Gartner Research has long been a leader in evaluating new computer-based technologies, and I personally know several of the researchers who write about business communications. Bern Elliot, Vice President of Research at Gartner, did a pretty good job in the middle of last year of putting UC technologies into an enterprise business perspective for their “Magic Quadrant” for Unified-Communications, 2007.

In a way, identifying who’s doing what in the UC industry is a little premature, because, until the new technologies are really finished or legacy technology is really ready to be replaced, UC has to be viewed as “a migratory work in progress.” However, it is important to track technology developments, products, and services so that IT will be ready to selectively deliver new UC capabilities whenever required. Gartner rightly confirms the following key points about UC value and approaches to implementation:

• What the UC Magic Quadrant 2007 report highlights, is the shift to software rather than premise-based hardware for UC application servers, as well as for endpoint device client software flexibility at the desktop and for personalized mobile device independence. This sets the stage for who the UC technology suppliers will be.

• The biggest value of UC capabilities, in general (not necessarily a particular application or infrastructure component of UC) is the “ability to reduce ‘human latency’” in business processes. Right there is the biggest challenge for enterprise UC planning; where, why, and for whom will UC applications really be important?

• Gartner recommends that organizations start doing the planning “homework” to answer the above-mentioned questions, i.e., identify the important users, what they are doing now, and start testing UC solutions for those types of users.

• Gartner claims to have coined the term “Communications Enabled Business Processes” or “CEBP”), now heavily adopted by Avaya) to describe what I have frequently talked about where automated applications can proactively can now act as efficient contact initiators to people. This can exploiting the flexibility of UC to further minimize the inefficiencies of traditional consumer-oriented, person-to-person communications..

New Comments From Gartner – “Business UC”

Bern Elliot added some additional useful perceptions about UC in a new Network World article, “Understanding the Value of Unified Comms.” In addition to repeating his prior statement about what UC is and the main value of reducing “human latency,” Elliot further identified “three functional areas” of what I would call “Business UC” (as opposed to “Consumer UC” which gets into entertainment.)

These are

1. “Personal UC” – which enables individuals to more easily and efficiently contact other individual (“Person-to-Person”). We have described that kind of productivity value as being a “micro-productivity” metric.

2. “Work-Group UC” – This is where UC is exploited to make teams of people more efficient and effective in their “collaborative” efforts on task performance as a group. This gets the job done to produce what we have described as a “macro-productivity” metric, which has more direct payoff to the organization, rather than just to the individuals.

3. “Enterprise UC” is new perspective for 2 above, but is based on proactive, business process application activities that exploit “CEBP” functionality to initiate and “orchestrate” faster and more effective contacts between people. By putting a business process work flow application “in charge” of notifying and coordinating contacts between people, it will be possible to also track the time-to-resolution of a problem, or completion of a task.

The emphasis on communicating flexibly efficiently with people, regardless of who the initiator is and regardless of the recipients, can maximize the success of any business task performance. Conversely, the failure of any key stakeholder to be able to initiate or receive a time critical contact, can impact the completion of any task.

Of course, the article reiterates the problem of what providers will supply what UC technologies, mentioned last year. There will be a lot of overlap, mix-and-match best-of-breed, and services vs. products. However, the bottom line message is to “pick your poison” after you do your homework!

Comment? Send me an email at artr@ix.netcom.com

Tags: UC Information by Art Rosenberg
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There was a rumor going around that Adomo, one of the newest players to the UM market, has just shut its doors. The folks at Adomo called me put to rest these rumors and to say that they are indeed still in business but are restructuring the business from the sales and marketing end, and looking at alternative go-to-market strategies (which could likely mean partnering with a larger company to help take them to market, which I assume in all likelihood means that they are looking to be acquired). As part of this restructuring a large part of the sales, marketing, and some of the management staff have been “downsized.” The company insists that its doors are open and the company is very healthy financially with a strong cash position. The Adomo folks said that there are ongoing deployments, and they are continuing development.

Adomo told me that they are reorganizing and restructuring operations in order to adapt to customers and the changing environment. The company has strong products and a good customer base, and customers are very happy with the product, especially the business continuity aspect. Everything except sales and marketing remains unchanged, with engineering and customer service staying untouched. Adomo notes that its clients are generally large enterprises with complex environments, and it has been a challenge to most effectively reach that market and fill their needs in a timely, cost-effective manner. Adomo now needs to figure out what are the best options to reach these companies.

Adomo is one of the few independent vendors not tied to a PBX company. I was introduced to the company when they first began operations and was impressed with their product, which leverages Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and Active Directory. I was also impressed with some of the people on the Adomo board, especially Chairman Bob Cohn, who was CEO and founder of Octel–if anyone knows and understands the messaging market, it’s Bob. However, like many others in the industry, I have had my concerns about the viability of Adomo once Microsoft announced and introduced Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, which competes directly with the Adomo offering, but at a much lower price point. While the Adomo product certainly has some advantages over the Microsoft UM product, it became a much harder sell once Microsoft got into the UM business.

Adomo’s products include patented technology with out-of-the-box Exchange and Active Directory connectivity without requiring schema changes, as well as integration with any PBX, whether TDM or IP. There are also some impressive mobility capabilities, including SmartNumber with a “Priority Caller” feature that immediately routes user-defined priority callers to a preferred number while other callers get sent to voicemail. Adomo BlackBerry “Play on Phone” enables users to play the voice message attached to email on the BlackBerry (pre-4.2 and pre-Pear lBlackBerries cannot play voice messages attached to an email). Adomo notes that its “secret sauce” is the fact that the architecture is serverless. The UM server has been replaced with a hardened Linux plug and play appliance. It is a dedicated platform and no data is stored on this appliance so no backups are required. Also, instead of integrating each and every UM server in the network, Adomo has only a single touchpoint to Exchange. This means Exchange integration is done once, even if there are multiple sites and multiple appliances, simplifying deployment and maintenance. If Exchange or the network fail for some reason, the Adomo appliance goes into off-line mode, with full voicemail functionality.

The company recently raised a new round of $15 million from Menlo Ventures and Storm Ventures, which was going to be used to expand product development, marketing and sales efforts, but now I assume will be used less for sales and marketing and more for product development and supporting customers who have deployed the company’s products. As the company scales back sales and marketing and looks at options for how to get to market quicker and better, it will look into options like partnerships with larger companies, a channel strategy focusing on indirect sales, and other alternatives (which I assume means acquisition partners). In addition, Adomo wants to focus on supporting its current customers and those in deployment and make sure that engineering can develop the features and roadmap desired without spending too much effort on go-to-market. Adomo’s existing customers are very supportive of the company changes, and Adomo remains engaged on new customer opportunities, so it’s business forward as Adomo strategizes on a lower cost go to market model.

I’m not sure which company would be the best fit as an acquisition partner at this point. Most switch and telephony vendors already have their own UM products, and there aren’t very many companies willing to go up against Microsoft head on. While Adomo certainly has its share of challenges ahead, hopefully the restructuring will help it find better and faster ways to market.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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