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Cisco Systems Announces New Innovations, Creating a New Way to Communicate
Join us at VoiceCon, Booth #401 and #409, to learn more about the latest innovations to Cisco Unified Communications. Experience new products and solutions that catapult communications to the next level-where your business moves with you, security is everywhere, and information is always available…whenever and wherever it is needed. And ask about our new solutions that empower small and medium-sized businesses, improve mobility, and enhance collaboration-making your organization more agile and effective, productive and resilient. For information on these new products and more, visit: http://www.cisco.com/go/voicecon_spring2007 or http://www.cisco.com/go/unified

Daily Update part 1 by Eric Krapf

OK, let’s not beat around the bush. Royal Dutch Shell, one of the world’s largest companies, plans to replace its Nortel IP-telephony infrastructure with Microsoft-based systems led by Office Communications Server (OCS, formerly Live Communications Server or LCS).

Now the disclaimer, which if this were a TV commercial for a contest or a cholesterol drug, would be read very quickly:

The Nortel IPT infrastructure itself is barely deployed yet-Shell has rolled out 5,000 IP-telephony stations out of 140,000 planned. That Nortel infrastructure will have to come and go before Microsoft OCS is put in charge of running the voice network. So we’re talking about a long, long-term vision.

And the migration is contingent on the Microsoft systems being up to the challenge of running a 140,000-station communications network, which attendees here will remind you is not a trivial endeavor, especially for a software company whose experience and expertise with real-time communications control is, shall we way, limited and unproven, respectively.

But still, when Johan Krebbers, group IT architect for Royal Dutch Shell, took the stage for the afternoon keynote at VoiceCon Spring 2007, something changed in this industry. A top IT decision-maker at a major enterprise made it clear that his company is migrating toward a wider vision of unified communications, and that the PBX will have a new role to play. And it’s hard not to conclude that this will be a diminished role-if things go as Microsoft plans. Which is a big “if.”

For one thing, there’s that multi-year commitment to IPT that Shell made by buying the Nortel gear. And Johan Krebbers also made it clear that he did not buy the Microsoft line that you can migrate to OCS off a base of installed TDM PBXs. In short, Shell’s view is that OCS may be coming, but the IP-PBX replacement cycle will not be pre-empted.

So the big question: Why? Why is Shell crafting such a bold vision, however long-term? Johan Krebbers says it starts with the nature of Shell’s work force and its business. It turns out that Shell is looking at a major turnover in its work force in the next few years, because of what happened to the oil industry a decade and a half ago. With oil prices at record lows, the industry shed jobs, and those who remained are now approaching retirement age. Krebbers expects that within a few years, he will be supporting a very large cohort of employees who really are those storied younger, collaboration/social-networking oriented workers whose coming has been foretold to us.

What this means is that voice is, Krebbers emphasized, one among many communications channels that Shell will have to support. And because Shell has standardized on Microsoft for its desktops and messaging, this is the communications platform on which it will go forward.

Assuming Microsoft delivers on its goals, a question that is currently unanswerable. But if it does deliver-what happens to Nortel (and, by extension, all of its competitors in today’s enterprise voice space)?

Johan Krebbers said Nortel would likely continue to provide media gateways and voice applications systems for things like contact centers. I’m not sure either Nortel or Avaya sees itself as quite that peripheral (so to speak), judging from the morning keynotes from the two vendors’ CEOs.

In an energetic speech that kicked off the day, Lou D’Ambrosio, the new boss at Avaya, recapped the communications-enabled business process announcement that I wrote about yesterday. I thought his most noteworthy line was when he called customer service “the killer app for IP-telephony.” I think he’s largely correct-neither Avaya nor any other “traditional” vendor would deny the Shell worldview that sees new forms of communications taking on importance. But voice-i.e., people talking to people-is still the best way for many in business to communicate with customers. IPT just gives you new ways to make it happen.

However, D’Ambrosio didn’t confine his vision to the IP-telephony layer. He noted that a major customer, Whirlpool, had sent a key IT executive named Brian Murphy to the show. “He wouldn’t have been here last year,” D’Ambrosio said of Murphy. “His focus is applications.”

When Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski took his turn on the stage, his message was simple: Nortel is here to stay, and is committed to the enterprise. Having delivered that message, he turned the stage over to CTO John Roese, who’s one of those really smart technical guys who’s also superb at communicating why this stuff matters. I first met John when he was CTO at Enterasys; I’d take briefings with him at Interop way back during the boom years, and I’d just soak up as much as I could in the time we had. He was one of my unacknowledged teachers as I learned about technology.

His job at VoiceCon was to describe the “mega-trends” that he sees occurring in private and public networks, and to dispel some myths that he said were out there, especially regarding Nortel’s deep partnership with Microsoft. “Some people said: ‘You’re dancing with the devil; you’re giving up your crown jewels,’” Roese said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Roese said Nortel is merely embracing a change that is inevitable as the voice industry moves toward a software model.

And he delivered on a promise to “pick fights.” Though he didn’t utter the name “Cisco,” he did coin the term, “Legacy VOIP,” and made it pretty clear who he was talking about. “Once you get to that state [of market prominence], people have an interest in defending the status quo,” he said. “A legacy player resists change.”

We’ll see what Cisco’s Charlie Giancarlo has to say about that in his Wednesday keynote.

I’ll conclude with a blatant metaphor. One of the great things about VoiceCon is that it happens in Florida at just the time of year when a Chicagoan is about to go nuts because winter won’t end. So whenever possible, I take the laptop outside to write these updates. On the grounds of the hotel, there’s always music being piped in from somewhere up above the trees. As I wrote about Johan Krebbers, they started playing that Jack Johnson song from “Curious George,” the one my daughter likes so much.

“…I want to turn the whole thing upside down…”

Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
VoiceCon Program Chair

Daily Update part 2 by by Marty Parker:
Unified Communications-A Growing Theme At VoiceCon Spring 2007

Unified Communications (UC) is increasingly in the conversation and news at VoiceCon Spring 2007. This year there are six UC breakout sessions as well as an Executive Summit in the main conference on Thursday morning. The first session, Intro to Unified Communications, drew 300 customers at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday to hear panelists from Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft. And in this morning’s keynotes, both Louis D’Ambrosio, CEO of Avaya, and John Roese, CTO of Nortel, emphasized the ways that Unified Communications is an integral part of what their companies are working on now and where they see the next big impact of this industry coming from.

The exhibits, breakouts and announcements at VoiceCon Spring are filled with evidence that UC is growing in capability and maturity. Many exhibitors are offering UC enhancements to what customers already own as well as to new systems from the major suppliers. Examples of this at VoiceCon include Litescape, Calabrio, IPcelerate, Phoneware, Radvision, Sipera, Spectralink, Unimax and many others. In addition, both Avaya and Cisco dedicated about half their total exhibit space to software development partners who enhanced their systems for specific applications or vertical markets.

The major UC system suppliers are well represented from both the IP Telephony and the Desktop/Server software categories. Cisco announced advances in mobility and in UC solutions for small businesses and Avaya announced Avaya Communications Process Manager, comprising six “applets” for communications enabled business processes (CEBP) to allow businesses to integrate communications into their business processes. Much more information is available on the supplier’s web sites, of course.

More updates will come as the week progresses and in the weeks following the exciting VoiceCon Spring 2007.

Marty Parker
Communication Perspectives and UCStrategies.com

What do you think? Drop us a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com or marty@parkerbiz.com

• VoiceCon Podcast: http://www.voicecon.com/podcast/
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• Photo Gallery: http://www.voicecon.com/photos/
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Posted in Architecture, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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