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.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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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 by Marty Parker
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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.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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From time to time, UCStrategies.com experts are invited to be keynote speakers at customer events sponsored by leading vendors in Unified Communications.  In addition to our sessions at conferences such as VoiceCon and InterOp, Blair Pleasant (COMMFusion), and Don Van Doren and I (UniComm Consulting) have each enjoyed responding to those requests to provide independent industry viewpoints at these customer events.

Beginning on November 20, I will be speaking at Microsoft Unified Communications Road Show events in the US, India, Greece, Denmark, Spain, Germany, Italy, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. 

The theme will reflect the white paper that Don Van Doren and I recently created with Microsoft sponsorship, “Achieving Cost and Resource Savings through Unified Communications.”   This highlights roughly a dozen areas where companies around the globe are applying UC solutions, especially Microsfot Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Exchange Server 2007 and 2010, to produce measurable savings.  On a “per employee per year” basis and backed up with actual case studies, the potential savings are in the range of $12,000 per employee per year — a very compelling ROI and cash positive within months.

Since Unified Communications is very likely to be quite different in each country, my plan is to report the perspectives on UC as well the creative UC solutions being implements at each stop along the way.  You may share my curiousity about what will be found at each stop.  

If you have questions you would like me to explore, please post them here.   It will be a joy to share with you.

Best Regards….

Marty Parker 

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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I spent a few days in San Francisco at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. John Chambers, as always, did an amazing job of positioning Cisco as a leader and innovator. I totally agreed with Chambers when he said that the technology for collaboration is the easy party, but changing a company’s culture is hard, and it’s especially hard to change the way people work. He noted that collaboration needs to be driven from the top down to match a company’s business goals. It also leads to new business models, such as how to respond to a hurricane, or how you move operations to the data center.

Jim Grubb, Demo Master, demonstrated the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP), which lets users create and share social content and expertise. ECP brings together people, information, and communities in an integrated collaboration experience. Customers will have to wait for this, however, since ECP is just going into beta trial today with some key accounts.

Here’s the basic idea behind ECP. Similar to IBM’s Lotus Connections and products from smaller Enterprise 2.0 companies like Socialtext, ECP is a social software portal application that lets users form team spaces and communities of interest where they can search for individuals with specific expertise, share information, and collaborate and communicate. As Grubb demonstrated, communities can be dynamically created based on a project, for example, and people and resources can be brought into the community quickly and easily. Based on tags and other criteria, users can search for individuals based on skills or expertise and bring them into the community. Using Cisco’s UC tools, users can integrate real-time voice and video capabilities, and send IM’s, initiate real-time voice and/or video calls using click-to-call capabilities. They can also invite other people to join the discussion. Community members can share blogs, wikis, videos, documents, and other information within the shared community workspace.

Cisco acknowledges that other vendors have similar social software tools, and they’re not the first ones in this area. However, there is a gestalt that occurs when ECP can be integrated with Cisco’s UC tools, allowing for a richer collaborative experience, with real-time voice, video, and chat capabilities.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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Another VoiceCon has come and gone – while the exhibit hall wasn’t as full with exhibitors as in years past, it was still a great VoiceCon, with lots of information-packed sessions, and opportunities for networking with vendors, customers, and peers.
To help prepare for my locknote session, I jotted down notes about what I thought some of the key take-aways were.
• I’m happy to say that we are not talking about unified communications definitions anymore –instead, we’re now talking about how customers can get payback from implementing UC. For the past couple years, the UCStrategies.com team has been presenting our definition of UC at VoiceCon, and the good news is, we no longer have to do this – people get it. Everyone now knows that UC is “Communications integrated to optimize business processes,” and that there are two types of UC – UC-User and UC-Business Process.
• The focus this year was on how UC will make companies and workers more productive and efficient. The discussion has moved to implementations – what problems customers are having in their business processes and where UC can help them. For example, during and after my UC Market Overview presentation, I was asked was about how to get people in the organization on board with UC, and how to get the buy in from the people who make the final decision. People know they want UC, now they have to figure out how to get the approval for it from the people holding the budgets.
• We’re talking more about the business value of UC. Most of the vendors did a great job of talking about customer examples of UC and the business value it provides to them. There were good case studies and examples of real UC implementations, discussing the ROI and value that UC provides to businesses.
• It’s about collaboration, or UCC. The real value of UC is collaboration – finding the people, resources, and information we need, when we need it. Will we still call it unified communications in a couple years, or will the “C” stand for collaboration?
• UC is really integrated communications – we’re not unifying our communications, but integrating them. While this is true, as Jim Burton noted during one of his sessions, the term “integrated” has a negative connotation – involving lots of professional services needed to make things work together. This is also true for unified communications, but the term “integrated” isn’t as hopeful as “unified.”
• There was consensus throughout the various presentations that it’s about the customer experience – regardless of device, locations, etc. What really matters is the customer experience.
• Customers are in charge – not the vendors. Some things that came across loud and clear: they don’t want softphones – they want real phones that work and don’t cost a fortune to maintain. They want standards and interoperability – standards should come first, products second.
• Social networking will subsume UC. In addition to Mark Straton’s cool demo of integrating Siemens OpenScape with twitter, there was plenty of discussion about the role of social software in the enterprise, and the benefits of integrating these capabilities with UC. I was disappointed that there weren’t more examples of companies integrating social media with UC (click to call from an enterprise twitter- or Facebook-like application, for example), but hopefully we’ll see more next year.
• Mobile devices will be the main device of use, even in the enterprise.
• Voice is still the killer app – it’s not going away any time soon.
• UC and CEBP are viral. Capabilities like IM and collaboration have more value when more people are on it and sharing information. When people in parts of an enterprise seeing other departments and workers using UC, they get excited and want to use it also.
• Google is on everyone’s mind
• Federation and interoperability are mandatory – hurry up!
All in all, VoiceCon San Francisco was a great conference. Despite the lack of some key vendors participating (yes, Microsoft and Cisco, you know I’m talking about you), there was some good energy and lots of sharing of information about the future of unified communications. Looking forward to Orlando.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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Among the usual chatter about “What do you think of the show”, at VoiceCon this week were comments about the need to modify some of the usual presentations that we have on comparing vendor offerings in unified communications, and where the industry is in unified communications. The vendors I talked to commonly voiced that for the most part, comparing the features of unified communications is a moot point, because almost every player has all the basics by now. That is pretty much what I saw too. The show was smaller, and there weren’t any tremendous new announcements this year.

This year VoiceCon was co-resident with Enterprise 2.0, which focused on social media, etc., with lots of smaller companies present. I didn’t focus on those individual players so much as the spillover of the theme of the inclusion of social media within unified communications and collaboration, or even the reverse, the disappearing of the term unified communications within a larger framework of collaboration that includes social media.

So, much of these tweaks in innovation I saw revolved around the inclusion of social media into UC. For example, highlighted in the keynote given by Mark Straton of Siemens Enterprise Communication Group, was Siemens announcement of “Socially Aware Unified Communications”. This announcement was about open, standards-based integration of social networking into the Siemens OpenScape UC platform. Rightfully, up until recently, the UC vendors had their hands full doing what I mentioned earlier - developing all the basic UC bells and whistles, but now, despite grappling with how to incorporate social media and all of its privacy and security concerns into the enterprise, the industry is now turning towards just that - bringing social networking into the fold, but with a focus on how to improve business with it.

One of Siemens goals along these lines is to unify UC and social media through innovative mash-up applications in the cloud. What Siemens announced and demonstrated was the inclusion of Twitter into OpenScape UC.  Despite the fact that yours truly, is still personally blocked from Twitter - reasons unknown - I thought this was pretty cool.

Siemens is using OpenScape and Twitter to automate routine tasks. The reasoning behind this is that more and more users are updating their social status before attending to other basic tasks. So, for example, if a person is traveling and lands at an airport, what is the first thing they do? They turn their mobile devices on. The second thing they do if they don’t have to call someone to say that they have arrived is to read emails, update FaceBook or they tweet. Therefore, if you have a socially aware mash-up application within UC that can follow what a user tweets about, and get information from those tweets that can be used to do a task - such as update the person’s presence status based on knowing that the person has landed and is reconnected with the world, then that saves the person time, and makes them more efficient, without them having to do anything.  Yes, the user would have to pre-define words or phrases, or hash tags, that the application would use to search for, but that is not a big deal in the long run for the benefits they would gain.

Similarly, from a user perspective, I loved the fact that Siemens has incorporated the Twitter feed onto the user screen, but then added OpenScape presence status next to the name of anyone that the user is following that is an OpenScape user. That is very cool.

Many other hallway conversations with vendors mentioned Twitter, FaceBook and other applications and how they applied to UC. I wouldn’t be surprised if next year that Enterprise 2.0 and UC are combined as one theme at the show.

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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