My Observations at VoiceCon: The State of the Economy Paints a Not-So-Pretty Picture
At VoiceCon last week, it was clear that the economy had hit the show. Attendance was light, booths were even lighter, and the word was that most enterprises were holding off on big IT projects until Q1-09. From a vendor perspective, they felt VoiceCon Spring was a more important show. This is definitely a sign that vendors are being cautious about where they put their marketing dollars.
The conference overall, took a turn in terms of the hype around it. It was quieter than usual, and I realized that the hype has died down. UC is no longer a question of if it will happen, but more of when and how it will happen. Vendors at the show focused more on features and functionality of UC solutions, really getting down to what the actual solution consists of. Many also pointed out partnerships that will enhance their solutions, as is in the case of NEC and Tellme, where NEC will be combining its services with Tellme’s on-demand platform. Several topics that I didn’t see however, or wish there were more of were:
Green IT-GREEN is a big initiative for the president-elect, and I would not dismiss being “green” as a core part of UC’s value proposition. Enterprises today have either included, or are including green initiatives into their business strategy, in part because of corporate social responsibility, in part for the more obvious, which is the cost savings behind being “green”. Unified communications brings together groups of global talent at the click of a button, making go-to-market timing much more efficient; the reduction of travel not only helps the air pollution, but also an enterprise’s bottom line; less hardware (servers, wiring closets, etc) means less real estate; relationship building with external partners through unified communications, improves customer satisfaction; and ultimately, when we see communications increasingly embedded into business processes, automation of those processes, which in turn, will help enterprises to reallocate resources towards other business initiatives. I would also include in this section, offering services in the cloud, which is still very much a nascent market, but not one to be overlooked.
Mobility-Although VoiceCon has historically not been a wireless show, I firmly believe that the lines between wired and wireless are blurring. Unified communications is tearing down this wall, but did not see much focus around mobility. As was evident during Microsoft’s keynote when they introduced their customer, the “convergence” manager from Boeing, leading enterprises understand that the worlds of wired and wireless have come together. I did receive an interesting demo from Mitel, which has understood that the key for mobile UC will be the GUI, and they have opted to mirror the GUI for each supported device (i.e. BB with their own interface, etc). Many vendors have strong mobile UC stories; however, I didn’t find them prevalent at this show.
Collaboration-Although unified communications is still not widely deployed, and I don’t expect it to evolve to a more comprehensive collaboration strategy within enterprises any time soon, there has been growing interest in what the next step for unified communication is. Collaboration is the long-term evolution of UC, and the umbrella under which UC falls. I look at collaboration as being unified communications+wikis, blogs, communities+enterprise social networking. While we’re certainly not there yet, it would be great for enterprises, both big and small, to see what the evolution of UC is and have a better understanding of how they all fit with one another.
So, while it was good to see all the usual suspects attending this event, this industry is changing, and VoiceCon must evolve. It really is not just about voice anymore, but so much more, of which voice is a small part of. The roles within an IT organization are changing, and targeting the “network” guy or the “telecom” guy is no longer the case. The coming together of IT and telecom is happening and addressing one and not the other is detrimental. I have seen titles like IT manager evolve into convergence manager and titles such as Chief Information Officer turn into Chief Innovation Officer. What do you call them? The telecom guy? The IT guy? I think I’ve made my point.
For enterprises, it’s critical that a long-term collaboration strategy is put in place. Although the economy has put many IT initiatives on hold, UC and collaboration should be priorities. The long- and short-term benefits are well worth it and employees need to begin taking advantage of these tools. Organizational behavior starts from the top, and management must implement policies that will encourage the use of UC and collaboration tools. Cisco has been a vendor that has demonstrated that they practice what they preach. With a mandate from the top to cut 1 billion dollars in CAPEX/OPEX, the use of these tools is critical to making that happen. Conducting business doesn’t stop just because you can’t get on an airplane. It’s critical that the necessary tools be put in place as to not disrupt business.
Vanessa,
Your observations confirmed much of what I had expected the VoiceCon show to be like. I certainly didn’t think the enterprise market was ready to “buy” new UC technologies that IT organizations had little implementation/management experience with, especially for mobile devices that end users will choose and control personally. Throw in the impact of mobility on business applications and you really have to rethink traditional premise-based software vs. “virtualized” servers and hosted services.
As person-to-person business calls increasingly shift to IM and more “intelligent,” presence-based conferencing, speech also has to become just another user interface option for business applications (particularly for input). That would include automated self-service applications, as well as “click-to-contact” a live person on demand.
Where that leaves the future of existing telephony CPE is very questionable, since, by definition, UC requires speech interfaces to be part of device-independent, multimodal and transmodal business communication services, regardless of the location of users or the application servers.
@ Vanessa: I agree that there was caution among vendors. As far as long-term strategies go, there is far too much confusion in the marketplace for them to decide on a long-term collaboration strategy. And don’t forget: the IT department in the last couple of years has had LESS control over collaboration than ever before, as individual departments or groups of staff pick their own Web 2.0 collaboration software and run with it — sometimes without the IT department knowing.
@ Art: maybe virtualization and hosting will become important for UC sometime, but it won’t be soon. Reason #1: Microsoft does not support virtualization of Exchange or OCS (yet, at least). Reason #2: Microsoft’s hosted products (Exchange Online etc), launched this week, do not provide the UC elements of Exchange 2007 (ie the ‘unified communications’ server role) and cannot be hooked up to a PBX system.
In a sense, this is a step backwards: Microsoft’s UC offering will only run on-premise on non-virtual servers.
Rurik Bradbury
Vanessa,
I revisited your blog about VoiceCon and noted your concern about VoiceCon’s need to shift from just a telephony emphasis for it’s attendees and the need to relabel the title of UC technology management.
I have long tried to push Fred Knight to change the name of the show and open the program to include text messaging management as part of the new UM/UC.world of communications. Why would you only want to talk to traditional telcom and network managers, when end point devices, software clients, and application servers, are all converging to support multimodal and transmodal end user UC interfaces? Email and message management has to be part of the UC migration planning process, as well as IT management for business process applications (CEBP), mobility, and federated presence for end users both within and outside of an organization.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on just the needs of real-time voice, but it can no longer be an isolated silo for enterprise IT management as in the past. The “graceful” migration from TDM telephony is, of course, a specific challenge for every existing business operation all by itself that will require careful and customized planning.
However I don’t see enterprises continuing to buy new premise-based telephone systems in the future, without them being a strategically integrated part of a UC environment (including hosted and managed services). But then it is not going to be easy or practical to organize a single physical conference to cover everything about UC implementation management. (That is also why I have been pushing for combining “virtual” and physical conferences to maximize the best of both approaches to serve the much broader “UC” audience).