I recently spent 2 days battling with United Airlines to get to Chicago and then home – all for a very interesting summit focused on two segments of the reseller/dealer channel – MSPs (managed services providers) and video resellers/dealers – and how they can better work together in our expanding world of unified communications.  Let me first point out that United Airlines is going to be singly responsible for the growth of the telepresence and video conferencing areas of UC!  Anything to avoid flight delays and cancelled flights on UAL!  But I digress….. 

 The summit in Chicago was hosted by CompTIA (“IT” organization) and InfoComm (video trade organization), with the program focused on identifying commonalities and disparities between the two groups of member resellers and a goal of determining how the groups could work together in this new UC landscape.  Is it saying something that a Cisco employee participated?  Anyway, I’ve discussed ad nauseum the differences and commonalities of the data and telecom dealer channels and the impact on UC.  Now I’m seeing a new segment – video dealers – in the mix and again….differences, differences and some commonalities. 

 What jumped out at the summit was a picture of video dealers three-four years behind data VARs in the dealer business evolution process.  Many video dealers are still selling hardware and not even thinking “solutions”. “Unified communications” isn’t even on their radar yet.  Many of the dealer organizations are led by “former rock stars”, according to Randy Lemke, CEO of InfoComm; so there is a strong element of creativity and ego-driven management style but a lack of business expertise.  They deal with architects on room design, acoustic engineers for sound, and professionals for room color and visual appeal.  Many of them work on one-of-a-kind events – rock concerts, corporate meetings, etc. – to provide audio and visual effects.  Definitely a different world from IT or telecom….  But wait!  The participants at the summit were there because they want to know what’s going on with unified communications and how they can play in the game.  They know that technology – even theirs – is changing rapidly and a different world is growing around them. The video dealers were openly excited about learning more from the MSPs who are moving beyond the hardware/low margins model and exploring relationships that will help both groups extend their expertise and offerings.  And the MSPs were very interested in the value that a video dealer could add to their own efforts at solution building.

 Wow!  We haven’t even figured out – on a mass basis – how to bring data VARs and telecom dealers to a level of consultative selling and cooperation and now we’ve added video dealers into the mix.  It’s going to be fun getting these new participants in the UC channel to the model that in a white paper on my own website I’ve described as necessary for success (or even just survival) going down the road.

Tags: Unified Communications Information // Add Comment »

Companies recognize that the capabilities and availability of underlying network infrastructure are essential ingredients to sucessfully deploying and using Unified Communications transparently across multiple types of users and locations.  Thus the ongoing Net Neutrality debate merits close scrutiny.  Yesterday, Verizon and Google announced a nine-point proposal on Net Neutrality (see  http://www.scribd.com/doc/35599242/Verizon-Google-Legislative-Framework-Proposal ).  I recently provided a high-level analysis of the FCC’s Net Neutrality NPRM (see http://www.ucstrategies.com/detail.aspx?id=5345&terms=Lisa+Pierce)

On a 0-1.0 probability scale in which 1.0 is “certainty” and 0 is “won’t happen even if Hades froze over”, here is my assessment on the probability that the FCC will ultimately agree with each of the points in the Verizon-Google proposal: 

1.      First three points- Transparency, Consumer Protection and Non-discrimination on broadband Internet elements:  Probability of FCC agreement: 1.0

2.      Network management: First the FCC must wrap its head around the reality that just adding more bandwidth to the Internet won’t make it more reliable, usable, etc.  Once the FCC concurs that proactive network management is essential to maintaining a reliable, relatively secure, functioning internet, then the probability of FCC agreement: .8

3.      Additional online services—These already exist-they are supported via MPLS and Ethernet services, and can interface to Broadband Access. But by definition, these are not public internet services, and so aren’t part of the FCC’s net neutrality NPRM.   Also, some providers have implemented QoS functionality on their public Internet networks.  The underlying rub seems to be that FCC assumes that broadband internet customers will *only* be able to access content via the public internet.  Despite the fact that this is not the case today and won’t be the case tomorrow, the probability of FCC agreement: .6

4.      Wireless broadband:  Of the nine points, this is by far the most important.  Verizon and Google.  They want to exempt wireless data from all other principles here except the Transparency Principle (above).  Many customers use mobile devices as their primary method of interacting with Internet-based content.  Some rely on mobility exclusively, and this trend is expected to grow with time.  It’s likely a wireline-only FCC ruling on Net Neutrality would face numerous challenges in the courts and in Congress.  True, there have been and will be substantial investments in wireless broadband access (e.g., 3G investments, current and future 4G/LTE investments).  But very suubstantial investments have also been made and will continue to be made in landline Broadband access.  If accepted, the proposal might lead to a world where new multimodal applications appear first on LTE, and sometime later (if at all) on landline.  Such an outcome would not make the FCC happy-because the Commission would see this as a creating new kind of information divide.  Thus, as envisioned by Verizon and Google, probability of FCC agreement: .1

5.      Case by case enforcement:  As described by Verizon and Google, the FCC would be enforcing policy in areas where it does not have rulemaking authority.  That’s a huge can of worms – one that will make for endless litigation and Congressional oversight.  Probability of FCC agreement: .1

6.      Regulatory authority: stipulated over Internet Access, not applications or content.  Those who want more federal oversight of problematic Internet content will point out that this stance is inconsistent with other types of FCC authority (such as over radio and broadcast TV) and so even if all the FCC Commissioners agreed, it could face numerous court challenges.  Probability of FCC agreement: .3

7.        Broadband Access for Americans:  Proposes using Universal Services Funds to spur broadband deployment in underserved areas and by low income populations, and continues to treat Internet services as Interstate.  The FCC is in favor of all of this, so probability of FCC agreement: .9.  But let’s point out that (1) From a regulatory perspective, the internet is currently treated as an interstate service, (2) billions of dollars have already been allocated to deploy Broadband to under-served markets.  Since this has recently begun, we don’t know how much these funds will solve the availability problem and make it un-necessary to redirect additional resources, and (3) the Verizon-Google proposal isn’t clear if any of the USF would directly or indirectly subsidize wireless broadband access, a technology that Verizon and Google clearly want very much to remain unregulated.  

The Bottom Line:  Although it has attracted a lot of attention and debate, this proposal will have very little if any substantive impact.  At best, the FCC will extend an olive branch to Verizon and Google on those points where all parties share similar perspectives.  But it is precisely the controversial topics, like the wireless exclusion proposal, that regulators believe are essential to resolve in order to achieve their stated objectives.   Undoubtedly the Net Neutrality debate will generate more fireworks, but don’t be surprised if this topic takes a hiatus at least until after Election Day.  

Tags: Mobility, Unified Communications Information // Add Comment »

OK – I have to admit it….. I have a love/hate relationship with social media.  While I find it useful as a networking tool, I go crazy when I have to read about what someone is fixing for dinner tonight!  For business – yes!  For personal – not my thing (yet)!  But I just finished reading an interesting article about social media in the context of business and realized that the UC reseller channel (solutions integrators) would be remiss in not acquainting themselves with the tools that young people entering the workforce take for granted, not to mention other older-but-still-savvy workers.

 Do I have enough hours in my day to add tweeting to my tasks?  I’d better!  And what about LinkedIn?  I’ve found former colleagues and potential business associates on LinkedIn.  Prospective clients have found me!  Yes, social networking is here to stay and is just going to become ever more pervasive.  In fact, the UCStrategies team has already added social networking to the topics for resellers and consultants at the UC Summit 2011.  You’ll see it right up there with mobility, collaboration, video, cloud-based unified communication solutions and other key areas that UC solutions integrators, consultants and vendors will be exploring and discussing at the next Summit.

 The usefulness of social media in the business climate cannot be underestimated.  Companies are using blogs and tweets to establish their own expertise in an area and to create dialogs with people in potential customer companies that they might not be able to reach otherwise.  And what a great vehicle for keeping customers happy!  It’s easy to keep your fingers on the pulse of your customers when they are expressing their satisfaction or frustration in real time.  And what about more personal service – tweeting about problems and fixes, new products, and on and on?

 And resellers (solutions integrators) not only should know about social media for intelligent discussions with their customers; they should also be using this resource as a tool for their own business.  Drink the kool-aid!  There are still too many telecom dealers who are struggling to move past TWIWAD (“that’s the way it was always done”) and start using today’s technology tools in their own business.  Social media is just one of those tools – but it’s growing in importance for both the reseller/solutions integrator’s own business and for their customers.  So start tweeting…. join LinkedIn…. but I still don’t want to know on my Facebook page what you’re going to fix for dinner!

Tags: Unified Communications Information // 4 Comments »

Score one for Microsoft!  In a recent blog on the Microsoft Dynamics Partner Community site, Kevin Machayya talked about a special offer - Analyst Relations for the Channel - for Microsoft channel partners.  Once I worked through the corporate speak, I figured out that it provides the partners with access to market trend data and business strategy validation such as Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, as well as access to Gartner webcasts and a special Gartner portal.  Of course, I can’t get into the partner portal to see if there’s an associated cost, but I’m hoping not - or that it’s very minimal and hence affordable.

And score one for IBM, who is offering to their PartnerWorld members sales training - real sales training, not product sales training - for a number of vertical markets.  This one isn’t free, but for the value that it provides, it’s well worth the nominal expense for any VAR (or telecom dealer, for that matter) who wants to shift from selling “boxes” to the more profitable selling solutions.  Years ago when IBM only sold direct and used solution selling sales training that was the envy of many manufacturers, I had the opportunity to be trained  IBM-style (long story….old history).  I’ve been a “consultative selling” evangelist ever since because I know it works!

So why am I tooting the horn for these two vendors?  FINALLY, we’re seeing manufacturers take significant positive steps to actually help their channel partners become stronger and smarter.  What vendor plans their future strategy without having market data to refer to?  What reseller can afford to pay for access to similar market data?  But they’ve needed the information just as much as their vendor partners.  How long have vendors been offering product sales training to their partners, when savvy and successful resellers have figured out that they can’t be successful selling products - they have to sell solutions and professional services?  This is especially true in the UC space.

A few sales leads that usually don’t go very far….. marketing collateral that focuses on products, not solutions….. marketing funds that are usually only good for product-focused events/advertising…..all typical elements of most vendors’ channel programs.  FINALLY we’re seeing signs that vendors are figuring out the same thing that I’ve been recommending over and over and over again on the Sierra Summit Group website and have integrated into the UCStrategies UC Summit events - today’s resellers (solutions integrators) need more from their vendor partners if they are to survive and thrive.  With an economic downturn still in full swing, a better set of sales and sales support tools are essential to equipping channel partners with every possible advantage to drive revenue. It’s time for vendors to think outside the traditional channel program/support box!  Let’s see more vendors stepping up!  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that if the reseller channel succeeds, everyone wins!

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information // 1 Comment »

Last week in Las Vegas I got to follow up on Cisco’s contact center analyst day by attending Ciscolive, which is Cisco’s big customer event, co-located with C-Scape, Cisco’s main analyst event. Ciscolive was huge! In the main keynote there were 12,500 customers, a lot of analysts, and 23K total attendees if you include those participating virtually. As usual, John Chambers was completely engaging speaking on the vision that Cisco has with snippets such as, “Economies of the future won’t be information economies, but network economies”, and “Every mistake I’ve made as a leader is in being too slow or in having speed without process and being replicable.”

Ciscolive also had what Cisco called, ‘The World of Solutions Expo’, which was essentially a trade show of Cisco and Cisco partners. In the collaboration area we got to see and hear much more about UC and collaboration products, such as Cisco Pulse, and I was happy to hear that Cisco has come a long way in getting the answers to some of the questions I had last November when they announced those products.

The best part of the keynote was the Cius demonstration; Cisco’s new tablet phone. Aimed at a business user, rather than consumer, like Apple’s iPad, this UC tool, is nice. This telephone/tablet combination acts as a portable communications and collaboration platform, working as a phone with a screen that works with Cisco applications such as Telepresence or WebEx, and with Cisco’s Unified Communications manager, or as a tablet. When the tablet is docked it provides the screen, and the base has USB ports, a wired Ethernet connection, and, of course, a telephone handset and speakerphone.

When used as a tablet, Cius has an HD 720p camera that faces the user, and a 5 megapixel camera mounted on the back, so that a user can pop the tablet off of the base, and use it for two way video calls, or video calls in which the user can see the other party and show them whatever the back camera is pointed at.

The Cius tablet weighs 1.14 pounds, runs on the Android operating system, and supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and 3G. Later releases will include 4G mobile networking. Cius is blue-tooth enabled, and supports connection of other headsets through a micro-USB port. Cisco said that when the product is released in early 2011 that it will come with a set of applications and a Firefox browser, but also stated that Android developers can write applications to the device using Cisco’s own SDK and APIs. Cisco also claims that the tablet has an 8 hour battery life.

If a unified communications “phone” could be fun, this would be it. It has a nice design, supports a lot of functionality, and appears very easy to use. For Cisco, the Cius is also a very attractive add-on to their shameless drive to put video everywhere, not only because of the video capabilities of the phone, but also because of support for Cisco’s myriad video-enabled UC applications.  There is no hidden agenda here; just video everywhere all the time, and this makes video appealingly mobile.

 Lastly, although the Cius is positioned as a business device, with Cisco’s statements towards bringing the network to everyone, it’s not out of the question that further positioning towards the consumer market might happen not far down the road.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications // 2 Comments »

A new report from mobility expert, Tomi Ahonen,  shows that SMS has already become the most widely used text messaging application by all users in the world (53%), and even more by mobile users (78%). This reflects a shift from “real-time” voice calls that may run into “unavailability” problems and go to “voicemail jail”, to more practical “near real-time,” immediate message notification and delivery that another study reports will usually be responded to within five minutes.

A 2009 study by Lightspeed Research in the UK showed that 11% of mobile users didn’t initiate any voice calls at all,  while in the U.S., the percentage was even higher, 13%.

I am sure you are all familiar with seeing a user with a ringing cell phone often just looking to see who it is from then simply letting it go to a messaging function. Lately, voicemail-to-text services have taken care of caller voice messages by transcribing them automatically to text messages. So, whether the contact initiator chooses to use voice or not, the contact recipient can still deal with voice messages more efficiently than with voice mail interfaces.

From a UC perspective, where I include “process-to-person” contacts in addition to “person-to-person” contacts, text messaging and SMS are an obvious choice for personalized, pro-active, automated, time-sensitive notifications from a business process application, commonly referred to as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), because business applications don’t really want to generate voice messages instead of their usual text message output.  (If the recipient requires a speech interface because they are driving a car, we can let them selectively exploit “unified messaging’  options based on their presence status.

With the rapid growth of screen-based, multi-modal smart-phones, the flexibility of input and output can be extended to end users independently of whether they are contact initiators or recipients/respondents for SMS. In addition, however, with the power of UC and presence, SMS exchanges can be easily escalated to real-time Instant Messaging and/or “click-to call” voice connections when appropriate.  This makes conversational voice calls more manageable from both a caller’s and callee’s perspective, and reduces the unnecessary problems generated by “blind” call attempts and voicemail’s retrieval limitations.

Needless to say, SMS itself doesn’t satisfy all the informational needs of users involved in a business process, but provides an efficient,  timely, mobile contact interaction to people wherever they are, along with links to the real information required for the business process, e.g., email. However, SMS is used 2.6 times more than email by mobile users. The key to efficient information exchange is to make timely and efficient contact first, not have conversations or deliver documents. Clearly, UC will be successful with its different forms of communication applications,  if it can exploit mobility for accessing individual recipients as quickly and flexibly as possible.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information // Add Comment »

Technology can only do so much, and sometimes, human nature has to play a role. There are times when a technology isn’t being implemented properly because of cultural or social issues, and there are many situations where we have to change our cultural habits to accommodate new technologies.

In the early days of computer telephony integration, there were examples of call center agents who received screen pops on their desktops providing them with information on the caller’s name and what they’re calling about, and the agents would answer the phone based on this information. “Hello, Mr. Jones, I see you have a problem with your credit card statement, and since you’re a platinum card holder, I’d be happy to assist you.” Instead of rejoicing at this recognition, customers got flustered, wondering how the agent knew who they were, and the time it took for the agent to explain about screen pops eliminated the expected time savings that screen pops are supposed to provide. Some companies stopped using screen pops altogether, but generally most call center agents went back to using a neutral greeting so they wouldn’t alarm the callers.

In the world of unified communications, presence and IM, new etiquette rules are being developed, both formally and informally. I’ve heard of many companies where it’s considered rude to call someone without sending an IM first to see whether it’s a good time to call. Most companies haven’t formalized these rules, but I expect to see more and more companies promoting “best practices” or “etiquette guides.”

Microsoft has a wonderful “Instant Messaging Etiquette Guide” that provides general guidelines. For example, some tips for politeness when using IM include:
•    If you are initiating the IM, it’s generally considered polite to ask the other person if they have time to “talk” with you. This may not be necessary with someone you work with frequently and when the question is quick, as opposed to something requiring discussion.
•    Don’t invite someone to join a conference in progress without first asking the others in the conference if it’s OK to do so.
•    Don’t use all capital letters to type your message. It’s the IM equivalent of shouting (note: this goes for twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Social and personal issues are often the reasons why technologies fail to be adopted, despite the quality and reliability of the technology itself. I often hear from enterprise workers that they don’t want to use UC (particularly presence capabilities) because they don’t want people knowing their status or because they don’t want to be interrupted if they’re working. Instead, they generally set their status to “unavailable” all the time, thus greatly reducing the value of the technology for not only that individual, but for people in their workgroups and organization. This could be avoided if everyone followed guidelines and best practices. For example, respect IM status settings. If someone’s IM status is “busy” or “away,” don’t try contacting them and disturbing them. Alternatively, recognize that just because someone’s status is “available” doesn’t mean that they can drop what they’re doing and interact with you. If someone doesn’t respond to your messaging request, it probably means they’re busy, even if they’re status shows that they are available.

Microsoft also suggests: “If you’re carrying on too many IM conversations at once, those you’re corresponding with may feel that you’re not giving them the proper amount of attention. No more than three conversations at a time is a general rule.” I suggest that contact centers also follow this rule – I’ve stopped using the web chat option for customer service because too often the agent I’m chatting with for service is also helping several other customers at the same time, causing delays in the chat and making it a very lengthy and unpleasant experience.

One of my personal guidelines is that after going back and forth on IM for a long time, it’s generally easier to have a live conversation, and UC users can easily click-to-communicate to have a phone or conference call.

What all of this points to is the need to consider human factors in any design. Success in a UC project will come not just from buying the best hardware and software, but from designing the best solution. As we are dealing with new tools that will allow people to do their jobs in new ways, we need to address the issue of how we help people to use these tools in the most effective way. People know their telephone etiquette, but part of our UC deployment plan has to look at how we teach UC etiquette.

Tags: Unified Communications // 1 Comment »

My last blog touched upon legal issues in UC and speech technologies by addressing patent trolls and what can be done about them. Here is another little legal nugget, rising up within UC which merits some attention as well, and that is, what to do about compliance issues, privacy and all those other things, that sometimes fall by the wayside when employees use social media applications.

It is pretty evident that companies are jumping on the bandwagon of social media, and investigating, planning, developing or deploying social media within their unified communications and contact center applications. Voxeo, Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, Genesys….. The list is getting longer and longer. The issue is that if we thought we had problems with just pure instant messaging working its way into corporate life unattended, well, well, well, think about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the dozens of applications popping up.

Below are excerpts of a press release from Autonomy this week that tackles this issue head on, so I wanted to post it here since the announcement is one of only a few that seems to deal with the legal aspects of incorporating social media into the enterprise, rather than just the fun and business use side. Autonomy announced the availability of Autonomy Social Media Governance, what Autonomy claims is the industry’s first solution designed to monitor, govern, and protect organizations across social media channels. Social Media Governance enables businesses to maintain compliance with new regulatory requirements for employees engaging on social media sites.

The May 26^th press release said:

“Rapid adoption of social media by employees, customers, advertisers, bloggers, and news organizations presents unique challenges to many organizations. Regulators recognize the influence and risks associated with these channels, and are starting to require organizations to actively monitor and govern employees’ social media interactions. For instance, FINRA (The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) recently issued FINRA Regulatory Notice 10-06, which requires member firms to supervise and archive content posted to social media for business purposes. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the National Futures Association (NFA) are also developing rules associated with the use of social media.

New regulatory requirements around social media add to the already burdensome task of adhering to current law for organizations - which requires that corporations archive, set policy, and make discoverable many forms of electronic information, including email, audio, and video.”

“Social media represents an extremely important new channel for businesses to develop engaging and profitable relationships with their customers. However, it is not without its risks, and for a business to leverage social media legally and profitably, corporations need to establish a comprehensive strategy to govern social media interaction.

For instance, a business could face regulatory issues if a bank employee marketed or misrepresented the value of a potential investment on social networks. Likewise, if an employee defamed another fellow employee, or a client, on a social site, this could raise legal issues for the company. Also, a pharmaceutical company could run into litigation issues if an employee denigrated a product on a social site that the company is actively promoting with advertising on traditional channels.”

Those are some good examples of the risks. What Autonomy provides is a platform that does what they call ‘meaning based computing’ which is recognizing patterns and relationships in unstructured information. They combine this with the company’s archiving, policy management, supervision, and analytics technologies. The result is that Autonomy Social Media Governance automatically identifies content and conversations on social networks, and allows a corporation to tie the information directly into a company’s existing compliance infrastructure.  All of this can be stored in Autonomy Digital Safe; a hosted archive service that enables corporations to outsource the storage and management of email messages, rich-media files, audio and video files, instant messages, and web content. According to the press release, the Social Media Governance product includes:

• Connectors and aggregation of thousands of relevant news feeds, blogs, and social media sites. Autonomy Social Media Governance can monitor social media content from employees logged in through company networks, as well as identify discussion from users operating outside company networks.
• Conceptual search of all aggregated content
• Policy-based monitoring
• Compliant archiving for regulated content
• Advanced analytics such as clustering and visualization tools
• Escalation and workflow management
• Reporting and trend analysis
• Executive dashboards

This is a great start to a knotty and growing issue that isn’t as fun to talk about as the benefits of incorporating social media into the contact center and UC.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information // 4 Comments »

At this week’s event for industry analysts, AT&T emphasized that after a prolonged absence, innovation is back (and I’d add, hopefully here to stay). But this isn’t the mode of innovation that propelled AT&T into the business voice and data services leadership position between 1985-1995. it’s clearly a (1) more focused, (2) significantly more modest, and (3) less proprietary model. The first two are fairly self-explanatory—the spinoffs of Lucent Technologies and Avaya from AT&T tore Bell Labs asunder, and its level of commitment to basic R&D plummeted. But in addition to engineers who are focused on specific platform or product-related projects, there are about 200 engineers who follow in the Labs’ tradition of working on long term basic research. I’ll get back to the third point in a bit.

 But what does this mean for UC? Actually, a lot of things. Over the next few months, there will be some product announcements in Fixed Mobile Convergence and Telepresence that I’ll analyze as AT&T introduces them. What I want to talk about now is the company’s UC as a service (UCaaS) platform. Core UCaaS functions include desktop and mobile clients, presence, UM, IM, conferencing, telephony and FMC.

AT&T’s UCaaS platform can support a number of managed and hosted IPT/UC applications. Current incarnations include managed IP PBX services (Cisco and Avaya), and managed or hosted Microsoft OCS. Beginning this summer, AT&T will trial a service designed to support enterprise requirements for hybrid connectivity. For instance, many companies still have legacy PBXs but would like to begin using UC services and features now. UCaaS is designed to help these customers—this is especially important for companies with Nortel assets. Other customers want to make sure their Cisco/Avaya and OCS products ‘play well’ together.  Or, some companies need to extend the benefits of UC to smaller sites, or to mobile users, and to have their experience seamlessly interwork with other UC vendor products. UCaaS is designed for these types of hybrid applications. AT&T’s recent Royal Dutch Shell announcement is a case in point-hosted OCS R2 coupled with Cisco and Nortel IPT, and HP Halo and Tandberg videoconferencing products. Not surprisingly, UCaaS (under the AT&T DNA banner) is also available as a stand-alone service—to use UC, companies need not have sunk considerable resources into any of the UC vendors named. In the future, UCaaS will be able to be used on a federated basis—between AT&T customers, and over time, we could see UCaaS elements in third party platforms.

People who are familiar with the UC landscape will point out that AT&T is not the first company whose UC platform can claim the type of functionality I just described. True enough. But AT&T has a huge installed local and LD voice base, and so UCaaS is of significance to all of them, and to anyone else who might be interested in using their services going forward. Over time, the potential margin upside for AT&T is tens of billions of dollars.

Returning to my point of ‘not invented here’, a condition AT&T and its offspring suffered from for decades. The void in internal innovation forced AT&T to look outside. For instance, UCaaS is the brainchild of Interwise, the same company whose web/IP voice conferencing system is the foundation of AT&T Connect (AT&T acquired Interwise in 2008).  And AT&T has plans for UCaaS-to expose its APIs to customers and third party developers—this is one of the great lessons AT&T learned from its 3G experience.

Directionally, everything I’ve discussed is good news. Robust competition is always good for customers. Here are a few things that temper my immediate enthusiasm:

Limited vendor set. From a productized offer perspective, UCaaS’ focus is on several specific UC vendors Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft), not all UC vendors. The pool of prospective legacy vendors is larger (UCaaS and SIP trunking service running into a managed premises gateway), but not all legacy vendor products—it all depends on what the gateway will support (apart from AT&T’s stated focus on supporting Nortel PBXs still covered by maintenance contracts).

Long trial. AT&T plans for the UCaaS platform to be in trial for a year, with GA 2Q 2011. Given the size of the Royal Dutch Shell agreement (150,000 stations), that is not a complete surprise, but it does mean that any company who can’t get on the trial list and who wants to implement this solution soon should look elsewhere. One hundred companies have made inquiries about participating in the trial.

MNC focus. Although UCaaS can be used by customers of any size, initial target customers are large multinationals. I expect this focus will linger at least through mid-2012. Companies who are interested in using UC services within the next two years (or UC hybrid models) and who don’t meet AT&T’s initial target market criteria also should look elsewhere.

Tags: Unified Communications Information // Add Comment »

At the recent Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco at the end of April there were some delightful departures from the focus on speech technologies and mobility — although there is nothing wrong with speech and mobility. In fact, Mobile Voice was a name change away from the original name of the conference, Voice Search, due to the incredible growth in the use of speech technologies in mobile applications over the last five years or so. And that, of course, has everything to do with unified communications.

The departures from the expected presentations included a very interesting panel on patent law, which included Marie Meteer, of MM Consulting, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium - Building the Prior Art Library to Enable Better Patent Application Examinations”, Jason Peltz, an attorney with Bartlit, Beck Herman Palencher & Scott LLP, speaking on “Patent strategy: considerations in filing a patent infringement suit and in defending such a suit”, Mark Powell, the Director of the Technology Center 2600 of the US Patent and Trademark Office, speaking on “United States Patent & Trademark Office - How You Can Work With Us”, and Ria Farrell Schalnat, a patent attorney with Frost Brown Todd, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium - Using Re-examinations Proactively to Clear the Threat of Patent Trolls”.

It was a very educational and interesting session given that the topic involved the legal in and outs of intellectual property, not technology introductions, product information, or applications. Still it was a fascinating panel and one that struck a cord with me. Why? Because there is evil lurking out there in the form of patent trolls, which is threatening to stifle creativity and stall the speech technology industry, and related industries, one of which again is unified communications.

So just what is a patent troll? In a nutshell, it is a non-practicing individual or group/entity that buys up patents from willing sellers or struggling companies, that then turns around uses to sue related companies for patent infringement. In other words, this is someone who has not practiced their patent, and is not contributing or innovating in the industry in any way. Instead, they accrue patents as an arsenal (with multiple claims in each patent), bundle them up, and then take companies to court. We saw this happen starting more than a decade ago, with Michael Katz taking on the voice processing industry (at the time, voice messaging and IVR), and now, extremely aggressively, with Phoenix Solutions, who have sued big companies such as Sony, PG&E, and Wells Fargo, for their use of speech technologies.

To set the stage, Jason Peltz explained that there are 200K patents that are issued annually, with 2700 patent suits filed annually. Currently, there are 4000 patent cases pending. The average case takes two years, with an average cost of between $4.5 to $5M to defend, with an average jury award of $6.5M. Something that was equally interesting is that 30-40% of patent cases are overturned on appeal, which is dramatically higher than any other form of litigation. Also, in the case of patent law, the higher courts at the federal level do not have to defer to the trial court’s interpretation of the claims in the subject patent, so if a company successfully defends their patent, and the “troll” decides to appeal, they may get a second bite at the apple, with all the associated costs escalating. Many small companies just fold, as it’s often less costly to pay license fees than legal fees. But it is not just small companies that fold. In a recent case filed in 2002 (US patent 5,799,273) Allvoice Computing, PLC vs. Nuance, Nuance won their first case, and then ended up settling rather than going through it again on a federal level. Why does this matter? Because even though Nuance won, when they settled in July of 2007 rather than pay, it gave the patent troll a big stick to use against smaller companies by being able to say that Nuance paid rather than fight — we can beat you too.

The panel discussed what could potentially be done about this, and Ria Farrell Schalnat talked about using re-examination as an alternative or supplement to litigation. Depending on the type of re-exam conducted, costs may initially be anywhere between $5,000 - $50,000+. It all depends on the complexity of the patent as well as whether the initial decision is appealed. Although these fees are a fraction of litigation, they may still be too cost prohibitive for one company to take on by themselves. The potential solution would be to band together to fight the trolls as a group - hence the birth of the idea of a Speech Technology Consortium (STC), which would pool money and intellectual property resources to defend and win against the trolls. There would be a membership fee for participating companies, but no charge for the cost of accepted re-exam requests. A key component of this effort would be to uncover, gather up, and create a database of prior art to be used as evidence in the re-exams.

Ria cited statistics showing a 73% patent “kill rate”, through August 2008, which is a complete elimination of all claims targeted by a requestor, which represents a rate much higher than litigation at 33%.

I just love the whole concept of a group effort to defeat something which only hurts the industry. Needlessly spending money to defend or settle “claims” only drains the coffers of companies trying to honestly innovate, and has the effect of inhibiting new companies from emerging because it jacks up the cost of entry to the market. I believe that as the STC is developed, that companies in the unified communications space should definitely jump on board and help out as the technologies used in UC, and the features and functions in these claims are interwoven, leaving UC companies at risk of attack too.

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