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At VoiceCon San Francisco last week, I had a chance to speak with Jim Burton about his role as intermediary in the talks between Microsoft and IBM on presence federation. Thinking about that conversation now, I kind of wonder if maybe Jim shouldn’t put in his name for Secretary of State in the new administration. Sounds like the negotiations were as complex and delicate as a lot of international diplomacy.

As we reported on No Jitter last week, Jim’s efforts ultimately succeeded, and Microsoft and IBM now say they are about to make good on their promise to implement inter-domain presence federation between Office Communications Server (OCS) and Lotus Sametime. The work does not cover federation between Microsoft’s MSN instant messaging and Sametime; MSN is a different division of Microsoft and this would have complicated the process of negotiating interoperability, beyond where it could have gotten done in the seven months the vendors had between VoiceCon Orlando, when they made their commitment, and VoiceCon San Francisco, where they announced success.

I wrote a feature earlier this year about the many obstacles that stand in the way of real, meaningful interoperability in enterprise communications, and last week’s Microsoft-IBM announcement addresses just a fraction of this universe. Inter-domain federation can, as the name suggests, link two separate enterprises, which will be useful for the many vendor and partner relationships that large enterprises rely on. But the real critical piece, and the bigger technical challenge, is intra-enterprise federation.

And in that area, all eyes are, once again, on Microsoft. During the VoiceCon session where the inter-domain agreement was announced, IBM’s Pat Galvin made it clear that he doesn’t feel the job is done. “As far as IBM is concerned,” Galvin said, “this process is only half complete.

“I hope that Microsoft starts participating in the intra-domain [work],” Galvin concluded.

IBM, together with Cisco, has taken the lead on trying to solve intra-domain federation, and we were fortunate to have Jonathan Rosenbaum of Cisco on the VoiceCon UC panel. Jonathan, along with Avshalom Houri of IBM, was one of the original co-authors of the IETF draft on intra-domain federation (available here http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-simple-intradomain-federation-02 ). Not surprisingly, Jonathan joined the call for Microsoft to be more active in the intra-domain effort–though Microsoft’s Eric Swift, probably wisely, refrained from shaking any more hands after the initial introductions were over.

I’m beginning to wonder, however, if the key isn’t interoperability, but interworking. Here’s what I see as the difference: Interoperability would be the ability to plug any SIP/IP communications device into any other, and have them work together. That’d be terrific, of course, but for all the reasons I outlined in the feature article referenced above, it’s more complicated than just presence federation–and presence federation is pretty complicated, itself.

Interworking would be at once a more modest and potentially more useful goal. For the foreseeable future, we’re going to be communicating over diverse overlay networks–not just a mix of TDM- and IP-based communications in the enterprise, but more importantly, public cellular as well. If an enterprise could tie together all of these diverse components, it could exercise greater control over its cellular costs (and assets, such as phone numbers) and provide more efficient communications to its mobile workforce. The core of such an interworked systems is…well, it’s a PBX, probably an IP-PBX.

This isn’t as fancy as a presence-enabled, business process-integrated, unified communications system, but I’d argue it has more practical value in the near term. It helps you take costs out your network and serve the immediate needs of your workforce. It lets you slow-roll your TDM-to-IP migration in a tight investment climate, while still opening up collaborative technologies that also save on costs, such as conferencing in all its media.

So interoperability is good if you can get it. Interworking is something you need–and can get.

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

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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:

***

“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.

***

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

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Phil Fasano was well positioned to give a business-level view of communications technology in his VoiceCon San Francisco keynote this morning. Fasano is senior VP and CIO at Kaiser Permanente, and he said at the outset that “information technology is the differentiator” in the health care market, where Kaiser uses technology to drive prevention, which in turn is the engine of cost reduction for health care providers.

Prevention is the “single focus” in everything Kaiser does, and by automating all patient records, the company was able to use this massive online resource as the source for communications that go out proactively, reminding patients about needs around prescription refills, follow-up, etc.

The transition to IP communications did involve some concrete technology transition and attendant cost savings. Namely, Kaiser went from:

• 450 PBXs to 60
• 250 messaging systems to 60
• 150 wireless voice systems to 0
• 150 IVR systems to 15
• 120 ACDs to 15

The result was a 7%-10% savings on telephony costs.

During Q&A, Fred Knight asked Fasano how he built the IT organization for this effort. Fasno responded that Kaiser’s 6,000-strong IT organization includes Business Information Officers who are “absolutely aligned with line-of-business officers,” one of the most direct such associations we’ve seen among VoiceCon end user speakers. As for the bulk of the IT staff, much of these are “focused entirely on the technology,” and an ongoing effort is made to keep them focused on members’ needs and how members want to interact with the company.

Finally, Fasano said Kaiser tries as much as possible to standardize to as few vendors as possible, adding, “The price tag of variability is high.” When Fred Knight harkened back to this statement during Q&A, and asked if it was at odds with the notion that Unified Communications requires multiple vendors, since “no one can do it all,” Fasano said it’s prudent to spread your risk by avoiding reliance on a single vendor. But, he added, he believes Kaiser has too many vendors in some areas, and his goal is to consolidate down to 2-3 major vendors in each major technology area.

***

This morning’s vendor keynote was provided by Bruce Morse of IBM, whose most compelling demo came when his demo team built “voice mashups” on the fly. This was accomplished in a Web Services environment where IBM was able to take feeds from anything from Domino servers to Excel spreadsheets to create a mashup in which the user can more effectively track developments with a customer. Specifically, the scenario featured a news feed customized with the names of companies, who in the demo are those that the end user sells his product to. The user then adds to the mashup a spreadsheet where the user would have his contacts for each of these companies, as well as a link to the directory in which their phone numbers are stored.

The result is a mashup where the user clicks on a piece of news about the customer company–presumably one that suggests a sales opportunity–and clicking on the news feed brings up the information for the contact at that company.

The context for this demo was in Bruce Morse’s presentation of IBM as a company that can enable communications and collaboration that yields business value. In addition to the mashup demo, Morse showed capabilities within Lotus Sametime that let users share screens and do screen grabs within their Instant Messaging interface, and others that let users find colleagues who are “experts” in particular areas by linking into Lotus Connections social software. Being able to link into Connections from the IM interface lets the user find out not only how to reach someone in a contact list, but what communities that person belongs to in the Connections system, which may give an idea of where that person’s expertise lies.

***

So we wrap up tomorrow with panels on UC Architectures and Mobility. We’ve been fortunate to see strong traffic on the show floor, which we hope is a sign that, as difficult as times are, enterprise decision-makers are committed to keeping up with market developments and understanding what’s out there.

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

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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

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The economic news seems all bad these days, and Nortel’s announcement of 1,300 layoffs and a $3.4 billion quarterly loss hung over the opening of this year’s show like a San Francisco fog. Or at least we thought it would. What we’re finding, however, is that the crowd here–which we’re expecting will equal last year’s San Francisco event–is all business.

Judging by the breakdown in morning tutorial attendance, the big concerns among our attendees haven’t changed: People gravitated to Brent Kelly’s updated session comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 with IBM Lotus Sametime; they also went for David Bryan’s SIP Tutorial, which once again got great reviews; and our new tutorial, with Nemertes Research examining business cases for IP telephony and Unified Communications, was another strong draw. Somewhat surprisingly, we had a light crowd for Gary Audin’s tutorial on saving money for the enterprise by saving power. My take is that, while this is a worthy topic and Gary is a perennial favorite among speakers at VoiceCon, the subject–or at least the need for knowledge on the subject–still isn’t as urgent for this group as our core technology topics remain.

I also had a chance to do some podcast interviews today, including a chat with Jim McQuaid of NetQoS, a management software vendor which, as the name suggests, provides reporting on voice quality in an IP telephony network. Mostly, when people talk about voice quality in IP telephony, it’s of the “Can you hear me now?” dilemma: Just how lousy does the other person sound, and how lousy might you sound? But as Jim and I discussed, there’s another whole issue around quality for telephony, and that’s the question of time to dialtone, post-dial delay and the like. This is another element of the frustration factor, and one that NetQoS can report on.

“The expectations remain those that were set up by the Bell System,” Jim said. We’re willing to wait somewhere between 5 and 12 seconds, “and then we think: This is not working.”

“Human impatience,” Jim observed, “is a renewable resource.”

Tomorrow morning we’ll start the main conference program, opening with a keynote from Charlie Giancarlo, interim and, in fact, outgoing CEO of Avaya. Charlie was named interim CEO earlier this year when Lou D’Ambrosio stepped down for health reasons, and Charlie made it clear that Avaya would hire a permanent replacement. That individual, Kevin Kennedy, currently CEO of JDS Uniphase, has now been hired, and so tomorrow will represent Charlie Giancarlo’s first and last keynote as Avaya CEO. Charlie will be followed by Betsy Frost Webb, GM for Unified Communications Marketing at Microsoft–who we can expect to offer further information on the Office Communications Server Release 2 that was announced last month at VoiceCon Amsterdam.

We’ll follow up with a complete report 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

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My fears about planning VoiceCon Orlando 2009 before we even get to VoiceCon San Francisco–that this might cause some sort of rip in the space-time continuum–appear to be unfounded, because Fred Knight and I are already working on the program for next March’s event even as we pack our bags for next week on the West Coast. And so far the only thing to disappear has been the entire contents of my laptop’s hard drive–but that’s another story.

One thing we think we know about the enterprise communications industry in 2009 is that the buying environment will be challenging, to put it mildly. At the same time, we think there will be companies seeking to capitalize on the opportunities that 2009 will present.

Fred and I had some preliminary discussions with our friends at UCStrategies last week, and all of these folks–Jim Burton, Marty Parker, Blair Pleasant and Don Van Doren–agreed that 2009 may see the industry’s biggest players looking to gobble up market share at the expense of weaker competitors.

And ironically, one company that looks well placed to do this is Avaya. If you go to www.nojitter.com, you’ll see multiple posts summarizing Avaya’s recent analyst conference, where Avaya announced some executive changes and a new, improved approach to channel relationships and sales. The personnel moves culminated in the announcement last Friday of a new CEO for Avaya, Kevin Kennedy, who led a turnaround at JDS Uniphase and also was a colleague of Charlie Giancarlo at Cisco. Giancarlo has been serving as Avaya’s interim president and CEO, and will continue as chairman after Kennedy takes over.

Another factor that positions Avaya well, at least relative to many of the other legacy players, is its private equity ownership. Silver Lake Partners and TPG, which together bought Avaya last year, will be able to fund Avaya’s initiatives to regain market share–even if such efforts come, as they so often do in this kind of circumstance, at the expense of job cuts.

But getting back to VoiceCon Orlando, I think one thing Fred and I are searching for as we build the program is whether there are any analogues to the Avaya situation within enterprises. Can an enterprise really find a way to implement Unified Communications that gives it a business edge at a time when others are retrenching? The assumption is: only if that enterprise can make an ROI case that stands on its own, based on cost savings within the communications budget.

So we’re approaching Orlando with a fresh approach to the program’s structure: We’ll be devoting a whole track to the question of How to Save Money with or on…. Each session within that track will focus on a different way of completing that sentence: How to Save Money with or On Video; How to Save Money with or on Telecom Services; How to Save Money with or on Wireless/Mobility; etc.

But we’re also going to have a track on Generating Revenue/Transforming the Business. That’s where all of this is supposed to be headed anyway, and we feel that if technology is adopted with a tunnel-vision focus on cost savings, this opportunity could be missed.

I expect most of the talk in San Francisco next week will follow these same lines, and the sessions there, and the show floor conversations, can’t help but touch on the situation we find ourselves in. Nobody’s under any illusion about the pressure that budgets are under, but communications will always be a mission-critical need for business, and when the budget picture thaws, you’ll want to be ready to move.

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

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OK, I’ll just ‘fess up to this one: When we designed the VoiceCon San Francisco tutorials on “Cutting the Corporate Energy Bill,” we didn’t think a gallon of gas would ever see $2.50 again, or that it’d wind up being cheaper for me to fly from Chicago to the West Coast in November than it was to fly to New York in September. Of course, on the other hand, when we designed those sessions, we didn’t imagine that file photos of Depression-era bread lines would become a staple of the stock-image industry.

So in the current economic crisis, saving money is as relevant as ever. But has the notion of looking for savings within the energy bill lost some of its urgency?

In the early days of the financial crisis, Tom Nolle wrote on No Jitter: “This year, 39% of CIOs say that their primary goal is productivity enhancement, and my numbers say that will rise to 43% in 2009 and to 46% in 2010. It beats out ‘modernization’ or ’sales increases’ or even ‘cost reduction’ by an increasing margin.”

By that logic, Unified Communications–or maybe Communications-Enabled Business Process, if you’re slicing your buzzwords thin–should always be the focus for IT decision-makers. The challenge with that, however, is that cost reductions are predictable (assuming your projections are accurate and you execute your deployment in accordance with those projections); productivity enhancements can be less certain.

So cost reduction will remain important. The question is whether energy costs are a productive target for cost reduction efforts, given how volatile these costs have turned out to be: Should you invest significant dollars in energy-saving technology if the cost of energy might continue to fall in the short or even medium term?

I think energy efficiency still makes sense because even if prices fluctuate, your total energy consumption for IT is likely to be on an unbroken upward trend (leaving out, of course, the impact if you wind up closing facilities due to larger economic factors). Every new IP phone you put in place will increase your demand for Power over Ethernet, and every Power over Ethernet switch you put into a wiring closet will increase your need to cool that closet, potentially with air conditioning systems that will, in turn, suck more power. Virtualization and datacenter consolidation strategies may be one way to reduce powering needs, but those strategies will be adopted in a much larger context than just energy cost savings.

Meanwhile, the other half of our VoiceCon energy costs tutorial will deal with the ways in which technology can drive energy conservation by enabling remote work/collaboration. Like virtualization, remote work is a larger trend that will continue to happen irrespective of its implications for energy consumption. It’s more likely to be driven by a grassroots push for energy conservation–i.e., employees who don’t want to commute–than it will occur via top-down fiat.

Remote work isn’t just attractive here in the U.S., either. At our recent VoiceCon Amsterdam event, Robert Zeitz, an IT executive with Hapag-Lloyd cruise line, described how his company is using the Mitel-Sun Ray thin client approach, and having implemented this system in its headquarters, is now looking to integrate it in a teleworker solution for home-based workers.

Finally, advocates of telepresence have consistently said that the real appeal of the high-end video technology wasn’t travel avoidance, but rather better collaboration. Again, the larger economic forces may now be driving travel avoidance, for reasons that have nothing to do with energy costs specifically. And it’s probably true that telepresence’s main benefit is in enabling international collaboration, where travel isn’t just expensive but time-consuming; telepresence lets you strengthen international relationships by having more face-time with people you realistically just wouldn’t get to meet with as often.

So I guess the bottom line is that even if energy costs have been coming down, enterprise communications departments might be well advised to behave as if they weren’t.

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

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I blogged briefly on Johan Krebbers’ keynote address at last week’s VoiceCon Amsterdam; I focused on the issue of information sharing and collaboration at Royal Dutch Shell, but now that I’ve had some time to digest Krebbers’ talk (video here), I want to revisit some of the core communications issues.

The big headline out of the speech was Krebbers’ assertion that at Shell, voice is no more important than the other peer-to-peer real-time media. In his talk, Krebbers elaborated, saying that within Shell today, if you travel, you’re encouraged to use a softphone to save on international dialing; the expectation is that you’ll become comfortable enough with the softphone that you’ll be willing to use it when you’re in the office as well. The plan is to get to the point where it’s, “Hard phone only if really needed.” Which is why, at the bottom of one of Krebbers’ slides, there’s a hard phone with a big red X over it.

That said, Krebbers added that there are locations which probably will have hard phones for the long term–places like refineries and chemical plants where the need is for a single-function voice device.

Krebbers gave some other hints about the environment in which communications is developing within Shell. He noted that his network serves 150,000 clients and 165,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes in more than 130 countries. Everybody in Shell has the same desktop interface for peer-to-peer communications, an interface Shell calls My Workspace, he said. From My Workspace, users can access voice, video, instant messaging both internally and externally, and presence management. Notably, Krebbers said presence isn’t something that Shell’s IT leadership actively “sells” to users–instead, the users just receive the capability and use it as their work demands. In practice, this capability is “very much appreciated” by the users, he added.

The striking thing about Krebbers’ speech–both the slides and the actual talk he delivered in Amsterdam–is its contrasts with his March 2007 VoiceCon Orlando keynote. At the earlier keynote, given just months after Microsoft’s announcement of Office Communications Server, Krebbers was more circumspect when it came to Shell’s OCS plans; he gave a fair amount of emphasis to Shell’s use of Nortel IP-PBX technology to backstop OCS in delivery of voice functionality.

In contrast, the word “Nortel” doesn’t appear once in Krebbers’ Amsterdam slides, and he only mentioned the company once, in passing, during his talk last week–and even then, it was to note that Shell has “some Nortel, some Cisco” IP-PBXs in its network. He was clearly behind OCS as Shell’s voice platform of the future, saying that, while it’s true OCS doesn’t offer all the voice capabilities the incumbents’ products do, the OCS feature set is good enough for many of Shell’s users.

Together with the OCS Release 2 announcement in Amsterdam last week, this perspective has got to be a blow to Nortel. With Release 2, OCS can do more robust conferencing natively, meaning there’s one fewer reason to add Nortel’s MCS5100 to a UC deployment. Late last year, Nortel split the conferencing bridge function out of the broader MCS5100 product capabilities, enabling users who planned for OCS at the desktop to still implement some Nortel functions, namely robust conferencing. Now, OCS R2 seems set to pre-empt that requirement for the Nortel MMC 5.0 conferencing platform. (I blogged about MMC 5.0 here.)

Johan Krebbers concluded his Amsterdam talk with the statement that, while Shell hasn’t solved all of its challenges on the way to its new communications environment, IT execs believe they’re well on their way. If that continues to be true over the next 12 months, Shell will be in a pretty enviable position.

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:

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Greetings from beautiful Amsterdam, where our first-ever European VoiceCon event is wrapping up its first day. The big news from today was Microsoft’s announcement of Release 2 of Office Communications Server (OCS), but there was plenty going on all day as we crammed tutorials, keynotes and exhibits into a lovely autumn Tuesday in the Netherlands.

You can read Allan Sulkin’s rundown of the details of the OCS announcement, and his analysis of the significance of this step, at No Jitter. In the Amsterdam keynote session, Eric Swift of Microsoft demo-ed some of the cooler functions like IM integration with business applications and one-click desktop sharing out of an IM session. And he made it clear that Microsoft will continue to aggressively position its approach as the one that will lead to a fundamental change in the way voice is handled in the enterprise. Swift characterized R2 as “optimizing voice and conferencing,” and promised that future releases will deliver unspecified “complete software powered voice for all…really making the PBX obsolete.”

Now, on one level, Microsoft has been promising to make the PBX obsolete for the last couple of years, ever since none other than Eric Swift gave a talk at VoiceCon Orlando 2006 in which he approvingly cited a Gartner projection characterizing the PBX as “an architectural dead end.” They’ve made no bones about it.

On the other hand, that projection seemed like a shot across the bow two and a half years ago, and today, it’s more or less conventional wisdom. Don’t believe me? Go find yourself a half-dozen marketing folks from different vendors and ask them to tell you about their company’s PBX. If one of those marketeers allows the term “PBX” to stand unchallenged, I’d be shocked.

There are a few complications, one of them being named Cisco Systems. Cisco has long shunned the term “PBX” even as it shot to the top of the pack by selling, well, PBXs. But now comes Cisco WebEx Connect, which takes a much more expansive view of the interaction of various voice functionalities scattered throughout service provider and enterprise networks and mashed up via APIs and SOA. So depending on how the WebEx Connect play turns out, Cisco could be taking its own route to, if not rendering the PBX obsolete, at least offering a compelling alternative.

But I want to return to the other portion of Eric Swift’s closing remarks–the part about “complete software-powered voice for all.” That’s what everyone says they want, and the benefits are obvious. But there is going to be a cost, and it won’t be trivial. Eric Swift told the crowd here in Amsterdam that “The pace that we can innovate in a software platform is very fast.” And he said it like that was a good thing.

But as Gary Audin has been pointing out ever since the migration to software started, frequent software releases are not necessarily compatible with the goal of maintaining a stable, reliable real-time communications network. Even if those releases bring you new and exciting capabilities, they could add other forms of excitement that you could just as easily do without.

So something will have to give here, because ultimately it’s undeniable that communications is going to software, and away from sturdy, stable–too stable, for some people’s tastes–hardware. The state of the economy throws the whole question of timing up in the air, but it’s coming, so be ready.

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 Aastra:

Aastra is a global leader in IP communications products including IP-PBX systems, standards based telephones, unified communications and contact center applications. With 29 years experience delivering integrated voice and data communications services to some of the most demanding companies in the world, Aastra Intecom has developed deep industry expertise in solving the telecommunications challenges faced by large enterprises. Our unique perspective allows us to deliver highly reliable, scalable systems, deployed on time and professionally supported.

In the past two VoiceCon Webinars that I’ve moderated, we received a question that was repeated almost identically, with only very minor variations in wording, from a different attendee in each session. Essentially, each person said: Folks in my enterprise want to know why, as our Mobile Unified Communications strategy, we can’t just give everyone Blackberries and call it a day?

Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

And indeed, several of the leading Unified Communications vendors, including Microsoft and IBM, have clients for the Blackberry. But the question in these webinars was more along the lines of, Isn’t the Blackberry, all by itself, Mobile UC–or at least close enough?

On our most recent webinar, Mike Berlin of AVST explained why he believes the answer is no: “The key to us…is to also give them the next step–whether that’s a mobile client that gives them backend access to customer data, which means they can make a decision very quickly to say, Yes that product shipped and it will be delivered on your doorstep on X date, without having to make 15 inquiries to do so. Then that is a useful deployment of that technology.”

In other words, your Blackberry-enabled users are seeing what these devices in their present form can do for them, while UC says Blackberries can be even more. Implicit in the audience questions has been the idea that if you buy everyone Blackberries, you don’t need to spend any more money on that fancy UC stuff. Just give us the devices and don’t bother us with more stuff to learn.

Most of us can see the sizeable gap between that notion and the explanation that Mike Berlin gave about the potential to do more. But in bad economic times, I wonder if the business units will go for it.

The approach that makes sense, for IT, is to disabuse any such Blackberry-only proponents of the notion that such service is kinda sorta basically free once you pay for the devices. You, on the other hand, know that if you throw Blackberries to the masses and turn them loose, they’ll get a lot of work done on the road–while running up rather enormous bills.

Any enterprise that goes with a cellular service as its primary communications strategy for some or all of its users must come to grips with the reality that wireless costs are exploding in the enterprise. At VoiceCon San Francisco next month, two great consultants, Steve Leaden and Robert Harris, will be running a session on “Managing Your Cellular Spend.” Steve opens up his presentation with these sobering data points:

• Wireless voice and data services now represent 25 percent of U.S. enterprises’ total telecom spend, according to the Yankee Group.
• Another report, from Insight Research, pegs this figure at one-third of the corporate bill for telecommunication services in 2006
• U.S. corporate spending on wireless voice and mobile data services will exceed business spending on all wireline voice and data services by 2010, according to InStat.

Wireless is the way of the future, and spending is going that way. This fact remains hidden, most likely, in enterprises where individual employees’ cellular bills are expensed, rather than the enterprise having a corporate-liable contract. But as Robert Harris points out, corporate-liable contracts have their own challenges, in that if you don’t structure your contracts and per-minute rates correctly, you could wind up paying a lot more than you think.

Enterprise users are going to be needing more mobility, not less. IT/communications managers can help by understanding the real costs of this functionality, and then helping your users to understand this as well.

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