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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

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

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications, Video by Nancy Jamison
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UC 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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Yesterday in a “Seeking Alpha” email there was a quote from IBM which read,”IBM plans to make mid-sized acquisitions to boost its software business, according to CEO Sam Palmisano. The spend on targets could range as high as $300M, as it seeks to find highly targeted deals that could be accretive in two to three years. “No spurious, off- to-the-side, unrelated things.” No spurious, off-to-the-side, unrelated things, while an odd quote, is on target for what I have been thinking for the past week or so. Most of the time you would believe that in a down or stalled economy companies would be holding tight and not spending money on acquisitions. However, good for those who have money, and there are still those that do have money, and this allows them to perhaps buy companies for less.

But that isn’t the key observation that I’ve been making as of late. I’ve observed that in the areas that I track, acquisitions have been on the rise during the summer and continuing into the fall, not going down, and the focus is on being strategic. For the most part companies aren’t going for the installed base plays as much as in prior years, (although installed base still is certainly a consideration). Instead, the majority of acquisitions lately are being used to fill a gap in product, augment a new product area, or gain a distribution foothold, with installed accretion as gravy.

Case in point - on Tuesday, there were three such acquisitions. IBM acquired Q1Labs to help them build a security business unit. McAfee, a unit within Intel, acquired NitroSecurity; a company that provides real-time security products, in order to greatly bolster the company’s risk and threat assessment capabilities. According to McAfee this acquisition will enable them to identify and help take care of threats in “minutes instead of hours”, which we all have a vested interest in, so strategic is good in this case. Lastly, Avaya acquired Sipera, a UC provider. In this case, Avaya, as they put it, although they will still have their Acme Packet relationship, “adds Session Border Controller as an owned asset” and will accelerate development of SIP-based security offerings for UC and contact centers.

That was just Tuesday. This month had plenty of other examples.  Two weeks ago I blogged on my site about NICE’s acquisition of Fizzback, which was a really strategic acquisition that and will significantly enhance NICE’s Customer Experience Management (CEM) portfolio and Workforce Optimization (WFO) offerings, adding a lot of functionality to the company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) strategy.

Last week it was Verint, also in the workforce management and analytics space and VOC, acquiring Global Management Technologies Corporation (GMT), which in addition to workforce management solutions, specializes in the retail segment. In this case, Verint not only acquires some differentiating technology, complimentary to the company’s existing offerings, but a strong foothold in the retail segment, and some key partnerships that GMT has, which will expand Verint’s reach. In this acquisition, installed base was secondary.

This has been a theme with Verint lately. The case can be made that unlike when Verint acquired Mercom and Witness several years back, in which installed base growth was a bigger factor, the last few acquisitions that Verint has made have all been focused on adding core technology areas; Iontas (2/10) for desktop analytics, PSIM (4/11) for video security, and Vovici (7/11 blog) for enterprise feedback management (and other solutions).

Yes, we had a few acquisitions that seemed weighted towards installed base play. Perhaps Nuance acquiring Loquendo, or 8X8 acquiring Contactual, but there were many more in the strategic realm.  To finish this out, just a few of note were Oracle acquiring  Inquira for knowledge management for contact centers,  Skype acquiring GroupMe for group messaging and conferencing applications for mobile devices,  Cisco acquiring Versly for collaboration software for MS Office, and Broadsoft acquiring iLink Communiications for web collaboration. Likely we will see others in the near future.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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There’s a saying that some people are such experts in their field that they forgot more than everyone else will ever know. That must be the case with Marty Parker’s recent comments on No Jitter regarding UC and SIP Trunks (see ” SIP Trunks: Least Cost Routing, not a Route to UC“).

In at his remarks, Marty reminds us that SIP Trunks are primarily used now to connect SIP-enabled customer sites to connect to the PSTN for voice calls. That’s a fair statement of where we are today, because roughly 80-85% of the calls that a company makes or receives are offnet - to or from other companies who don’t use the same provider, or the same technology from the same provider, for voice calls. He’s absolutely right when he says that providers’ SIP Trunk services are not needed for intra-company UC when those people and locations are connected by QoS-enabled MPLS or Ethernet. He also lobs the Internet into this mix, but the ongoing performance of internet-based communications are less predictable - some people and companies think the low price is a fair performance tradeoff, some don’t. It all depends on (1) what you need to do, and (2) the available alternatives.

But Marty must have forgotten a few things that are important to recall:

1. As Eric Krapf points out, don’t write off voice, it will always be with us. And there will be a lot of voice traffic out there for years to come (see “Are SIP Trunks Strategic?“).
2. Many providers are offering cloud services that require SIP Trunk interfaces. These include hosted contact center and contact center as a service offers (voice, IM, chat, etc.), hosted IP audioconferences, hosted IP PBXs and UcaaS, hosted SIP videoconferencing services. Over time, more will follow. The economic “recovery” is going to be prolonged. Given tight capex and opex budgets, and lack of plentiful resident SIP/UC expertise, it’s likely that a growing number of companies will seriously consider using managed, hosted and cloud-based SIP services (vs. buying all their UC systems).
3. Not all companies want to employ a centralized architecture that uses MPLS or Ethernet services for inter-location real-time communications. SIP Trunks are a secure, enterprise-grade alternative.
4. Many companies would like to engage in highly secure, enterprise-grade inter-company UC. They can’t do that today easily, because most domestic MPLS and Ethernet services are ‘islands’-Company A is on carrier 1’s MPLS service, Company B is on Carrier 2’s, and the two MPLS networks don’t interconnect. At all. This is one of the reasons that initiatives like the recently-announced Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) have been formed-to interconnect multi-carrier, multi-vendor videoconferences using SIP “bridges” and QoS-enabled WANs. To get there, you’ll need SIP Trunk services from a partner service provider. As will other companies.
5. As alluded to above, SIP just isn’t about voice, nor are SIP Trunks. The protocol performs session control for all real time IP communications. And use of real time non-voice applications is growing like weeds, which Marty points out.

Are SIP Trunks strategic? That’s not nearly as important a question as (1) what can UC do for your company, and (2) what does your company plan to do with UC? In many cases, in order to enjoy the full fruits of UC, many companies will find that SIP Trunks are an absolute necessity.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Lisa Pierce
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In a time when severe reductions in public sector spending are near the top of the news, it is refreshing to hear that a municipality found it important to invest in a new UC system to improve its communications and operations. So is the case of The City of Riverside, Missouri, outside of Kansas City. Riverside installed a new Mitel UC system late in 2010 after undergoing a competitive procurement. How Mitel and American Telephone, a Mitel Exclusive Business Partner, became Riverside’s provider of choice and how the system is being used (both things known before the procurement and things learned since it was installed) is the subject of this article.

As in most full system change-outs (rip-and-replace), there was a compelling event. In this case, Riverside needed a new telephone system because their old system could no longer be supported. The new system would be designed to support the administrative departments, Public Safety (Police and Fire) and Public Works - a total of about 150 users with about 120 of them, mobile. The municipal phone system is separate from the schools and, while it connects to and supports 9-1-1, the PSAP is a different system. In addition, the users felt they were not trained to effectively use the old system, and its voice-mail did not support always-mobile employees (those without a physical desk-phone). These became two requirements in the RFP.

Feeling that they were not personally qualified to make this important procurement on their own, Riverside hired a consultant with prior experience with municipal projects to provide the essential expertise of developing and managing the RFP process. Complete telephony capabilities and overall system reliability and support were the most important considerations, although a fair price was also a requirement. 24X7 reliability and operations was critical since both Public Safety and Public Works, which are around-the-clock critical operations, use the system. The system supports multiple buildings in one system, previously separate.

In all, four bidders responded with systems from Avaya, Cisco and Mitel being submitted. The Cisco solution was eliminated as the city felt that the channel partner bidding its system was too new and might not provide the reliable and essential support Riverside requires. The pricing among the contenders was not significantly different. American Telephone and Mitel really won the day because of the quality of the demonstration they presented, with the support of a Mitel representative. Key was the range of the cordless phones and the ease of use of the twinning of desk and cell phones - both very important with the largely mobile workforce of Riverside. With the cordless handsets, admin employees aren’t fixed to their desks.

While the Mitel UC Advanced Mobile Client for BlackBerry integration wasn’t discussed until the demo, this capability, including updated presence, has proven critical. The called-party and location information (of the officer on patrol) are available whenever the caller, oftentimes a witness with critical and timely information, chooses to call and talk “now” - a voice message would never work.

Since the installation, Public Safety has setup a “situation Room” where it can collaborate effectively with other safety departments to manage emergencies. Also, hot-desking has become another capability supporting workforce mobility.

American Telephone indicated that their proposal to Riverside was a change in their philosophy to give the customer the opportunity to see what is possible (with a broad demonstration) and allowed Riverside to choose from the full menu.

Although not considered as part of the initial project, there are several areas for future investigation and possible implementation. For example, and surprising to me, given my significant exposure to government projects, there didn’t seem to be a recognized need to integrate the phone system with the private radios that are ubiquitous in both public safety and public works departments. Even when probed, the city felt that the mobile integration with cell phones was sufficient. Also, the overall focus on voice - both fixed and mobile - was surprising, given the broad and growing acceptance of integrating multi-modal communications (IM/presence, e-mail, conferencing, etc.). Also, there was no discussion about linking administrative municipal processes such as citizen outreach or collections with the UC system.

Overall, a good success story for the 30,000-plus residents and many visitors to Riverside, that demonstrates the power of good cooperation between the customer, the consultant, the channel partner and the vendor all focusing on meeting the critical customer needs and learning from the conversations, the RFP and demonstrations. Something the entire UC space needs to keep in mind - cooperation and focus on customer needs, not just pushing all the things in the product catalog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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Last week Polycom issued three announcements that underscore its commitment to being a global videoconferencing and collaboration player. This blog focuses on one of those product-related announcements: Polycom’s acquisition of HP’s dedicated videoconferencing products, related managed services and customers (the high-end Halo line).

Through this sale, HP exits the dedicated videoconferencing system arena. Halo is a terrific product and managed service, but its focus on the very high end of the market, which limits market penetration/reach. I think this announcement signals something much broader than a decision on videoconferencing-it implicitly underlies HP’s strategic decision to focus on broader reach/market opportunities.

Given what I see as a strategic decision by HP, it makes sense for HP to focus on core competencies - (1) multi-functional, general purpose systems and personal devices like servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones; (2) operating systems (specifically, its new multi-device webOS);  and (3) of course, its substantial work in the professional services/systems integration arena.

It also makes sense for Halo customers. It’s hard to imagine a better home for Halo customers than Polycom - especially when combined with its two other announcements regarding the Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) and new collaboration tools that are being co-developed by Polycom and Microsoft.

Polycom clearly plans to support existing Halo installations, managed services and customers going forward. Still, it’s prudent for Halo customers to obtain specific commitments from Polycom on the level and length of support they require, on long-term interoperability plans/development with other Polycom and partner (Microsoft, Juniper) systems, and ultimately on migration plans to standards-based videoconferencing platforms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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