UC and CEBP Can Provide Fast, Secure Communications

Health care activities have long been recognized as a big target for UC flexibility, particularly for mobile end users and for personalized automated notifications. However, a recent announcement by the health care industry’s Joint Commission showed the potential for another way UC-enabled applications can play a key role for convenient and efficient contacts.

The Joint Commission stated that texting medical orders directly is not acceptable because of authentication and record keeping requirements. Needless to say, the convenience of using mobile smartphones and tablets would be limited. However, while person-to-person texting is prohibited, person-to-process-to-person should be acceptable, and that’s where Mobile UC flexibility and CEBP come into play.

The doctor who wishes to initiate a medical order can simply do so through a mobile app that first requires secure access and authentication, including a written signature or voice ID if necessary. The order can be input as speech or typed, and then becomes a text message that is then deliverable to authorized recipients, which can include hospitals, pharmacies, and the specific patient. The voice recording of an order is also useful for validating a record of the medical order.

The patient involved can be immediately notified and have access to a copy of an order to be aware of what will be done and to quickly follow up with timely usage of any medications involved.

Doesn’t that look like a multi-modal UC application to you?

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Art Rosenberg
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UC Interoperability - Technology “Separation of Church, State, and End Users”

Unified Communications (UC)-enabled applications must be supported in various ways and “interoperability,” a loose term being used to describe a major challenge (see No Jiitter post by Fred Knight) in supporting UC’s operational growth. For many providers of UC applications and services, interoperability simply means getting old and new communications applications integrated to work together at various levels, including network access, application user interfaces, and endpoint device form factors and operating systems. However, every organization will also have to consider interoperability as a means of gracefully transitioning from the past to the future. This will not only be a challenge in transitioning operational communications technologies, but also a challenge to the future role of an organization in controlling access to both its information resources and its communications between people (internal staff, customers, and business partners).

Business communications (particularly voice telephony) are transitioning away from hardware-based, location-based technologies to “open” software and “virtual” applications that can more easily interoperate with each other. They are also shifting to application-driven real-time notifications and multimedia self-services rather than requiring person-to-person phone calls for real-time information access and delivery. Bottom line is that traditional requirements for enterprise communication control is expanding away from just the wired premise desktop to multimodal, mobile BYOD devices that will be primarily controlled by the individual end users through UC and shared for the many different contacts with other organizations that the individual end user has “business” relations with.

These technology shifts would suggest that much of yesterday’s real-time, voice-only desktop telephony requirements will be significantly reduced in favor of multimedia user interfaces, asynchronous forms of personalized contact, and real-time mobile notifications, with the option of “click-to-call/talk/video” connectivity based on accessibility and availability (presence). End users will be initiating voice conversations differently and managing responses to such contacts differently than traditional call management.

So, the basic question really is how will that transition take place from the perspective of enterprise technology? Will it shift (slowly or quickly) completely or partially (hybrid) to virtual cloud based IP network services that can satisfy application customization, management, and security needs? That’s where standards and interoperability become key and both the industry and the markets still have “one foot on land and one foot in the canoe!”

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications by Art Rosenberg
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UC Short-circuiting Call Centers?

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

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

So, what does this have to do with UC?

Contact Center Evolution – UC Self-services and Live Assistance

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

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

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

Bottom Line

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

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

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

Tags: Contact Center, Mobile UC, Mobility, Speech Technologies by Art Rosenberg
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I 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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Like AT&T Mobility’s earlier move, Verizon Wireless introduced tiered 3G/4G prices, and is discontinuing a flat fee for “unlimited” data. While the majority of current Verizon Wireless 3G/4G subscribers will only feel the effects of the new usage-based data contracts at subscription renewal, Verizon Wireless appropriately introduced some new free tools for usage-based subscribers to track their monthly data usage now. They include:

• #DATA - Customers can check data usage by dialing #DATA and pressing send from Verizon Wireless phones to receive a free text message with the information.
• My Verizon and My Verizon Mobile - Customers can monitor data usage directly from their handsets via My Verizon Mobile or online through My Verizon.
• Data Usage Calculator - At verizonwireless.com, customers can learn about common features and activities that utilize data and determine estimated total monthly data usage using the Data Usage Calculator. It can be found by simply searching for “data usage calculator” on the Verizon Wireless website.
• Data Usage Widget - Customers with data plans also can download a Data Usage Widget to most Android^TM smartphones, BlackBerry® devices and tablets. The widget tracks usage with a quick glance at the phone screen and with one click connects to the customer’s My Verizon Mobile account.

There’s nothing wrong with these tools per-se, except:

1. Each requires that subscribers perform new behaviors, which people typically do not like to do.
2. All mobile providers tell us that a small number (less than 5%) of subscribers exceed the standard limits on “unlimited” data plans. If a comparably small number of users are the “problem,” why not ask them to take on new behaviors like those above? Why require everyone to change?
3. In the future when Verizon Wireless introduces its anticipated family shared data plans, tools like these must track usage across multiple devices. But just like yesterday’s new price structure and tools, it’s a virtual certainty that the company will introduce both concurrently.

But more importantly, what Verizon Wireless is doing reminds me of the TSA’s approach to airline security, which nobody likes but everyone must endure. But unlike the TSA, mobile customers:

(1) Have other provider choices, which at least some will prefer. I don’t see Sprint dropping its unlimited plans anytime soon.

(2) Will loudly complain to the media, consumer protection groups, government bureaucrats and elected officials, which they will do. The last thing mobile providers want is any incremental regulatory scrutiny or oversight. Given the increased scrutiny the industry is already receiving from AT&T’s earlier introduction of tiered data prices and its planned merger with TMo, it’s a mystery why Verizon Wireless would go ahead now (vs. wait) on any major (unwelcome) change.

If the country’s largest providers introduced usage based billing along side of “unlimited” data plans, it would expand, not contract, subscriber choice. Billing systems are flexible enough to offer both unlimited and tiered plans simultaneously. Maybe it’s part of a plan to reintroduce “unlimited” plans  at a higher rate (once LTE is more geographically ubiquitous).

But one thing that’s a no-brainer: these recent provider moves, combined with the prevailing mood throughout the country, signal the beginning of the usage-based mobile data saga. We are far, far from the end of it.

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications Information by Lisa Pierce
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Sprint customers are now being notified that they will be able to integrate with Google Voice. Among the benefits touted in the announcement was access to the Google Voice web feature that enables callers to use one phone number that will then ring all your phones (wired and wireless). How dumb can you get!

See news release at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/faster-forward/post/sprint-starts-rolling-out-google-voice-integration/2011/04/22/AFpZbTQE_blog.html

It’s bad enough that the legacy telephone user interface (TUI) is so disruptive to the call recipient and anyone within range of the ringing device, it provides no information to the recipient about the caller’s reason for the call,  (No ” subject” information). Busy people don’t always want to be notified that someone is calling them, especially when it is  a bad time to talk (driving a car, in a meeting, noisy environment, etc.), often unimportant, and often a “wrong number.”  Call notifications can now be done more efficiently and less disruptively than simply ringing a device.

As consumers quickly move to using mobile, personalized,  multi-modal “smartphones” rather than desktop phones or even old, limited cell phones, the call notification and screening game will change forever!  That’s all I want say for now on this subject, but, believe me, there is much more!

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Art Rosenberg
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Today, AT&T announced an agreement to buy T-Mobile U.S. for $39B in cash and stock. If approved by regulators in the U.S., Germany and Europe, it will create the largest mobile provider in the U.S., and provides the new carrier with sufficient scale to move to LTE post-haste. As many customers undoubtedly noticed, both GSM carriers had resisted this move, but Verizon Wireless’ aggressive deployment of LTE radically and rapidly re-altered the competitive U.S. landscape. The prospective consolidation of this country’s two largest GSM providers does so once again.

These recent events will influence far more than the U.S. market, because two international rivals, Vodafone (which has a large minority stake in Verizon Wireless) and Deutsch Telekom AG (which owns T-Mobile U.S. and will own 8% of AT&T), will each possess a vested interest in U.S. LTE deployments, offers, operations, migration, and customer support that can be applied directly to their home markets (and other major international markets in which each operates), giving both of these mobile operators potentially considerable advantage in learned experience compared to other rivals.

While AT&T and T-Mobile U.S. customers will view this announcement with mixed-positive reaction, it’s important that would-be LTE users appreciate that the roll-out of networks, products, and other essential infrastructure is not infinitely malleable or adjustable. Thus, regardless of provider, one can expect availability of any LTE service to be spotty for some period of time to come (2+ years). And as we’ve already seen, it’s entirely possible that service availability in certain cities will also be accompanied by congestion. Thus it is imperative that customers seek out mobile service plans, devices and providers that support 2G, WiFi, 3G and 4G/LTE.

Moreover, the handoff between LTE and other wireless technologies should be seamless, and occur on a timely basis. In that regard, GSM and CDMA networks are unequal, because the 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) has created a standard process for GSM providers to support 2G-4G (voice) handoffs (for background on UC and Voice over LTE see my earlier blog at http://blog.ucstrategies.com/index.php/2011/02/22/why-volte-matters-to-uc/). Prospective GSM customers should not assume their carrier has implemented the 3GPP’s specifications, they must verify. Similarly, CDMA customers should request similar information from those mobile operators—because these carriers could elect to implement proprietary solutions. But over the next several years, it is essential that all VoLTE customers use mobile providers that have implemented 2G-VoLTE handoffs throughout their networks, in a manner that makes the handoff un-noticeable (e.g., apart from the support of IP-only features on an end-end basis, the handoffs should be very rapid, and supported by a highly redundant, diverse and scalable backoffice infrastructure).

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications by Lisa Pierce
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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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At this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Verizon CTO Tony Melone re-iterated the carrier’s planned commercial introduction of Voice over IP over LTE (VoLTE) before the end of 2012. He also stated that 4 LTE-compatible smartphones will be available no later than this June.  These are dual-mode devices, using traditional 2G cellular services for voice.

Why is VoLTE such a big deal? Here are just a few reasons:

For customers:

• Since the technology is all IP-based , this will make it much easier to for customers to use a wide variety of mobile and mobilized UC applications that also include voice, including those embedded in communications-enabled business processes (CEPB) like click to call embedded in a CRM application.
• VoLTE calls can interface to carrier-certified SIP stacks and applications, just as SIP Trunk services do today. This will make it less cumbersome for both SIP-based mobile and fixed handsets to use the same application –either network-based (like hosted IP audioconferencing) or premises-based. I expect the arrival of VoLTE will facilitate the introduction of many more mobile and mobilized UCaaS applications than are currently available. With VoLTE, FMC may finally come into its own.
• The same methods to monitor and maintain session and application performance can be used across all applications. Of course, these methods themselves continue to, ahem, “mature”. They haven’t “arrived” yet, not by a long shot.

For suppliers:

• On the mobile carrier side, use of the same technology to support all mobile applications is a necessary precursor to ultimately retiring 2G (cellular voice) service. We have seen this before—with the complete retirement of analog cellular technology just a few years ago. This process will take some time, but when it does, it will allow the carrier to re-deploy all of its licensed spectrum in a much more efficient manner, supporting several more magnitudes of simultaneous sessions than it can today.
• It will provide the basis for mobile device vendors, applications developers and carriers to work together to create the necessary methods to offer better end-end security, and as alluded to above, meaningful end-end SLAs. Finally, it will become harder and harder for all mobile suppliers to dodge these legitimate enterprise requirements.
• It will set the stage to unleash great innovation—on applications, devices, and ancillary services. This includes collaboration and UC. And if mobile carriers do their work very well, it can also create a necessary cornerstone of potentially huge wave(s) of (multi-media) cloud-based services. When VoLTE becomes real, we’ll have the opportunity, finally, to see how much an IMS architecture that supports both fixed and mobile SIP stacks can deliver on all of its promises. Many of us who are friends of UC Strategies can hardly wait.

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Lisa Pierce
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The saying “All roads lead to Rome”, could for this week be changed to “All communication roads lead to Barcelona.” The big names in mobility are there; Ericsson, Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, Motorola, Broadcom, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE Corporation and Huawei and more, but also IT heavy weights such as Google’s Eric Schmidt, Paul Otellini from Intel and Cisco’s John Chanmbers. The line between IT and mobility feels like they are officially gone. More and more users choose mobile devices to access the Internet, so it is not surprising that so many choose to visit this gigantic event.

Most interesting was probably this week’s announcement that Nokia partners up with Microsoft to use Windows Phone for their smartphones. This new strategy leaves a lot of questions, and the Nokia stock declined when the news became official. Nokia also negotiated with Google, but in the end they choose to work with Microsoft. This direction is not surprising since the world’s largest mobile phone supplier would have effectively created a duopoly with Apple iOS, if they had chosen Android over Microsoft. Microsoft has other challenges as well. Their efforts to claim the mobile device has not been as successful as many anticipated. The partnership with Nokia is really their chance. I am sure the two companies will work day and night to produce new phones. When Stephen Elop (former executive at Microsoft) president and chief executive officer of Nokia Corporation held a press conference after the Microsoft announcement he was confident, but made clear that they have a long way to go before this cooperation shows any results.

When Steve Balmer of Microsoft held his key-note he said that they will release two major updates to Windows Phone and make it possible to run Internet Explorer 9 on their phones. By using a hardware accelerant it will be possible to play h.264 encoded clips in the browser and get the same performance as running an application natively on the phone.

Ericsson announced a concept that will allow mobile operators to offer a cloud-pc together with Akamai. Ericsson explained that their vision is that our world is completely connected via wireless networks where everything is tied together using machine-to-machine technology. Hans Vestberg said that Ericsson will be the leading provider to the networked society. Ericsson is strong in mobility and broadband solutions, now they are investing in the third area, the cloud. Their service consists of a thin computer with a special version of Linux. Their servers use virtualization, network and security technology and was demonstrated running Microsoft Excel from a server in India via High Speed Packet Access (HSPA), high-speed 3G data services provided by cellular carriers worldwide that use the GSM technology.

But MWC is also about gadgets.

• Android is one of the big players where Google in only a few years have created a dominant position. MWC presented far more Android devices than any other.
• Motorola is back in the game again with new devises.
• Chinese company ZTE presented a number of 4G pad devices and thus trying to enter into the premium segment.
• Sony-Ericsson presented new devices before the show started. But for enterprise customers the business mobile Xperia Pro with built in support for device management, Microsoft Office document editing, and native Microsoft Exchange connector, a well-spaced QWERTY keyboard that slides out and Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
• Samsung presented a new Galaxy S II with larger screen, thinner casing, full HD, 8M pixel camera and voice control. They also demonstrated a new Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a 10.1 inch screen. But their strategic alliance with Adobe, Cisco and Sybase is even more interesting for enterprise customers and will be interesting to see what they will achieve together.
• HTC presented five new devises, among them HTC Scribe which allows the user to write with a pen directly on the screen.
• LG presented mobile phones and Pads that could show 3D without special glasses. This is a feature from their TV side.

So, what was missing? Or should I say who was missing? Apple.
As usual they are not participating in the Barcelona event. But the spirit of Apple does hoover the show. The rumors of new versions for Ipad and Iphone, what they will include keep flourishing.

But hey, who doesn’t love a mystery?

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility by Jason Andersson
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