Last week in Las Vegas I got to follow up on Cisco’s contact center analyst day by attending Ciscolive, which is Cisco’s big customer event, co-located with C-Scape, Cisco’s main analyst event. Ciscolive was huge! In the main keynote there were 12,500 customers, a lot of analysts, and 23K total attendees if you include those participating virtually. As usual, John Chambers was completely engaging speaking on the vision that Cisco has with snippets such as, “Economies of the future won’t be information economies, but network economies”, and “Every mistake I’ve made as a leader is in being too slow or in having speed without process and being replicable.”

Ciscolive also had what Cisco called, ‘The World of Solutions Expo’, which was essentially a trade show of Cisco and Cisco partners. In the collaboration area we got to see and hear much more about UC and collaboration products, such as Cisco Pulse, and I was happy to hear that Cisco has come a long way in getting the answers to some of the questions I had last November when they announced those products.

The best part of the keynote was the Cius demonstration; Cisco’s new tablet phone. Aimed at a business user, rather than consumer, like Apple’s iPad, this UC tool, is nice. This telephone/tablet combination acts as a portable communications and collaboration platform, working as a phone with a screen that works with Cisco applications such as Telepresence or WebEx, and with Cisco’s Unified Communications manager, or as a tablet. When the tablet is docked it provides the screen, and the base has USB ports, a wired Ethernet connection, and, of course, a telephone handset and speakerphone.

When used as a tablet, Cius has an HD 720p camera that faces the user, and a 5 megapixel camera mounted on the back, so that a user can pop the tablet off of the base, and use it for two way video calls, or video calls in which the user can see the other party and show them whatever the back camera is pointed at.

The Cius tablet weighs 1.14 pounds, runs on the Android operating system, and supports 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and 3G. Later releases will include 4G mobile networking. Cius is blue-tooth enabled, and supports connection of other headsets through a micro-USB port. Cisco said that when the product is released in early 2011 that it will come with a set of applications and a Firefox browser, but also stated that Android developers can write applications to the device using Cisco’s own SDK and APIs. Cisco also claims that the tablet has an 8 hour battery life.

If a unified communications “phone” could be fun, this would be it. It has a nice design, supports a lot of functionality, and appears very easy to use. For Cisco, the Cius is also a very attractive add-on to their shameless drive to put video everywhere, not only because of the video capabilities of the phone, but also because of support for Cisco’s myriad video-enabled UC applications.  There is no hidden agenda here; just video everywhere all the time, and this makes video appealingly mobile.

 Lastly, although the Cius is positioned as a business device, with Cisco’s statements towards bringing the network to everyone, it’s not out of the question that further positioning towards the consumer market might happen not far down the road.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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A new report from mobility expert, Tomi Ahonen,  shows that SMS has already become the most widely used text messaging application by all users in the world (53%), and even more by mobile users (78%). This reflects a shift from “real-time” voice calls that may run into “unavailability” problems and go to “voicemail jail”, to more practical “near real-time,” immediate message notification and delivery that another study reports will usually be responded to within five minutes.

A 2009 study by Lightspeed Research in the UK showed that 11% of mobile users didn’t initiate any voice calls at all,  while in the U.S., the percentage was even higher, 13%.

I am sure you are all familiar with seeing a user with a ringing cell phone often just looking to see who it is from then simply letting it go to a messaging function. Lately, voicemail-to-text services have taken care of caller voice messages by transcribing them automatically to text messages. So, whether the contact initiator chooses to use voice or not, the contact recipient can still deal with voice messages more efficiently than with voice mail interfaces.

From a UC perspective, where I include “process-to-person” contacts in addition to “person-to-person” contacts, text messaging and SMS are an obvious choice for personalized, pro-active, automated, time-sensitive notifications from a business process application, commonly referred to as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), because business applications don’t really want to generate voice messages instead of their usual text message output.  (If the recipient requires a speech interface because they are driving a car, we can let them selectively exploit “unified messaging’  options based on their presence status.

With the rapid growth of screen-based, multi-modal smart-phones, the flexibility of input and output can be extended to end users independently of whether they are contact initiators or recipients/respondents for SMS. In addition, however, with the power of UC and presence, SMS exchanges can be easily escalated to real-time Instant Messaging and/or “click-to call” voice connections when appropriate.  This makes conversational voice calls more manageable from both a caller’s and callee’s perspective, and reduces the unnecessary problems generated by “blind” call attempts and voicemail’s retrieval limitations.

Needless to say, SMS itself doesn’t satisfy all the informational needs of users involved in a business process, but provides an efficient,  timely, mobile contact interaction to people wherever they are, along with links to the real information required for the business process, e.g., email. However, SMS is used 2.6 times more than email by mobile users. The key to efficient information exchange is to make timely and efficient contact first, not have conversations or deliver documents. Clearly, UC will be successful with its different forms of communication applications,  if it can exploit mobility for accessing individual recipients as quickly and flexibly as possible.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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At the recent Mobile Voice Conference in San Francisco at the end of April there were some delightful departures from the focus on speech technologies and mobility — although there is nothing wrong with speech and mobility. In fact, Mobile Voice was a name change away from the original name of the conference, Voice Search, due to the incredible growth in the use of speech technologies in mobile applications over the last five years or so. And that, of course, has everything to do with unified communications.

The departures from the expected presentations included a very interesting panel on patent law, which included Marie Meteer, of MM Consulting, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium - Building the Prior Art Library to Enable Better Patent Application Examinations”, Jason Peltz, an attorney with Bartlit, Beck Herman Palencher & Scott LLP, speaking on “Patent strategy: considerations in filing a patent infringement suit and in defending such a suit”, Mark Powell, the Director of the Technology Center 2600 of the US Patent and Trademark Office, speaking on “United States Patent & Trademark Office - How You Can Work With Us”, and Ria Farrell Schalnat, a patent attorney with Frost Brown Todd, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium - Using Re-examinations Proactively to Clear the Threat of Patent Trolls”.

It was a very educational and interesting session given that the topic involved the legal in and outs of intellectual property, not technology introductions, product information, or applications. Still it was a fascinating panel and one that struck a cord with me. Why? Because there is evil lurking out there in the form of patent trolls, which is threatening to stifle creativity and stall the speech technology industry, and related industries, one of which again is unified communications.

So just what is a patent troll? In a nutshell, it is a non-practicing individual or group/entity that buys up patents from willing sellers or struggling companies, that then turns around uses to sue related companies for patent infringement. In other words, this is someone who has not practiced their patent, and is not contributing or innovating in the industry in any way. Instead, they accrue patents as an arsenal (with multiple claims in each patent), bundle them up, and then take companies to court. We saw this happen starting more than a decade ago, with Michael Katz taking on the voice processing industry (at the time, voice messaging and IVR), and now, extremely aggressively, with Phoenix Solutions, who have sued big companies such as Sony, PG&E, and Wells Fargo, for their use of speech technologies.

To set the stage, Jason Peltz explained that there are 200K patents that are issued annually, with 2700 patent suits filed annually. Currently, there are 4000 patent cases pending. The average case takes two years, with an average cost of between $4.5 to $5M to defend, with an average jury award of $6.5M. Something that was equally interesting is that 30-40% of patent cases are overturned on appeal, which is dramatically higher than any other form of litigation. Also, in the case of patent law, the higher courts at the federal level do not have to defer to the trial court’s interpretation of the claims in the subject patent, so if a company successfully defends their patent, and the “troll” decides to appeal, they may get a second bite at the apple, with all the associated costs escalating. Many small companies just fold, as it’s often less costly to pay license fees than legal fees. But it is not just small companies that fold. In a recent case filed in 2002 (US patent 5,799,273) Allvoice Computing, PLC vs. Nuance, Nuance won their first case, and then ended up settling rather than going through it again on a federal level. Why does this matter? Because even though Nuance won, when they settled in July of 2007 rather than pay, it gave the patent troll a big stick to use against smaller companies by being able to say that Nuance paid rather than fight — we can beat you too.

The panel discussed what could potentially be done about this, and Ria Farrell Schalnat talked about using re-examination as an alternative or supplement to litigation. Depending on the type of re-exam conducted, costs may initially be anywhere between $5,000 - $50,000+. It all depends on the complexity of the patent as well as whether the initial decision is appealed. Although these fees are a fraction of litigation, they may still be too cost prohibitive for one company to take on by themselves. The potential solution would be to band together to fight the trolls as a group - hence the birth of the idea of a Speech Technology Consortium (STC), which would pool money and intellectual property resources to defend and win against the trolls. There would be a membership fee for participating companies, but no charge for the cost of accepted re-exam requests. A key component of this effort would be to uncover, gather up, and create a database of prior art to be used as evidence in the re-exams.

Ria cited statistics showing a 73% patent “kill rate”, through August 2008, which is a complete elimination of all claims targeted by a requestor, which represents a rate much higher than litigation at 33%.

I just love the whole concept of a group effort to defeat something which only hurts the industry. Needlessly spending money to defend or settle “claims” only drains the coffers of companies trying to honestly innovate, and has the effect of inhibiting new companies from emerging because it jacks up the cost of entry to the market. I believe that as the STC is developed, that companies in the unified communications space should definitely jump on board and help out as the technologies used in UC, and the features and functions in these claims are interwoven, leaving UC companies at risk of attack too.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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Ever since the “UC” concept started to gain traction in business communications, I had been bugging Fred Knight to let go of the emphasis on voice telephony reflected in the name of their very successful “VoiceCon” conference.  I also was suggesting that enterprise  text messaging technology providers like Microsoft and IBM bring their customers to  this show to start delivering a common technology message of convergence, flexibility, and UC interoperability to the market place.

Well, today, on the 20th anniversary of VoiceCon, they announced a name change at the show to “Enterprise Connect.” To learn more, go to www.voicecon.com/is-enterpriseconnect.

This simple name change will help open business communication doors wider to include more than a flexible choice of person-to-person voice/video or messaging connections, but to also include “application process-to-person” and “person-to-application process” contacts that exploit the efficiencies of automated (self-service) business processes across all forms of communication interfaces.

Maybe we will see the next name change take us from the real-time traffic-centric label of  VoiceCon’s popular blog site,  “No Jitter,” to something more pertinent to the UC vision of flexible, interoperable, multimodal user interfaces.

Congratulations on the name change!

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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I would say that the bulk of attention in the industry is paid to the handful of big vendors and multitudes of smaller ones that create products and solutions, and then sell them direct or through partners, and systems integrators. The industry and analysts talk about “the channel”, but don’t talk a lot about the channel, typically because of the vast amount of announcements that require our attention from the big manufacturers, such as the Cisco’s, Avaya’s and IBM’s of the world. However, the indirect channel is a large and growing group of companies that is intensely valuable to vendors of all types, which is why UCStrategies focuses on the channel as much as possible. In case you haven’t checked it out click on UC Summit on the upper right corner of the home page to see information on our UC channel summit in April. Today let’s focus on a couple of examples of how systems integrators work and the contribution they play in getting solutions to the market.

Systems integrators and resellers are a valuable group of partners that supplement a company’s direct sales and support staff. More importantly, for the customer, they understand how to successfully integrate the systems and applications not just from one vendor, but multiple vendors, which more often than not is the reality of any company’s business infrastructure. They also provide continuous systems and application improvement, maintenance and support over time. Long term they develop deep expertise across a wide range of platforms, products and applications, which is something that the bigger vendors often don’t do as well. In essence they act as a trusted arm of a bigger vendor.

Let’s look at two of these vendors, and one vertical - mobility - to show how this works. Acclaim Telecom Services, Inc., while not billed as a classic systems integrator, acts in some capacity as a systems integrator in that they have broad knowledge across multiple platforms, act as a systems integrator for some of them, such as delivering self-service (IVR) applications on Microsoft Speech Server, and develop and deliver applications on multiple platforms as well.

For example, in the case of mobility solutions, Acclaim has launched the company’s Smartphone Mobile Solutions Division, powered by one of those platforms; Unwired Nation. Acclaim launched this as a hosted service to provide diverse mobile applications for companies wanting to take advantage of the growing use of mobile applications as a customer channel. The Unwired Mobile Platform (UMP) provides access to multiple device platforms through a single integration API, which means that an application can be developed once and deployed across multiple mobile devices, without regard to operating system or device manufacturer. This solves a problem that I touch on briefly in my upcoming April Voice Value column in Speech Technology Magazine. Despite the proliferation of mobile applications, having to write to different devices and operating systems is a deterrent to growth.

As another example, SOFTEL Communications, is a classic systems integrator/reseller in that they have very broad expertise in integrating products and solutions across multiple vendor platforms, such as Genesys, Avaya and Cisco, along with third-party application providers, such as CRM, workforce management, VoIP, etc. SOFTEL also creates complimentary products and solutions to supplement those offered by such vendors.

In the case of mobility, for example, SOFTEL provides location-based services (LBS) to companies, such as Telco’s for their end customers, such as downtown business districts or mall owners. They create the solution and partner with Telco’s to deliver to end user customers.

In both cases these companies partner with other vendors, integrate platforms and products together, and then provide their “value-add”, on top to round out and improve the offering. This is particularly important in area like unified communications as there are numerous applications to tie together, and companies often have one or more initial pieces to build on.

If you are a customer looking for a solution it is well worth checking out the third party providers that work with the big vendors. It works well in the past, and as a proof point, more and more of the bigger vendors are radically changing the mix of direct and indirect sales that they use to a more indirect model.  It shouldn’t be hard to find one that has the right mix of expertise for the of solutions that you might have or be moving towards.

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Nancy Jamison
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Microsoft released their Visual Search beta on Bing this morning. It’s pretty cool, particularly if you are a visual person. I played around with some of the categories they had listed to show off the application. One category, dog breeds, really shows how this software shines, compared to doing searches on Google. I’ve done this search before when trying to show what certain breeds of dogs look like, for my kids. Visual search is cool. Click on dog breeds and up come boxes with the individual dogs in them, just like if you pulled open a big file drawer and could see all the files. Go and try it.

Easily laid out to help, the screen allows you to sort by size of dog, either by clicking on a “sort by size button” at the top, or sliding a scroll bar labeled as such down the side. On the left side are popular subcategories that some one might want to click on, such as “most obedient”, “hypoallergenic”, etc., Below that are sub categories under the heading “narrow the search”. For example, categories include grooming needs, size, temperament, etc. Once you narrow your search, then you get links to the best choice for what you are looking for.

I loved it. But it’s more than that. The visual component is what got me. Let’s take “popular books” as a category. Sometimes you know the author or the name of the book, but sometimes you have just seen a book around and can’t remember either of those. Click on “popular books” and up come dozens of covers. I instantly recognized several my fellow airplane passengers had been reading last week on a plane with me.

While just playing with it seems like a toy, it does have the potential for enhancing unified communications and mobility applications, particularly multi-modal applications. Giving people visual choices, even on a small screen can speed up their ability to make selections, and the visual component spurs memory recall. I’d like to see how developers will incorporate this function into applications.

For now I have to quell my desire to go to Barnes and Noble.com rather than work. :) I now have to quell my desire to play longer with Visual Search. It’s fun and useful. Oh oh, I hear “greatest movies” calling me. Back to work.

Tags: ADA communications, Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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It is clear that VoiceCon continues as “the place” for the communications industry to meet.   Thousands of customers, vendors, and industry experts have gathered here to share updates.  Avaya and IBM will are both making major announcements here.  The keynotes are from top execs from Avaya, Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.  The exhibits have an increasing registration.  In total, it’s a big deal! 

UCStrategies.com is providing the core UC content.  Our team is delivering the tutorial, “UC: Who’s Offering What?” on Monday afternoon; the industry updates, “Unified Communications Market Update” on Tuesday AM, and “UC Leadership Round Table” on Tuesday afternoon; and detailed content in the sessions, “Integrating Mobility with UC” on Tuesday afternoon; “Communications-Enabled Apps in Action” (a customer exec panel) on Wednesday AM, “The Future of Voice Messaging” on Weds. AM, and “Leveraging VoIP for UC” on Wednesday PM.  

Jim Burton will be a co-moderator of the VoiceCon Summit on UC, a plenary session on Thursday AM, and Don Van Doren will be part of the “Locknote” panel to recap and wrap up VoiceCon Orlando 2009.

Read the VoiceCon program details, and watch for our posts during and after VoiceCon.  Drop us a note or post to this blog if you have specific questions.  You can count on UCStrategies.com to continue to bring you the latest and greatest on UC!

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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I just attended the second annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego, organized by the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (president, TMA Associates, editor, Speech Strategy News). Voice search encompasses a wide range of applications from speech-enabled directory assistance and mobile applications, to speech analytics in the contact center.

Best said by the conference brochure, the conference was held “to address the disruptive role of speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile and Web applications. Voice Search 2009 addresses the disruptive role of speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile, Web, and call center applications.” As a way of description, it goes on to say: “Voice Search can find information quickly by a spoken request. In a mobile environment, Voice Search helps address the limitations of a small device for text entry. It creates the option of a uniform user interface executed within the network and largely (or entirely) independent of the specific device.

On the Web, Voice Search can allow audio or video files containing speech, including podcasts or video clips, to be searched by content. A text inquiry can not only find relevant content on the Web, but the location in that audio file where keywords were spoken.

Voice Search makes voice and text more interchangeable. For example, voicemail can be transcribed and stored as text for easy scanning and retrieval.”

Note that the conference description says that the focus is speech technologies as used in mobile, web and call center applications, with no mention of UC. However, unified communications was everywhere at the conference from session topics to panel discussions, which was not at all the case in last year’s event. As a gauge of industry awareness, the interjection of the term unified communications across a speech technology conference shows how pervasive the concept is becoming.

That usage came in many forms from speakers who focused on unified communications, lots of talk of UC in general in sessions, to speakers talking extensively about the business capabilities that are being facilitated by the use of voice on mobile devices; which is a big part of UC. In one of the panels that I moderated, for example, Steve Gutierrez, from Dialogic, spoke on “Unifying Networks for Unified Communications”, which talked of the nuts and bolts of the network. In many of the contact center sessions, I heard plenty of mention of unified communications as well.

Similarly, unlike last year where the focus for mobility applications was just what kinds of things you could with your voice on a device, this year’s focus on mobility and multimodality, included user interface design, speech-enabled mobility applications such as 800-GOOG-411, Vlingo, and 800-CALL-411, and newer productivity applications such as the speech-to-text conversion of voicemails to text.

In one of the most amusing talks of the show, Gary Wright of Applied Speech Resources did a presentation, “A Year Using Voice Search”, in which he chronicled his experiences over a year intentionally using voice search on his mobile device, everyday, and on impromptu road trips. His questions at the outset of the year included do voice search applications live up to the hype?, for what tasks are they most useful, how do phone-based search and multi-modal search differ, and what is the user interface experience.

In addition to ferreting out all manner of interesting UI improvements, supported by some frustrating, but amusing anecdotes, Gary delivered his list of things that worked well as a user and suggested improvements for vendors.

Overall, the conference had exceptional presenters and presentations, carrying on the legacy which was the AVIOS and Meisel conferences of the past. Unlike many conferences I attend that are rife with vendor presentations that border on advertisements, many of the presentations at Voice Search reflected research studies into speech technologies, or real-world deployments of applications. I’m not sure if the show name is too broad or not specific enough, but I would invite any UC player to attend next year’s event.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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The Sunday New York Times article entitled “Living Apart for the Paycheck”  detailed how the economy is forcing more and more couples to have commuter marriages. This in turn caused me to reflect on the use of unified communications applications in the personal/home environment. I have written many blogs about unified communications, but applying unified communications to the home environment is a new. Read my take of this new development on my Blog, The User View, “Video Technology Aids the Enterprise and Families Alike“  at http://www.jamison-consulting.com/blog/ .

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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2008 was the year of communications.  Unified communications became a reality, with products and solutions actually being deployed, to form a collaborative strategy within organizations.  Perhaps the need for cost efficiencies, combined with the plummeting economy, forced enterprises to rethink how they utilize their communications platforms to improve overall productivity within their organizations, and ultimately add to their bottom line.  While tools such as UM and e-mail have been deployed for quite some time now, the emergence of a more unified communications and collaborative strategy took shape.  The integration of telephony and presence features became much more critical to business processes. All of a sudden, there were so many modes of communications that calling someone on the phone really became secondary. Modes such as IM and SMS have become the way to have a conversation.

As the year comes to a close, what does 2009 hold in store for this industry?  With emerging technologies taking shape, business models changing, a new group of millennials coming into the workforce, the blending of personal and professional lifestyles, and a new president-elect, I think that despite the economy, we’re in for change.  Here are a few things that I think will happen in 2009 (in no particular ranking order-they’re all important):

1. The Unified communications market will consolidate-as the credit crisis continues, the financial viability of vendors will be challenged, those who don’t survive will simply get acquired in a rapid fire sale, or simply go away. 
2. Interoperability will happen-There’s no way around it, if UC is to succeed, vendors will need to interoperate and partner with other vendors, in order to drive UC adoption. Most enterprises will take a best of breed approach, simply because of existing, disparate technologies within the organization, which becomes expensive to rip out and replace.  2008 was a lot of talk about making it happen; 2009 will see it happen…really.  Vendors finally understand that this is not a one vendor-take-all space and will learn to guess what? Collaborate!
3. Customers will have the option of deploying UC and collaborative tools overall, in the Cloud, making for better resource efficiencies.  Although still a relatively nascent market, vendors will capitalize on this opportunity and make it enterprise ready.  Enterprises will evaluate any technology that can help to rationalize capex/opex.
4. Enterprise social networking will become a legitimate collaborative tool.  Look for Facebook and LinkedIn type enterprise applications take shape in order to enhance partner, supplier and customer relationships, while at the same time, securing an organization’s intellectual property.
5. SaaS will gain traction as enterprises, both big and small, look to reduce hardware investment and create efficiencies; market will move towards anything as-a-service.
6. Terms like software, hardware, and telephony will go away, making way for new terminology.

Although there are many things that MAY happen, I believe these WILL happen.  The market must go in this direction in order to further the value proposition of UC and collaboration in general.  The value and benefits will be hard for enterprises to ignore, even in this economy.  This is a good time for enterprises to take the time to re-evaluate their equipment, strategy and ultimately resources.  Automating many business processes and implementing productivity applications is key in this environment and vendors have a choice of solutions to choose from.

On that note, thank you for reading me, and providing feedback.  I’m very interested in reading what you think will happen in 2009, feedback is very much welcomed.  It’s been quite a year and glad to have been a part of it.  I look forward to sharing my thoughts and opinions with you in 2009, and wish all my readers a wonderful and prosperous New Year!

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Vanessa Alvarez
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