Ah, September. Back to school, back to football, and back to preparing for the cold months ahead. It was a quiet month, as always, at Lake Wobegon. Not so by the tempest-tossed waters of Lake Uceeisnow. For months, there were rumblings of disenchantment about the pace and depth of customer migration to UC. This was coupled by near-universal agreement that UC could not really be defined but nonetheless, you’d know it when you see it. Moreover, according to numerous analysts, UC could enhance your enterprise’s “business processes”, assuming you know what they are or can derive them.

In early September, Nick Jones of Gartner had the audacity to put forth the polarizing notion that UC is some sort of Ponzi scam http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_jones/2010/09/07/is-unified-communications-the-biggest-scam-since-ponzi/  This created quite a stir and (at last count) 27 comments both pro and con. It is still referred to in recent No Jitter posts. Of course, some UC pundits will write this off as a spurious Gartner analysis input which has little credibility, only Gartner’s Magic Quadrant with vendor rankings has “value”. The gist of my response to Nick-which I’ll stick with-was “It (UC) is overhyped, undefined, and un-measurable, but unfortunately the tag has been adopted by enough vendors, media types and others so that right or wrong we’ll all have to live with it. There’s no doubt that advanced and converged communications (IP and otherwise) can (eventually) improve an enterprise and how it does business. BUT in a down economy there are lots of alternative bangs for limited IT bucks. I don’t think a UC vendor or analyst’s “trust me” with or without B-School white paper will be the closing argument for moving to UC (whatever it is). One would think any CIO, COO, CFO or CEO would want real ROI as opposed to the proverbial marketing song and dance.”

Soon after the Ponzi reference and its analyst reverberations were felt, Microsoft announced the renaming of OCS to Lync. It was a timely event, in my opinion, because for months overall UC perception needed some sort of shot in the arm. There’s nothing like Microsoft and its resources (i.e., money) to boost any IT market opportunity. Unifying enterprise voice, instant messaging, applications/desktop sharing and video and audio conferencing into a “new, connected communications experience” was the theme of the Lync announcement. Nothing new here but welcome nonetheless as a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s vision for UC. In many respects, Microsoft was and is the primary driver of UC and this was clearly reflected in the sycophantic responses to Lync by the UC analyst claque.

To a one-time voice switching guy like me, Microsoft is hardly ignoring VoIP but continues to integrate it into their “stuff” (software, servers, etc.) in lieu of separate (IP) PBXs. By now, Lync’s voice functionality should be robust enough and user-acceptable. How fast users will dump operable PBXs for the Microsoft equivalent in these difficult economic times remains to be seen.

A mere two days after Lync, Avaya’s Flare came on the scene. The Flare “experience” and the “non-tablet” Desktop Video Communicator have been adequately discussed and dissected on these pages and elsewhere. The impact for me is that Avaya, the classic voice/PBX-centric UC participant, has done something innovative and out-of-character. It took “chutzpah” to do this, good for them. The announcement underscores the emerging importance (at least to vendors) of flexible, portable video conferencing and tablet-like devices. As for price points and whether the dogs will eat the dog food, as always, time will tell.

As noted, the Microsoft and Avaya announcements came when UC, by any definition, needed some positive press. Mission accomplished on that.  Moreover, as far as I could determine, neither vendor tied their announcement and its contents to any mystical enterprise workflow improvements, reduction in “human latency”, or other UC pseudo-science rationale. Perhaps, the Apple-like approach may be taking hold, namely, easy-to-use solutions to real definable problems and provide an enjoyable “experience” in getting there.

The final September item of note was the No Jitter article by Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group on Cisco’s near-term UC strategy http://www.nojitter.com/feature/227500594. This created a firestorm of 19 comments and spawned a separate posting by another blogger commenting on all the comments! Why all the excitement? It was all about Cisco vs. Microsoft and there are a lot of strong opinions about that. Sort of like Fox vs. MSNBC on a political topic. Opinions, yes, market share demographics, not really, since those vendors as well as most others do not have a common definition of UC, and in some cases, even its scope. However, if you’re keeping score at home, Microsoft seemed to have the edge in UC mindshare.

September was definitely interesting, let’s see what October brings. As for the name game, one can hope that the fuzzy UC tag is sent to the recycle bin if and when adult supervision arrives. It would be useful to have a more descriptive set of terms rather than one misused global label. My initial suggestion is Advanced Converged Communications (ACC) and its 4 dimensions-voice/telephony, messaging/presence, conferencing/collaboration, and mobility. More on this at a later time.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Jay Brandstadter
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This morning Avaya and Skype went public with a partnership they term “a strategic agreement to deliver innovative, real-time communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes”. The output of the agreement will come in two phases. The first is centered on integration of voice, and the second, integration of video and other unified communication capabilities. The output of the agreement will be development around integration as well as a combined go to market strategy.

In Phase 1, Avaya’s US customer base will have access to Skype Connect^TM, allowing customers to communicate via SIP between Avaya communication systems and Skype. This will be available to customers with Avaya Aura^TM Session Manager or Avaya Aura SIP Enablement Server, CS1000, Avaya IP Office, or BCM systems. Avaya cited that calls will be handled using Avaya’s routing, conferencing, messaging, mobility and contact center capabilities, and collaboration services.

In Phase 2, which is slated some time off in the later part of 2011, the two companies promise to deliver integrated unified communications and collaboration solutions to enterprises, including video. The companies claim that the integration will establish federation between Avaya Aura and Skype communications platforms, and through that, will bring together the business and consumer side.

This union is interesting and promising from two perspectives. First, the two companies have offerings that complement each other. Avaya, focused on communications for government and the private sector businesses, seeks to round out and expand its communications offerings. This builds on their UC and collaboration offerings, including this month’s Flare Experience announcement, and it provides benefits to Avaya customers by helping reduce communication costs. Skype, built its popularity among consumers, but seeks to attract more businesses by expanding capabilities attractive to the enterprise, and this will enable them to do that. Second, is the promise that this union will provide federation of some applications, including presence, voice, video and IM, between businesses and consumers. The later could produce some interesting customer service business benefits, and is something we have all been waiting for.

A small note, even though Skype’s growth has hinged in part on being available to users internationally - part of its appeal - this announcement was focused solely on the US. Plans to expand internationally will be rolled out as the partnership and offerings are developed. Also, complete plans for the product roadmap won’t be made available for a few weeks yet.

In all, I really like the promise of what this partnership will bring, especially as both integration and federation have been two sore spots that have had a lot of lip service given them, but not a lot of concrete work done yet. However, although there are solid plans in this agreement to do so, Avaya still hasn’t extended that intent by joining up with the UCIF just yet. During the Q&A part of the analyst call on this, Jim Burton asked if Avaya would join the UCIF for interoperability. Avaya’s answer was very politely that there is some governance challenges associated with joining that they are trying to work out with the companies involved. They added that the way that the effort is structured raises concerns if the UCIF is truly an open and peer-based organization. More to come on this, I’m sure.

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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Because UC also encompasses human contacts with automated applications, the human user, regardless of how contact was initiated, with one major exception, must dictate the mode of interaction. While great progress has been made in speech recognition as a means of data input and user interface control, it has not made completely full voice conversation practical as a user interface for self-service applications. As recognized in a new book, “Advances In Speech Recognition: Mobile Environment, Call Centers and Clinics,” speech is efficient for user input, but not practical for large amounts of content output which can most efficiently be reviewed on a screen as text or graphics. That is why I see traditional telephone self service applications (IVR) being replaced with what I call “Interactive Multimodal Response” (IMR) applications on all forms of multimodal mobile endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads, tablets, etc.)

One of the key roles that mobility and UC flexibility can play is in supporting automated business processes that can initiate contacts with individual end users for time-sensitive notifications. However, I see such applications doing more than sending notification information to a user. Instead, the applications will be able to initiate an interactive multimodal exchange with the recipient, but with the choice of input and output media resting with the human recipient.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) is going to heavily exploit such “multimodal notifications” because they can proactively initiate a self-service interaction without waiting for the recipient to take the initiative. Until now, telephony-based IVR was seen as the best way to handle self-services from consumers who, until lately, were not expected to have access to a real-time communication device other than a phone. With UC and mobile, multimodal devices, the future and value of business self-services will expand significantly from legacy online desktops and telephone IVR applications

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Technology headlines have been announcing new software products and services that support UC, using short, descriptive names that will appeal to individual end users and make UC’s person-to-person connectivity understandable. Most  recently, there was Microsoft’s big announcement in changing the name of it’s enterprise OCS (Office Communications Server) software to “Lync“  to symbolize easy, flexible, real-time contacts between  people.. This week, Avaya took center stage with it’s push into multi-modal collaboration “experience” by offering it’s back-end connectivity for various forms of person-to-person contact applications under the label of Avaya Flare, but also a new front-end device for a convenient video conferencing interface.

Several industry pundits, including myself, have commented on the increasing role that technology product and service names are  playing in the UC market, especially as they focus on what individual end users do with the technology, because “UC” doesn’t really mean anything +to an end user. Once they can see and experience useful functionality from new technology with a convenient, descriptive  name, then they will have something they can ask for and understand when they get it. So, that’s what’s starting to happen with new IP-based communications in general, and UC in particular.

What end users in the business communications market are getting first, are the changes that UC will be bringing to familiar, real-time, person-to-person voice telephony. These changes will include how telephony will integrate with use of other modes of contact (e.g., messaging) and multi-modal communication devices. While the software infrastructure has to integrate all forms of access and functionality across modalities of communication, it will be the multi-modality of user endpoint device form factors and user interfaces  that will dictate how end users will be able to exploit  the flexibility of UC for any application.

So, while Microsoft’s Lync is named to reflect what their software will handle in terms of connectivity and access, Avaya’s “Flare” announcement this week not only involves software clients for various desktop IP phones, but also included their own, desktop multi-modal video device that will support video-conferencing interactions as well. Avaya’s approach  can support multi-modal activities at the individual end user level, by providing both  current contact and presence information, but also  contextual information from previous contacts in the past.

While it is easy to see how person-to-person video conferencing can be included in UC contact options, as long as the involved users have suitable endpoint devices, one intriguing direction for Avaya’s Flare will be how video and other forms of media will be part of the user interface in an automated, self-service environment, just as the phone and speech is in legacy IVR applications. In fact, as long as we are talking about new names for technology,  I think it is time to change the traditional label for speech-oriented, telephone-based, self-service applications known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), to the more comprehensive name of Interactive Multimodal Response or “IMR,” which will work well for both new screen-based desktop and mobile (”smart-phone”) devices.

Video conferencing lends itself also to a  new perspective on how UC works for the end user acting as either the contact initiator or a contact recipient, just as it does for telephone voice conferencing. .  With either form of conferencing, UC’s presence information capabilities will be necessary, as well enabling a mix and match of video conferencing with audio conferencing for different  individual participants.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Today, Glowpoint, a provider of managed videoconferencing and video bridging services, announced an agreement with Equinix, a provider of global data center services, to offer carriers direct access to Glowpoint’s managed video services through the Equinix ’s private Layer 2 Carrier Carrier Ethernet Exchange. 

Glowpoint’s suite of cloud-based managed video services and B2B video calling for telepresence and video conferencing is now available to Equinix’s Ethernet Exchange customers, who can provide these services directly to their enterprise, medium and small business customers. Equinix currently has 7 Ethernet Exchange POPs on two continents, with an eighth coming on line in a matter of days.  Equinix plans that all of its tier 1 centers across three continents (19 POPs)  will be on the Ethernet Exchange before Q2 2011.  Current members of the Exchange include a number of carriers who derive the majority of their revenues from wholesale services, like Level 3, Reliance Globalcom and KPN International.

I recently published a report for GigaOM Pro that examines the enterprise-class videoconferencing landscape (see “The Enterprise Videoconferencing Landscape, 2010-2015” at http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/08/report-videoconferencing-unleashed/ ). During the last three years, a number of important technology advances have taken place that make HD IP videoconferencing much easier to use and more affordable than older technology that is still widely used. But one of the major impediments to widespread use of recent generation HD IP technology is the lack of interoperability of this technology – both on a vendor and service provider level. Thus the Glowpoint-Equinix announcement is an important step that allows large wholesalers and their customers to more easily engage in mixed/hybrid vendor/technology and service provider videoconferences – something that is a fact of life, but that many suppliers elect to downplay. 

One of the more remarkable aspects of this type of agreement is that it can provide interoperability to small or medium businesses who use carriers that are customers of Equinix’s Ethernet Exchange (for instance, between customers of Level 3 and Abnovenet) well in advance of their peers. For example, despite the obvious business benefit, Enterprise Customer A on ATT’s managed Telepresence service isn’t yet able to interconnect with Enterprise Customer B on Verizon’s managed Telepresence service.

Tags: Unified Communications by Lisa Pierce
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I just read, with some amusement, the UCStrategies podcast transcription on Microsoft’s latest announcement, which I missed because I was traveling. Numerous UCStrategies folks have already written about Microsoft’s latest and greatest, including discussing the new name, but I’d also like to chime in on the company’s naming strategy, as part of a naming trend I am starting to see.

What is so big about the way OCS was renamed? Well, two things really. One, this name, and some others that follow here, are part of delightful naming trend that has recently popped up that indicates that finally, high-tech is moving from boring - ‘this only really means something to us’ - to what consumer products companies have known for years - make it sound appealing to the consumer, or end user.

For decades we have been creating and selling products in communications such as voice messaging, PBXs, data centers, etc., with some of the most boring brand names known to mankind. Sure, back in the 80’s and 90’s we had some creative names that made sense whether you worked in a high tech company or were a consumer - such as ROLM’s PhoneMail voice messaging product, in which the name said exactly what it was - phone mail. But this same company had a plethora of products that were named with three and four letter acronyms that had model numbers after them, and if you weren’t in the industry you had no clue what they were. We also had our share of companies, such as Apple, that decided that just because their company had some name that had nothing to do with the products they were selling, that they should create product names having to do with the company name, and hence, Apple started selling a flavor of Apple, the Macintosh, instead of telling people it was a personal computer. Thankfully, they didn’t follow up with the Gravenstein.

The good thing about Apple is that they were both a consumer and business play, so eventually sanity took over and Apple started making products with names that had high recognition and consumer appeal. Now they have iTunes (says exactly what it is), iTouch, iPad (well, except this one…. I won’t go there), and others, that make perfect sense to the consumer.

So what does this have to do with Lync? Lync is part of an emerging trend to simplify naming, and creating shorter names that actually have something to do with what the product does. Plus, more importantly, they seem to elicit a thought about what the product should do, which is key in consumer product naming.

We have recently seen a bunch of these names come out of Cisco. For example, Cisco Pulse, “takes a pulse” on what is going on knowledge or theme wise, within a company, by scanning through everything that traverses a corporate network that has been tagged. Not only is the name short, and a real English word - not two words slammed together with a capital letter in the middle - it also elicits the image of taking a reading. Cisco’s Show and Share is similar; short, sweet and not only tells what it is, but elicits the sense that it’s easy to do. I video, and then upload and share. Cisco has some other names in the works that are equally compelling.

As for Microsoft Lync, some of the comments my colleagues made talked about what the name might elicit in the minds of the user. For example, Blair Pleasant said, “Basically Microsoft said that they wanted a new name to get into the next generation of communications, and to embody the spirit of this new generation and this new version of the product. So the new name is the combination of link and sync and what I like about it is the ability to use the name as a verb, so sort of like it will be the Kleenex and Xerox and Google of office communications, I guess. You’ll be able to link with somebody and you know, “let’s link tomorrow,” or whatever. I really like the verb aspect of it.”

I like the verb aspect of it too. One important point that shouldn’t get lost here goes back to what I said about Apple, which also applies to Microsoft and a few others. And that is, some of these companies have been selling to consumers and enterprises for a long time, but with different marketing strategies. Now it seems the strategies are starting to overlap in that products, particularly unified communications and social media are bridging both worlds, and therefore, simplifying and making naming more consumer oriented will work for both sets of customers.  A good example of this is Cisco’s new Cius tablet, introduced in July. The name is simple and elicits the concept of being seen, which is part of the tablet’s video capability. So although Cisco launched the product with idea of it being a business tool, there is nothing that precludes them from turning it into a consumer product as well, and the Cius name works for both.

As Marty Parker pointed out, the goal isn’t really to go after the average consumer, but a greater pool of end users. In my opinion, a greater pool of end users can contain pure consumers, or just a bigger audience of business users, but in all, more user-friendly naming can only help the growth of unified communications, and social media.  

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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