This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by IBM:

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

This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by IBM:

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.

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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

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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.

Register now and save up to $500.

Last week’s newsletter got things cooking over on No Jitter, because my description of the concept of Human latency really didn’t do justice to the concept the way that (as it turns out) most people see it. Brent Kelly (”Brent Kelly on Human Latency“), Marty Parker (”Human Latency in UC: What Does the Business Process See?“) and Art Rosenberg (”More About Human Latency: Art Rosenberg Weighs In“) all weighed in to correct me.

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

This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco:

There has never been a better time for enterprise decision-makers to register for VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, to be held November 10-13, 2008 at the Moscone Center. The migration from standalone TDM voice networks to IP Telephony, converged networks and Unified Communications continues, and enterprise IT/telecom executives face pressure to leverage all of this in order to strengthen the business. Only VoiceCon lets you see the innovators and hear from the experts.

Register now and save up to $500.

On No Jitter this week, Zeus Kerravala makes some valid points about the whole “human latency” issue around Unified Communications (see “Mobile Unified Communications Provides More Bang For The Buck Than On The Desktop“). Human latency, for those not buzzword-current, is the time it takes for workers to move from one communications channel–say, email–to another one–say, the telephone–to respond to whatever issue they’re dealing with. UC gets touted as the way to automate these multi-channel transitions, saving time and therefore money. For example, you get an email, and can see, within the email, the correspondent’s current presence status, availability on various communications channels, and you can invoke the appropriate channel to respond without leaving the email program.

Essentially, Zeus says that at least when it comes to landline communications (as opposed to when we’re mobile), most of us have developed pretty effective workarounds for the human latency in our communications routines, so that it’s really not as inefficient to work in separate media as the UC marketers make it out to be.

But if Zeus is right, I wonder if it doesn’t cast at least a little bit of doubt on all of the UC usage scenarios and, more important, all of the scenarios for Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). The vision of CEBP says that you’ll add communications to workforce applications, scheduling apps, even production line applications for manufacturing. The classic scenario is that something goes wrong in the process and the system automatically calls the relevant people and sets up a conference call or whatever communication is needed to bring together those who have to collaborate to fix the problem.

But why is this really any different from the above-described “pure” communications integrations that UC interfaces/portals are meant to address? Any company that doesn’t already have processes–however burdened by “human latency”–to deal promptly with exceptions, probably won’t be in business very long. And the more critical the type of problem, the more likely that the relevant people have developed their own ways of overcoming the inherent human latency.

And expecting things to change relies on the assumption that everything goes off perfectly in the CEBP communications process. But CEBP will involve more complex call setups and communications among applications, and adding complexity to a process is not usually a recipe for improving its quality–especially a process like real-time communications, which is already highly sensitive to latency (the actual bits-and-bytes kind, not the soft “human” kind). And if the network happens to be running slow for any of the myriad reasons why networks run slow, and this happens just at the time your CEBP process is trying to set up a conference call to solve a critical issue that’s arisen, what are the odds that the user won’t just say, Screw it, and pick up the phone and start yelling? Now you’ve got the worst of all worlds.

I may be overstating my case somewhat here. All things being equal, the more efficient you can make communications interfaces and the more you can integrate voice into business processes, the more opportunities open up for smoother connections that actually do produce results. But I think that it’s important to realize that both UC and CEBP are certain to fail spectacularly if they run over networks that can’t deliver the performance required by real-time communications.

It’s kind of ironic: In the IP telephony generation, voice was the un-sexy application that some IP data folks didn’t care to spend a lot of time worrying about–until they had to. Now it’s the IP network that gets short shrift while everyone talks about the applications layer, blithely assuming that it will be trivial to make this stuff work right.

And it’s the IP networking experts’ turn to say: Wait a minute…

What do you think? Drop me a note at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by Psytechnics:

Join Dr Mike Hollier, CTO, Psytechnics, and John Bartlett, Principal, NetForecast, for a VoiceCon webinar covering “Practical IP Telephony Performance Management.”

Dr Hollier is a pioneer in perceptual engineering, and his expertise has created Psytechnics, a world leader in voice and video user experience management. Psytechnics’ unique capability delivers real time voice application management, measuring, reporting and diagnosing voice specific problems such as echo, noise, volume levels and speech distortion.

As we’ve begun discussing the program for November’s VoiceCon San Francisco conference, Fred Knight and I have been looking for ways we can program sessions around the issue of communications’ role in saving energy. Since energy costs appear to be on a permanent upward trend, it seems clear that enterprises will have to take a fresh look at this problem from all its various aspects, and it’s inevitable that communications technology will be the preferred solution in at least some of the situations.

To get the obvious point out of the way: This isn’t about saving the planet. There may be some specific corporate directives around “Green” initiatives whose aim is corporate image-building, but what we’re talking about here is the immediate and long-term effects that high and rising energy prices will have on enterprise IT systems and human behavior.

This breaks down into two pieces: Conserving energy in the consumption of communications technology by the enterprise; and deploying communications technology in ways that help the enterprise avoid energy consumption in its business processes.

On the first point, Gary Audin and Matt Brunk have been doing yeomen’s work at No Jitter, discussing the progress that’s being made–or not made–in bringing energy efficiency to networking. For just one example, as Matt has blogged, the Energy Star certification program is finally coming to servers and other network gear, helping buyers choose products that will use power most efficiently (see “Power Resources” and many other blogs at No Jitter–just search on Matt’s name).

However, as Gary has pointed out many times, IP telephony creates unique new challenges when it comes to power consumption, not the least of which is the fact that power demand becomes much more decentralized. Instead of main distribution frames (MDFs) and/or intermediate distribution frames (IDFs) representing a handful of easily monitored and understood locations, much of your power will be consumed at the wiring closet, where desktop switches will run power over Ethernet out to the phones (and the WLAN access points, too).

Not only are these closets often ill-equipped to properly dissipate the heat generated by these deployments–I once heard an APC exec say his company should really be in the box-fan business–there’s an even more basic problem when it comes to understanding your power consumption in the new IP telephony architecture: Chances are, the telecom or IT folks never see the bill for the power that’s consumed in the closets–that’s the bailiwick of the facilities department, which, ironically, telecom used to be a part of in many organizations.

Then there’s Part 2 of the larger equation, which is: How can enterprises deploy communications technology, and especially the new Unified Communications capabilities, to reduce energy consumption by employees throughout their day–whether it’s commuting to and from an office, or whether we’re talking about the way the enterprise moves people and materials around in the course of doing whatever the company does for a living.

Certainly this begins with telecommuting/telework, and it likely involves various forms of conferencing–audio, video and Web–but how specifically does the enterprise implement these applications most effectively? And what other applications might there be? Could communications technology be integrated with business processes to, for example, send workers to the job site or retail outlet nearest their home based on that day’s needs? If so, and if that’s a good idea, how does that change the employee’s notion of where he or she works? They become “home based,” at least in the sense that their constant is where they start from each morning, rather than where they report to.

As you can see, this is a big, complicated discussion, it’s one we’re just starting now, and it’s one we hope to engage more fully in San Francisco this November. We’ll dig into more detail in future newsletters as well.

What do you think? Drop me a note at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by VoiceCon San Francisco:

There has never been a better time for enterprise decision-makers to register for VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, to be held November 10-13, 2008, at the Moscone North Convention Center. The migration from standalone TDM voice networks to IP Telephony, converged networks and Unified Communications continues, and enterprise IT/telecom executives face pressure to leverage all of this in order to strengthen the business. Only VoiceCon lets you see the innovators and hear from the experts.

Register now and save up to $500.

On his blog, renowned security expert Bruce Schneier recently picked up on an article about a Verizon Business study (see “Insider Threat Exaggerated, Study Says“) questioning the conventional wisdom that the major security threat to enterprises comes from within, not from without. Schneier explains why this makes sense, and why it’s also a highly constricted view of the problem in any event:

“The whole insiders vs. outsiders debate has always been one of semantics more than anything else,” he writes. “If you count by attacks, there are a lot more outsider attacks, simply because there are orders of magnitude more outsider attackers. If you count incidents, the numbers tend to get closer: 75% vs. 18% in this case [the Verizon study]. And if you count damages, insiders generally come out on top–mostly because they have a lot more detailed information and can target their attacks better.”

He concludes: “Both insiders and outsiders are security risks, and you have to defend against them both. Trying to rank them isn’t all that useful.”

In practice, I’ve never heard of an enterprise behaving as if outsiders weren’t a significant threat, though I’ve certainly sat through many marketing presentations in which I was reminded that insiders were the real problem. I think everybody intuitively grasps Schneier’s last point, that making the inside/outside distinction isn’t that useful an exercise, since you know you’re going to have to protect against both. Obviously, security is an exercise in risk management, in deciding how much weight to give what kinds of threats. But I think most enterprise managers grasp the idea that a catastrophic breach can originate on either side of the demarc.

Interestingly, Verizon actually broke the data breaches into categories based on three sources of the compromise: Insiders, outsiders and partners. In the comments on Schneier’s blog, one of the report’s authors wrote that, “When you multiply likelihood and impact, partners represented the greatest risk,” and added, “we often found partner-facing controls to be non-existent.”

This is obviously a factor to keep in mind as enterprises begin dissolving the perimeter of their communications infrastructure as they move toward Unified Communications. The vision is one where the core of the communications system is accessible via a range of mobile endpoints, devices connecting over the Internet, and presence-enabled contact/buddy lists that may be extended not just to colleagues within the enterprise, but to partners as well. Given the findings of the Verizon study, UC security will be every bit as complex as security in the wider IT infrastructure.

We continue to hear that, while vulnerabilities have been reported, actual attacks specifically targeting the enterprise VOIP infrastructure remain somewhere between rare and nonexistent. Various structures remain in place today to protect the enterprise, the most effective of which is probably the continued isolation of IP telephony into site-based islands connected over dedicated carrier services. As long as this continues to be the case, the broader issue of UC security may not be critical.

But part of the emerging UC discipline within enterprise organizations is the growing realization that specialists from virtually every division of IT must come together to understand how the integration of communications and business applications, running over a converged IP network, will affect the many stakeholders in the process. This inter-disciplinary, inter-departmental effort will have to extend to security, and will have to be more comprehensive than the current threat picture might suggest.

What do you think? Drop me a note at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

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• DataComm II: Switching & Routing Technologies for Converged Networks
• Voice over IP and IP Telephony
• VOIP II: Deploying and Best Practices in the Enterprise
• Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications
• Managing and Controlling the IT Power Bill
• Cost Control of Wired and Wireless Networks

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Fred Knight and I had the opportunity to travel down to Huntsville, AL, last week to visit with the folks at Digium, the company founded by Mark Spencer, creator of the Asterisk open source PBX. What we found was a company that appears to be making the familiar tech industry passage from a young startup focused on breaking new ground, to VC-funded company on the IPO track, focused on execution and building its market.

Digium has always had lots of buzz, largely thanks to Mark Spencer’s high profile, enthusiasm and energy in advocating for open source in the communications world. In classic startup form, the company has brought in a team of industry veterans to push Digium to the next level. Many of these leaders, including CEO Danny Windham and worldwide sales VP Steve Harvey, moved over from Adtran, whose HQ is just across Huntsville’s industrial park from Digium. Another exec, product marketing VP Bill Miller, is a veteran of Fujitsu, 3Com and other venerable networking and telecom companies.

What I wasn’t really aware of was how solid a footing Digium has built: It’s on its 26th consecutive quarter of profitable growth, driven primarily by analog and digital gateway boards, which account for 70% of the company’s revenue. In fact, up until August 2006, all of its revenues were tied to boards, according to Bill Miller, who admitted, “The challenge has been for us to monetize Asterisk.”

Things picked up in a big way last year. The company launched its first Asterisk appliance; concluded three OEM deals (3Com plus two companies not publicly named); and acquired Switchvox, a San Diego-based firm that had built a 400-station-capable PBX on Asterisk. According to Bill Miller, the Switchvox acquisition and product is what will boost Digium out of the low-end SMB market into larger deployments. Digium also launched 24×7 worldwide subscription support services last year.

The company touts its growing customer base, recently announcing that its 4 millionth port of Asterisk was shipped to Wisconsin-based Ashley Furniture, which claims to be the #1 selling brand of home furniture in North America. Among its other installations is a 1,200-seat contact center for Aheeva (a call center/CTI software vendor) which has 4 sites, 28 T1s, 650 lines and 10 Asterisk servers, handling a peak of 160K calls in one day, 55K calls on average. Digium is working on scaling its Business Edition Software’s capabilities, and in the next (4.0) release will start to build some of the clustering capabilities needed to support growing deployment sizes, Miller said.

Cost is still the major appeal of Asterisk, according to Bill Miller, who said ROI for Digium’s AA50 Asterisk appliance or its Business Edition software package can be “months.” SMBs, he said, “don’t care about Asterisk”-that is, they’re not open source advocates-they just want an appliance that works.

The other big advantage is flexibility. Customers can work with their VARs (Digium sells only through the channel) to customize the software in ways that would be much more expensive and time-consuming with legacy vendors’ products, Miller said.

Digium/Asterisk may not be a PBX for the large enterprise today, and if Unified Communications had never come along, it might have continued to show up as nothing more than a science project on the part of a few motivated hobbyists within enterprise IT/telecom shops. But UC is beginning to cause enterprises to think differently (to coin a phrase) about phone systems. I recently spoke with Blake Baxter of Dimension Data, who said that in some client enterprises, UC is “pulling” IP telephony instead of vice versa. This tracks with the general perception that enterprises might want to first find the communications applications that will add value, then build IP telephony out where it enables these apps. In a context like that, call control can become something of a wild card. And so could Digium/Asterisk.

The venture capital firm Matrix Partners invested $13 million in Digium in 2006, and Adtran also holds a 13% stake in Digium. Now isn’t exactly the time for any startup to be bandying about specific plans for an IPO, but that’s clearly where Digium will be positioned in the medium term-which might just coincide with the time when the market rebounds.

What do you think? Drop me a note at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

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Over on NoJitter.com, Marty Parker and Fred Knight have had an interesting back-and-forth on the issue of whether users are confused about the value of Unified Communications, whether they’re deploying UC, and generally how big a deal UC is today. Marty is bullish; Fred more skeptical.

Much of their debate centers on a Forrester Research report on enterprise decision-makers’ attitudes about a range of communications technologies, from WAN services to VOIP to UC. I’ve dug through the Forrester report and could easily pull out data to support either Fred’s or Marty’s position. So I’ll leave them to battle it out and call attention to one other question from Forrester’s survey of enterprise decision-makers.

Forrester asked, “How important to your organization is each of the following features of Unified Communications? (very important/somewhat important/not important/don’t know)”. And here are the percentage results, in the same descending order of importance as in the parenthesis from the previous sentence:

• Integrated voice, email and IM: 58/38/3/0
• Audio, Web and videoconferencing capabilities: 62/33/5/0
• Integration with collaboration software: 42/49/8/2
• Presence: 38/48/14/0
• Business telephone features on mobile devices: 37/43/18/2
• Call control from the desktop: 25/51/23/1
• Calendars that can be accessed and updated by voice commands: 21/40/38/1

I’m not at all surprised by the position that conferencing took in the survey. Audio conferencing-i.e., getting rid of expensive conferencing services–is the killer app for VOIP/UC cost justification, and videoconferencing is surging in the enterprise. I am a little surprised by the high importance that the respondents placed on integrating all communications channels, primarily because the payback on such integration is extremely soft.

And yet, I was talking to Allan Sulkin not long ago, and Allan asked me, “When was the last time somebody said: I need a new voice mail system; I’ve got to go do an ROI?” It looks to me like this survey is telling us that integrated UC portals like Microsoft Communicator and Lotus Sametime are reaching the same level of acceptance, at least in the minds of IT decision makers. Which means that the UC story has been very good news for Microsoft and IBM, less so for others.

At the same time, the survey respondents seem to have a somewhat constrained-or maybe less grandiose-vision of the world than do the vendors. There’s decidedly less interest in Presence, even though vendors seem to agree that Presence is the heart of UC. All you ever hear about is how you’ve got to know what your co-workers are up to so that you can contact them the right way on the first try.

This survey seems to suggest otherwise. The respondents clearly grasp the idea that unifying a worker’s communications into a single interface will make that worker more productive. They believe that collaboration tools and integration will likewise help end users do their jobs. But fewer of them see the importance of dictating too carefully exactly how those employees collaborate.

Another thing may be that there’s more resistance out there than we realize to the notion that people should be findable at all times-even if the individual gets to configure his or her own findability. Communications professionals and power users may love the idea of Presence, but maybe the same IT folks see less evidence of demand for it among their broader workforce.

In closing, I was also kind of surprised by the relatively low position given to business-feature-enabling of mobile devices. Fixed-mobile convergence clearly is a hot topic in the industry, but if it isn’t so important to port business telephone features onto mobile devices, does this mean that mobility isn’t as critical as we thought? Or does it mean that, for now, Blackberry email and plain-vanilla cellular voice are good enough for the mobile worker?

What do you think? Drop me a note at ekrapf@techweb.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair