I love Vienna – the architecture, the pastries, the wine, the history, the cafes, and did I mention the pastries? What a beautiful place to visit and hear from Siemens Enterprise Communications execs about their progress to date, future plans, and more. While it was sometimes hard to pay attention to the presenters since it meant taking my eyes off of the frescos on the ceiling of the 16th century palais where the conference was held, I managed to gather a few tidbits.

As you have probably read by now, Siemens Enterprise Communications did not announce which company will most likely merge with or acquire them, and all they will say is they are “In advanced stages of talks with potential partners” and are in discussion with a private equity partner and a competitor. That’s disappointing to me since I’d like to see them get acquired by a synergistic partner such as Oracle, SAP, or another business process or application provider (you know, UC is “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”) But they didn’t ask for my opinion.
The theme of the conference, as to be expected, was openness and the move to software-based solutions. Siemens OpenScape products are open, software-based solutions focusing on open standards that can integrate to existing IT landscapes. For example, the OpenScape UC Server is described as a single comprehensive software suite based on SOA. The software can run on all infrastructures, and not just with Siemens’ products. OpenScape UC Server has been deployed on Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent, and NEC switches, works with any IT or telephony infrastructure, whether IP or TDM, and works on any client, while providing the basis for several UC applications.

Thomas Zimmermann, COO, and Gerhard Otterbach, CMO, discussed how the OpenScape UC Suite is “the world’s first truly integrated unified communications solution based on open standards.” The software foundation, OpenScape UC Server, provides SIP Session Control, Aggregated Presence, Administration and Licensing, Availability Management, QoS Management, and compliance and governance. On top of this software foundation are the OpenScape Applications based on OpenSOA, including: OpenScape Voice, OpenScape Mobility, OpenScape Video, OpenScape Messaging, OpenScape UC Application, and OpenScape Contact Center. The layer on top, OpenScape Integration Services, include Security, CEBP Microsoft Ecosystem, CEBP Vertical Industry, CEBP IBM Ecosystem, and CEBP Other Line of Business Applications.
Continuing the discussion about the transition to a software and services business, Zimmermann and Otterbach mentioned that the company is growing several innovation areas, including OpenScape UC Suite, HiPath OpenOffice, OpenScale Managed and system integration services. I agree with the company that it’s important for them to speed up this transition to a software and services business, and was glad to hear several speakers state that they have a clear roadmap on how to accelerate, which will include enhancing systems integration and other areas within the company. What I believe is the most important but also most challenging step is to transform skills to UC software and services, which includes training and certification programs for Siemens and its channel partners, and the need to recruit experts.

For system integration and professional services, Siemens Enterprise Communications provides OpenScale Service to design, implement and support open, multi-vendor UC solutions. The Openscale integration services include CEBP for the Microsoft ecosystem, IBM, other line of business applications, and vertical industry applications. OpenScale is a global services offering that works with competitors’ environments, not just Siemens’. This is key as Siemens Enterprise Communications transitions to a software and services business – most enterprises are multi-vendor.

Siemens Enterprise Communications is also developing broader market coverage and lower sales cost, with a focus on having a direct presence in all of its regions, while developing indirect channels and alliances, and growing in emerging countries. For example, in 2006, indirect revenues for OpenScape Voice Licenses accounted for 35% of the revenues, and today accounts for 53% of revenue.

While doing all of this, Siemens will continue to focus on its core business, divest non-core assets and businesses, partner with SMB channels, and focus R&D on UC innovations.

For several years I’ve been saying that Siemens Enterprise Communications has been a thought leader in terms of unified communications, and everything I heard throughout the two days of the conference reinforces this belief. Siemens was first to market with a product to support Microsoft LCS, and spent a great deal of time and energy evangelizing about UC, what it means, and what it does (remember when many people didn’t know what “presence” referred to – Siemens had to explain it over and over to help people understand the value of UC). Siemens Enterprise Communications is not sitting back and waiting for UC to happen, but is being an active player in moving the industry forward. The company’s move toward software and services is exactly what the company needs to be doing. Hopefully whoever acquires or invests in the company will allow it to continue moving forward and innovating.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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In the June 19, 2008 VoiceCon UC eWeekly (a weekly newsletter jointly sponsored by VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com), Fred Knight asked the question, “Where’s the Beef?”

At first, I thought that Fred was losing faith on the directions for UC. But after reading his newsletter a couple of times, I decided Fred was basically raising a challenge, one of his most important roles across both the entire communications industry, especially as Co-Chair of VoiceCon. Fred had seen a very skeptical article in NetworkWorld, entitled, “Enterprises baffled by Unified Communications, survey finds.”

Fred’s challenge is to “prove” that Unified Communications is real, is understood by the customers, and has real value. So, I took his challenge and did my homework on the NetworkWorld article. My conclusion is that Forrester Research is off-target on this one - either they asked confusing questions in their survey or they tried to make UC-related conclusions from a survey that was really a “general purpopse survey on networking plans,” rather than on UC specifically.

But the homework of studying the NetworkWorld article did prove that UC is alive and well. The article links to an excellent definition of UC and to a survey based on that definition, in 800 telecom managers were very clear on the benefits of and reasons for UC. It also shows that audio and web conferencing (i.e. collaboratively sharing and discussing information) is the leading UC application at over 40% adoption, somewhat ahead of video conferencing and well ahead of IP PBX.

Anyway, I found plenty of beef, even to the extent that UC applications seem to be pulling VoIP rather than the other way around. If you’d like to read more, take a look a the entire post on NoJitter.com.

So, thanks, Fred, for the challenge. Improves all of our games, and the UCStrategies.com team likes to win!

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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It’s finally completed and published! After months and months of research and writing, I’ve just released my new UC market study, Unified Communications Market 2007-2012. I’ve been writing analyst reports for a long time (ok, a really long time), but this was probably the most challenging report I’ve written. For one thing, forecasting the UC market is no piece of cake - everyone defines UC differently, vendors are not yet providing UC shipment data to analysts, and there’s no simple way of counting and measuring the market. How I yearn for the old days when it was simple to count voice mail shipments - a voice mailbox was a voice mailbox and it was easy to count how many voice mail ports were shipped (yes, we counted in ports). With UC, there’s no easy way to count shipments or revenues. Some vendors (I’m not naming names) include all of their IP PBX shipments in their UC data. But there’s no way of knowing if those IP PBXs are being used as part of a UC solution or not. I’ve seen analyst and vendor forecasts for UC that include all the IP PBX revenue, plus all the revenues associated with unified messaging, conferencing, instant messaging, etc., all added together. This is fine for getting an understanding of the total potential UC opportunity, but it doesn’t provide a realistic picture of where the real UC market is or will be. Since there’s no agreed-upon way of defining the “UC market” and counting UC shipments, I did what any good analyst would do - I made one up. Actually, I made up several ways to define and count the market - the total or “UC Capable” market, the net or “true” UC market, the sub-segment of UC that is requisite for a UC solution, and more.

Another reason this report was so hard to complete is that the market is so dynamic and constantly changing. The vendor profile chapter, which covers the leading UC vendors’ products, direction, etc., had to be continually updated, as the vendors added new products, packaging and bundling, on what seemed to be a daily basis. Just when I thought I completed one vendor’s profile, they made a new announcement about a new UC offering, or a new strategic partner, or something else. By the time you read this, some of the vendor profiles may already be out of date.

I’ll be posting some of the key findings on here on www.ucstrategies.com, but if you want all the detailed information (all 150 pages!) about UC in general, trends, challenges, market adoption, forecasts, etc., then you need to buy the report. If you’re interested in purchasing the report, or if you have any questions, feel free to contact me at bpleasant@commfusion.com.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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During a VoiceCon webinar Nancy Jamison and I presented along with Jim Krauetler of Genesys, I was asked to clarify a couple terms I had used. The following is intended to do a better job of explaining what these terms mean, both by definition and based on the impact they have on customers.

Tagging

“Tagging” allows UC users to “tag” contacts so they will receive a notification whenever the tagged contact becomes available for communication (IM, phone call, etc.). By “tagging” someone, you let the system know that you want to be notified when that person’s presence status changes to indicate the person is available for a phone call or IM. So, when the person’s status changes, the system will notify you so that you can make contact. Essentially, tagging reduces phone tag, voice mail or e-mail just to request a contact and makes it easier for people to connect, minimizing the communication overhead in managing tasks. Of course, many UC solutions also offer the ability to find alternate resources with equivalent knowledge, skills or authority, so that the transaction or task does not even have to wait for future availability, so Tagging should be seen as only one option for “optimizing business processes.”

Federation

In the UC world, federation is the term used for exchanging presence information among and between systems and devices, or the sharing of presence information across multiple presence systems. Federation makes it easier for UC users to connect with their colleagues, business partners, suppliers, and customers who are either outside of the company or using other UC systems, servers, or IM services. Without presence federation, a user can only see the presence information of other users who are on the same system and/or within their company. This is great for internal communications, but if you want to interact with people outside of your organization, especially with customers, partners, and suppliers, then federation is needed. With federation, rather than having separate islands of proprietary and private presence and IM systems, users on different environments can share presence information and IM with each other regardless of the system or service they’re using.

An alternate to federation, of course, is to ask all of your contacts to enroll in the same publicly-available presence service as you are using. The IM services of AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others are examples of this. Similar examples exist within the social networking services such as Facebook. However, it is not hard to realize the limitations of that approach and the effort required to manage many IM interfaces. In addition, these public services are often not sufficient for enterprise needs, such as security and compliance requirements.

There are many ways that federation will have to work: Between servers in different companies; between servers within the same company; within a network of servers; between enterprise servers and public IM services (e.g., MSN, AOL, Yahoo!); and between servers and other systems that are a source or user of presence data. SIP/SIMPLE standards are one way that presence clients and devices to share presence information with a presence server.

There are two ways of looking at federation or federated presence - 1) sharing presence information with users on the same vendor’s platform but in different companies, and 2) sharing presence information with people on different vendors’ platforms.

In the first case, the single vendor can often provide the federation, but may use some proprietary methods to do so, limiting the reach and participation in the federation approach. For example, using federation on Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), Jim at Genesys can see the presence status of Eric at Microsoft, and they can do click-to-call/click-to-communicate, collaborate and share documents, etc.

In the second case, a person (or company) using one vendor’s presence server would be able to connect with and see the presence of a colleague or partner using a presence server from another vendor. This requires conformity with industry standards, specifically the SIP/SIMPLE standards. This might occur within the same company, say if one division is using Microsoft OCS while another division is using Jabber IM. And, of course, it could occur between enterprises.

Of course, there is an alternative to just use a trusted network service so that each enterprise only need federate once with that service, rather than separately federating with each and every partner or customer. This has been used for years in telephony, e-mail and encryption services, so why not in IM and presence? We will have to watch and wait for this.

Think about email - it doesn’t matter what email system you’re using, you can send and receive email from anyone regardless of what email system they’re using. Enterprise-class IM and presence don’t yet work the same way - today, there is little or no federation between different enterprise IM and presence systems, although some of these systems offer federation with a few public IM systems, such as AIM and Yahoo.

For UC to be used successfully outside of the enterprise walls to customers, partners, suppliers, and others, federation is required across different types of IM services, and across different presence/IM servers and systems from different vendors (whether Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent, etc.). For presence to be effective, it needs to work in a multivendor environment, especially when being used across company boundaries. This can happen either by system-to-system communications or by linkages to a central clearing house, and either way will require adoption of standards

The primary challenge making federation difficult to achieve is that different vendors have different ideas about what presence should be and how it should be used. Each supplier believes that it can “own” the presence engine, making interoperability more difficult. In addition, licensing for IM and presence systems may limit federation.

Many UC vendors are working on federation capabilities and standards. For example, both Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime offer some federation capabilities - Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 supports federation between organizations using OCS 2007, with partner presence systems, and with public IM systems (AOL, Yahoo and Windows Live). In addition, a specification has been published to allow any presence server to federate with Office Communications Server. IBM Lotus Sametime federates with any SIP & XMPP user, as well as with Public IM networks such as AIM, Yahoo!, and GoogleTalk. While this is a start, much more work is needed in the area of federation, and to make it easier to share IM and presence information between systems and services from different vendors.

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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Yesterday, June 4, VoiceCon hosted a great webinar, “Demonstrating UC Productivity Benefits”.  The webinar presented the findings of an important survey recently completed by Blair Pleasant and Nancy Jamison, both leading Market Analysts and both associated with UCStrategies.com. 

The survey focused primarily on the User Productivity category of UC (the UC-U) rather than that Business Process category of UC (UC-B), since the UC-U category is the one that is easiest to adopt and so has the largest early uptake. 

Blair and Nancy described the methodology of the survey and then focused on two major categories of their findings:

• 1. The quantitative results as to adoption and usage of UC-U. A graphic on slide 7 shows that 100% of those interviewed were using Presence and IM, with over 80% using click to call functions. Tagging, Web Conferencing and Video Conferencing ranked lower in use and/or adoption, as you can see.

• 2. The qualitative results as to where the benefits are being realized. There are some great examples that Blair and Nancy describe in five categories. Interestingly, these five categories are similar to the five UC Application categories described here and in a June 2007 BCR magazine article. You will learn a lot about the adoption by listening to this section.

You can hear the entire webcast, including a presentation from the sponsor, Genesys, by going to the VoiceCon webinar site (click here).  you will need to register, but then can get immediately to the replay.  You can also move the slider to hear a specific section, and for that, here’s a short index:

Minute   6:00   Survey Methodology
Minute   8:13   Findings Overview
Minute 11:00   Adoption Statistics
Minute 12:25   Business Impact Categories
Minute 14:50   Results by Impact Category

It’s worth the watch. Hope you enjoy it.  I’d welcome feedback as to what you think of the webcast.

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Marty Parker
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Every once in a while, a vendor comes along with not only innovative products but innovative ideas on how to help their channel partners be successful. Communicado wins my praise for “getting it” when it comes to innovative programs for resellers! Last week, they announced a new program, Quick Start Dealer Program to enable VARs to quickly and efficiently remotely manage their customers’ converged networks.

“Oh sure”, you think. “If we take on another product we’re once again faced with ramp up time and money out of our pocket for training and demo equipment.” Yea for Communicado, who claims that the comprehensive program “provides resellers with the necessary tools to drive significant new streams of revenue without lengthy ramp time or large capital expense”.

At the UC Summit in Scottsdale last month, Kerry Shih, founder of Communicado, talked to the resellers twice - once on the secrets that every entrepreneur needs to know and then later on how to get started in unified communications by taking small steps instead of trying to run the whole marathon at once. The message that I get from Kerry is that he thinks outside the box - and that type of thinking shows in Communicado’s products and programs. How refreshing! And certainly worth watching if you’re a reseller!

Tags: UC Information by Pam Avila
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Nancy Jamison and I just finished up a new study on UC productivity benefits, and will be presenting some of the key findings during a VoiceCon webinar on Wednesday, June 4, 2p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Labs. You’ll get to hear first hand about our findings – some of which were expected and obvious, some not so obvious (see my VoiceCon eWeekly newsletter about the “hidden” benefits of UC).

For the study, we interviewed real UC end users who use UC in their day-to-day jobs, examining how they use UC in their daily workflow, and how UC has made an impact. We spoke with executives/managers, operations (including IT and engineering), human resources, and marketing users to gain insights into if and how UC has made them more productive and effective at their jobs. They unanimously agreed that UC has made a critical impact on their productivity – in fact, 100% of those surveyed said UC has positively impacted the way they do business.

During the webinar, we’ll discuss the study’s key findings, and break down the results based on the ways in which UC helps workers, and then by job category. Jim Kraeutler of Genesys will also discuss how he uses UC to help him do his job more effectively.

The full study will be available on Friday, May 30 – check the UCStrategies.com home page under “In the Spotlight.”

To register for the webinar, go to https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=110311&sessionid=1&key=ACC1F5D9D5C310F94CE52CEEE627FF12&sourcepage=register

Tags: UC Information, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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It all starts in the contact center.

That’s my contention anyway. When you look for the obvious launch point for unified communications in the enterprise, it has to be the contact center. Almost all discussions about UC in the enterprise include a mention of Presence, the UC concept that provides users with an overview of the availability and status of other knowledge workers in the organization and a means to efficiently tap into those resources as necessary.

If you think about it, the contact center is the most logical place for the initial use of Presence and UC in the enterprise. The goal of most, if not all, customer contact centers is first call resolution. In other words, the folks in charge of running customer service generally prefer to have a customer issue resolved in one call. There are two reasons for this, the first of which is customer satisfaction. As a consumer or customer, aren’t you generally happier if the company you call can resolve your issue in one call without repeated call transfers or without asking you to call back in order to speak with someone else later? Everyone’s time is valuable these days and no one likes to have to make repeated phone calls to get a question answered or an issue resolved.

Presence would allow an agent the ability to pull in enterprise resources from outside the contact center in order to resolve a customer call. Agents would be able to identify which internal subject matter experts might be available and the best way to reach them. While still engaging the customer, contact center agents would have the additional resources at their fingertips to keep the customer happy or at least resolve an issue without repeated call transfers or callbacks.

The second reason customer service professionals strive for first call resolution in the contact center is cost. Each time a customer service agent picks up the phone, it costs the contact center in terms of salary, benefits, etc., and if they’re paying for an agent to address the same problem with the same customer more than once, that is usually money down the drain. UC in the contact center makes absolute sense from a cost savings perspective. Here’s where we run into our conundrum, though.
If you’ve been around the contact center long enough you’ve undoubtedly heard the discussions about the strategic importance of the customer service center in terms of its value to operational success and profitability. To hear some people talk you’d believe that the business universe revolved around the contact center. If you haven’t been around the contact center and heard this talk, trust me when I tell you that it’s mostly lip service.
The truth is, the contact center is as important as all the pundits claim it is but the fact is that most businesses look at the contact center as a cost center. As you probably know, it is generally very difficult to get a business to invest in a cost center. Thus our conundrum: an investment in UC on the contact center would undoubtedly lead to cost savings and a tangible return on investment, but there is a general reluctance to invest in cost centers such as the contact center.
I think we may be able to find our way out of this potential quagmire if the industry in general follows the lead of the small percentage of companies who really do view their customer service function as a strategic advantage or differentiator and will invest in UC in order to provide their agents with Presence functionality. It’s going to take time and there will still be those executives who will drag their contact centers into the 21^st century kicking, screaming and protesting the whole way.

Any other ideas?

Tags: UC Information by Paul Stockford
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Verint Systems announced that it won a patent suit against Nice Systems, providing the company with vindication and $3.3 million in damages. Here’s a little background – Nice had initiated legal actions against Verint related to patent lawsuits, and Verint then countersued with its own patent infringements against Nice. Without getting into specifics, the patent is about Verint Witness Actionable Solutions’ speech analytics (the suit was initiated before Verint acquired Witness) and covers systems and methods for, among others, analyzing speech to identify, for example, emotion, words, and talk-over.

A federal jury in Atlanta ruled in Verint’s favor, and the next step is for Verint to seek a permanent injunction to “enjoin Nice Systems in the United States from making, using, selling, offering for sale or importing any infringing speech analytics products, including speech analytics offered with Nice SmartCenter, Nice Perform, NiceUniverse and NiceAdvantage.”  Essentially, the jury determined that the Witness patent was valid and infringed upon, and now it goes to the judge to see if Nice can continue to sell these products, which should be decided upon in a couple months.

When I spoke with my friends at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions right after the verdict was announced on Friday, they emphasized that they didn’t initiate the patent lawsuit, but did it only as a response to Nice’s patent infringement suits against Verint/Witness. They noted that Verint has a long history around analytics, and of course they feel good that their R&D team was validated. And then they celebrated with some champagne. Cheers!

Tags: UC Information by Blair Pleasant
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In real-estate its location, location, location, in the UC world I believe it’s process, process process!

First I went to Wikipedia to see if they had a reasonable definition. The Wikipedia definition is “Unified Communications (UC) is a commonly used term for the integration of disparate communications systems, media, devices and applications. This potentially includes the integration of fixed and mobile voice, e-mail, instant messaging, desktop and advanced business applications, Internet Protocol (IP)-PBX, voice over IP (VoIP), presence, voice-mail, fax, audio video and web conferencing, unified messaging, unified voicemail, and white boarding into a single environment offering the user a more complete but simpler experience.”

UC Strategies  defines UC as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes”, a much easier way to comprehend for simpler minds such as mine. Then there is an array of different definitions from Avaya, Cisco, ININ, Mitel, NEC and Nortel, sorry if I left any of my astute colleagues out.

The history of Unified Communications is tied to the evolution of the supporting technology. Unified Communications relies on the Internet Protocol (IP), which also supports e-mail and the World-Wide Web.

But I need to digress for a moment. Do you remember when the telephone company introduced PRI, in 1990? No body including the telephone company knew how to configure it properly, never mind install it correctly. Only through time and effort did PRI finally come to the common enterprise around 1993-1994. What about IVR and CTI? The first CTI was created by IBM in 1987. The problem was nobody knew the in’s and out’s of it. Everything became customer code and it took till 2002-2003 for CTI to be able to show it could work for the everyday enterprise. Read the book, Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A Moore, for a good history of CTI. Well although VoIP has been around 7 plus years, people are still not sure what to do with it. Yes, its here to stay but in order to make UC work you need the VoIP component. But you need other components as well.

Okay that’s all great but why has everyone in the world not jumped all over this? I think they do not know where to start. Everybody has such different needs, are in different stages and have different tools to work with. They do not know how to put the pieces together.

Most enterprise customers truly do not know what they have and what it will take to even consider UC. You do! Develop a tool kit or checklist of what the entry level to look at UC is. This can come from vendors, manufacturers, peers or research. Appraise the customer’s environment against that list. This creates a baseline to work from. We have a customer who is in the media business and across 10 divisions they do not share common email, business process or disciplines. How in the world is some one like that going to implement and benefit from UC with out taking stock?

Work with the client to develop a budget of what it would take to even consider UC in their organization after taking stock. Next determine the business solutions, revenue generation and cost containment opportunities that will make UC a success for that customer. Remember one organizations opportunity is not the same next door. Take the Hispanic customer in the USA. The latest estimates by the US Census Bureau at the time of writing put the US Hispanic population at 42,687,224 or 14.4 percent of the US population. That equates to one person out of every seven in the US being Hispanic. The projection for 2050 is that this will increase to one in four people or 25 percent of the total population. That means that the client wanting to serve the Hispanic customer needs something different then the client who does not, as only one example. The manufacturer client wanting to communicate out on the line has different needs then a retailer.

Third and most importantly develop the process that will be accepted, implemented and must be adhered too by all stakeholders. If this is not done up front it will never get done. There is no rule book on “How to implement UC” out there that I know of yet. Collectively the consultant community has the opportunity to develop a process that could be applied by anyone practice, group or enterprise.

No technology can fix poor people skills, as reported by Paul Stockford recently in the NACC “In Queue” blog or fix bad or non existent process. If you disagree with that theory please call me, I will gladly provide you with a myriad of examples. Even if you agree we want to hear from you.

Tags: UC Information by Samantha Kane
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