There’s a buzz in the air in Dubai - the electricity of optimistic growth.   The airport gives an amazing first impression, blending the high tech look of the new terminal with touches for Arabia in the arches, sconces with (cloth) flames, and the ceiling painted with the deep blue, star-studded night sky.  The ride into town is more of the same: the sparkling new Metro, the smooth-flowing expressways, and the beautiful skyline, now highlighted by the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world (at 2,720 feet - over half a mile tall) since the opening at the beginning of January.  

Dubai is, most certainly, a center for business, with all the supporting services.   One of the attendees pointed out that Dubai is a central location between Europe, Asia, and Africa.  A quick visit to Bing Maps will make that clear (mouse over to see country names, with U.A.E. in the middle of the map).  The companies represented at the Road Show ranged across the business spectrum, from banks and financial firms, to real estate development, to a mercantile exchange, to Emirates Airline, to the operator of a major chain of sports clubs (have to be healthy to do business), to a major regional telecommunications company.

While the audience was very focused on the cost-savings element of the program theme, they were also looking for new ideas that could create competitive advantages.  Of course, this fit well with the Microsoft messages in the event.   In fact, the conversations at the breaks and lunch were really centered on which innovations would likely yield the most return via savings or cost avoidance.

Probably the biggest single interest was in connecting more effectively with internal teams and with external partners and customers.  Almost all the companies were multi-location businesses and were not satisfied with the amount of money they were spending for inter-site communications nor with the limited functionality they could achieve with those connections. 

There was real resonance with the idea that one of the best ways to cut telecom tolls and cellular bills is “don’t call in the first place.”    Thus, presence and instant messaging were either already deployed or were high on the list of projects for a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) deployment.

Once that was done, the attendees expected their users would quickly pick up on the internal company PC-to-PC calling and desktop sharing.  Also, most of the firms already had both Exchange and SharePoint installed, so the integration of OCS for communications directly from those applications was a top benefit, as well. 

There was also strong interest in linkages with field personnel, whether at construction sites, in retail banking, in development projects, or similar mobile roles.  Most of the attendees were in the planning or pilot testing phases of applications for the Communicator Mobile (COMO) client for OCS.   With that tool, calls can be placed to the cell phone under OCS control, rather than calling from the cell phone, which significantly lowers the monthly charges. 

Some companies were focused on process improvement, which of course resonated with me, based on our definition of Unified Communications as “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”  The customers’ concepts were that definition and streamlining of processes is key to competitiveness, since that avoids costly delays, mistakes and rework.  Of course, including communications in that analysis is key, often leading to simpler or more effective modes (e.g. IM vs. voice calling).  

This is all within the setting of telecom rules that do not allow Voice over IP calls to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), similar to the situation in India (see blog from Mumbai).  On the one hand this is good, since it helps focus the Microsoft-based UC projects to those that did not conflict with the PSTN rules.  On the other hand, it complicates the initiatives that involve calling into the PSTN, such as requiring integration with the customers’ TDM PBXs. 

So, I’m heading home from Dubai with the same electric sense as my first impression, wishing all these customers the best of success in their UC endeavors.

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

Imagine a modern city where business, trade, society, architecture, religion, culture, continents, and history all come together in one place.  Got it?  OK, then Istanbul, Turkey, is very likely that place.  Istanbul (formerly Constantinople and Byzantion before that), sits astride the Bosporus, a magnificent waterway that connects the interior of eastern Europe with the civilizations surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.  One side of the Bosporus is the southeastern tip of Europe and the other side is a southwestern corner of Asia (locals chat about how they commute to work from Asia).  People and their goods have flowed up and down that waterway for over 8,000 years and have established business and culture in the very fabric of Istanbul; just visit the Grand Bazaar to be overwhelmed by what’s available and how many people there are to help you find something that you would like to have.   The Aya Sophia church and mosque was the largest known church for centuries, beginning in 537 C.E. (A.D.) and is marvelous even to this day.  Symbolically, Istanbul is celebrating its role as one of two “European Capitals of Culture” for 2010, beginning the weekend before the UC Road Show event.   

Against that backdrop, it’s no surprise that customers were out in force to find new ways to enhance business and trade.  Attendees included financial institutions, trading and distribution companies, food manufacturers, and many others. 

Most of the attendees and their firms had thought through UC and were taking action.  Most had either pilots or some level of deployment already in place, and were pleased with that progress to date.  The major themes were:

• Improving productivity: Essentially all of those I spoke with were focused on helping their people work more effectively. Having both presence indication of who is available and the ability to click-to-communicate via Instant Messaging, or voice, or desktop sharing, or even video is seen as a major step forward compared to the past where each media type was in a separate application or services. on the desktop. IM and voice got the most emphasis, but video interest was increasing for branch office communications, training, or expert services (link to an expert without the time delays or travel expense).
• Office application integration: A significant portion emphasized the value of linkage between Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and the other applications in the Office family, especially Outlook and SharePoint. The comments indicated that each product got more valuable by virtue of linkage to the other, again due to productivity increases.
• Remote working - in branch offices, home offices, or on the road. Widespread use of the Microsoft Office Communicator client so that employees could maintain their productivity while also cutting both their telecom and travel expenses.
• Linking with clients and business partners: This application was one of the “next things” being considered by several companies. The attendees could see the value for optimizing their business processes, and were working on the policies and practices that are required for including outside people and companies in the UC operations. The sense was that the initial versions would by inviting third parties into OCS Live Meeting conferences rather than by providing those people with guest accounts on the enterprise’s OCS system or by federation (which will come later as more companies have UC systems with federation capabilities).
• Mobility: Last but not least, there is always interest in cutting the mobile phone bills. With the “caller pays” billing found in most GSM networks, OCS was being used to let the user click on their mobile to make a call, then to have the call come out to the mobile device (no fees) from the OCS server in the data center which then extends the other leg of the call to the intended party.

While there was some discussion of embedding UC into business applications such as SAP or Microsoft Dynamics CRM or customer portals, it seems that the embedding of UC into apps will be in the next set of projects, in late 2010, 2011, or beyond. 

So, Istanbul lived up to, and exceeded my expectations.  I wish all the attendees the best of success as the extend the Turkish business tradition.

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Last week I accompanied a system integrator in the Midwest to meet with and help educate several of their customers about unified communications and building a UC strategy. In addition to the Midwest hospitality and better weather than I expected, I got some good insights into what these customers are thinking about regarding UC. I was gratified to see that these customers really understand and appreciate what UC can do for them in terms of saving time, making workers more efficient, increasing collaboration between work groups, etc.

One thing that came across loud and clear is that Microsoft did a heck of a job getting OCS out there for enterprise IM and presence. All of the companies I met with have OCS implemented to one degree or another, and most also have Sharepoint and Live Meeting. Several of the customers are Nortel shops, which makes me wonder if part of Microsoft’s success is based on the now-defunct ICA relationship between Nortel and Microsoft, although I tend to doubt it. Side note: Avaya stated that the ICA relationship has been terminated, although the two companies will continue to work on how they engage with each other, but Nortel (now Avaya) will no longer resell OCS. It will be interesting to see if this impacts OCS sales in any way, but it’s doubtful.

It’s clear that OCS is getting lots of traction, and vendors will have to work hard to compete with and displace Microsoft in the UC arena. A good portion of the customers I met with are Cisco shops, but none are using Cisco Unified Presence Server or Cisco Unified Presence Client – or any other presence/IM solution other than OCS. While none of the customers are using OCS for call control and don’t have any immediate plans to do so, none had gone the next step to integrate OCS with their PBX/IP PBXs. I’m glad to see more companies using IM and presence, but I wish more of them were actually integrating these capabilities with their voice capabilities to get more of the benefits that UC provides.

Some of the companies I met with clearly see the benefits of integrating OCS with their voice switches, but a variety of issues have prevented them from doing so. In some cases, the IT people are aware of the benefits of UC and acknowledge that the people in their companies could greatly benefit from it, but don’t want to deal with the integration or cost issues involved, and feel that they have enough to do without adding another layer of complexity. Others want to move to UC, but realize that in their particular environments it will be a major undertaking based on their existing technology and infrastructure.

For many customers, the will is there – they just need a good way to move to the world of UC. It needs to be simpler to implement and integrate all of the various pieces (data network, telecom environment, carrier networks, etc.). The vendors need to do a better job of working with each other to simplify integration and interoperability, and to help customers migrate. And to those vendors that would rather battle with Microsoft than accept the fact that they’ve made huge inroads into the unified communications world, I suggest you work harder to find ways to coexist in a multivendor environment, and to provide the necessary tools to your partners to help them support their customers’ mixed environments. Companies want to move to UC – let’s help make it easier for them.

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

The bottom line payoff for UC-based business communications has been widely promoted as optimizing business process performance through communications efficiency and flexibility or “UC-B.” While there are also direct benefits to individual end users (UC-U) in terms of personal productivity, the reality is that the more you can automate and the less you need to depend on people to be be part of a business process, the more efficient the process will be. (In the real world, though, we can’t automate everything all the time!)

With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” voice message exchange, online interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might also be part of the game.)

The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, the automated business process can monitor the status of  application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference. I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.

If we are looking at UC-B as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility. Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based call center game has to change as well.

Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice/-Visual Response)

Tags: Unified Communications Information // 2 Comments »

Athens!  A cradle of western civilization.  I arrived in Greece with enough time to visit the Acropolis, the neighboring Areopagus, and the marvelous new Acropolis museum.  Even the Metro station in the center of the city has a 100-foot long wall of glass showing the layers of civilization back to 600 BCE, which were exposed during construction of the Metro. 

You might think that businesses in Greece could be so captured by their history that they would be slow to change.  Actually, the business people I met were justifiably proud of their heritage, but they took the lessons of history as a cause for action - as illustrated by the archeology, new methods always win out, whether suddenly or inexorably. 

Sure enough, this Microsoft UC Road Show event was well attended by a broad cross-section of business and government.  Hotel chain CIOs rubbed elbows with finance and insurance firms.  Natural resources firms interacted with manufacturing and distribution firms.  Several government agencies, including the Navy, were there, too. 

The points of emphasis and inquiry by the attendees had their unique themes, including:

• Branch office and retail outlet communications. There was interest in how to support branch offices more quickly and effectively and with less cost. Certainly, Unified Communications was seen as a solution for branch office support by making the regional or central support teams more immediately available using presence, IM and click-to-communicate. Also, use of the conferencing functions of UC for training of new branch office employees and for training of all associates on changes in products or policies was seen as a potential method for saving both travel cost and time.
• Conferencing Savings. Direct cost savings were also anticipated by bringing hosted conferencing services in-house, using Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). Those I spoke with were thinking of this savings in combination with putting the Office Communicator client on the employees’ desktops, to make conferencing easier to use. One company mentioned that after rolling out OCS, they trained their users on setting up and managing conferences using the combination of OCS and Microsoft Outlook and the use of conferencing went up by 30% in less than a month.
• Co-existence with aging PBXs. Many of the firms owned PBXs or key systems that were approaching a replacement cycle; or in some cases the firms were using direct central office support (like 1MBs or Centrex lines in the US) and were looking to reduce those monthly tariffs. The favored approach, both for ease of implementation and for the fastest cost reductions, was to implement the OCS solution for specific groups of users or for specific locations based on those which most needed a communications capability upgrade or system refresh and to connect to the remaining PBX users via gateways. There were no complaints of limitations or barriers from those who mentioned this approach.
• Management communication effectiveness and cost savings. One firm, a multi-national natural resources and minerals firm headquartered in Greece, is using OCS for their management team and their remote mining locations. They provide the managers with mobile phones equipped with the Microsoft Communicator Mobile client so the management team can see who is available for interaction and decision making at any moment, and across continents and time zones. The remote mining locations use either PCs or the USB or network-attached phones for communications to and from the sites and also to and from the management team members. The report showed lower telecom toll costs, reductions in cell bills, and economical deployments that reduce telecom costs for the remote mining sites.

So, in summary of the Athens event, it seemed to me that the Hellas business community is applying the logical methods for which their ancestors are famous to the current problems of cost savings and resource optimization and finding that software-based UC can deliver the intended benefits. 

It was a real pleasure to visit Athens both to interact with today’s business community regarding their UC actions based on Microsoft’s UC offerings and also to observe and contemplate one of the primary cradles of our western civilization. 

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Bangalore, India, has a unique flair.  As you may know, Bangalore is known as the “Silicon Valley of India.”  That concept is visible in many ways, with a very attractive new airport and a thriving business community that are set amidst a hospitable and diverse city with many traditional India sights, such as the fully lit wedding grounds along the main avenue on my evening ride into the city.  

For the UC Roadshow, customers packed the venue at the Oberoi Hotel, clearly interested in the possibilities of Unified Communications.  They represented a broad cross section of the Bangalore business community comprising software firms (both software producers and contract software firms), manufacturing and distribution firms, biological/pharmaceutical research labs, retail chains, systems integrators, and India offices of a major US financial services firm. 

These enterprises seemed to be well along the Unified Communications (UC) path.  Most of them already had hands-on pilot experience with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange were working on the more advanced issues related to broad roll-outs and deployments.  Topics of major interest included:

• Finding the best mix of capabilities for desktop deployment. Specifically, there was an interest in positioning conferencing capabilities on the desktop and in determining the extent to which desktop video conferencing should be enabled and then promoted. This was linked to the question of how much bandwidth will be consumed by a desktop video session, to understand the trade-offs, i.e. would voice and desktop sharing/web conferencing be more than sufficient for the business purpose, or would video have enough incremental value to justify the additional bandwidth over the Wide Area Network or out though an Internet Gateway. The sense of the questions on video were still exploratory, indicating that might come in a second or third wave of roll-out for most users.
• Facilitating customer interactions. Since many of the firms worked on major contracts with large enterprises (software, pharmaceuticals), there was interest in the options for links with those customers using UC. Some wanted to include their customers without any technical requirements, such as by inviting them into OCS-based Live Meetings. Others were interested in the details of federation to their customers, since those customers already had UC deployments. Either way, there was interest in more and better links with their clients.
• Enhancing team collaboration. Of course, the software firms were very interested in project speed, but that theme was echoed by the research lab, the systems integrators, and the manufacturing and retail firms. The manufacturing and retail firms were focused on collaboration primarily for supply chain management (e.g. requirements planning, order scheduling, and marketing).
• Improved conferencing at lower cost. Of course, the cost factors were important here, as several firms were looking to lower or eliminate their conferencing service provider costs, but there was also a major cost reduction focus on training retail store and branch office personnel via web or video conferencing tools. One questioner inquired as to how UC conferencing such as provided with OCS compared to high definition or special room-designed “telepresence.” That led to an interesting discussion of whether the 720p high definition mode now supported by OCS and Live Meeting were sufficient for the interpersonal applications of telepresence, at the resulting lower bandwidth, and whether desktop, home office or mobile location uses of a UC HD solution were preferable to specific telepresence room locations. The consensus was in favor of the UC approach, probably reflecting a blend of the audience’s experience with OCS and the pragmatic cost-conscious theme of the road show.
• Options for PBX integration. Several firms were moving or planned to move a portion of their users to OCS and had detailed questions on the options and methods of integrating OCS with their PBX systems to provide seamless links between the two communities of users.

As in Mumbai, the Microsoft IT (MSIT) team from India shared their experiences as part of the global Microsoft roll-out in deploying UC layers or “workloads” to 92,000 users across Microsoft, including (OCS), Microsoft Exchange, and Unified Messaging, with mobility and remote access thrown into the mix.  Also, Microsoft federates the OCS systems with their business partners, including presence, IBM and click-to-communicate.  For example, all Microsoft Partners in India are required to run their own OCS systems and to federate with Microsoft for ease of communications.   

Of course, the same regulations on non-interaction of TDM and IP networks exists in Bangalore as in Mumbai, addressed with similar creative configurations and operational solutions.

In summary, the Bangalore event just underscored the Mumbai conclusion that UC has momentum in India.  It will be very interesting to see what case studies show in 2010 as these customers roll out their UC applications.  

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Wow!  India!  What a happening place.  Even in the midst of a global economic slowdown, the morning Mumbai newspaper had the headline, “India GDP up 7.9%” reflecting the quarter ended September 2009 vs. the year prior.  This land of rich history is busy writing a new chapter, for sure.

The enterprise customers in Mumbai were a cross section of businesses, including retail banking, retail financial brokerage, construction, a major television network, a diamond-grading institution, and a number of software firms.  Most of the software firms were providing contract services to clients around the globe.

These businesses all had some very clear and consistent reasons for coming to a UC meeting.  Most of all, to find out more about how UC could help them save money and cut costs.  But, in every case, they added some business improvement goals, too, such as better collaboration with their customers, better employee productivity, improved branch communications, enhanced international communications, lower costs for conferencing services, and/or cutting the telecom bills.

Also, it was clear that these managers and planners were expecting to apply Unified Communications to selected parts of their businesses, in some logical sequence based on the applications mentioned.  They might be focusing on customer interfaces, or on mobile staff, or on branch operations, but clearly they were planning to proceed in phases to accelerate the benefits, to lower the risks, and to align with budgetary constraints. 

Roughly half of the firms were already running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a pilot environment, anticipating production rollouts in 2010.  But whether they were in pilot mode or still in the planning stages, all of them were gathering the facts to help them justify and budget for their UC actions.  Notably, the questions about justification were very much in the mode of ‘how to’ make sure UC can be justified, rather than in the mode of not taking action until the case is ‘proven’ beyond doubt.  In other words, these businesses in India seem to be focused on how to capture the opportunities, rather than on protecting the status quo.

To add spice to the UC scene in India (beyond the spice in the wonderful food), both the customer and the System Integrator UC teams have to work with a telecom regulation in India that bans any call in the public network from crossing the boundary between traditional analog/TDM (time division multiplexing) telephony and IP (packet-based) telephony.  If there’s Internet Protocol telephony in the call, such as from a PC or an IP Phone, then the call has to stay entirely within the enterprise’s private network, or has to be entirely on the data network.  Obviously, this can create a few challenges in system design and call routing, but there seemed to be plenty of Unified Communications applications that could be deployed without crossing that regulatory line.  Hopefully, that type of regulation will be eliminated soon.  Regulatory adjustments have already been made to accommodate the booming call center industry in India, so it would seem the changes could be extended to general purpose communications, as well. 

In summary, UC has momentum in India.  Businesses are planning and pilot testing the next wave of applications.  And, with the thriving India economy, it sure seems there will be plenty of UC roll-outs around Mumbai in 2010!

Tags: Unified Communications // 1 Comment »

What better place to start this series than in Cincinnati, Ohio? Known for nearly two centuries as a center of American manufacturing, this strength continues, augmented by major media firms (including print, broadcast and Internet) as well as major distribution firms, including HQs of a leading fast food chain. Of course, this is supported by business infrastructure including law firms and financial institutions. We saw representatives of all these Cincinnati businesses at the Microsoft Unified Communications Roadshow last week.

In meeting dozens of customers from the Cincinnati area, the UC theme was alive and well. In essentially every case, the customers were looking to “integrate communications to optimize business processes,” our UCStrategies.com definition of UC. Specifically, the dominant approach among Cincinnati-area enterprises was to look at the use cases within their business processes in order to make some breakthroughs.

In one case, represented by a custom technology engineering firm, the theme was to selectively move users to PC-based communications, on desktop or laptop computers. The primary driver was speed and effectiveness of engineering teamwork (aka collaboration), which was noticeably enhanced with presence and IM to access resources and with click-to-communicate, -share, or -meet or both internal teams and for meetings with clients. In addition to the business benefits, the company was achieving cost savings on toll costs for field and customer communications as well as reductions in infrastructure costs as the users moved from PBX-based communications to PC/Server based communications using Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). All users moving to OCS received specific training so that they learned how to use the tools specifically for their jobs.

A number of firms were looking at major out-of-pocket cost savings from recent or planned movement of conferencing from hosted services to the in-house “unified conferencing” capabilities of OCS. Those companies with major peak-load or seasonal conferencing loads were using or considering a hybrid model, leaving the peak period conferences with a hosted provider so as not to over-invest in the in-house capacity.

Another consistent theme was enablement of increased and improved remote working (teleworkers, field or traveling personnel, off-shore contractors). The primary motivation for these moves was employee productivity and convenience, supplemented by speed and effectiveness of customer services. In addition, there were specific net savings in terms of office space and travel expense. While some firms were comparing PC/Server type solutions to IP PBX-based solutions, the majority were already moving ahead with the Microsoft OCS model since most of their remote workers were already on a PC or laptop.

The media firms were looking for continuing improvements in support of their content creation and content management teams. Since these are very collaborative activities, the theme among the media firms was to have communications tools embedded into or linked with the collaboration tools for speed of project completion, which increases competitiveness, lowers costs and enables revenue growth,

This cross section of US businesses was consistent with both the Top UC Applications as described in the BCR Article “Top UC Applications Now Apparent” and with the Cost Savings and Business Value themes described in the “Achieving Cost and Resource Savings with UC” white paper.

However, beyond the consistency with noted themes, this group of businessmen and businesswomen displayed a wonderfully focused approach to Unified Communications - homing in on the hard dollar savings and the profit-enhancing, productivity-driving use cases.

Stay tuned for coming updates from Mumbai and Bangalore, India, and Athens, Greece, as the road show continues.

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There’s been a lot of discussion of “Collaboration” lately, what with Cisco’s use of the term as another redefinition of their marketing messages and positioning, as well as with the continued advancement of collaboration platforms from IBM, Microsoft, Google, and many others.

Fortunately, we realized the importance of collaboration from the beginning at UCStrategies.com.  Our definition of UC incorporates collaborative tools, as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.”  As you’ve heard or read, all of the collaboration offers promote the value proposition of optimizing business processes and outcomes by incorporating any number of communications methods and tools — ranging across voice conference calls, persistent chat, web-conferencing/desktop sharing, collaborative workspaces, and with video options in most of these. 

Also, our June 2007 article, “Top UC Applications Are Now Apparent,” highlighted “Collaboration Acceleration” as one of the top five UC applications.  The other four top applications focus on other parts of the enterprise value chain (both business and public sector), but certainly collaborative roles are in the spotlight. 

Here are some additional thoughts that might be helpful to expand the conversation about this interesting topic. 

First, on the definition of and applications for “collaboration”.    Definitions at Wikipedia, Mirriam-Webster, and Business Dictionary.com all point to the concept of two or more persons working towards a shared goal.  Links are: 

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration

Mirriam-Webster On-Line:  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/COLLABORATION

BusinessDictionary.com:  http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/collaboration.html

Layers of functionality are shown, from informal communications to structured communications (also known as the collaboration layer) to collaboration (and Project) management software.   In some cases, collaboration also relates to negotiation strategies, whether friendly or not.   

This leads to one observation on this point of definitions.  While possibly everyone could be included in collaboration, that is like saying everyone is water since we are all 62% made of H2O.   But, if we think of collaboration as a business activity, it’s a different story.  Depending on how you wish to count jobs and roles, only a small portion of jobs are primarily “collaborative” (research and development, marketing, university faculty, legislators, and some senior management roles, for examples).  However, many others are not primarily ”collaborative”, such as retail clerks, most culinary workers, most manufacturing / logistics / transportation jobs (I would not want a collaborative airline pilot, for example -  “Hey, Joe, do you think we should follow the ATC instructions, or not?”), primary education teachers (using defined lesson plans), non-physician or non-nurse medical practitioners, etc.  

In support of those points, the experts define collaboration in three layers:

At:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software#The_Three_levels_of_collaboration

Wikipedia contributors sort all communications into three categories:  Conversations, transactions, and collaboration.  The suggestions in the prior paragraphs reflect these distinctions. 

Then, since we are talking about communications technology applied to optimizing business processes, the industry generally categorizes Collaboration as Groupware with further distinctions between Collaborative Management Tools (including communications tools and UC types of tools as defined by Blair) and Collaborative Project Management tools.

If you look at this link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software you will see there are about 50 providers of open source or free collaborative software and about 76 providers of proprietary collaborative software applications, one (1) of which is Cisco’s WebEx while there are five (5) each from Microsoft and IBM, as well as entries from Adobe, Oracle and EMC.  

So, as Cisco begins to group all communications under the Collaboration umbrella, they are heading into a crowded space in which they are far from a leadership position and will be challenged in battles with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.   Actually, IBM showed some insight with their positioning of Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC2).   That avoids the problem of all collaboration being communications.    This move may be important for Cisco as they seem to be repositioning their communications applications (for investors, customers and prospects) beyond the IP Telephony and Unified Communications markets in which Cisco now has major share, but is unlikely to become dominant in any near term.

Of course, Collaboration consumes video!!!  And video drives bandwidth.   Perhaps the many new video announcements could be called HBC - High Bandwidth Communications — just to be perfectly clear!  That the new video-equipped phones might be in a branch office and that the video might consume all the MPLS bandwidth provisioned for phone calls is just a detail that can be addressed by upgrading the network.

So, to loop back to the naming of Collaboration in context with Unified Communications, the foresight of the UCStrategies.com definition is only underlined and reinforced by Cisco’s announcement.  Our definition of UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes” embraces all that Cisco announced last week. 

However, this is not just about Cisco.  Many other suppliers have alternative names related to UC, as you have read here on UCStrategies.com from time to time.  And, we’ll see many more variations, since Unified Communications is now a core element of the enterprise communications market (see the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony) and everyone wants to have a unique position in that growing element of the market.  

Change the name, change the slogan, change the marketing messages, even enhance the products, but the end measure of value is whether a communications-related business process has been improved (or optimized).  John Chambers emphasized that his new distributed council-based management methods are far better (optimized) than the old command and control methods and he asserts that the optimization was enabled by the integration of new (video-based) collaboration tools.   Sounds like a case study for our definition of UC, seems to me.

This has been a good opportunity to refresh the conversation on the definition of UC.  Thanks, Cisco, for the “stimulus package”.   

Tags: Unified Communications Information // 3 Comments »

Analysts talk all the time about drinking from the fire hose when we attend vendor analyst briefings, but I think that Cisco had that fire hose on stun this week. They claimed they were announcing 61 or more (I lost count) products this week, and I’m sure they weren’t kidding. Granted many were perhaps features, sub products or new releases, but the overall feeling was more of I get the big picture, but I’m confused as to the dividing lines.

Of course, it was video, video, video, across every product line, with several new products being announced. These included the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP) that Blair spoke of in her Cisco blog, Medianet, which is a platform for delivering any media, anywhere, Intercompany Cisco TelePresence Directory, which is a hosted directory of TelePresence people and endpoints between companies, and Cisco TelePresence WebEx Exchange, which is a one-button initiation and scheduling solution with video integration between Cisco TelePresence and Cisco WebEx conferencing (the demos were pretty slick on this one).

Conceptually, I personally liked two products in this new line up; Show and Share and Pulse. Show and Share is a social video system that allows users to generate their own video content quickly and easily and share it with others in video communities. What I found most appealing about the product was the ability to not just edit and share, but also that the system can create speech-to-text transcriptions of the videos that are searchable and taggable. This means that you can search for something in the text, click on it and go to the portion of the video where it is at. Video can also be commented on, both publicly, or portions tagged with private comments as well.

Pulse is search platform that dynamically tags content as it crosses the network, such as blog and Wiki postings, or other content. Pulse essentially looks at real-time information “chatter”, across and entire organization, and “takes a pulse”, on what types of things are being discussed, researched, looked at, and who those people are that are creating or looking at that content. The resulting intelligence from Pulse can be used to accurately locate those people that are subject matter experts on things, and then lets the user easily connect with them.

One of the thoughts put out by Cisco is that tools such as Show and Share and Pulse, combined with ECP could eventually be used as a way to get real-time information as to which agent to route a call to in a contact center, instead of relying on static skills-based routing tables based on infrequently updated information on individual agents. The idea would be that information on which agent has which skill or attribute could be updated automatically, rather than waiting for an agents profile to be updated by an agent or supervisor. It would also eliminate “yellow stickyville”, that agents use to track which other expert in or out f the contact center can help them with a particular problem. That is an interesting concept.

However, this does lead me to some of the things that I felt were sort of unresolved, and therefore put out there for future observation. For example, just as there is a virtual world Second Life, using some of these tools, such as Pulse, seems like Naked Life because unless proper policies and procedures are in place, the user really is naked because everyone can see what they are up to. Along with this is the question of how do you change the culture to something so collaborative in the first place.

Lastly,there is the overhead associated with some of the products. As one of the presenters pointed out, “Cisco does a good job of content creation, but not content management”. They aren’t alone. Business is rife with email users that don’t ever delete, let alone video and all manner of documentation and information. In this case creation and aggregation of mass amounts of information leads to issues of storage, security, privacy, entitlement, and lots of other issues.

In all, it was a very interesting summit with products that are very appealing. The key for Cisco is in how to make those cool ideas and products have broad appeal, as it will involve both culture change, and sorting out how to position a lot of products that appear to have overlapping components. We have already seen this issue occur with the feature set of UC, but with Cisco’s announcement of more video and collaboration features, this issue is has become a magnitude more complex.

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