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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I was so glad to read on Blair Pleasant’s Enterprise Connect blog; Enterprise Connect 2011 What a Show! that the energy and crowds were back. I had been to ITExpo in the fall, and whereas it was better attended than recent shows during the downturn, and had new content, including social media in contact centers, still didn’t quite have the buzz of the shows we used to attend in the past when “telecom” was hopping. So I’m happy. I wish I could have been there, but Florida was too far this month.

I agreed with Blair on her assessment of cloud. We have been hearing it from every vendor from UC vendors to the contact center vendors, and cloud was tweeted to death during the show. However, it won’t happen overnight. Even if cloud shows up in every customer presentation, there is still a lot of investment in on-premise equipment and solutions that companies won’t just throw away. The key now is that everyone is thinking about it, so now they can plan for it, and it will move faster as — Blair said, with a hybrid approach, and with further offerings. Along those lines, Verizon’s announcement of the company’s Unified Communication & Collaboration-as-a-Service (UCCaaS) which they announced at the show, is being trialed now, will be available as a hybrid offering for enterprises later this year.

Siemens Enterprise Communications had another cloud winner (to use Blair’s analogy of the Oscars) with OpenScape Cloud Solutions; that build on and offers the capabilities of OpenScape Voice, OpenScape UC and OpenScape Web Collaboration, as cloud deployments. The solutions include a standard set of defined packages and options, to make it easy for a company to deploy and expand. The goal as with the other Siemens announcements I blogged about in December, is simplicity, cost effectiveness and reliability. These solutions will be hosted in third-party data centers and available through resellers.

An intriguing part of the announcement was OpenScape Mobile UC Client for Android, which featured new OpenScape Communication Gestures that will support the innovative Call Swipe Gesture (interesting name), the intent of which is to seamlessly transfer calls-in-progress to other devices with intuitive hand gestures on a touch screen interface.

Lastly, Siemens Enterprise announced OpenScape Fusion for Google Apps which delivers integration plug-ins for the Google Apps suite, enabling unified communications capabilities such as click to call from within Google cloud-based applications.

Other cloud announcements included Global Crossing introducing the company’s Communication-as-a-Service (CaaS) service. It combines the company’s IP VPN, SIP trunking capabilities and audio conferencing in the first release. Later releases will cover more UC capabilities.

I was also pleased to hear that interoperability was a winner. We talk about this all the time at UCStrategies in blogs, our podcasts and our calls, and although it seems like true interoperability will always be a moving target, all steps will help.  One announcement along these lines was Zeacom’s announcement that the Zeacom Communications Center (ZCC) will interoperate (see there is that word again) with Microsoft Lync 2010 is a further proof point of the blending of UC with the contact center.

Once again, I wish I could have been there. So if there was that much buzz, Eric and Fred, please, please, bring a west coast show back to San Francisco!!!.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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I know that one of my UC Strategies colleagues, Don Van Doren, attended the 2011 HIMSS Conference in Atlanta and should be able to report more details in how UC is making progress with health care applications. However, I was very impressed to see Avaya jumping in with both feet to exploit mobile devices for both hospital staff as well as mobile patient contacts to fully exploit UC for operational efficiency and effectiveness. (Never mind reduced telephony costs because of IP Telephony and SIP trunking!)

I have always seen mobility as the real driver for end user interest and benefits from UC and Avaya has finally connected some of the dots between the hospital environment, health care information systems, and patients who are not in a hospital environment but are key participants in operational performance issues. Given that the health care topic is at the top of this country’s financial concerns, anything that will help improve the performance of health care activities will get attention from everybody!

So, the headlines that got my attention are some of Avaya’s new solutions announced at HIMSS this past week. What’s important is that this is not just a start-up company with a bright idea, but an experienced technology provider with an established market share that is finally delivering something significantly better to the marketplace. (So, expect others to follow suit accordingly!)

• Mobile Device Checkout - Basically, this new function supports “dual personna” mobility on premise by letting hospital staff use their own, personalized mobile devices to be be automatically accessible through the hospital’s phone system and WLAN,  by generating a temporary unique phone number. It allows for role-based-contacts, rather than having to know specific individual names and numbers, and it ties into a presence-based system for locating personnel. Yeah!
• Nurse Call Response - This solution replaces the need for a patient to contact a nurse’s station in order to talk to the nurse responsible for their care, but will initiate the contact directly with the appropriate nurse either available or assigned such responsibility. This reduces the wasted time delay and frustrations for a patient who needs immediate attention. (The announcement did not mention any options for such call contacts to exploit the benefits of UC with visual, contextual information on a smart-phone device.)
• Patient Admit Coordinator - This “workflow” solution targets patients coming to an Emergency Room for treatment to be admitted to a hospital bed. Currently, such procedures are paper-based, slow, inefficient, and costly. (I know from recent personal experience!)
• Patient Appointment Reminder - This is not really anything new, but is a basic application that can capitalize on the multi-modality of UC for personalized outbound notifications. It is particularly useful for health care and especially for senior citizens whose memory starts to suffer with age. It is also useful for other types of reminders, such as time to take a particular medication, or if an automated patient monitoring application detects a new problem, the need to see a particular doctor or take a particular medication suddenly becomes critical.

The above applications are tied to mobility of the individual end user, either as a contact initiator or a contact recipient, which in turn is tied to UC for flexible communications. I am sure there are other apps/solution examples in the health care environment, and some of these will also apply to other business activities, e.g., appointment reminders, CEBP applications, etc. So, I am glad to see some of the fundamental visions of UC that I and my colleagues have been pushing for several years starting to be realized in the real world.

Tags: Contact Center, Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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A lovelier setting for the 9^th annual Genesys conference couldn’t be had as the Ritz at Half Moon Bay. But first, it wasn’t just the ninth annual Genesys conference; it was the first annual Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise conference. But don’t think that the Genesys name has gone away. On the contrary, or perhaps I should say au contraire, ALU has made an even stronger statement about maintaining the Genesys brand with a new updated identity. Starting this week at their sales kick-off meeting Business cards at ALU will look like

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprises (Alcatel logo) and underneath in the Genesys red:

(Genesys Logo) followed by Genesys Communications Network

The intent is to represent that ALU is not just PBX, carrier and networking, but also is playing in the enterprise, and that they are leveraging from three different groups; Genesys, Communications and Networks. This is really about go-to-market, in that keeping them all allows ALU to use the market awareness of the Genesys brand in customer service, UC, etc., and the PBX, carrier, and networking capabilities of ALU.

On top of the business side of continuing the merging of the two organizations and a development of a superior go to market strategy than they have had before, executives pointed out that they felt that they had never seen a year of such technical innovation within the company. For example, within contact center ALU rounded out the company’s work force optimization (WFO) suite, adding quality monitoring and making a lot of progress on Interactive Insights with cradle to grave interaction reporting. The first phase of this was marketed as Infomart, (back-end data repository) followed in 2009 and 2010 with Interactive Insights (front end reporting). So now all of the scalability and consolidated data of Infomart (real-time and historical) has been brought into Insights, providing complete support of the entire Genesys product suite. ALU is also working on all manner of video for enterprise and contact center.

ALU also showed us Social Engagement; which is the company’s entrée into the industry’s much beloved trend of integrating social media into customer service. They have some very interesting customer use cases brewing that I’m looking forward to being able to write about once ALU’s customers get a sizeable chunk of usage data.

Finally, ALU unveiled OpenTouch; which is the commercial name for the converged architecture (ICE), Genesys SIP server, GVP server, and OXE PBX. OpenTouch is a family and packaged offerings that are all about shifting the user from voice centric communications to multimedia communications, on devices chosen by the user. OpenTouch is also about taking communications that are now one-on-one communications to multi person communications with extreme ease, so that the user can add or remove people as their business needs dictate.

Yes, as I normally do, I’ll comment on the new naming convention. Much as there was a lot of stumbling of analysts, and even executives in saying things like OmniTouch instead of OpenTouch, or commenting on how close it was to Siemens OpenScape, it’s a good name. Both OpenScape and OpenTouch speak to the same thing - open. And whether it is touch or scape, both give the end user the idea of what the product is about, so I like them both. Let’s just hope that sales people from ALU/Genesys and Siemens don’t mix them up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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