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Microsoft’s entry to the market has changed the way enterprise communications decision-makers look at their choices for the future, so it made sense that the software giant brought a couple of customers along with its own keynoter on the first conference day of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, for a discussion of how the enterprise should organize and prioritize for the changes that Unified Communications will bring.

Betsy Frost Webb, Microsoft’s GM for Unified Communications marketing, talked up the need to focus on the organizational impacts of UC, then brought out two enterprise end users who are living through those impacts: Michael Terrill, convergence project manager at Boeing, and Michael Keithley, CIO at Creative Artists Agency.

Terrill stressed the importance of having a steering/governance body that includes representatives from at least the following organizations: Messaging, Desktop, Security, Legal, Telecom, Data. “Make sure you really build an inclusive team,” he said. He said patience is critical on everyone’s part as they learn to deal with differences in terminology, language, acronyms and the like.

Keithley had an interesting take on the inclusion of traditional telecom folks in the new endeavor. Telecom had been part of Facilities, but made the transition to IT. Previously, for the telecom team, “Dialtone was the only thing that mattered,” he said. “We embraced them, took them under our wings.” Now, he said, those telecom people feel very much a part of the IT team, they make more money and are happier.

Both users have been pretty aggressive in their adoption of UC. Terrill laid out the following timeline that Boeing has experienced:

• 2006–IT did a market survey to consider suppliers
• 2007–Concept and feature demos
• 2008–Rollout to 200 users on Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.

Keithley noted that CAA, the well-known Hollywood talent agency, which employs 1,000, has always “tried to push the envelope on technology.” He said presence is critical feature for his company–not surprising when you picture the image of the ultra-mobile, ultra-connected Hollywood talent agent.

Terrill, for his part, said mobility and virtual workforce/home worker considerations leads him to see traditional desktop telephones as “less strategic,” and he hopes to be “investing less in those fixed-function appliances.” The one stumbling block: Those users, many of whom represent a “cultural challenge” as they remain attached to their traditional devices.

The concluding advice from both men was to have a clear vision of where you want to go with UC. Terrill’s recommendation was, “Think through what your overall strategy is,” and Keithley added, “It’s all about business value.”

Betsy Frost Webb brought out Eric Swift of Microsoft for an OCS Release 2 demo of audioconferencing, and then she concluded by rattling off some statistics: More than half of the Fortune 500 have licensed OCS; 1,000+ customers are using Roundtable, Microsoft’s snazzy 360-degree, tabletop-based videoconferencing endpoint; and Microsoft has 2,000 partners in its UC ecosystem. She also asserted that there are “companies that are bypassing an entire generation of PBX technology” to go straight to OCS. This would have been maybe the most newsworthy item of the whole speech–if she’d given any details.

***

Earlier, one of the providers of that very-much-alive generation of technology, Avaya, was on stage in the person of Charlie Giancarlo, the company’s acting CEO. Giancarlo will step up to chairman of Avaya at the end of this year and be replaced as CEO by Kevin Kennedy, who’s currently head of JDS Uniphase. So this could be the last we see of Giancarlo on the VoiceCon stage–at least for a little while.

For his speech, which opened the conference this morning, Giancarlo took the theme of “The Age of Business User” (46 in the case of this business user, but that’s another matter). Giancarlo ran through many of the points that have become standard-issue, discussing focus on the end user, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the like. He did get a ripple of recognition in the crowd when he said, “Everybody talks about end users as if they know them. But it’s usually some version of themselves.”

But the part of Giancarlo’s speech that really resonated was when he put up a slide with an obviously recent picture of a board full of stock quotations, each lit up in the appropriate color for gains and losses: Just 5 green entries wallowed in a sea of red. His point: Now is a good time to be a private company, like Avaya.

Not being subject to the whims of an ugly stock market “really allows you to focus on the fundamentals,” Giancarlo said. Avaya doesn’t have to worry about rising or falling with this quarter’s revenue or earnings announcement. Giancarlo also brought some perspective from his days at Cisco when the high-flyer fell victim (along with everyone else) to the bursting of the tech bubble–not that he was underestimating the seriousness of the current situation, but, “I’ve been through nuclear winter–it was 2000 and 2001,” he said.

Even better, Giancarlo was willing to give hard numbers on Avaya’s performance–which as a private company, they’re not obligated to do. The tallies:

• Revenue Base: $5.2 billion
• Gross Margin: 48%
• EBITDA: $772 million
• Operating Cash Flow: $436 million
• Cash Balance: $677 million

“We’re in very good financial position,” he assured the crowd.

Here’s hoping we all can say the same.

***

Tomorrow, we’ll have keynotes from IBM and from an end user, Kaiser Permanente. We’ll bring that report to your email inbox this time tomorrow.

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

Posted in Management, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications |

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