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Like its counterpart session last March in Orlando, today’s VoiceCon UC Summit made interoperability news: Pat Galvin of IBM and Eric Swift of Microsoft announced today that the two vendors had achieved inter-domain presence federation between Office Communications Server (OCS) and Lotus Sametime. You can read more on No Jitter.

There was other interesting discussion in this summit as well, most of it focused on one of the main watchwords for the week: Cost savings. Panelists from Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft, IBM, Siemens and Mitel all agreed that cost was the overriding concern for enterprises; Mark Spencer, founder and CTO of Digium noted that in open source, “The sell is all about cost savings.” He recounted the story of an unsuccessful procurement in which the customer refused to believe Digium’s open source Asterisk solution could be delivered at the specified price. That’s not an attitude he expects any customers to take these days.

The other trend that many of the executives on this panel anticipate is great use of managed and hosted services as a way to deal with capital constraints. Paul McMillan of Siemens pointed out that “easier acquisition”–i.e., lower costs–would be crucial. Another factor arguing in favor of managed services, McMillan noted, was that if enterprises go through headcount reductions next year, they could wind up owning too many user licenses; a leased service would avoid this cost.

Now, here are some VoiceCon thoughts from our good friend and partner from UCStrategies, Marty Parker:

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“On the User Forum Summit (featuring four end users), my take away summary is:

Key points by all four customers:

• VoIP is just another application. The extreme case, of course, was Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, which had a 3Com telephony application running on the IBM System i. Virgin MegaStore’s OCS/Cisco combination was a close second. Beckmann Coulter, a health care company that uses Siemens HiPath 4000, is more aligned with traditional PBX architecture, though on open servers, and the Washington State Employees Credit Union’s ShoreTel is most proprietary, though still an application.
• Phones were not the topic. Many are using softphones and mobile phones in place of or in conjunction with desktop phones. All of them talked about phones as just something the user plugs in, especially for branch offices and home workers.
• All of them said it was easy and doable. Beckman Coulter, of course, said it was “big”, but not difficult.
• All of them were able to get staffing consolidations after the transition was complete, though at Beckman Coulter that was in the branch office organizations, not in the IT team.
• Related to that was mention of the change of the vendor support model, with minimal or no “truck rolls” in the IP world.

Notable by absence of mention was the network. Not one of the customers indicated they had made a significant investment in their network just for the purpose of VoIP. (Amazing to me, given the Cisco conversations I hear.)

However, for Unified Communications applications, there was “not so much” mentioned by these customers. Each of them had some ideas of where they would go with UC, but the UC investments were not built into the VoIP transition.

As to the Keynotes, I’ll suggest these two points:

1. IBM: Intriguing demo of the ease and cleverness of the Sametime environment, enabling user creativity, but the tools were not translated into specific business applications. It left a feeling of a hard-to-justify and even harder-to-support investment, rather than a transformative, easy-to-use tool for business process streamlining. A missed opportunity, I’d say.
2. Kaiser-Permanente: A fabulous presentation of how a vision-driven enterprise can combine their strategy and their technology, including communications as integral to the processes, to make major breakthroughs for their customers (members), employees (clinicians), and their industry overall. In that context, it was interesting to note there were few boundaries on the definition of Communications — it certainly included voice and video, and also embraced IM, SMS, e-mail, web sites, call centers, kiosks, mobile phones and more. Clearly, they are packaging the technology to provide a “personalized” experience.

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To close out from the co-chairman’s point of view, I’ll admit that, given the economy, we came into this VoiceCon not knowing what to expect–tumbleweeds in the aisles of the show floor? As it turned out, attendance was strong and interest was high in the booths. Likewise, session audiences were engaged and as skeptical and probing as ever.

Attendance was especially strong in the Unified Communications sessions, which certainly isn’t new at VoiceCon, but it has led Fred Knight and I to finally conclude that UC is the core of the conference, not just a technology overlay on the voice over IP that dominated a few years ago. I don’t think anyone thinks about deploying an IP-PBX anymore without asking themselves, “Then what?” Not everyone has an answer yet, but knowing that there needs to be an answer may be what will motivate people to keep coming to VoiceCon. At least that’s what Fred and I are going to shoot for.

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 Contact Centers/CRM, Management, Market Trends, Phones & User Devices, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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