Athens!  A cradle of western civilization.  I arrived in Greece with enough time to visit the Acropolis, the neighboring Areopagus, and the marvelous new Acropolis museum.  Even the Metro station in the center of the city has a 100-foot long wall of glass showing the layers of civilization back to 600 BCE, which were exposed during construction of the Metro. 

You might think that businesses in Greece could be so captured by their history that they would be slow to change.  Actually, the business people I met were justifiably proud of their heritage, but they took the lessons of history as a cause for action - as illustrated by the archeology, new methods always win out, whether suddenly or inexorably. 

Sure enough, this Microsoft UC Road Show event was well attended by a broad cross-section of business and government.  Hotel chain CIOs rubbed elbows with finance and insurance firms.  Natural resources firms interacted with manufacturing and distribution firms.  Several government agencies, including the Navy, were there, too. 

The points of emphasis and inquiry by the attendees had their unique themes, including:

• Branch office and retail outlet communications. There was interest in how to support branch offices more quickly and effectively and with less cost. Certainly, Unified Communications was seen as a solution for branch office support by making the regional or central support teams more immediately available using presence, IM and click-to-communicate. Also, use of the conferencing functions of UC for training of new branch office employees and for training of all associates on changes in products or policies was seen as a potential method for saving both travel cost and time.
• Conferencing Savings. Direct cost savings were also anticipated by bringing hosted conferencing services in-house, using Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). Those I spoke with were thinking of this savings in combination with putting the Office Communicator client on the employees’ desktops, to make conferencing easier to use. One company mentioned that after rolling out OCS, they trained their users on setting up and managing conferences using the combination of OCS and Microsoft Outlook and the use of conferencing went up by 30% in less than a month.
• Co-existence with aging PBXs. Many of the firms owned PBXs or key systems that were approaching a replacement cycle; or in some cases the firms were using direct central office support (like 1MBs or Centrex lines in the US) and were looking to reduce those monthly tariffs. The favored approach, both for ease of implementation and for the fastest cost reductions, was to implement the OCS solution for specific groups of users or for specific locations based on those which most needed a communications capability upgrade or system refresh and to connect to the remaining PBX users via gateways. There were no complaints of limitations or barriers from those who mentioned this approach.
• Management communication effectiveness and cost savings. One firm, a multi-national natural resources and minerals firm headquartered in Greece, is using OCS for their management team and their remote mining locations. They provide the managers with mobile phones equipped with the Microsoft Communicator Mobile client so the management team can see who is available for interaction and decision making at any moment, and across continents and time zones. The remote mining locations use either PCs or the USB or network-attached phones for communications to and from the sites and also to and from the management team members. The report showed lower telecom toll costs, reductions in cell bills, and economical deployments that reduce telecom costs for the remote mining sites.

So, in summary of the Athens event, it seemed to me that the Hellas business community is applying the logical methods for which their ancestors are famous to the current problems of cost savings and resource optimization and finding that software-based UC can deliver the intended benefits. 

It was a real pleasure to visit Athens both to interact with today’s business community regarding their UC actions based on Microsoft’s UC offerings and also to observe and contemplate one of the primary cradles of our western civilization. 

Tags: Unified Communications by Marty Parker
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Bangalore, India, has a unique flair.  As you may know, Bangalore is known as the “Silicon Valley of India.”  That concept is visible in many ways, with a very attractive new airport and a thriving business community that are set amidst a hospitable and diverse city with many traditional India sights, such as the fully lit wedding grounds along the main avenue on my evening ride into the city.  

For the UC Roadshow, customers packed the venue at the Oberoi Hotel, clearly interested in the possibilities of Unified Communications.  They represented a broad cross section of the Bangalore business community comprising software firms (both software producers and contract software firms), manufacturing and distribution firms, biological/pharmaceutical research labs, retail chains, systems integrators, and India offices of a major US financial services firm. 

These enterprises seemed to be well along the Unified Communications (UC) path.  Most of them already had hands-on pilot experience with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange were working on the more advanced issues related to broad roll-outs and deployments.  Topics of major interest included:

• Finding the best mix of capabilities for desktop deployment. Specifically, there was an interest in positioning conferencing capabilities on the desktop and in determining the extent to which desktop video conferencing should be enabled and then promoted. This was linked to the question of how much bandwidth will be consumed by a desktop video session, to understand the trade-offs, i.e. would voice and desktop sharing/web conferencing be more than sufficient for the business purpose, or would video have enough incremental value to justify the additional bandwidth over the Wide Area Network or out though an Internet Gateway. The sense of the questions on video were still exploratory, indicating that might come in a second or third wave of roll-out for most users.
• Facilitating customer interactions. Since many of the firms worked on major contracts with large enterprises (software, pharmaceuticals), there was interest in the options for links with those customers using UC. Some wanted to include their customers without any technical requirements, such as by inviting them into OCS-based Live Meetings. Others were interested in the details of federation to their customers, since those customers already had UC deployments. Either way, there was interest in more and better links with their clients.
• Enhancing team collaboration. Of course, the software firms were very interested in project speed, but that theme was echoed by the research lab, the systems integrators, and the manufacturing and retail firms. The manufacturing and retail firms were focused on collaboration primarily for supply chain management (e.g. requirements planning, order scheduling, and marketing).
• Improved conferencing at lower cost. Of course, the cost factors were important here, as several firms were looking to lower or eliminate their conferencing service provider costs, but there was also a major cost reduction focus on training retail store and branch office personnel via web or video conferencing tools. One questioner inquired as to how UC conferencing such as provided with OCS compared to high definition or special room-designed “telepresence.” That led to an interesting discussion of whether the 720p high definition mode now supported by OCS and Live Meeting were sufficient for the interpersonal applications of telepresence, at the resulting lower bandwidth, and whether desktop, home office or mobile location uses of a UC HD solution were preferable to specific telepresence room locations. The consensus was in favor of the UC approach, probably reflecting a blend of the audience’s experience with OCS and the pragmatic cost-conscious theme of the road show.
• Options for PBX integration. Several firms were moving or planned to move a portion of their users to OCS and had detailed questions on the options and methods of integrating OCS with their PBX systems to provide seamless links between the two communities of users.

As in Mumbai, the Microsoft IT (MSIT) team from India shared their experiences as part of the global Microsoft roll-out in deploying UC layers or “workloads” to 92,000 users across Microsoft, including (OCS), Microsoft Exchange, and Unified Messaging, with mobility and remote access thrown into the mix.  Also, Microsoft federates the OCS systems with their business partners, including presence, IBM and click-to-communicate.  For example, all Microsoft Partners in India are required to run their own OCS systems and to federate with Microsoft for ease of communications.   

Of course, the same regulations on non-interaction of TDM and IP networks exists in Bangalore as in Mumbai, addressed with similar creative configurations and operational solutions.

In summary, the Bangalore event just underscored the Mumbai conclusion that UC has momentum in India.  It will be very interesting to see what case studies show in 2010 as these customers roll out their UC applications.  

Tags: Unified Communications by Marty Parker
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Wow!  India!  What a happening place.  Even in the midst of a global economic slowdown, the morning Mumbai newspaper had the headline, “India GDP up 7.9%” reflecting the quarter ended September 2009 vs. the year prior.  This land of rich history is busy writing a new chapter, for sure.

The enterprise customers in Mumbai were a cross section of businesses, including retail banking, retail financial brokerage, construction, a major television network, a diamond-grading institution, and a number of software firms.  Most of the software firms were providing contract services to clients around the globe.

These businesses all had some very clear and consistent reasons for coming to a UC meeting.  Most of all, to find out more about how UC could help them save money and cut costs.  But, in every case, they added some business improvement goals, too, such as better collaboration with their customers, better employee productivity, improved branch communications, enhanced international communications, lower costs for conferencing services, and/or cutting the telecom bills.

Also, it was clear that these managers and planners were expecting to apply Unified Communications to selected parts of their businesses, in some logical sequence based on the applications mentioned.  They might be focusing on customer interfaces, or on mobile staff, or on branch operations, but clearly they were planning to proceed in phases to accelerate the benefits, to lower the risks, and to align with budgetary constraints. 

Roughly half of the firms were already running Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 in a pilot environment, anticipating production rollouts in 2010.  But whether they were in pilot mode or still in the planning stages, all of them were gathering the facts to help them justify and budget for their UC actions.  Notably, the questions about justification were very much in the mode of ‘how to’ make sure UC can be justified, rather than in the mode of not taking action until the case is ‘proven’ beyond doubt.  In other words, these businesses in India seem to be focused on how to capture the opportunities, rather than on protecting the status quo.

To add spice to the UC scene in India (beyond the spice in the wonderful food), both the customer and the System Integrator UC teams have to work with a telecom regulation in India that bans any call in the public network from crossing the boundary between traditional analog/TDM (time division multiplexing) telephony and IP (packet-based) telephony.  If there’s Internet Protocol telephony in the call, such as from a PC or an IP Phone, then the call has to stay entirely within the enterprise’s private network, or has to be entirely on the data network.  Obviously, this can create a few challenges in system design and call routing, but there seemed to be plenty of Unified Communications applications that could be deployed without crossing that regulatory line.  Hopefully, that type of regulation will be eliminated soon.  Regulatory adjustments have already been made to accommodate the booming call center industry in India, so it would seem the changes could be extended to general purpose communications, as well. 

In summary, UC has momentum in India.  Businesses are planning and pilot testing the next wave of applications.  And, with the thriving India economy, it sure seems there will be plenty of UC roll-outs around Mumbai in 2010!

Tags: Unified Communications by Marty Parker
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