Musings on VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 – Unified Communications Still Rules
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.
Blair
Thanks for the feedback from VoiceCon, since I couldn’t be there. Good summary!
It is unfortunate that the term “UC” is so general that it is causing confusion in the industry. Your point about “integration” is right on, but that term is primarily useful for IT, not for end users or business management. In fact, “UC” also really means nothing to end users, unless you qualify it with specific application functionality!
I agree that “UC” alone covers too much territory and needs specific “modifiers” to reflect the perspectives of different constituencies, as well as the different applications (communication, business process) that will be selectively exploited by individual end users and their usage “roles.”
So, perhaps a “UC” label attached to any specific communication or CEBP application can be used to indicate that the application will support interoperability with “presence-based,” flexible, multi-modal contacts with people, both for contact initiation and contact reception and responses. It will indicate endpoint device independence and accommodate flexible individual user choice of interfaces (speech, visual, text), as well as choice in synchronous interactions vs. various flavors of asynchronous messaging.
This approach will also separate out the networking infrastructure considerations, wired and wireless, from the user interfaces and specific software application functions involved. So, for all “UC” application modalities to be supported by common, standardized network connections, those connections would be fully IP-based and/or utilize appropriate gateways and switches that support UC applications connectivity.
The issue of “collaboration” is simply a matter of who is using UC technologies, their business relationships with other users, and for what kind of operational interaction. It should be very obvious by now that “consumers” will also be using (and driving)UC communication technologies, especially social networking, not only for person-to-person contacts, but also as “customers” who interact with organizational entities and self-service business applications.
So, the definition of UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes,” really applies primarily to “Business UC,” but not necessarily to all “Consumer UC.” Under “Business UC,” you then have specific communication applications such as “UC Telephony (or Call Management),” “UC Messaging,” “UC CEBP,” “UC Self Service Application,” “UC Conferencing,” “UC Notifications,” “UC Fax, “etc., and your “UC-U” and “UC-B” benefits and ROIs. “Consumer UC” will have similar, but not identical, applications.
“Role”-based communications will not only involve selective use of UC communication applications, but also selective use of business process applications associated with different organizational roles and responsibilities, eg. contact center staff and subject matter experts (SMEs). “UC CEBP” will be especially important for mobile applications.
“Consumer UC” will be exploding with the adoption of personalized, multi-modal, mobile “smart-phones.” Business users are already clamoring for using their personal iPhones for business contacts of all kinds and that’s where the flexibility of UC will really be needed. Consumers will also be using their iPhones for business contacts (as customers) and access to self-service applications.
This is where Business UC and Consumer UC software boundaries have to be established in order to enable end users to use a single mobile device for both business and personal usage. Obviously, this is new territory for carriers and enterprise organizations, but will be critical for the concepts of UC.
I know this is all starting to look very complicated, but, guess what, that is the real world of convergence and personalized mobility!