Based on statements it made yesterday, the FCC’s Net Neutrality decision (FCC 10-201), leaves current and future U.S. UC customers and suppliers in no clearer or more certain circumstances than before.  Uncertainty often inhibits investment in innovation, which is the exact opposite of the FCC’s stated intentions.  Some examples:

1.       The FCC’s logic clearly relies on its authority to regulate telecommunications, and thus it implicitly re-classifies Broadband Access and Internet Services as Telecommunications Services.  Up to this time, both have been explicitly treated as Information Services, and thus largely exempt from either FCC or legislative oversight.  This decision is so divisive that two current FCC Commissioners believe the justification used by the three other FCC Commissioners is illegal.  Thus it’s a virtual certainty the decision will be challenged by Congress, which warned the FCC earlier to not attempt to exceed its rulemaking authority.  Several facilities-based providers, most notably, Verizon, are rumored to be evaluating lawsuits to overturn at least some of these rules.

2.       While not everything in the FCC’s decision is controversial, here are some highlights that effectively create greater uncertainty (or uneven-ness in the broadband playing field):

a.       The decision attempts to regulate both wired and wireless Broadband access.  As seen just last April in the Comcast vs. FCC decision, federal courts have already made it clear the FCC lacks this type of rulemaking authority over cable companies (this was established decades ago by an Act of Congress).  Thus by default, “wired” refers to access provided by telecom carriers.  Also, this is the first time the FCC is explicitly attempting to regulate wireless access as Broadband.  However, its language in yesterday’s press release is quite vague (as of this time, the decision itself is not available on the FCC’s website).  It’s also a complete reversal from the FCC’s preliminary findings in the Net Neutrality NPRM it published in June (see http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2010/db0617/FCC-10-114A1.pdf

b.      Assures unfettered access to content.  Whether fixed or mobile, the FCC’s decision seeks to assure unimpeded access to “lawful” content so that Broadband providers can’t favor their own services or applications over those supplied by third parties.  This makes it unclear if and how 3G/4G providers will be able to continue with their existing relationships with select applications providers. 

c.       Seeks greater authority over a broad swath of IP networks.  In this decision, the FCC intends to extend its rulemaking and enforcement authority not only to Internet services and Broadband, but to any and all current/future substitute technologies that may be used in their place.  The FCC expressed concern about the investments Internet facilities-based providers may make in other technologies at the expense of their investments in the Internet.  It’s not clear if the FCC plans to follow up this decision with explicit guidelines on what constitutes acceptable future investments in IP networks—something to which all facilities-based providers would strenuously object.   While they were not explicitly named, this kind of dark cloud could inhibit the pace of carrier’s investments building out enterprise WANs built on MPLS and Ethernet services.  That could in turn a chilling effect on the adoption of many types of business applications, including the use of enterprise-grade WANs to support UC and related collboration technologies on a multi-site basis.

d.      Prohibits third parties like content providers from paying facilities-based providers to treat their applications on a favorable basis.  This is an outgrowth of spats like the recent one between Comcast and Level 3 on the delivery of Netflix content (see http://www.level3.com/index.cfm?pageID=491&PR=965).  If it holds, this decision could affect all over-the-top providers.  If the full decision fails to prohibit consumers or other customers (like businesses) from paying for the preferential treatment of certain applications (via techniques like CoS or DPI), then it will in effect have approved it.

As mentioned, the above findings represent my preliminary conclusions.  Once the full FCC decision is available on its website (typically in a matter of a few days), I’ll be able to provide UC Strategies readers with a more thorough analysis.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobility, Unified Communications, Video by Lisa Pierce
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In the early days of UC, “softphones” (screen-based PC telephony), offered UC flexibility where traditional desktop “hardphones” were lacking.  It is still a viable alternative for wired, location-based telephony. However, mobile smartphones are making a huge dent in the consumer and business user markets for multimodal UC applications.  That is, until the larger screen size of tablets came into the picture. Now, a user has two kinds of mobile devices, one convenient for the hand and one to carry along.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece on the subject of mobility and what the user experience would be like if the user was standing up or sitting down.  Obviously, that experience will vary with the size of the device, the screen, and its impact on on the user interface. When worse comes to worse, and no screen can be looked at (e.g., driving a car), then speech interfaces come into  play, and that is one good reason that mobility needs multimodal UC flexibility.

So, with UC convergence, business applications need to be endpoint device independent, not only in terms of screen-based interfaces vs. speech interfaces, but also based on the size of the screens for handheld devices , portable tablets and iPads, and wired desktop PCs. The choice will be based upon who the users are and what they need to do their jobs, whether premise-based or mobile. It is becoming intuitively obvious that most business users will want to use a single, personalized smartphone when mobile for both their business and personal contacts with “dual persona” access management and services (two addresses). In addition, they can also use a desktop device on a transient basis, using the current network address of their choice.

All this represents a significant shift in old telephony networks, but not to Internet communications, which have always been “virtual.”  So, that’s what is shaking up the enterprise communications world while the migration shift slowly takes place. In the meantime, will multimodal PC “softphones” be replaced more easily by portable/mobile iPads and tablets when a bigger screen is needed for data output? How will the enterprise support such flexible mobile service with CEBP - based applications? Will the choice of mobile tablet become like the smartphones, that of the individual end users’?

Variance in device screen sizes brings with it the problems of standards, impact on Operating Systems, as well as the user applications themselves. The success of Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) will be very dependent on resolving these issues, because outbound notifications and information delivery to individual end users will be based on greater (process-to-person) accessibility through user mobility.

Tags: Mobile UC by Art Rosenberg
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While many eyes were on unified communications and collaboration this month, and speech technologies are certainly part of that, speech held its own for announcements in November too. Just taking a look at Nuance alone, there were quite a few. This didn’t even include the tasty, but so far false rumor that Apple was acquiring Nuance. This came about when Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, misspoke at an event, mentioning that Apple had acquired Nuance. It created quite a stir and a bump in Nuance’s stock price.

Despite the “rumor”, Nuance was quite busy in November, boasting several announcements across the company’s product lines. Nuance added another mobile device to the customer list by announcing that Nuance’s natural language voice technology is behind the new Genius Button and Hands-Free mode innovations on T-Mobiles’ myTouch 4G phone, which will allow consumers to speak, receive and send text messages completely by voice, by pressing a button and saying “Turn Hands-Free Mode on,”. This turns on Bluetooth capabilities, providing complete hands free use. While this wasn’t a big announcement, I’m all for it.

Nuance’s Healthcare division announced an outsourced transcription service - Nuance Transcription Services, which expands their clinical transcription services portfolio. This draws upon resources they received through the company’s acquisition of Outsourcing Solutions, Inc. and Encompass Medical Transcription Inc. They also introduced PowerScribe 360, which is an advanced radiology reporting and communications platform that combines the best capabilities of PowerScribe and RadWare into a unified solution. Nuance claims that 1/3 of all radiologists in the country now use PowerScribe. Also in the radiology area, Nuance announced collaboration with a privately held company - Montage Healthcare Solutions, that does search and analytics on radiology reports, to improve the ability to search radiology reports. Hmmm. Any time I see privately-held company and Nuance in the same paragraph I smell mergers and acquisitions, but I digress.

Nuance had several mobile applications announcements too. These included saying that Nuance technology is behind the voice-to-text on the new Ask for iPhone application from Ask.com, and that Nuance Dragonmobile technology is behind the new price check for Amazon application for the IPhone as well.

Another announcement that I really liked, although it was also not earth shattering, was Nuance’s announcement that they will be working with WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, to improve the quality of close captioned media. A US Department of Education-funded project, this effort seeks to improve the close-captioning of real-time news programming for the hearing impaired. Nuances’ contribution will be using the company’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking technology as the basis for developing customized language processing, data analysis, and benchmarking tools for the project. As a long time proponent for using speech technologies to improve accessibility, I’m all for this one too.

Although not a formal announcement, last week I also spoke with Nuance on how the company is extending Nuance on Demand to include extensions for CTI and ACD, essentially giving Nuance the capabilities of hosting entire contact centers rather than just self-service. This solution includes speech self-service, intelligent routing, screen pops, and fully-featured ACD capabilities. Nuance has paid particular attention to extending their goal of improving the caller experience by providing capabilities such as having the self-service “agent” continue interacting with the caller while the caller is in queue, and populating the agent screen with call context when the caller requests to be transferred to an agent.

Nuance has seen 98% growth in its hosted on-demand customer service applications in the past year, with about half of new customers moving over to Nuance from other hosted service providers. Nuance’s hosted offering is now processing over 2 billion minutes annually, with just self service alone. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Nuance is now making the foray into hosting the entire contact center. It makes sense from the standpoint that they have had pretty significant success in hosting, and the fact that growth in virtual contact centers in general is growing exponentially across the industry.

This is a good thing for existing Nuance customers who choose to move the contact center to Nuance because they will get better end-to-end analytics capabilities if they choose to do so. It is also a good solution for adding on remote offices or remote agents, and lends itself well to a hybrid approach as well, as Nuance can overlay a CTI adapter onto a Nortel or Avaya contact center and get the intelligence they need to route calls to a Nuance contact center agent or one of the others, for example. It will be interesting to see how competing vendors react to this, however.

We are at a cherry picking time in the contact center industry right now. It is a decade past when we churned a lot of the installed base because of the millennium change, there is a huge installed base of systems out there that are getting to end of life, and hosted solutions are now a common choice. Not to mention the churn that is being caused by consolidation, such as we have seen with Avaya and Nortel. So, all companies that have moved into the virtual contact center space, including Nuance, are in a good spot to capitalize on the chance to win contact centers over to their offerings. One caveat, Nuance isn’t going into the “hosted contact center” wherein they provide agents, just agent management applications.

As an additional proof point of the move to the cloud, Five9, an on-demand contact center software provider, also announced the availability of a speech self-service offering in the cloud in November too. Within Release 8 of their Virtual Contact Center product line, Five9 customers can now add IVR as an integrated or standalone product.

Finally, I had originally set out to do one November roundup of speech announcements, but Nuance has just been too busy this month to bury them in a bigger blog. I’ll blog about the others shortly.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC, Mobility, Speech Technologies by Nancy Jamison
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