It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about the hospitality industry, although I always pay attention to the telephony infrastructure (Ok, the phones in the room and behind the front desk) wherever I stay. I’ve seen a lot. There is a lot of old Nortel out there, particularly as they had a hand hold in the hospitality industry early on, for example. But more and more I’m seeing newer, higher end phone sets in rooms, along with newer entertainment options as well.

Last July Mitel announced that the JW Marriott Indianapolis had selected and deployed Mitel’s Unified Communications solution based on its Freedom architecture. Mitel’s UC solution is a pure IP voice infrastructure spanning all 33 floors and over 1000 guest rooms, as well as the adjunct 104,000 square feet of convention space. The hotel has used this infrastructure to give guests new services not possible before, such as web-based information and other services on the phones in the rooms, as well as mobility options for guests.

When I was at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Miami earlier this month I got to take part in a site visit of JW Marriott Marquis and Hotel Beaux Arts in Miami. This is a unique hotel from the perspective that it is a Marriott on the lower part, and an embedded smaller hotel on the 39^th floor. It is also technologically unique as well. Cisco, along with partner Modcomp, used the Cisco Connected Hotels framework to combine 12 Cisco technologies to deliver guest services, including physical safety, Medianet, video and collaboration.

The hotel has the most pervasive and creative uses of video I’ve ever seen in a hotel.  Up in the ballroom, which can double as a basketball or tennis court, is the biggest video board in the world, at 450 feet, made up of 52 inch Cisco LCD Professional Series display boards. This screen is amazing and multi-use. A basketball team could show replays, corporate events could show video presentations, etc. I could think of all sorts of uses. What came to my mind were those embarrassing childhood videos that brides and grooms sometimes torture each other with at weddings. But Cisco took this idea farther by saying that guests could use video devices to record and stream video during or after the wedding/reception. I don’t know about this one.

The hotel has video signage throughout the building for guest services, Cisco IP phones with video-enabled screens, and a TelePresence concierge in the lobby. The latter is almost a test case on how to introduce TelePresence to the mass market. They have positioned the board at some distance away from registration. However, during peak hours when there can be a line, those in the back of the line could have the opportunity to interact with a life-size video concierge that can show them restaurants options, Google Maps, menus, etc. The hotel says that they will be placing a printer there shortly so that guests can print out things such as Google Maps and directions.

For guests, there are wired and wireless options, including being assigned a wireless IP phone in their room, which they can take with them throughout the property. Guests have the option of using TelePresence rooms for meetings, can also request a mobile video concierge so that they can interact with a concierge without leaving a meeting room.  Once in their rooms, guests have multiple options of services on the phones, and the hotel has used the same for targeted advertising to guests. For example, during a slow time in the spa, they might put an ad on the phone with a discount during a specific time period that the person can get by mentioning a code on the display, or perhaps get a free drink or appetizer in the restaurant.

Finally, Cisco also took too care with security by using Cisco Physical Access Control, and Cisco IP Video Surveillance technology, coupled with Cisco Emergency Responder for 911 calls. This was really a great hotel, and don’t even start me on how nice the rooms were. I didn’t want to leave.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobile UC, Video by Nancy Jamison
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In my ‘Happy Birthday, Cisco TelePresence’ blog last month, I wrote about the latest and greatest Telepresence offerings Cisco introduced near the five-year anniversary of the birth of the first TelePresence product. To recap, the first two parts of the announcement were a vertical market application for healthcare called Cisco VX-Clinical Assistant, a number of new TelePresence endpoints, including the Cisco Jabber^TM Video for TelePresence; a standards-based, HD video-calling software application that allows participants to join TelePresence calls from their desktop PCs or laptops, and Cisco TelePresence MX300; Cisco’s newest multi-purpose, room-based TelePresence system, that supports nine people in a room.

The third part of last month’s announcement was the extension of TelePresence into the SMB market with the introduction of Cisco TelePresence Callway, a hosted service that is part of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. Even though Cisco talked about how the four pillars are mobile, social, visual and virtual, the combination of video and the cloud were the two central themes I took away from annual Cisco Collaboration Summit, held last week in Miami, Florida.

Murali Sitaram, VP /GM of the Collaboration Software Group, gave a presentation on “Cloud Collaboration in the Post PC-Era”. Snorre Kjesbu, VP/GM of the TelePresence Technology Group, and Hakon Dahle, VP/CTO of the TelePresence Technology Group presented “Delivering on the Promise of Video Everywhere”.  We also listened to a very entertaining panel of Cisco executives talk about “Managing and Securing Collaboration in the Cloud”, as well, backed up by a breakout session on “The New Role of Video”, with multiple executives fielding our questions.

Barry O’Sullivan, Senior VP/GM of the Collaboration and Communication Group, started off the summit by talking about the cloud, and stated that WebEx is now the second largest business SaaS application out there with 500M users. Barry then spoke about the announcement of the next generation of WebEx, which extends the experience of the meeting to before and after the meeting. The idea is that users do work before and after meetings, related to those meetings, and this work would be far more effective and efficient, if attendees could have a persistent meeting space where they could file share documents from a desktop or file store, to get ready for the meeting, and leave that meeting “essentially open” for any updates after the meeting.

In Murali’s presentation he outlined a vision of how users collaborate now that we have so many device options and collaboration tools other than just our desktop. As he put it, “we consume experiences, documents, etc. and we do it across multiple devices. The cloud fundamentally enables this world that we live in, which is mobile, social, visual and virtual. The user device is like a piece of glass with the intelligence higher up.” So following up on this concept of a persistent meeting, the idea is to make meetings more expressive and meaningful.  There is knowledge in each meeting that needs to be conveyed to the next one.  With a persistent meeting space you can prepare by scheduling, posting the agenda and meeting materials, meet through video and sharing, on the device of your choice, and then follow up by sharing, continuing the discussion, watching recordings and tracking progress.

We also heard and saw a lot on Cisco Quad, and using Quad to create neighborhoods where employees can work. One demo showed how a vendor could collaborate using WebEx, and we were shown how Cisco has worked on getting the user interface between the Quad and WebEx to look very similar, including sharing a common activity stream. There is also now a history feed in the activity stream, added through the assets brought in from Cisco’s acquisition of Versely. In addition to the history feed, the demo also showed a widget that allows a pop up for an approval on part of the project, chat to get project approval, and then a video popped up via Callway. An additional party was using Telepresence through VXE, and another one was brought in using Jabber client on an iPad.

It is hard to encapsulate two days of Cisco collaboration into a few paragraphs. I’ll just say that from where Cisco was five years ago with the introduction of TelePresence, to the variety of tools and applications in collaboration, including video, that they now have available for users of all company sizes and types, and how they are integrating them, and delivering them is truly impressive.

—–

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Cisco Collaboration Summit - What’s UC?, (UCStrategies Views article) by Jon Arnold
• Cisco Continues to Help Customers Transform Their Business, (UCStrategies Views article) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Helps Companies Transform Business, (video podcast) by Blair Pleasant
• Cisco Getting Serious About Developers, (UCStrategies Views article) by David Yedwab
• UCStrategies Experts Discuss the Cisco Collaboration Summit, (Industry Buzz podcast) by Blair Pleasant

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications, Video by Nancy Jamison
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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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I just returned from Salesforce.com’s annual conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. dreamforce ‘11 had a record attendance of over 40K participants. Frankly I’m amazed at how smoothly the whole event was run as I didn’t see a glitch. The theme of “social” was prolific, with “Let’s Get Social” and “Welcome to the Social Enterprise”, everywhere. After two days of social it makes me wish this keyboard had a like icon on it, but alas it doesn’t.

CEO Mark Benihoff’s two hour (yes, two plus hour) long keynote on Wednesday was all about social, and how the concept of being social has created a social divide between the enterprise and users who have grown accustomed to having access to all manner of social applications. Of course he was here to fix all that, and this theme was the backdrop to a score of new feature enhancements and applications that were unveiled at the show. In his keynote Mark provided a three step process to bridging the divide between the enterprise and the end user:

• 1. Create a Social Customer Profile - keeping track of your customers and growing and evolving your information about your customers, in terms of the social media they are using, and building that into your customer profile so that you know what they are saying on Twitter, liking on Facebook, etc.
• 2. Create an Employee Social Network that is more than creating a private Facebook type of application for your employees, which includes collaboration, but not another island of collaboration or data. Mark spoke about integrating collaboration into all areas of the enterprise, including custom applications, sales, service, etc.
• 3. Create a customer social network and product social network - hooking products onto the network, including social media.

A primary theme of the event, along with social, was of course that the core of the social enterprise is multi-tenant cloud computing. Mark said that the cloud should be fast, no hardware or software required, easy to use with automatic upgrades and a pay-as-you-go model, open, and available to everyone.

Then it was time to roll out the announcements, which included:

● Chatter Now: providing Chatter users with presence capability so they can see when other users are online, and chat and screen share without leaving Chatter.

● Chatter Customer Groups: allowing Chatter users to invite people outside of their organization into their Chatter network to collaborate. This extends collaboration outside of the organization, and Salesforce claims it has done a huge amount of work on making this private and secure, so invitees only see what you or your group members allow them to see, and users can’t accidentally invite a bunch of people in that shouldn’t be in the group, for example.

● Chatter Approvals: will enable users to take action on any approval process from directly within their Chatter feed, of all types such as sales discounts, hiring decisions, vacation requests etc.

● Chatter Service: Salesforce claims this will be the ultimate self-service destination for the social enterprise, allowing customers to pose questions in a familiar social feed, and get instantaneous answers from multiple sources including those from within the company and from outside social networks. So it might be a knowledge base, the community of experts or a service agent, Facebook, or some other repository.

● Data.com: provides sales and marketing professionals from within Salesforce.com the information they need to effectively plan, target and execute sales and marketing campaigns, by helping them to build and maintain social customer profiles, by unifying socially-crowd sourced contact information from Jigsaw and company information from Dun & Bradstreet (D&B).

Beyond all the social networking bells and whistles that were announced, was delivery of those bells and whistles. Mark announced Touch.salesforce.com, which will leverages the open standard HTML5 technology to provide an optimized experience of Salesforce applications and customizations for multiple smart phones, tablet devices and operating systems.  

Mark also talked at length about new advancements in development as well, with more details to be found on the Salesforce.com website.

The demos were pretty good. For example, there was a demonstration of Salesforce.com being run natively on multiple devices, and it showed that from within the Chatter feed a user being able to get everything, on the device, including running multiple windows, looking up all customer data, including all of the social feeds available on the customer, conducting a meeting, closing a sale, and log the deal.

Mark ponied up some pretty key customers, such as Burberry and Toyota, showing their customer portals and all of the things that can be done to build a brand and following using Salesforce.com as the core. Maybe I’m a sucker for the hype, but I “liked” a few of them on Facebook as a result just to see what things were available. I’m expecting my Burberry’s free “new scent” sample any day now. Seriously, in all dreamforce, and the new products announced were an impressive lot.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobility by Nancy Jamison
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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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Now that I have your attention, this was a statement made at the recent Avaya Contact Center Analyst day in San Jose. What it referred to was that the Avaya Aura Contact Center from launch to booking, was the most successful new contact center product in Avaya history. Why is this important for Avaya? It is important because, today’s announcements should add even more fuel to the bookings fire.

Today’s announcements were anything but ho hum. Avaya tackled and delivered upon all the current trends that are evolving in the contact center; trends that are taking the traditional self-service (IVR) and agent handling of calls, to a new level of customer care.  In the past several years, Avaya has been part of this industry evolution already, but continues to add onto these trends, including social media integration, UC and the contact center, and elevating the customer experience across multiple channels. 

In their announcement material Avaya makes numerous points about how they  commissioned a study (Avaya Contact Center Customer Preference Study) that showed that 40% of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e., chat, text or email) for customer service, compared to the phone. Studies like this are ok, but they really just back up what the industry has been trying to do for a decade in creating multiple “customer touch points” or channels as alternatives or addendums to the contact center. We have been saying for years that we want to be able to provide customer service in the manner in which customers want to receive it, and we all are witness to the growing use of the Internet and mobile devices to access customer care. So it’s not revolutionary that Avaya is saying this, it is the way these announcements deliver on this that is important.  

Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC) 6.2

At the core with this release Avaya is making it easier for the content/context of any interaction on any channel to be seamlessly transferred to another. So whether someone prefers chat, text, or the IVR, for example, when they want a live agent, their initial “customer service investment” is not lost in transition. This integration makes the experience consistent for the customer.

With the 6.2 release, Avaya added the ability for agents to easily bring in experts to assist in any call with a customer, in a collaborative fashion, along with additional integration with social media. Here is the difference. AACC takes the call, gathers all pertinent customer context, including the requisite customer account number, history, and anything else pertinent to that customer, and matches it to the most appropriate agent.  This is not just plain skills-based routing, but a far more fine-tuned version of that, plus, the agent simultaneously has the right resources, including any potential experts, displayed along with the call, so that they can seamlessly bring in additional resources if needed into the call. 

Collaboration is done through the combination of AACC and Avaya Aura which displays, using presence, experts that are appropriate and available for the particular call that came in.  This means that the agent doesn’t have to go and search for an expert, as one or more are populated on the agent desktop at the time the call is received. This is all configurable by the contact center manager based on skills, or time of day, or particular need. 

In addition to the experts being shown on the agent desktop, Avaya has also has provided for the integration of social media as well, so that agents can respond to social media postings such as tweets and Facebook updates, but in a single consistent view, making it easier for the agent to get the full picture without having to go to a separate screen or application. This is facilitated through the addition of Avaya Social Media Manager.

Along with the integration of Social Media Manager is the addition of a new Social Media Consulting Services practice, which really is critical for companies to provide to their customers as those customers start to navigate through the development of social media strategy. In the case of Avaya, this new consulting practice follows a consistent methodology to lead the customer through the creation of their own strategy, including a “social assessment”, creation of a roadmap, and a social media adoption plan.

Avaya Aura Experience Portal

Next, Avaya didn’t just strengthen the agent side of the contact center experience, but the self-service side as well, across multiple channels as mentioned above with the introduction of Avaya Aura Experience Portal.  The most significant capability of the portal is a more seamless hand-off of customer data, as well as context, from any self-service session to AACC agents.

On the deployment side, Avaya added new development tools to help develop applications that seamlessly hand off the data to the contact center, making it faster and easier to deploy self-service applications that improve the customer experience. This is done by the new Avaya Aura Orchestration Designer.

As for the nuts and bolts part of the announcement, AACC will now support up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura.  Experience Portal can also be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers too, reducing TCO.  In addition, AACC 6.2 is now unified with Avaya’s automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration.  To protect the investment of existing self-service customers, Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal. 

In all, this is a well thought out and solid announcement, and should continue to help make those bookings numbers look good.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC by Nancy Jamison
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Today, Interactive Intelligence announced the upcoming availability of the company’s all-in-one IP communications software suite - Customer Interaction Center (CIC) version 4.0. This was all the buzz at Interactive’s annual customer conference which I had the pleasure of attending two weeks ago in Indianapolis, IN. Regrettably, I had to leave before the Indianapolis 500, which happened at the end of that week, but there was a race car in the lobby of the hotel - one with Interactive’s name on it, along with RightNow Technology, and a lot of race track type of energy. This may have been their largest customer event to date. I’m not sure of the numbers but I think I heard more than 700 customers were there, including a couple hundred that registered at the last minute and a couple dozen walk ups. Walk ups — at a customer conference in Indianapolis during iffy weather. That hints at what kind of excitement this event produced.

There were seven tracks and over 100 sessions, so there was plenty to hear about, but the theme of the event was really “taking the cover off of CIC 4.0″ from both a premise and hosted (CaaS) perspective. Underlying themes of the event were, of course, cloud, social media, UC, mobility, and the contact center of the future. In President and CEO, Don Brown’s opening remarks he reiterated that the CIC “suite” is really only one product: a complete SIP stack, same code base with no siloe’d applications, and that the 4.0 release was the result of hundreds of development years, representing millions of lines of code.

The formal unveiling of CIC 4.0 falls into the category of “significant release”, which for me means the attributes of significant architectural change, old functionality clean up, plus the addition of new features and functions, rather than just one of these components. We have seen this occur a number of times this past year; for example, Aspect’s Unified IP7 release, and Siemens OpenScape UC Suite 2011. With Interactive’s CIC 4.0 there was plenty of all three components as well.  In the case of Interactive, the blend of these attributes in CIC 4.0 is represented by, but not limited to:

• Much better scalability - more than double the number of ACD-enabled agents on a single server, five time increase in IVR sessions supported
• Improved IP-PBX capability
• ‘Bullet-proof’ recording capability (completely re-written, and seven time increase in the number of calls that can be recorded in an hour)
• Better email and web capability (completely new email interface is much more like Outlook than previously)
• Tighter integrations with third party applications, such as RightNow, MS Lync, Salesforce.com
• Improved management insight

Another architectural improvement Interactive made was to eliminate all of third-party call processing software previously used in CIC; greatly improving reliability. Further, the company moved all media processing to its Interaction Media Server^TM, leaving CIC 4.0 as a pure application server that can be located at a central data center with media servers at branch offices, creating a private cloud deployment model.  This change facilitated one of the key goals of the release - increased scalability, and it allows customers to process media locally for improved business continuity and survivability.

Speaking of cloud and deployment models, we also heard a lot about cloud and Interactive’s Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) success. They had a number of CaaS customers telling their deployment stories, including Thatcher Young, the Director of Call Center Operations at New ERA Tickets (parent company Comcast), who loves the CaaS model as he said that their call volume can run from 200 calls to 1.5M calls an hour depending upon what event is happening.  I would consider that to be the definition of “large spikes in call volume”.  He also said that “As a CaaS customer I haven’t had to worry once about updating or breaking the system”.  It was a very interesting and nice testimonial.

Interactive Intelligence also announced Interaction Web Portal^TM , which is a new application for contact center outsourcers that gives them secure, branded access and real-time visibility into their contact centers from reporting to monitoring and call recording, with different levels of access so that lower managerial staff and agents can have a view into certain aspects of performance.

The part of the announcement that I was most intrigued by was the release of Interaction Analyzer^TM; Interactive’s foray into speech analytics. Interaction Analyzer isn’t a bolt on, third-party speech analytics product. It is the company’s own creation, and while not as fully featured as many of the incumbent speech analytics products out there, Interaction Analyzer has some distinct advantages that I think will just make this product rock for Interactive Intelligence, most notably ease of use and real-time analytics capability. You can read more about it on my June rumors and happenings blog in speech technologies.

Tags: Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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Cisco Quad is an important and interesting component of Cisco’s Collaboration portfolio. I say interesting because when we first saw Quad a year ago there seemed to be a lot of potential, but Quad was a work in progress. The product had the potential to tie a lot of work and communication capabilities together in one cockpit or dashboard for a regular business user. Imagine Outlook combined with Twitter, Facebook, and select business applications you might use, all on one desktop. Quad is also similar to what contact center agents have experienced for years, with multiple functions on one screen, or the ability to get to them through one screen. Not surprisingly, Quad also has potential for use in the contact center to makeover what an agent in a contact center would use as the agent desktop, by providing a lot more functionality than what is currently available (particularly in the social media realm).

Yesterday, Cisco provided analysts with an update on Quad - one year later, by Murali Sitaram, who runs the Collaboration Software Group, where Quad now sits. We also had the opportunity to hear what Cisco has learned after trialing Quad on 64,000 Cisco users over the past year. Talk about a proof point of “eating your own dog food.” Murali showed us a live demo of Quad running on his desktop, rather than showing us a canned demo.

Collaboration is one of the key offerings at Cisco. In case you aren’t familiar with the portfolio, collaboration includes enterprise social software (such as social media and monitoring, e.g.; SocialMiner), conferencing, messaging, TelePresence, mobile applications, customer care, and IP communications. Even though these are separate product areas, Cisco has developed them with a continual eye on process, culture, and the interrelationship between these areas. Collaboration is truly people oriented, and as Murali explained, Quad is an enterprise collaboration platform that integrates the places people “live” at work; the social aspect, content, communication, and business process.

As he pointed out, as workers we are always dealing with different types of content, whether it is a spreadsheet, web page, word file, PDF file, presentation, etc. We also communicate through voice, video, and file sharing, etc. Different types of workers “live” with different applications. HR professionals live with applications such as Oracle or PeopleSoft; sales people spend part of their day with Salesforce.com, while customer service agents deal with an agent desktop, for example.

Cisco integrates with Microsoft OCS for instant messaging, SharePoint, Active Directory, and Exchange for calendaring. Quad also integrates with Documentum and other content repositories. Cisco is also looking to integrate with Lotus Notes for calendaring and Lotus Sametime for instant messaging, Cisco wants to continue to improve upon building a platform that integrates the Cisco components together, but over time with other third-party products, to provide an integrated experience. Quad is rooted in the social element, putting the user at the center of the conversation and bringing information to them.

Murali’s demo highlighted the four main areas of Quad. The first was Myview, which the user configures to highlight how they want to work during the day. Myview is rooted in the user’s activity feed, much like you would have on Facebook and Twitter, with a stream of content of interest to the user. The user can follow people or be followed, comment on posts, add photos, etc. Myview also can have calendar items, directory with presence capabilities, voicemail, etc.  It gives the user a sense of what is going on within their groups or teams.

The “watchlist” area is for those items in the activity feed that are of special interest or importance to the user. Think of it like Twitter and Tweetdeck. In Twitter you get a feed of everyone you are following, but with Tweetdeck you can have separate columns for subjects of interest. In Quad’s case, the activity feed is everything from documents posted about things you follow, or activities, blogs, posts, etc. or people you follow.

The Watchlist allows the user to add and remove things from the list, and shows a trail of things that are happening related to a subject or activity. The user can search, and refine the search using parameters such as more recent activity, etc.

The second area is Myprofile, which is a profile, of course, but one that the user can add content to, including photos of what they are doing - once again, like you would do a mobile upload to Facebook. It also shows content such as the user’s latest blog (excluding restricted or private information). In addition there is a tag cloud area as well.  The person’s reporting structure within the organization is also available.

The third area is communities, which includes communities of interest, such as a product area they are involved or working in. It includes things like discussion forums, content (including videos), directory, etc. The search function allows the user to search on anything, and lets the user narrow down the search to groups, activities, etc. that are pertinent to their work life.

The last area is instant messaging, which allows the user to search in a directory, for someone in their group, area of interest or the company, see that person’s presence status, and then and instant message with them.

Cisco is only about 18 months into development of Quad (they launched in June 2010 and rolled it out to Cisco employees in November), and I’m pretty amazed at how useful the platform is. Cisco also has dozens of customers at various stages of development or deployment, as well as dozens of partners that they are working with on the Quad product.  Cisco offered partners a program enabling them to use Quad internally to determine if it is something that they would like to sell.

From a product perspective, Cisco created an open platform, and added a mobility aspect. When Cius ships in May or June, Quad will ship as an application with the Cius device. Additionally, flexible deployment models are important to Cisco, so they are looking at all options including private cloud and public cloud deployments.

In summary, I think that Quad is fairly impressive. It is hard to convey how useful or visually appealing Quad is without seeing it in action. If you get a chance, take it.  I also like the fact that Cisco is developing Quad by learning from the company’s internal use of the product. After the initial launch, Cisco experienced a high user adoption rate, from which Cisco is continually learning. Cisco’s main goal is to learn from their experience and create a useful platform that combines social application and portals into a user experience platform.

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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