This morning Avaya and Skype went public with a partnership they term “a strategic agreement to deliver innovative, real-time communications and collaboration solutions to businesses of all sizes”. The output of the agreement will come in two phases. The first is centered on integration of voice, and the second, integration of video and other unified communication capabilities. The output of the agreement will be development around integration as well as a combined go to market strategy.

In Phase 1, Avaya’s US customer base will have access to Skype Connect^TM, allowing customers to communicate via SIP between Avaya communication systems and Skype. This will be available to customers with Avaya Aura^TM Session Manager or Avaya Aura SIP Enablement Server, CS1000, Avaya IP Office, or BCM systems. Avaya cited that calls will be handled using Avaya’s routing, conferencing, messaging, mobility and contact center capabilities, and collaboration services.

In Phase 2, which is slated some time off in the later part of 2011, the two companies promise to deliver integrated unified communications and collaboration solutions to enterprises, including video. The companies claim that the integration will establish federation between Avaya Aura and Skype communications platforms, and through that, will bring together the business and consumer side.

This union is interesting and promising from two perspectives. First, the two companies have offerings that complement each other. Avaya, focused on communications for government and the private sector businesses, seeks to round out and expand its communications offerings. This builds on their UC and collaboration offerings, including this month’s Flare Experience announcement, and it provides benefits to Avaya customers by helping reduce communication costs. Skype, built its popularity among consumers, but seeks to attract more businesses by expanding capabilities attractive to the enterprise, and this will enable them to do that. Second, is the promise that this union will provide federation of some applications, including presence, voice, video and IM, between businesses and consumers. The later could produce some interesting customer service business benefits, and is something we have all been waiting for.

A small note, even though Skype’s growth has hinged in part on being available to users internationally - part of its appeal - this announcement was focused solely on the US. Plans to expand internationally will be rolled out as the partnership and offerings are developed. Also, complete plans for the product roadmap won’t be made available for a few weeks yet.

In all, I really like the promise of what this partnership will bring, especially as both integration and federation have been two sore spots that have had a lot of lip service given them, but not a lot of concrete work done yet. However, although there are solid plans in this agreement to do so, Avaya still hasn’t extended that intent by joining up with the UCIF just yet. During the Q&A part of the analyst call on this, Jim Burton asked if Avaya would join the UCIF for interoperability. Avaya’s answer was very politely that there is some governance challenges associated with joining that they are trying to work out with the companies involved. They added that the way that the effort is structured raises concerns if the UCIF is truly an open and peer-based organization. More to come on this, I’m sure.

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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Because UC also encompasses human contacts with automated applications, the human user, regardless of how contact was initiated, with one major exception, must dictate the mode of interaction. While great progress has been made in speech recognition as a means of data input and user interface control, it has not made completely full voice conversation practical as a user interface for self-service applications. As recognized in a new book, “Advances In Speech Recognition: Mobile Environment, Call Centers and Clinics,” speech is efficient for user input, but not practical for large amounts of content output which can most efficiently be reviewed on a screen as text or graphics. That is why I see traditional telephone self service applications (IVR) being replaced with what I call “Interactive Multimodal Response” (IMR) applications on all forms of multimodal mobile endpoint devices (smart-phones, iPads, tablets, etc.)

One of the key roles that mobility and UC flexibility can play is in supporting automated business processes that can initiate contacts with individual end users for time-sensitive notifications. However, I see such applications doing more than sending notification information to a user. Instead, the applications will be able to initiate an interactive multimodal exchange with the recipient, but with the choice of input and output media resting with the human recipient.

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) is going to heavily exploit such “multimodal notifications” because they can proactively initiate a self-service interaction without waiting for the recipient to take the initiative. Until now, telephony-based IVR was seen as the best way to handle self-services from consumers who, until lately, were not expected to have access to a real-time communication device other than a phone. With UC and mobile, multimodal devices, the future and value of business self-services will expand significantly from legacy online desktops and telephone IVR applications

Tags: Mobile UC, Mobility, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Today, Glowpoint, a provider of managed videoconferencing and video bridging services, announced an agreement with Equinix, a provider of global data center services, to offer carriers direct access to Glowpoint’s managed video services through the Equinix ’s private Layer 2 Carrier Carrier Ethernet Exchange. 

Glowpoint’s suite of cloud-based managed video services and B2B video calling for telepresence and video conferencing is now available to Equinix’s Ethernet Exchange customers, who can provide these services directly to their enterprise, medium and small business customers. Equinix currently has 7 Ethernet Exchange POPs on two continents, with an eighth coming on line in a matter of days.  Equinix plans that all of its tier 1 centers across three continents (19 POPs)  will be on the Ethernet Exchange before Q2 2011.  Current members of the Exchange include a number of carriers who derive the majority of their revenues from wholesale services, like Level 3, Reliance Globalcom and KPN International.

I recently published a report for GigaOM Pro that examines the enterprise-class videoconferencing landscape (see “The Enterprise Videoconferencing Landscape, 2010-2015” at http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/08/report-videoconferencing-unleashed/ ). During the last three years, a number of important technology advances have taken place that make HD IP videoconferencing much easier to use and more affordable than older technology that is still widely used. But one of the major impediments to widespread use of recent generation HD IP technology is the lack of interoperability of this technology – both on a vendor and service provider level. Thus the Glowpoint-Equinix announcement is an important step that allows large wholesalers and their customers to more easily engage in mixed/hybrid vendor/technology and service provider videoconferences – something that is a fact of life, but that many suppliers elect to downplay. 

One of the more remarkable aspects of this type of agreement is that it can provide interoperability to small or medium businesses who use carriers that are customers of Equinix’s Ethernet Exchange (for instance, between customers of Level 3 and Abnovenet) well in advance of their peers. For example, despite the obvious business benefit, Enterprise Customer A on ATT’s managed Telepresence service isn’t yet able to interconnect with Enterprise Customer B on Verizon’s managed Telepresence service.

Tags: Unified Communications by Lisa Pierce
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I just read, with some amusement, the UCStrategies podcast transcription on Microsoft’s latest announcement, which I missed because I was traveling. Numerous UCStrategies folks have already written about Microsoft’s latest and greatest, including discussing the new name, but I’d also like to chime in on the company’s naming strategy, as part of a naming trend I am starting to see.

What is so big about the way OCS was renamed? Well, two things really. One, this name, and some others that follow here, are part of delightful naming trend that has recently popped up that indicates that finally, high-tech is moving from boring - ‘this only really means something to us’ - to what consumer products companies have known for years - make it sound appealing to the consumer, or end user.

For decades we have been creating and selling products in communications such as voice messaging, PBXs, data centers, etc., with some of the most boring brand names known to mankind. Sure, back in the 80’s and 90’s we had some creative names that made sense whether you worked in a high tech company or were a consumer - such as ROLM’s PhoneMail voice messaging product, in which the name said exactly what it was - phone mail. But this same company had a plethora of products that were named with three and four letter acronyms that had model numbers after them, and if you weren’t in the industry you had no clue what they were. We also had our share of companies, such as Apple, that decided that just because their company had some name that had nothing to do with the products they were selling, that they should create product names having to do with the company name, and hence, Apple started selling a flavor of Apple, the Macintosh, instead of telling people it was a personal computer. Thankfully, they didn’t follow up with the Gravenstein.

The good thing about Apple is that they were both a consumer and business play, so eventually sanity took over and Apple started making products with names that had high recognition and consumer appeal. Now they have iTunes (says exactly what it is), iTouch, iPad (well, except this one…. I won’t go there), and others, that make perfect sense to the consumer.

So what does this have to do with Lync? Lync is part of an emerging trend to simplify naming, and creating shorter names that actually have something to do with what the product does. Plus, more importantly, they seem to elicit a thought about what the product should do, which is key in consumer product naming.

We have recently seen a bunch of these names come out of Cisco. For example, Cisco Pulse, “takes a pulse” on what is going on knowledge or theme wise, within a company, by scanning through everything that traverses a corporate network that has been tagged. Not only is the name short, and a real English word - not two words slammed together with a capital letter in the middle - it also elicits the image of taking a reading. Cisco’s Show and Share is similar; short, sweet and not only tells what it is, but elicits the sense that it’s easy to do. I video, and then upload and share. Cisco has some other names in the works that are equally compelling.

As for Microsoft Lync, some of the comments my colleagues made talked about what the name might elicit in the minds of the user. For example, Blair Pleasant said, “Basically Microsoft said that they wanted a new name to get into the next generation of communications, and to embody the spirit of this new generation and this new version of the product. So the new name is the combination of link and sync and what I like about it is the ability to use the name as a verb, so sort of like it will be the Kleenex and Xerox and Google of office communications, I guess. You’ll be able to link with somebody and you know, “let’s link tomorrow,” or whatever. I really like the verb aspect of it.”

I like the verb aspect of it too. One important point that shouldn’t get lost here goes back to what I said about Apple, which also applies to Microsoft and a few others. And that is, some of these companies have been selling to consumers and enterprises for a long time, but with different marketing strategies. Now it seems the strategies are starting to overlap in that products, particularly unified communications and social media are bridging both worlds, and therefore, simplifying and making naming more consumer oriented will work for both sets of customers.  A good example of this is Cisco’s new Cius tablet, introduced in July. The name is simple and elicits the concept of being seen, which is part of the tablet’s video capability. So although Cisco launched the product with idea of it being a business tool, there is nothing that precludes them from turning it into a consumer product as well, and the Cius name works for both.

As Marty Parker pointed out, the goal isn’t really to go after the average consumer, but a greater pool of end users. In my opinion, a greater pool of end users can contain pure consumers, or just a bigger audience of business users, but in all, more user-friendly naming can only help the growth of unified communications, and social media.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Art Rosenberg
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Technology can only do so much, and sometimes, human nature has to play a role. There are times when a technology isn’t being implemented properly because of cultural or social issues, and there are many situations where we have to change our cultural habits to accommodate new technologies.

In the early days of computer telephony integration, there were examples of call center agents who received screen pops on their desktops providing them with information on the caller’s name and what they’re calling about, and the agents would answer the phone based on this information. “Hello, Mr. Jones, I see you have a problem with your credit card statement, and since you’re a platinum card holder, I’d be happy to assist you.” Instead of rejoicing at this recognition, customers got flustered, wondering how the agent knew who they were, and the time it took for the agent to explain about screen pops eliminated the expected time savings that screen pops are supposed to provide. Some companies stopped using screen pops altogether, but generally most call center agents went back to using a neutral greeting so they wouldn’t alarm the callers.

In the world of unified communications, presence and IM, new etiquette rules are being developed, both formally and informally. I’ve heard of many companies where it’s considered rude to call someone without sending an IM first to see whether it’s a good time to call. Most companies haven’t formalized these rules, but I expect to see more and more companies promoting “best practices” or “etiquette guides.”

Microsoft has a wonderful “Instant Messaging Etiquette Guide” that provides general guidelines. For example, some tips for politeness when using IM include:
•    If you are initiating the IM, it’s generally considered polite to ask the other person if they have time to “talk” with you. This may not be necessary with someone you work with frequently and when the question is quick, as opposed to something requiring discussion.
•    Don’t invite someone to join a conference in progress without first asking the others in the conference if it’s OK to do so.
•    Don’t use all capital letters to type your message. It’s the IM equivalent of shouting (note: this goes for twitter, Facebook, etc.).

Social and personal issues are often the reasons why technologies fail to be adopted, despite the quality and reliability of the technology itself. I often hear from enterprise workers that they don’t want to use UC (particularly presence capabilities) because they don’t want people knowing their status or because they don’t want to be interrupted if they’re working. Instead, they generally set their status to “unavailable” all the time, thus greatly reducing the value of the technology for not only that individual, but for people in their workgroups and organization. This could be avoided if everyone followed guidelines and best practices. For example, respect IM status settings. If someone’s IM status is “busy” or “away,” don’t try contacting them and disturbing them. Alternatively, recognize that just because someone’s status is “available” doesn’t mean that they can drop what they’re doing and interact with you. If someone doesn’t respond to your messaging request, it probably means they’re busy, even if they’re status shows that they are available.

Microsoft also suggests: “If you’re carrying on too many IM conversations at once, those you’re corresponding with may feel that you’re not giving them the proper amount of attention. No more than three conversations at a time is a general rule.” I suggest that contact centers also follow this rule – I’ve stopped using the web chat option for customer service because too often the agent I’m chatting with for service is also helping several other customers at the same time, causing delays in the chat and making it a very lengthy and unpleasant experience.

One of my personal guidelines is that after going back and forth on IM for a long time, it’s generally easier to have a live conversation, and UC users can easily click-to-communicate to have a phone or conference call.

What all of this points to is the need to consider human factors in any design. Success in a UC project will come not just from buying the best hardware and software, but from designing the best solution. As we are dealing with new tools that will allow people to do their jobs in new ways, we need to address the issue of how we help people to use these tools in the most effective way. People know their telephone etiquette, but part of our UC deployment plan has to look at how we teach UC etiquette.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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My last blog touched upon legal issues in UC and speech technologies by addressing patent trolls and what can be done about them. Here is another little legal nugget, rising up within UC which merits some attention as well, and that is, what to do about compliance issues, privacy and all those other things, that sometimes fall by the wayside when employees use social media applications.

It is pretty evident that companies are jumping on the bandwagon of social media, and investigating, planning, developing or deploying social media within their unified communications and contact center applications. Voxeo, Avaya, Siemens, Cisco, Genesys….. The list is getting longer and longer. The issue is that if we thought we had problems with just pure instant messaging working its way into corporate life unattended, well, well, well, think about Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any other of the dozens of applications popping up.

Below are excerpts of a press release from Autonomy this week that tackles this issue head on, so I wanted to post it here since the announcement is one of only a few that seems to deal with the legal aspects of incorporating social media into the enterprise, rather than just the fun and business use side. Autonomy announced the availability of Autonomy Social Media Governance, what Autonomy claims is the industry’s first solution designed to monitor, govern, and protect organizations across social media channels. Social Media Governance enables businesses to maintain compliance with new regulatory requirements for employees engaging on social media sites.

The May 26^th press release said:

“Rapid adoption of social media by employees, customers, advertisers, bloggers, and news organizations presents unique challenges to many organizations. Regulators recognize the influence and risks associated with these channels, and are starting to require organizations to actively monitor and govern employees’ social media interactions. For instance, FINRA (The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) recently issued FINRA Regulatory Notice 10-06, which requires member firms to supervise and archive content posted to social media for business purposes. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the National Futures Association (NFA) are also developing rules associated with the use of social media.

New regulatory requirements around social media add to the already burdensome task of adhering to current law for organizations - which requires that corporations archive, set policy, and make discoverable many forms of electronic information, including email, audio, and video.”

“Social media represents an extremely important new channel for businesses to develop engaging and profitable relationships with their customers. However, it is not without its risks, and for a business to leverage social media legally and profitably, corporations need to establish a comprehensive strategy to govern social media interaction.

For instance, a business could face regulatory issues if a bank employee marketed or misrepresented the value of a potential investment on social networks. Likewise, if an employee defamed another fellow employee, or a client, on a social site, this could raise legal issues for the company. Also, a pharmaceutical company could run into litigation issues if an employee denigrated a product on a social site that the company is actively promoting with advertising on traditional channels.”

Those are some good examples of the risks. What Autonomy provides is a platform that does what they call ‘meaning based computing’ which is recognizing patterns and relationships in unstructured information. They combine this with the company’s archiving, policy management, supervision, and analytics technologies. The result is that Autonomy Social Media Governance automatically identifies content and conversations on social networks, and allows a corporation to tie the information directly into a company’s existing compliance infrastructure.  All of this can be stored in Autonomy Digital Safe; a hosted archive service that enables corporations to outsource the storage and management of email messages, rich-media files, audio and video files, instant messages, and web content. According to the press release, the Social Media Governance product includes:

• Connectors and aggregation of thousands of relevant news feeds, blogs, and social media sites. Autonomy Social Media Governance can monitor social media content from employees logged in through company networks, as well as identify discussion from users operating outside company networks.
• Conceptual search of all aggregated content
• Policy-based monitoring
• Compliant archiving for regulated content
• Advanced analytics such as clustering and visualization tools
• Escalation and workflow management
• Reporting and trend analysis
• Executive dashboards

This is a great start to a knotty and growing issue that isn’t as fun to talk about as the benefits of incorporating social media into the contact center and UC.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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AVST announced that it is acquiring Active Voice, formerly a subsidiary of NEC. Active Voice’s products will join the AVST portfolio, take AVST into the hospitality market, and deliver AVST an OEM relationship with NEC. AVST will continue to manufacture, support and enhance specific Active Voice product offerings for NEC, its channel partners and the independent Active Voice channel. The main benefits to AVST are access to additional distribution channels and expanded engineering resources. NEC customers will also benefit by having better access to AVST’s messaging and speech capabilities. This should also help AVST move more in the unified communications world by way of NEC.

AVST CallXpress delivers call processing, voicemail, unified messaging, personal assistant, fax, speech, and notification fax, with integration to over 250 PBX products using a multitude of integration methods, including SIP, E1/T1, analog, and digital station set emulation. For those of you unfamiliar with Active Voice, the company offers several UM products, including Kinesis (which supports a variety of switches), Repartee LX, and Repartee for Windows. Active Voice’s productivity applications for its Kinesis unified messaging solution include ViewCall, FindMe/FollowMe, and VideoMail. Active Voice OEMs its products through NEC and its products are also sold through reseller partners.

As part of the agreement, AVST and NEC have entered into a long-term strategic technology relationship. AVST now has a stronger OEM relationship with NEC, enabling the company to reach more customers with its messaging and speech products. AVST has been an NEC partner for a while, and is a member of NEC’s UNIVERGE Solutions Partner Program. According to AVST, the two companies have been working together for over 8 years, and as a participant in the UNIVERGE Solutions Partner program, AVST can deliver products with tighter integration to NEC communication products. While AVST’s CallXpress is tightly integrated into the NEC product portfolio, supporting NEC TDM and IP telephony switches, the agreement with NEC means that NEC will now OEM AVST products, offering more options to its customers.

In terms of unified communications, AVST provides a platform that supports several applications of which UM is one of the stronger components. Moving forward, AVST will enhance CallXpress to make better use of presence and availability information and rules to determine how best to complete a communication request. AVST also sees UC solutions helping to bridge the void that currently exists between an ever increasingly mobile workforce and enterprise data.

This acquisition gives AVST additional engineering resources in order to help the company develop additional UC capabilities and functionality, and we expect to see the fruits of this in the coming months.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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