I have been following Siemens and their unified communications strategy even before we called it UC. Their strategy has evolved but their direction has been surprisingly consistent. Siemens worked with Microsoft on solutions we now call UC. They were ahead of the market but it looks like they now have an opportunity to become a market leader in the UC space.

My colleagues have posted several blogs and articles on UCStrategies.com discussing Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEC) joint venture (JV) with The Gores Group (TGG).

• Marty Parker - “SEN has arguably the best software stack for UC solutions in the entire industry in their OpenScape Communications Suite.”
• Don Van Doren - “My suggestion is that Gores and SEN strive to become the systems integrator of choice for integrating voice communications into business processes.”
• Paul Stockford - “Siemens in unquestionably a power to be reckoned with in the emerging UC market, but they’re a non-entity in the well-established contact center market.”
• Michael Finneran - “In the near-term, mobility could be the joint venture’s ace-in-the-hole.”
• David Yedwab - “the US focus of The Gores Group and its contribution of Enterasys and SER Solutions to the JV is logically designed to have significant positive impact”

The JV will be well positioned from the start with $350M Euros for investment to shore up any product or distribution deficiencies and $500M Euros in working capital (and no debt) to cover any losses - which are unlikely with SEC’s recent cost cutting initiatives and TGG’s practice of turning acquired companies profitable within months of acquisition (JV in this case).

The challenge - will the new joint venture be able to take advantage of this opportunity. I have always felt - Siemens has a great UC story but nobody is buying it - why? I have already mentioned they were early to market and, they have a great marketing executive in Mark Straton - so why haven’t they been more successful? A simple explanation - Siemens is too large to easily evolve with the changing market and technology. The market is changing but Siemens corporate was not agile enough to change quickly to leverage the opportunity (you can read - challenges at Avaya and Alcatel Lucent into this).

To become a market leader they need to change the way enterprise customers look at communications. This is something we at UCStrategies.com are passionate about. We believe the vendors needs to support what they already know - the PBX is changing from the center of communications to a part of an enterprises communications solution. UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes and is not about buying a new PBX.

SEC appears to be the only vendor positioned for the changes UC brings. Most vendors have not been able to change their business model and still require the revenue and profits associated with sales of new IP-PBX’s. SEC is position to be successful by selling UC solutions - no matter whose PBX is part of the solution.

Too many enterprise customers are stuck in the same old model that is slowly killing past industry communications giants. The first thing they think about is replacing their current PBX with an IP PBX that will migrate to UC. They should be thinking - how can I communications enable a business process. If we need a new PBX great but that is not the core decisions process.

The SEC and the JV has an incredible opportunity. In not too many years we could look back and say Alec Gores was a genius. He leveraged an opportunity and his company became a market leader. Time will tell.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Jim Burton
2 Comments »

Over the past four years Siemens has made it pretty clear to industry that they are not interested in the contact center market. The company’s commitment to that market has continued to wane over the years to the point where many industry watchers, me included, consider Siemens to be a non-player in the contact center industry today.

That’s why yesterday’s announcement of Siemens’ joint venture with The Gores Group barely caused a blip on the contact center industry radar. While the unified communications (UC) industry was fairly excited about the possibilities this new JV could bring to the burgeoning UC market, the contact center industry reacted with a collective yawn. There is a bit of irony here.

In earlier posts to this blog I took the position that the contact center will be the launching point for UC into the greater enterprise. Of course there will be exceptions to this, but I still believe that UC will begin to see mass market momentum when the contact center adopts it for its own. Siemens in unquestionably a power to be reckoned with in the emerging UC market, but they’re a non-entity in the well-established contact center market. Thus we have the irony that seems to have kept the contact center industry politely disinterested in the Siemens/Gores Group announcement.

There’s another small but potentially interesting kink in this new arrangement and that is the fact that The Gores Group owns SER, the contact management/predictive dialer company out of Dulles, VA, and they’re throwing SER in as part of the deal. Now, SER is no Aspect but it’s no slouch either and I question whether the new Siemens/Gores JV can afford to ignore it in deference to Siemens’ apathy toward the contact center industry. I foresee a bit of a quandary as the new Siemens Enterprise Communications comes to life.

Long term, the problem will probably take care of itself. Siemens is not going to take its eye off the UC ball but it is going to have to come to terms with the role of UC in the contact center. For the short term Siemens will have to follow the majority stakeholder Gores Group in its support of SER’s products and the contact center industry. This is not, however, where I see Siemens in the long run.

Long-term, I believe Siemens’ role in the industry will evolve with the industry itself. As the UC industry sorts itself out, I believe the players will become increasingly specialized. For example, one company might specialize in UC software. Another might specialize in infrastructure. Siemens’ specialization will be services. Siemens Enterprise Communications has made noise about transforming itself into a services company for years. Now it is out from under the heavy hand of Siemens AG, it finally has the chance to actually do it.

As for SER? Probably acquired by Aspect.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
4 Comments »

Marty, let me add further to your “modest proposal”.  My suggestion is that Gores and SEN strive to become the systems integrator of choice for integrating voice communications into business processes. 

As we look at the developing unified communications market, we see strong parallels to the way contact centers developed.  Companies are willing to spend thousands of dollars per agent seat gathering and integrating applications, communications, customer data, and knowledge systems into processes to solve a specific business problem - handling incoming customer contacts efficiently and effectively. 

Unified Communications holds a similar promise for many places in the enterprise - linking people, processes, and technology in a way that solves a specific business problem.  Our consulting work, and numerous published case studies point to the fact that applying UC to business processes is the road to the best ROI opportunities.   But achieving these results sometimes requires integrating voice communications into business applications.  And that’s a lot of potential revenue for innovative services companies.

Who better to tackle the subtle challenges of voice communications than a multi-billion dollar company with deep roots in the voice business.  Moreover, Siemens has, with their OpenScape UC Server, gained experience understanding other systems with which it will integrate. 

There are several paths.  Siemens could “go it alone” and choose one of several models such as Genesys Labs, IBM Global Services, DiData, Accenture, or others.  Or, they could work closely with their VAR network to develop an ecosystem of integrators. 

So, Gores and SEN, go beyond the traditional voice communications business.  Integration services is where it’s at in the unfolding unified communications marketplace! 

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Don Van Doren
3 Comments »

Our UCStrategies.com team has been discussing the acquisition of Siemens Enterprise Networks (SEN) into a joint venture with The Gores Group, who also owns Enterasys and SER.

As we pondered the situation, it became clear that this is an ideal time for some dramatic action.  SEN has arguably the best software stack for UC solutions in the entire industry in their OpenScape Communications Suite.  (Yes, we mean just the OpenScape Suite, not all the updated telephony-centric products such as the HiPath 8000, et al.).  

Our modest proposal is that the new SEN look past the traditional converged voice and PBX market, in which they are in a money-losing fourth place position (this according to their own slides from yesterday’s announcement) and look instead to the future via Unified Communications. 

What if they told all of their installed base customers that the new SEN is different?  The new SEN will not declare end-of-support on all that good Siemens technology that still works.  Instead, the new SEN recommends that the customers don’t waste their time replacing PBXs with IP PBXs and buying new phones, but rather spend their time and money installing OpenScape, connected to any PBX they own (old or new, of any brand).  Since OpenScape provides the complete set of communications tools that integrate seamlessly with both Microsoft and IBM (SEN has alliances for this with both companies) and with the enterprise back-office or hosted solutions (think SAP, Salesforce.com and more), SEN has the best chance of any company to come out as the market leader in Unified Communications. 

Hmmm. So the choice is to continue to sell PBXs, where SEN lost 602 million Euros on revenues of 3,200 million Euros in FY2007 and try to hold on to fourth place with declining market share, or to use this opportunity to truncate the loses in PBX selling (but continue the more profitable servicing business) and shoot for the leadership position in UC.  Losses/share laggard or smaller but profitable leader?  Oh, yeah, let’s be the leader! 

So, there’s our modest proposal.  What do you think?  Please post away on our blog here.

Tags: Unified Communications Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
1 Comment »

The recent UC Summit that was organized by UC Strategies was highlighted by defining productivity benefits at two different levels. One was for the individual end user who gained personal time-savings and convenience from UC technologies (UC-U), the other was the performance efficiency of a business process in terms of both quality and speed of process completion (UC-B). Some of this was described in the eBook, Unified Communication Cutting Through the Hype, that I and my UC Strategies colleagues published earlier this year.

While both perspectives are valid and important, there is a gap between the two. Because most business processes involve more than one person, it becomes critical to business process performance that all the individuals who are involved in the process (work flow) do so as efficiently as possible. That means that they must be able to communicate as quickly and flexibly as possible, either as as contact initiators or contact recipients/respondents, so that there is no unnecessary delay in the process as a whole. If a key decision maker or action taker should be delayed in communicating, the whole process will consequently suffer a delay. So the impact of personal productivity (UC-U) can also impact (UC-B).

I recognized this years ago when first looking at the need for UC. I suggested that UC-B performance must take into account the performance of individual users who can cause such delays to the performance of the “group” as a whole, especially in time-critical situations. Having alternative resources to fill the human availability gap is a typical business strategy that has long been used in call centers, for example, to handle real-time phone calls. However, whenever there is a requirement for specific individual, then such an individual has to maximize their communication accessibility through UC flexibility for the benefit of the group and the business process.

“Group productivity” or “UC-G” can be described as the flexible accessibility to receive and respond to timely information and people contacts as quickly as possible. UC capabilities, coupled with mobile accessibility, will maximize UC-G for the user as well as the business process. For this reason, it will be important to identify specific users who are key to a high priority business process and insure that they are fully equipped to exploit the benefits of UC technologies. So, for example, doctors and nurses who must be notified that a patient is in a life-threatening state, cannot afford to be without mobile devices that allow them to be accessed by people and information wherever they are. Business situations have similar kinds of demands when there deadlines or costly problem situations that need to be fixed as quickly as possible to minimize losses.

UC flexibility has to extend beyond the business premises and include people outside the organization who are involved or affected by the situation. This means that premise-based UC alone will not be adequate when customers and business partners need to be involved in a time-sensitive business process. UC-G will therefore have to involve capabilities like “federated presence” in order to deal with such outside contacts as effectively as possible. Similarly, metrics to track communication efficiency with people inside or outside the organization will be useful in identifying UC needs that the organization doesn’t have direct control over, but which will still impact the organization’s business process performance.

What do you think? We welcome your comments.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
3 Comments »

The number of disabled veterans in the U.S. has increased 25 percent over the last seven years. Today there are 2.9 million disabled veterans in the U.S. including over 181,000 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are receiving disability as of May 2008. A January 2007 report from the Small Business Administration entitled “Self-Employment in the Veteran and Service-Disabled Veteran Population” revealed that during the years 1988 - 2005, 64 percent of service-disabled veterans were unemployed. 32 percent of disabled veterans were employed by an organization of some sort while four percent were self-employed.

As soldiers continue to return from Iraq with devastating injuries that probably would have killed them in previous wars, they will hopefully be rehabilitated and begin seeking gainful employment. What better place for these veterans to find work than as home-based contact center agents?

Veterans2Work (V2W) is a relatively new organization that seeks to find opportunities for disabled people, and particularly disabled veterans, as home-based workers. Run by contact center industry and Vietnam veteran John Reynolds, V2W is a joint venture with the already-established CORA, which stands for Creating Opportunities by Recognizing Abilities. CORA is a certified training facility that trains, equips and qualifies disabled people for work. CORA can also function as an outsourced facility with disabled workers remaining with CORA but contracting for work with another organization - the classic contact center outsourcing arrangement.

CORA can also train and mentor workers to become direct hires of other companies through a set training period that demonstrates their abilities, typically 90 days, before the disabled worker becomes an employee of the hiring company. V2W’s job is to make sure the business community at large knows about the availability of this workforce.

Although the contact center industry as a whole has not fully embraced the notion of the home-based agent or employee, it’s time to get over the misconception that home-based workers are not as productive or reliable as office-based workers. Internet Protocol (IP) and unified communications (UC) offer any employee or contractor a means to stay in touch with the office regardless of his or her location. A home-based contact center agent can have virtually identical communications capabilities as an office-based colleague with UC solutions such as presence ensuring that qualified support is never more than a mouse click away for any agent.

V2W also offers American business what I consider to be an additional benefit in that it provides many industries, including the customer service industry, an alternative to sending jobs offshore in order to lower labor costs. With the substantial state and federal tax benefits that come with the hiring of disabled veterans and other workers, or through contracting with organizations such as CORA for outsourced services, there is now a viable financial alternative to sending contact center agent jobs to offshore locations.

As a veteran of the armed forces myself I believe it is vitally important that we take care of our own. Corporate America, and in particular the contact center industry, owes it to itself and to those who have served to consider what V2W might be able to do to help American business, and to help those who have suffered disabilities in service to their country. For more information on V2W visit www.veterans2work.com or call John Reynolds at 415-925-1515.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
4 Comments »

Aspect Software recently commissioned a study to look at opportunities to improve customer service through unified communications (UC). Aspect retained Leo J. Shapiro and Associates LLC of Chicago to conduct the survey of 50 contact center supervisors and 50 contact center agents at the end of 2007. The findings of the study clearly identify customer service stumbling blocks that could be overcome by the deployment of UC in the contact center.

The Aspect study found that, according to the supervisors and agents interviewed, 10.3 percent of all telephone inquiries handled on a daily basis required assistance from knowledge workers outside of the contact center. When these calls requiring outside help occur, the study reports that one of two things generally happen:

• Contact center personnel place the customer on hold while they seek the expertise required, then relay that information to the customer secondhand; or
• Contact center personnel attempt to resolve the customer issue to the point that outside expertise is needed, and then the customer call is transferred to the knowledge worker for resolution.

I submit that a third scenario is also possible - that the customer service rep takes the information from the customer and promises a call-back once the answer can be gleaned from the appropriate resources. In any case, these scenarios negatively impact two important contact center performance metrics; average call handle time, also known as average handle time (AHT), and first call resolution (FCR). An increase in AHT or a decrease in FCR can both be detrimental to the operational performance and customer service levels of the typical customer care center.

The Aspect-sponsored Shapiro study found that the average call was increased by approximately 2.5 minutes each time a knowledge worker outside the contact center was required to in order to resolve a customer inquiry. Although the study didn’t pinpoint how much of that 2.5 minutes was spent searching for the knowledge worker and how much was spent on the phone with the customer, we can reasonably assume that a good percentage of that time, perhaps as high as half of that time, was spent searching for and connecting to the knowledge worker outside of the contact center.

If that one-to-1.5 minutes spent searching for a resource could be reduced or eliminated through the use of such UC-enabled solutions as Presence, the cost savings and increased productivity could be significant. Think of the number of calls your own call center handles each day and what might be saved by shaving a minute or more off of ten percent of those calls. Although this is conjecture, it still serves to illustrate a point: UC in the contact center comes with a built-in return on investment (ROI) that is not only demonstrable; it is enough to make even the most hard-hearted CFO take notice.

Full details of the Aspect Software survey are available at www.aspect.com.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
4 Comments »