On the same day as the big news that Google had announced the intent to acquire Motorola Mobility, another acquisition in the UC/contact center space emerged - Nuance made their next acquisition of the year by announcing their intent to acquire Loquendo - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telecom Italia, for roughly $75M.  I was and wasn’t surprised by this move at all. After all, Nuance has been on an acquisition bender for years, but it still had my eyes open wide for moment, before turning to check out the Google Motorola announcement.

At first blush, what this acquisition gives Nuance is a lot. Loquendo, known for its wide variety of languages and text-to-speech voices (32 languages and 76 voices) is one of the biggest alternatives to Nuance in the realm of speech technologies.  By acquiring Loquendo, Nuance expands the company’s technology portfolio (with some overlap such as the core recognizers, biometrics, etc.), and gains a bigger geographic reach and presence, including support for more Latin languages.

To take from the Nuance press release, “Nuance intends to expand its operations and accelerate growth in four key areas:

Advanced Voice Solutions for New and Emerging Markets - Nuance and Loquendo’s combined technologies will advance groundbreaking voice capabilities through robust TTS, ASR and voice biometrics offerings - broadening Nuance’s global footprint especially in Europe and Latin America.

Strong Global Customer and Partner Relationships - The acquisition provides Nuance’s and Loquendo’s customers and partners access to the industry’s largest and most experienced voice and language portfolio. Loquendo’s technical expertise and talent, combined with Nuance’s global R&D resources and market strength, will accelerate a robust product and services roadmap to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for customers and partners.

Robust Language Support - Loquendo has strong proficiency in Latin languages, providing Nuance the broadest language support in the industry with the goal to drive natural, conversational interactions across a number of industry segments in the user’s preferred language. 

Innovation - Both companies offer sophisticated voice-enabled technologies. Together, Nuance and Loquendo will be able to accelerate innovation through a new center of excellence for speech research, based in Turin, Italy. This expands upon Nuance’s existing research and development facilities in Sunnyvale, CA, Burlington, MA, Aachen, Germany, Merelbeke, Belgium, Zurich, Switzerland and Montreal, Quebec.”

While good for Nuance, it does shrink the pool of alternatives to Nuance, which has some partners, who use more than one speech vendor, or are looking to expand to other vendors, concerned.

I thoroughly expect Nuance to have a lot in the way of announcements this fall, although it would be too early to hear about much of the impact that the Loquendo acquisition would have on their portfolio. However, one thing I’ve been talking and writing about is how formidable Nuance would be if they would get their assets in order. That is, with all the acquisitions they have done, they have a huge amount of technology to combine, and for years we have seen bits and pieces come out in new releases in different divisions, but not one cohesive R&D plan as to how they can cross utilize all of their different assets.  Nuance has a self-service/contact center division, a mobility division, healthcare specialty, dictation and imaging products, and others, but we really have yet to see one cohesive set of cross-indexed/developed products, with combined reporting, analytics and development tools.  OK, am I dreaming here?

One of Nuance’s competitors in speech, Microsoft, has the same issue; lots and lots of technology in different areas, and the capabilities to draw from one area and apply it to another. Cisco does as well — think Cisco’s investment in video technology, and their ability to apply that in areas from pure Telepresence, to UC, collaboration and the contact center. Microsoft has the same breadth of technology to draw from, and the more they can draw from one area and apply it to another,  the more formidable a competitor they become. 

Along those lines,  in a Microsoft tech blog this week it discussed the fact that Microsoft has taken the Microsoft Tellme speech assets and applied them to Xbox Kinect and Windows Phone for command and control - interesting stuff and fun video at the end. If Nuance can start to combine all of the assets they have, from an R&D perspective, and bring them to bear on all of the areas that they have a presence in - mobility, contact center, healthcare, etc., then the more formidable they become, and that has to be pretty scary for those remaining vendors still out there.

Back to business - One thing that the Google and Nuance announcements had in common was the acquisition of patents. Patents are like gold in tech. Well, half the time. You are either profiting from them or defending them. With Google, they recently lost out on the bidding war to acquire the patent assets of Nortel, which numbered in the thousands. They struck gold with the Motorola acquisition, as they are acquiring in excess of 17K patents.  

With Nuance it is the same thing. Loquendo brings a lot of patents to the party as well, and patents is something Nuance has used in the past to stave off competition with patent infringement suits. On another note, however, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you, and the later happened to Nuance this month when they lost their legal battle with Vlingo. Vlingo successfully defended against 30 patent infringement charges, when a jury in Federal District Court in Boston found that Vlingo did not infringe on U.S. Patent No 6,766,295 (the ‘295 Patent) entitled “Adaptation of a Speech Recognition System across Multiple Remote Sessions with a Speaker” .  Additionally, all claims in ‘295 patent have been found invalid by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in a reexamination proceeding

However, we know who the real winners were in that battle - the lawyers $$$$$$$$.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Video by Nancy Jamison
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There’s a saying that some people are such experts in their field that they forgot more than everyone else will ever know. That must be the case with Marty Parker’s recent comments on No Jitter regarding UC and SIP Trunks (see ” SIP Trunks: Least Cost Routing, not a Route to UC“).

In at his remarks, Marty reminds us that SIP Trunks are primarily used now to connect SIP-enabled customer sites to connect to the PSTN for voice calls. That’s a fair statement of where we are today, because roughly 80-85% of the calls that a company makes or receives are offnet - to or from other companies who don’t use the same provider, or the same technology from the same provider, for voice calls. He’s absolutely right when he says that providers’ SIP Trunk services are not needed for intra-company UC when those people and locations are connected by QoS-enabled MPLS or Ethernet. He also lobs the Internet into this mix, but the ongoing performance of internet-based communications are less predictable - some people and companies think the low price is a fair performance tradeoff, some don’t. It all depends on (1) what you need to do, and (2) the available alternatives.

But Marty must have forgotten a few things that are important to recall:

1. As Eric Krapf points out, don’t write off voice, it will always be with us. And there will be a lot of voice traffic out there for years to come (see “Are SIP Trunks Strategic?“).
2. Many providers are offering cloud services that require SIP Trunk interfaces. These include hosted contact center and contact center as a service offers (voice, IM, chat, etc.), hosted IP audioconferences, hosted IP PBXs and UcaaS, hosted SIP videoconferencing services. Over time, more will follow. The economic “recovery” is going to be prolonged. Given tight capex and opex budgets, and lack of plentiful resident SIP/UC expertise, it’s likely that a growing number of companies will seriously consider using managed, hosted and cloud-based SIP services (vs. buying all their UC systems).
3. Not all companies want to employ a centralized architecture that uses MPLS or Ethernet services for inter-location real-time communications. SIP Trunks are a secure, enterprise-grade alternative.
4. Many companies would like to engage in highly secure, enterprise-grade inter-company UC. They can’t do that today easily, because most domestic MPLS and Ethernet services are ‘islands’-Company A is on carrier 1’s MPLS service, Company B is on Carrier 2’s, and the two MPLS networks don’t interconnect. At all. This is one of the reasons that initiatives like the recently-announced Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) have been formed-to interconnect multi-carrier, multi-vendor videoconferences using SIP “bridges” and QoS-enabled WANs. To get there, you’ll need SIP Trunk services from a partner service provider. As will other companies.
5. As alluded to above, SIP just isn’t about voice, nor are SIP Trunks. The protocol performs session control for all real time IP communications. And use of real time non-voice applications is growing like weeds, which Marty points out.

Are SIP Trunks strategic? That’s not nearly as important a question as (1) what can UC do for your company, and (2) what does your company plan to do with UC? In many cases, in order to enjoy the full fruits of UC, many companies will find that SIP Trunks are an absolute necessity.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Lisa Pierce
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Jim Burton just wrote a provocative blog on NoJitter entitled “The Next Phase in Communications.” It referred to the role of analytics in the evolution of UC. Labeling that capability as “UC-A,” it “adds analytics and metrics to business processes.” With that thought in mind, I see “Unified Analytics” as being key tools to both UC planning and managing effective and efficient business process performance wherever people are involved.

One of the biggest challenges for any size UC implementation is to plan for its selective use in high-value business processes. That includes knowing which end users will require which UC capabilities and which business applications will also be involved through CEBP integrations. So, this means understanding where both person-to-person contact activities need the flexibility of UC, as well as which business process applications need to initiate contacts with which people and how.

Unfortunately, no one may really know what is needed and where, when it comes to UC planning. Compound that with the sad economy and existing legacy technologies, it is hard to make a quantifiable case for UC benefits, either “UC-U” or “UC-B.” Although everyone talks about proper and selective UC implementation planning, there really have been no tools to do that easily.

As Jim points out, “contact center” technology has been improving its “analytics” capabilities for a number of years, primarily to evaluate customer satisfaction and customer-facing agent performance. Such analytics have started to move beyond just call handling to other forms of customer contacts and interactions. I believe the technology has reached a point where analytics can play a bigger role in UC implementation, by providing the tools to evaluate all current business processes and communications activities in order to quantify and prioritize UC planning for everyone in the organization as well as those outside of the organization that may be involved with a business process.

The timing for such a “universal” view of unified business communications is most appropriate as the rapid adoption of multi-modal smartphones means that ALL end users will be able to benefit effectively from the flexibility of UC and the integration with business process applications through CEBP. It is just that organizations need to know where best to selectively start their UC migration, whether via hosted, “cloud”-based services, traditional internal technologies, or a hybrid combination of both.

“Analytics,” like “UC,” covers a lot of territory that is continually expanding beyond the limitations of traditional telephony communications, but has not really penetrated the market much beyond traditional call center operations. However, it’s potential value from a number of management perspectives is starting to be recognized. The lack of standards and definitions for UC capabilities hasn’t helped the problem either.  I think it is now time that analytic tools can help management understand who is doing what in all business process communications and lead the way to practical UC implementation planning.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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