Being a “pioneer” isn’t always fun, especially if you have to wait forty years for the world to catch up with you.

In my last blog, I described how “time-sharing” was the start of online applications before the Internet and the Web made them a lot easier and cheaper. I helped speed up the commercialization of time-sharing systems by getting Scientific Data Systems (SDS) to adopt the Berkeley time-sharing system as an early product offering. However, before moving to SDS, I also was able to help bring real-time “collaboration” and, what today would be called text “chat,” into time-shared applications.

The SDC Time-sharing System

System Development Corporation, a spin-off of the Rand Corporation, was tasked to develop one of the first “time-sharing” systems for ARPA. As described in my previous article, the objective was for remote end users to independently access various “interactive “ applications in real-time, dialing in on telephone lines from Teletype terminals. However, there was no person-to-person connectivity function involved.

In 1964, SDC was going to give a paper on the time-sharing system at a big computer conference in Washington, DC and I had the responsibility for demonstrating it at a small booth in the exhibit area.

I saw the value of having an interactive application simultaneously accommodate more one person at a time, so I talked to the programmer who was developing the communication front-end computer interface for connecting remote end users over the telephone network. I suggested that, instead of a single field associated with remote user connections, that two fields be provided. That would allow the two users to simultaneously interact with the same application, both seeing all inputs and outputs concurrently. However, the programmer wasn’t sure that the effort was really important or that it could be done in time for the conference.

The LINK Command

A week before the conference, the programmer called me to tell me he had done what I had asked, by adding an online command to the time-sharing system user interface. In addition to “linking” two remote terminals together with a time-shared application, the ‘linked” users could type in text messages for both to see. That was our version of today’s text “chat” function.

I immediately notified the various researchers, who were developing a variety of interactive applications on our time-sharing system, to plan on being on the system during the times that I planned to demonstrate the SDC time-sharing system at the computer show in Washington. I was then able to “visit” with each of the researchers to see and try the different interactive applications they had developed.

Summary

Needless to say, computer show attendees who were used to batch-processing, premise-based main frames, could not believe what they saw from the Model 33 ASR terminals connected to standard phone lines that I was using. The computer system itself was three thousand miles away and they could interact in real-time with different applications and concurrently exchange text messages with the people who were also three thousand miles away.

Although this demonstration was very simple and primitive compared to what the Internet and text messaging data sharing technologies do today, e.g., email, chat, file sharing, etc., it did help shift the original vision of time-sharing from simply remote access to interactive computing applications to the potential of direct communications between users on the network and to “collaborative” online interactions with shared applications. The SDC system was not a commercial product and the “LINK” concept did not go anywhere. The world had to wait for the Internet and email to provide universal access to online text communications; bringing voice and video communications into the picture has taken longer.

Today, with IP Telephony, SIP, UC and multi-modal, mobile devices, we are seeing that very early “time-shared” vision being expanded from person-to-person communications (including “click-to-call/chat,” voice and video conferencing, etc.) to process-to-person contacts and interactions (CEBP). This brings us down to the basics of business applications, mobile devices, and wireless network access.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Personalized UC - Mobility vs. Portability

While telephony struggles to find its new role in UC-based business communications, the real driver for UC is going to come from individual end users and the endpoint communication devices they will carry with them for both business and personal/social contacts. With the rapid adoption of wireless smartphones and tablets, the business communications market is faced with the challenge of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) for all types of end users who will interact with an organization.

Wired desktop and residence phones stuck end users with the “telephone” form factor designed for conversational speech input and output and limited non-voice keypad inputs for dialing and control functions, better known as the Telephone User Interface (TUI). With smartphones that provide a screen-based capability for output as well as full alphanumeric text inputs, end users can now choose a portable endpoint device that accommodates fast, flexible, on-demand multimodal contacts with both people and informational applications like a desktop computer, “anywhere, anytime, anyway.”

Steve Jobs, an acknowledged leading visionary for end user needs the industry has ever had, set the pace for UC Mobility with Apple’s first smartphone announcement back in January 2007. While it didn’t do everything that a multimodal end user would want, particularly with speech input, it was a start towards personalized, Mobile UC. Apple’s latest release of the iPhone 4S, finally brought in a missing user speech input interface (Siri) for a variety of automated mobile applications. So, the basic vision of UC, which allows an end user to dynamically initiate and respond to contacts in any interface medium and modality they choose or require, can now be supported by their personalized devices.

Smartphones vs. Tablets

Smartphones and tablets are both being gobbled up by consumers and the question has been raised as to which device will be carried most by the end users. My colleague at UC strategies, Dave Michels, wrote a thoughtful piece on the subject on the No Jitter website. Inasmuch as personalized usage will include all forms of information from documents to pictures to video, the size of the screen will affect the end user’s choice of device type.

My view is end users may well carry both types of devices when they are on the go. Sometimes they need something they can work with one hand while walking around and fits into any pocket, i.e., a smartphone, other times they will need the larger screen when they can also sit down and can look at the screen. In the first case, speech input recognition becomes a key component for the user interface (as reflected by Apple’s Siri addition to its iPhone 4S). When the end user knows they want everything a larger screen will support AND they have a convenient way to carry a larger tablet, e.g., in a purse or other type of shoulder bag, they will take the larger device with them.

When “push comes to shove,” the basic choice for end users is to be able to communicate with other people and with (mobile) business applications. The smartphone size and capabilities will accommodate that nicely. For mobile applications that really require larger screens, the portable tablet will start replacing laptops. But the choice will now be in the individual end user’s ballpark and wireless carriers trying to figure out how monetized everything subscribers will want and to keep control of the traffic demands that mobile apps will be bringing.

So, mobility will trump portability for basic consumer UC applications, but business users may well look to both kinds of wireless devices, just as they do with their wired desktops.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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UC Short-circuiting Call Centers?

Although my wife doesn’t want to use a computer herself, she is very aware of using it to go online for information, book airline tickets, and exchange email, etc. So, I am now her personal secretary to do all those things for her. She is also a big “shopper,” always checking the local newspaper ads, but most also watching for deals on the TV shopping programs.

The other day she complained about the fact that one of the home shopping shows she was watching kept announcing that a product on sale was all sold out even before they showed it on the program. Buyers (customers) were seeing the announcements on line and placing their orders on line without getting into any phone line connection queues for IVR applications or live call center agents.

So, what does this have to do with UC?

Contact Center Evolution – UC Self-services and Live Assistance

As more and more consumers start using smartphones and tablets to access web information and initiate business contacts, they will become less dependent on traditional customer call center agents. Basically, customers will really need live assistance by talking to someone only when they have a problem. In the case my wife experienced, there was no problem for those customers who could go online or be notified on their smartphones, either from getting information about a product sale or in placing their order. So, why would they need to get into a voice telephony call at all?

Historically, the call center has always included self-service applications based upon Interactive Voice Response (IVR) applications that used the Telephone User Interface (TUI). With improvements in speech recognition technology, speech input rather than Touch-Tone inputs were accommodated. However, the basic limitation of IVR applications had to do with output, i.e., the complexity of menu choices for specific applications, as well as the amount and type of output from the application. Voice was absolutely useless if the output wasn’t short and simple. In such cases, the caller was put into a queue for live assistance in the call center.

Now that the “phone” has evolved into a multi-media (smartphone) device, it can be increasingly exploited for multi-modal, self-service applications, thus minimizing the need for live assistance. In particular, self-services don’t have to be initiated with the limitations of a traditional phone call or IVR application, but can flexibly use voice commands and screen based input responses. With UC capabilities, the mobile smartphone customer can “click-to-connect” for live assistance when needed in the mode that is appropriate or desired (message, voice conversation, callback, etc).

Bottom Line

What my wife experienced was the frustration going through the limitations of a telephone connection and an IVR application interface, only to find out that the sale item was sold out. People who went online did not have the same problem, and the consumer adoption of smartphones (or tablets) will expand the consumer audience beyond those with desktop or laptop computers, i.e., everybody!

Customers can now do things faster and more easily with self-service applications, and with the power of UC for “click-to-call,” can still get access to live assistance on-demand as needed. Furthermore, such contacts will be contextually more intelligent than a simple “blind” phone call, and can enable better and more efficient interactions with an appropriate “agent.”

So, UC flexibility will pay off significantly to any organization that provides contact center services for live assistance, by minimizing the need for such help in the first place, and secondly, by providing more contextual insight in providing such help more efficiently.

Tags: Contact Center, Mobile UC, Mobility, Speech Technologies by Art Rosenberg
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I had the opportunity to present and participate in the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Real Time Communications Conference last week, and I can’t recall the last time I was surrounded by so many brilliant people. Representing both academia and the vendor/service provider community, the caliber of participants was mind boggling. The highlights were Henning Schulzrinne of Columbia University and Martin (Marty) Cooper of Dyna LLC. Cooper is a former Motorola vice president and division manager who led the team that developed the handheld mobile phone and is credited with making the world’s first cell phone call. Discussions ranged from the technical to the esoteric.

I participated in the Unified Communications track (of course), with my colleague Marty Parker, as well as representatives from NEC, Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, CommuniTech, InfoReach, and MAC Source, and was chaired by Dennis Goodhart. Much of the focus was on the evolution of UC based on drivers such as the new millennials in the work place, the rise of social media, the growing mobile workforce, the influx of personal mobile devices, etc. Almost every presenter talked about the BYOD movement, and the importance of supporting the devices that workers are using to do their jobs. The presentations were more about collaboration and social media than about unified communications, as most of us emphasized the changes that the UC market is currently going through.

I can’t review each presentation, but here are a couple highlights:

• Todd Landry of NEC discussed the need for organizations to focus on how well UC and social software aligns with their enterprise strategy, including their web and security strategy). He pointed out that different groups have different technology demands; users want to be able to sign on from anywhere, use their own devices, and be in control; while the C-level wants to lower costs, increase productivity, increase revenue, secure information, and support their company’s green initiative; and the IT staff wants the technology to align with their strategy, fit into their architecture, enable responsiveness, be cloud- and VM-ready, and be cost effective. Todd noted that NEC is utilizing the Rich Internet Application (RIA) framework, which brings the richness of local applications on the PC with the flexibility of browser capabilities. Much of the discussion prior to the UC track was around WebRTC, which seems to be the future replacement for RIA.

• Avaya’s Jane Montemayor stated that Avaya sees the business value increasing as we move from voice to UC to Business Collaboration, noting that collaboration provides more flexibility than UC. Jane defined Business Collaboration as the intersection of context, content, and communications. Along similar lines, I had earlier presented a venn diagram of what I call “Collaborative Communications,” which is the intersection of UC, social media, and collaboration (which includes tools such as conferencing, shared workspaces, document repositories, etc.). Jane stated that by making the end user (rather than the back end) the focus of collaboration, there’s a better chance of people using these tools.

• Marty Parker discussed nine new elements that are changing the way we communicate, including: presence, IP networks/multimedia, mobile devices, IM & chat, enhanced conferencing (context aware able to co-edit, tag, record & archive), collaborative workspaces, social networks, software-based solutions, and embedded communications. He also described several use cases and case studies of UC and the value that organizations are receiving, as well as the various implementation and deployment options for UC. As Marty Parker summarized, changes in communications solutions are: visible, compelling, and disruptive, which means that: this is a risky time, choices must be made, and future leadership is available for the taking.

It was interesting that while this was the unified communications track, UC was seen as a starting point for some of the new real time communications capabilities, notably collaboration and social media. I was glad to see much of the emphasis, in both the UC track and general sessions, on the user experience. Even though this was a pretty technical audience and conference, the role of the user experience was mentioned repeatedly. There were several sessions on WebRTC, which I expect will have a huge impact on the UC world, making it easier to embed things like click-to-communicate in web pages, and go even farther in making new capabilities more accessible. As Serge Lachapelle of Google and the WebRTC organization noted, “The goal of WebRTC is to open the web up to things we never thought of before. Not to bring a phone or IM video chat into the browser, but to enable things we haven’t thought of, and to leverage the strength of the web.” This sounds very exciting and bodes well for the future of unified communications.

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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Yesterday in a “Seeking Alpha” email there was a quote from IBM which read,”IBM plans to make mid-sized acquisitions to boost its software business, according to CEO Sam Palmisano. The spend on targets could range as high as $300M, as it seeks to find highly targeted deals that could be accretive in two to three years. “No spurious, off- to-the-side, unrelated things.” No spurious, off-to-the-side, unrelated things, while an odd quote, is on target for what I have been thinking for the past week or so. Most of the time you would believe that in a down or stalled economy companies would be holding tight and not spending money on acquisitions. However, good for those who have money, and there are still those that do have money, and this allows them to perhaps buy companies for less.

But that isn’t the key observation that I’ve been making as of late. I’ve observed that in the areas that I track, acquisitions have been on the rise during the summer and continuing into the fall, not going down, and the focus is on being strategic. For the most part companies aren’t going for the installed base plays as much as in prior years, (although installed base still is certainly a consideration). Instead, the majority of acquisitions lately are being used to fill a gap in product, augment a new product area, or gain a distribution foothold, with installed accretion as gravy.

Case in point - on Tuesday, there were three such acquisitions. IBM acquired Q1Labs to help them build a security business unit. McAfee, a unit within Intel, acquired NitroSecurity; a company that provides real-time security products, in order to greatly bolster the company’s risk and threat assessment capabilities. According to McAfee this acquisition will enable them to identify and help take care of threats in “minutes instead of hours”, which we all have a vested interest in, so strategic is good in this case. Lastly, Avaya acquired Sipera, a UC provider. In this case, Avaya, as they put it, although they will still have their Acme Packet relationship, “adds Session Border Controller as an owned asset” and will accelerate development of SIP-based security offerings for UC and contact centers.

That was just Tuesday. This month had plenty of other examples.  Two weeks ago I blogged on my site about NICE’s acquisition of Fizzback, which was a really strategic acquisition that and will significantly enhance NICE’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) portfolio and Workforce Optimization (WFO) offerings, adding a lot of functionality to the company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) strategy.

Last week it was Verint, also in the workforce management and analytics space and VOC, acquiring Global Management Technologies Corporation (GMT), which in addition to workforce management solutions, specializes in the retail segment. In this case, Verint not only acquires some differentiating technology, complimentary to the company’s existing offerings, but a strong foothold in the retail segment, and some key partnerships that GMT has, which will expand Verint’s reach. In this acquisition, installed base was secondary.

This has been a theme with Verint lately. The case can be made that unlike when Verint acquired Mercom and Witness several years back, in which installed base growth was a bigger factor, the last few acquisitions that Verint has made have all been focused on adding core technology areas; Iontas (2/10) for desktop analytics, PSIM (4/11) for video security, and Vovici (7/11 blog) for enterprise feedback management (and other solutions).

Yes, we had a few acquisitions that seemed weighted towards installed base play. Perhaps Nuance acquiring Loquendo, or 8X8 acquiring Contactual, but there were many more in the strategic realm.  To finish this out, just a few of note were Oracle acquiring  Inquira for knowledge management for contact centers,  Skype acquiring GroupMe for group messaging and conferencing applications for mobile devices,  Cisco acquiring Versly for collaboration software for MS Office, and Broadsoft acquiring iLink Communiications for web collaboration. Likely we will see others in the near future.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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Here’s what I wrote about the first release of Apple’s iPhone back in January of 2007. The recent announcement of iPhone 4S (instead of the expected iPhone 5) didn’t get rave reviews except for the new “Siri” capability which enables speech input for a variety of functional informational and messaging tasks. Mazel tov!

The new Apple bringing more innovation to mobile communications?

Well, Apple, no longer calling itself “Apple Computer,” got your attention, didn’t it?

The big splash it made with it’s iPhone announcement seemed to draw everyone’s attention to what we have been waiting for in UC - end-user demand. That demand will come from individual consumer needs (communications, entertainment, customer contacts) and individual work-related needs (desktop, roaming, traveling, mobile communications and information exchange). The common denominator between consumers and business users is the communications piece, and that’s exactly where application client software fits in with well-designed multimodal mobile devices and user interface form factors.

Industry pundits almost hysterically jumped on the Apple iPhone announcement, pointing out that most of the functionality is not really new, having been incorporated in legacy technologies like voice mail and cell phones. They also highlighted missing pieces like the lack of 3G cellular, speech interfaces for mobile users who might need it for hands-free, eyes-free situations, the fact that text input really benefits from a “hard” alphanumeric keyboard rather than a button-less screen, and that “visual voicemail” has been around for years for the few enterprise systems that moved beyond the desktop telephone TUI. However, they also grudgingly admit that the packaging was innovatively well done, the missing elements can be added in a variety of ways, and, last but not least, their device design success will be emulated by the competition.

“Different strokes for different folks!”

The bottom line for all coming mobile “UC smartphones” (a generic descriptor), is that they will come in many form factors and combination of features to support the different needs and preferences of the individual end user for business and personal contacts, including business applications, and consumer entertainment. Enterprise organizations will have to support such end user UC devices and UC in the same way they supported TDM/TUI telephony for universal phone access over the PSTN, except now it has to be multimodal communications over IP and wireless networks too.

The enterprise UC ball is in the business end user mobile smartphone court!

Ever since the IP telephony and messaging technology developers started touting “unified communications,” the enterprise market has been sitting on its hands wondering why, when and how they should start migrating to the converged world of UC. Well, the writing is on the wall, as handheld device designs become the center of attention for accommodating the complexities of converged communication applications, rather than focusing on just infrastructure cost savings to do traditional phone call and messaging functions.

In a recent column (before CES /MacWorld) I highlighted the role of mobile communications as a driver for unified communications in the enterprise. I pointed out that increased mobile accessibility would enable greater contact efficiency and therefore faster task performance by everyone involved in the business process. That would include people inside and outside of the enterprise organization, and to do that means making UC services universal, like good old PSTN telephony.

One of the key assumptions about such benefits from UC capabilities was that more and more people would be carrying personalized, multimodal, mobile devices that would be flexible enough to maximize real-time business communications in any form, not just voice. While UC is useful at the desktop with PC-based softphones and text messaging, UC will really pay off when users are “mobile” and need to switch modalities all the time.

Conclusion

The “UC industry” is making progress by consolidating infrastructure, application, and communication device needs. Until end users see everything at the interface level, they won’t understand the difference UC will make for them. Enterprise management must also see those benefits as well, otherwise there just won’t be much movement in UC migration based on cost reductions alone.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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If you have been keeping tabs on new technology announcements in the realm of UC business communications, you will see more products and services that are focused on customer services. That involves more than the business processes themselves through traditional telephony-based “call centers,” but also the performance of live customer assistance through customer-facing staff (agents, subject matter experts, field support, sales contacts, etc.). More importantly, with the rapid consumer adoption of mobile smartphones and tablets, there is also an increasing use of automated multi-modal self-service applications, supported by UC “click-to-call” options, to replace the limitations of legacy IVR applications. Under the label of “analytics,” all aspects of customer interaction activities can now be captured and analyzed to improve customer contact satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity.

While there is no question about the importance of understanding how customers and support staff are performing in various business processes, most of the contact center technology announcements coming from traditional telephony-oriented providers still focus heavily on the voice conversations between people and call center staff and using “speech analytics” as a key objective for customer service analysis.

On the other hand, there is also increasing use of analytics to monitor and track all kinds of online automated business process applications in order to improve the efficiency and ease of use of such activities. Information Week recently surveyed business executives on the shift to “innovation” in supporting end user needs and making business processes (which has to include communication contacts with people) more efficient. The study highlights the importance for UC and CEBP, showing CIO responsibilities outside of IT for telecommunications as the highest (64%) domain of responsibility and interest.

The study also describes how “innovation” is taking over automating business process applications, particularly in online/self-service activities, and is relying on more comprehensive analytics to monitor, evaluate, and improve such processes from an end user interface perspective. Since UC is not limited to just speech interfaces with automated self-service applications, it is obviously going to be a powerful element of any automated application process, as well as providing access to available live assistance when necessary. However, even as consumers rapidly adopt mobile, multi-modal end point devices (smartphones, tablets) for business contacts and interactions, the analytics world seems to be slow to integrate voice telephony contacts as part of the brave new world of seamless UC.

Business Communications - What We Say Is Only Part Of What We Do

Capturing what people say during a business call can be useful, especially if it helps describe the customer’s state of mind and satisfaction with the business process. Analyzing conversations for keywords and emotions can provide insights into what the customer is doing and, if displayed in real-time to a customer-facing agent, can expedite better resolution of the operational issues involved. That’s like having a customer hooked up to a lie detector while discussing any problem that requires live assistance. But, do we need that much “analytics” data all the time?

UC, by definition, covers all forms of business contacts and interactions; so tracking all communication activities is an effective way to monitor all business communications, not just customer interactions. The practical definition of UC as a concept has been well stated for a number of years by UC Strategies, i.e., “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” After all, business processes involve internal staff, external business partners, as well as consumer/customers. So, we really need to be looking selectively at key business processes as the starting point for what communication activities with people the analytic tools need to be tracking.

With the increased adoption of smartphones for all forms of contact with people, especially for text based messaging (SMS, social networking, email), voice conversations are slowly becoming less significant for analytics. So, even though the technology for capturing and analyzing voice has become very sophisticated, that does not mean that all other forms of business contacts should be ignored. In particular, automated business processes that initiate time-sensitive notification contacts with individual end users (CEBP), will not be having voice conversations with customers and will exploit the visual interfaces of personal smartphones and tablets.

Self-service Applications and UC

I recently reviewed a report in Speech Technology magazine on contact center technologies that focused primarily on call management and speech analytics to evaluate and manage customer-facing agents. Referred to as Work Force Optimization (WFO), the article describes the progress of speech analytics as key to evaluating both agent performance and customer satisfaction. While this perspective is certainly valid for customer contacts via traditional phones, it is definitely not adequate for exploiting multimedia self-service application access by customers through multi-modal mobile devices.

In talking to an old colleague, Jeff Schlueter, marketing VP at Nexidia, a leading provider of Enterprise Speech Intelligence software, I raised the question of how speech analytics fits into the overall multi-modal mobile UC picture. His first response was that smartphones was all that he personally needed. Then I reminded him that UC is not just about person-to-person contacts and that enterprise applications needed to be integrated into the picture (CEBP). Obviously, their technology is still evolving and that perspective remains to be defined and developed.

Needless to say, speech analytics does become useful when speech is involved for information input, whether in a voice conversation or even when speech commands are used as self-service application inputs. Otherwise, tracking all forms of user interactions is necessary for monitoring and evaluating end user communication activities. That’s why business communications need the flexibility of UC as well as comprehensive analytic tools to track all interactions that may occur during the course of a business process.

Tags: Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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