is no. Today, the voice communications aspect of your business runs on PBX features, and those features don’t exist in a vacuum; they’re not just sitting on the phone or the PBX waiting for somebody to pick them up and play with them. They’re built into your (dare I say it) business processes, as I noted awhile back in an Information Week blog (”You’ve Already Got Communications-Enabled Business Processes” ).
As Jim suggests, the UC way of handling business processes is potentially much more efficient and cost-effective, which is why we’re having this whole migration in the first place. But we’re not there yet.
Incidentally, Allan Sulkin–who’s squared off against Jim Burton in many VoiceCon Locknote sessions over the years–has an excellent feature up on No Jitter (”PBX Evolution: Where It Was, Where It Is, & Where It’s Going“) tracing the evolution of the PBX, and the revealing thing is that Allan does see the PBX fading away and being replaced by what he calls the Federated Communications System. But he sees this being a gradual process, and one that’s as much tied to what goes on in the public network as it is to other factors.
So here’s my bottom line: Enterprises need to understand what they mean by Unified Communications, and then they need to press the vendors for specifics on whether those vendors can deliver that set of capabilities.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by AVST:
Free Webinar: “Unified Messaging: Productivity Payoff Today”
Tomorrow, Wednesday, August 6, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET
In this webinar, a leading analyst and technology provider will explain how Unified Messaging can provide a payoff in end user productivity, along with administrative and compliance benefits. Understand how to select a Unified Messaging solution that provides the functionality you need within an architecture that meets the requirements of your network–and your budget.
When you talk to the CEO of a company that makes PBX, IVR, ACD and similar kinds of software, and you talk about their competitors, you expect names like Avaya or Nortel or Cisco to come up. But when I visited the headquarters of Interactive Intelligence last week, I got a different picture.
Don Brown, Interactive Intelligence’s chairman, president and CEO, told me he wants to compete against the likes of BEA and Ultimus in providing programming tools that automate business processes, instead of just communications-enabling those processes. In Brown’s view of things, communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) “undershoots the potential” of the cluster of technologies that are typically deployed first in the contact center, which is the marketplace where Interactive Intelligence has its historic strength.
Indeed, it’s in the contact center processes that Brown sees the greatest opportunity for a real revolution driven by the new software-based systems. “The contact center remains our bread and butter, because that’s the proving grounds for applications,” he said. Specifically, he calls out the contact center’s ability to not just route communications traffic intelligently, but to assign and track work and gather results: “In the contact center, we measure people out the wazoo,” Brown said. [Editor's note: I think I crossed the Wazoo River when I drove from Chicago to Indianapolis for the meeting.]
And while other vendors focus on call control or presence as the next generation’s center of gravity, Brown said he believes the PBX is basically plumbing, and presence is a “fairly trivial function.” Unlike many other vendors, he doesn’t believe his company needs to own the presence function to own the customer.
Instead, Interactive hopes process automation will provide the compelling ROI story, and they brought in an erstwhile customer, Rick Chin, to serve as the company’s manager of solutions marketing to promote the idea. Rick implemented an Interactive Intelligence solution when he was with Pinnacle Mortgage Corp., and used it to automate processes around mortgage approvals. He said that applying contact center-like processes and measurements let Pinnacle shave time out of the process, and the reporting was superior to traditional business process automation software. “Most people who try to automate something have no way to measure it afterwards,” he said.
Rick Chin claimed that the Interactive Intelligence system generated an ROI that led the company to mothball three NEC switches that hadn’t even been paid for, because the savings with Interactive Intelligence more than made up for the ongoing payments on the switches. He also said that business units within Pinnacle started demanding the system’s capabilities for their own processes: “We had a groundswell.”
With revenues of just north of $100 million, Interactive Intelligence is still a niche player, and it doesn’t have the full range of check-off items when it comes to unified communications, or even for that matter IP telephony: Most notably, the company doesn’t make its own phones and relies on SIP phones as their telephony endpoints. For a company whose strength is in the contact center, that’s not a fatal flaw, but it seems likely to limit Interactive’s ability to repeat the Pinnacle experience on a broad scale at very large enterprises.
Also, the relationship of the vendor’s Interaction Client with Microsoft OCS is interesting. Tim Passios, director of product marketing, said Interactive has figured out how to federate its presence engine with OCS’s–a capability that IBM Lotus, among others, has been at loggerheads with Microsoft about. When I asked how they do it, the Interactive folks told me it was a “secret sauce” kind of deal.
On the other hand, Interactive relies on Microsoft for features it doesn’t support natively, such as IM and video connectivity. And yet, you can’t embed Interaction Client in Communicator or vice versa, meaning users who have both systems will have to use both clients to meet all their needs. Whether this is a big deal or not remains to be seen.
All in all, Interactive Intelligence is adding another layer to the CEBP/UC story, and providing more ammunition for those who see the contact center not just as the killer app for next-gen communications, but as the model for it.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco:
Register today for VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, to be held November 10-13, 2008, at the Moscone Center. Everyone is looking for ways to stretch the corporate budget and reduce costs. VoiceCon will analyze the new framework for enterprise communications, and show you how to have a true, bottom-line impact on how your company does business and on cutting energy and related expenses.
Brent sums it up this way: “Human latency is not the time it takes to change communication channels, it is the delay in a business process that results when human interaction or intervention is required.” Marty offers something very similar: “Human latency is the time that a business process is pending or delayed while waiting for the humans who are required to act on the process. The important thing to the enterprise and to the enterprise’s customers or constituents is that the process be completed.”
I’m good with that, and I think Brent’s explanation, highlighting the difference between shifting communications channels vs. delaying business process, reflects the larger case that people are making around Unified Communications: There’s some value in saving people time as they muddle through their day communicating with others, but it’s not large or even quantifiable enough to make enterprises buy. But speeding up business processes could make a serious impact.
However, I do think we run the risk of overstating the benefits that UC can offer in reducing human latency, and how much of a breakthrough UC would be in dealing with this problem. For example, Marty writes, “Many, many examples exist [of technology overcoming human latency]. How about IVR systems and [automatic teller machines] and web sites, so that the customer or constituent does not even have to wait? How about e-mail, voice mail or texting so that a dialogue can occur without waiting for both (or several) parties to be available for a phone call (simultaneous by definition)?” He goes on to offer more examples, which don’t include, but could, based on this list: How about the telephone, so you don’t have to wait for a letter to get there?
The point being, business telecommunications from its inception has been all about reducing human latency. So the question becomes, how big of a deal is the incremental improvement that Unified Communications promises?
Marty sort of leads the way to this answer as well, when he writes about the application of advanced communications to contact centers: “The resulting improvements in both customer satisfaction and business profitability (from cost cutting, revenue growth or both) are matters of record. Why won’t we do this in the rest of the business?”
Pre-UC, the answer to that question was simple: It cost too much and was too much work. The costs of CTI in time and money were justified in the contact center, and weren’t justified anywhere else.
We often think that whatever technology is hot now will be some sort of end-state. When I worked at a magazine that covered the public network carriers, we had occasion at some point during the mid-’90s to name ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) as “Technology of the Year.” One of the package of stories was to answer the question, “What comes after ATM?” As far as the carriers were concerned, the answer was, “Nothing.” They actually seemed to believe that ATM was the end of history for carrier technology.
So all I’m saying is, maybe UC isn’t here to put an end to “human latency.” Maybe the advantages it holds over CTI will indeed let it penetrate deeper into the enterprise (as well as further improving the contact center). But at some point, the same cost/benefit equation that stopped CTI at the outside border of the contact center will come into play with UC.
In practical terms, what I think that means is you should go into UC looking to solve a couple of discrete issues rather than thinking it’s going to transform everything.
What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum, or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair
