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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Now that I have your attention, this was a statement made at the recent Avaya Contact Center Analyst day in San Jose. What it referred to was that the Avaya Aura Contact Center from launch to booking, was the most successful new contact center product in Avaya history. Why is this important for Avaya? It is important because, today’s announcements should add even more fuel to the bookings fire.

Today’s announcements were anything but ho hum. Avaya tackled and delivered upon all the current trends that are evolving in the contact center; trends that are taking the traditional self-service (IVR) and agent handling of calls, to a new level of customer care.  In the past several years, Avaya has been part of this industry evolution already, but continues to add onto these trends, including social media integration, UC and the contact center, and elevating the customer experience across multiple channels. 

In their announcement material Avaya makes numerous points about how they  commissioned a study (Avaya Contact Center Customer Preference Study) that showed that 40% of consumers prefer alternate methods of contact (i.e., chat, text or email) for customer service, compared to the phone. Studies like this are ok, but they really just back up what the industry has been trying to do for a decade in creating multiple “customer touch points” or channels as alternatives or addendums to the contact center. We have been saying for years that we want to be able to provide customer service in the manner in which customers want to receive it, and we all are witness to the growing use of the Internet and mobile devices to access customer care. So it’s not revolutionary that Avaya is saying this, it is the way these announcements deliver on this that is important.  

Avaya Aura Contact Center (AACC) 6.2

At the core with this release Avaya is making it easier for the content/context of any interaction on any channel to be seamlessly transferred to another. So whether someone prefers chat, text, or the IVR, for example, when they want a live agent, their initial “customer service investment” is not lost in transition. This integration makes the experience consistent for the customer.

With the 6.2 release, Avaya added the ability for agents to easily bring in experts to assist in any call with a customer, in a collaborative fashion, along with additional integration with social media. Here is the difference. AACC takes the call, gathers all pertinent customer context, including the requisite customer account number, history, and anything else pertinent to that customer, and matches it to the most appropriate agent.  This is not just plain skills-based routing, but a far more fine-tuned version of that, plus, the agent simultaneously has the right resources, including any potential experts, displayed along with the call, so that they can seamlessly bring in additional resources if needed into the call. 

Collaboration is done through the combination of AACC and Avaya Aura which displays, using presence, experts that are appropriate and available for the particular call that came in.  This means that the agent doesn’t have to go and search for an expert, as one or more are populated on the agent desktop at the time the call is received. This is all configurable by the contact center manager based on skills, or time of day, or particular need. 

In addition to the experts being shown on the agent desktop, Avaya has also has provided for the integration of social media as well, so that agents can respond to social media postings such as tweets and Facebook updates, but in a single consistent view, making it easier for the agent to get the full picture without having to go to a separate screen or application. This is facilitated through the addition of Avaya Social Media Manager.

Along with the integration of Social Media Manager is the addition of a new Social Media Consulting Services practice, which really is critical for companies to provide to their customers as those customers start to navigate through the development of social media strategy. In the case of Avaya, this new consulting practice follows a consistent methodology to lead the customer through the creation of their own strategy, including a “social assessment”, creation of a roadmap, and a social media adoption plan.

Avaya Aura Experience Portal

Next, Avaya didn’t just strengthen the agent side of the contact center experience, but the self-service side as well, across multiple channels as mentioned above with the introduction of Avaya Aura Experience Portal.  The most significant capability of the portal is a more seamless hand-off of customer data, as well as context, from any self-service session to AACC agents.

On the deployment side, Avaya added new development tools to help develop applications that seamlessly hand off the data to the contact center, making it faster and easier to deploy self-service applications that improve the customer experience. This is done by the new Avaya Aura Orchestration Designer.

As for the nuts and bolts part of the announcement, AACC will now support up to 90,000 agents in a single virtual network, due to new integration with Avaya Aura.  Experience Portal can also be deployed in a virtualized environment, which converts a single server into multiple virtual servers too, reducing TCO.  In addition, AACC 6.2 is now unified with Avaya’s automatic call distribution application, Avaya Aura Call Center Elite, enabling unified desktop, reporting and administration.  To protect the investment of existing self-service customers, Avaya Experience Portal software and tools unify migration of standards-based applications from Avaya Interactive Response, Avaya Media Processing Server and prior releases of Avaya Voice Portal. 

In all, this is a well thought out and solid announcement, and should continue to help make those bookings numbers look good.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC by Nancy Jamison
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While many eyes were on unified communications and collaboration this month, and speech technologies are certainly part of that, speech held its own for announcements in November too. Just taking a look at Nuance alone, there were quite a few. This didn’t even include the tasty, but so far false rumor that Apple was acquiring Nuance. This came about when Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, misspoke at an event, mentioning that Apple had acquired Nuance. It created quite a stir and a bump in Nuance’s stock price.

Despite the “rumor”, Nuance was quite busy in November, boasting several announcements across the company’s product lines. Nuance added another mobile device to the customer list by announcing that Nuance’s natural language voice technology is behind the new Genius Button and Hands-Free mode innovations on T-Mobiles’ myTouch 4G phone, which will allow consumers to speak, receive and send text messages completely by voice, by pressing a button and saying “Turn Hands-Free Mode on,”. This turns on Bluetooth capabilities, providing complete hands free use. While this wasn’t a big announcement, I’m all for it.

Nuance’s Healthcare division announced an outsourced transcription service - Nuance Transcription Services, which expands their clinical transcription services portfolio. This draws upon resources they received through the company’s acquisition of Outsourcing Solutions, Inc. and Encompass Medical Transcription Inc. They also introduced PowerScribe 360, which is an advanced radiology reporting and communications platform that combines the best capabilities of PowerScribe and RadWare into a unified solution. Nuance claims that 1/3 of all radiologists in the country now use PowerScribe. Also in the radiology area, Nuance announced collaboration with a privately held company - Montage Healthcare Solutions, that does search and analytics on radiology reports, to improve the ability to search radiology reports. Hmmm. Any time I see privately-held company and Nuance in the same paragraph I smell mergers and acquisitions, but I digress.

Nuance had several mobile applications announcements too. These included saying that Nuance technology is behind the voice-to-text on the new Ask for iPhone application from Ask.com, and that Nuance Dragonmobile technology is behind the new price check for Amazon application for the IPhone as well.

Another announcement that I really liked, although it was also not earth shattering, was Nuance’s announcement that they will be working with WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media, to improve the quality of close captioned media. A US Department of Education-funded project, this effort seeks to improve the close-captioning of real-time news programming for the hearing impaired. Nuances’ contribution will be using the company’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking technology as the basis for developing customized language processing, data analysis, and benchmarking tools for the project. As a long time proponent for using speech technologies to improve accessibility, I’m all for this one too.

Although not a formal announcement, last week I also spoke with Nuance on how the company is extending Nuance on Demand to include extensions for CTI and ACD, essentially giving Nuance the capabilities of hosting entire contact centers rather than just self-service. This solution includes speech self-service, intelligent routing, screen pops, and fully-featured ACD capabilities. Nuance has paid particular attention to extending their goal of improving the caller experience by providing capabilities such as having the self-service “agent” continue interacting with the caller while the caller is in queue, and populating the agent screen with call context when the caller requests to be transferred to an agent.

Nuance has seen 98% growth in its hosted on-demand customer service applications in the past year, with about half of new customers moving over to Nuance from other hosted service providers. Nuance’s hosted offering is now processing over 2 billion minutes annually, with just self service alone. So it doesn’t surprise me at all that Nuance is now making the foray into hosting the entire contact center. It makes sense from the standpoint that they have had pretty significant success in hosting, and the fact that growth in virtual contact centers in general is growing exponentially across the industry.

This is a good thing for existing Nuance customers who choose to move the contact center to Nuance because they will get better end-to-end analytics capabilities if they choose to do so. It is also a good solution for adding on remote offices or remote agents, and lends itself well to a hybrid approach as well, as Nuance can overlay a CTI adapter onto a Nortel or Avaya contact center and get the intelligence they need to route calls to a Nuance contact center agent or one of the others, for example. It will be interesting to see how competing vendors react to this, however.

We are at a cherry picking time in the contact center industry right now. It is a decade past when we churned a lot of the installed base because of the millennium change, there is a huge installed base of systems out there that are getting to end of life, and hosted solutions are now a common choice. Not to mention the churn that is being caused by consolidation, such as we have seen with Avaya and Nortel. So, all companies that have moved into the virtual contact center space, including Nuance, are in a good spot to capitalize on the chance to win contact centers over to their offerings. One caveat, Nuance isn’t going into the “hosted contact center” wherein they provide agents, just agent management applications.

As an additional proof point of the move to the cloud, Five9, an on-demand contact center software provider, also announced the availability of a speech self-service offering in the cloud in November too. Within Release 8 of their Virtual Contact Center product line, Five9 customers can now add IVR as an integrated or standalone product.

Finally, I had originally set out to do one November roundup of speech announcements, but Nuance has just been too busy this month to bury them in a bigger blog. I’ll blog about the others shortly.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Mobile UC, Mobility, Speech Technologies by Nancy Jamison
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Ah, September. Back to school, back to football, and back to preparing for the cold months ahead. It was a quiet month, as always, at Lake Wobegon. Not so by the tempest-tossed waters of Lake Uceeisnow. For months, there were rumblings of disenchantment about the pace and depth of customer migration to UC. This was coupled by near-universal agreement that UC could not really be defined but nonetheless, you’d know it when you see it. Moreover, according to numerous analysts, UC could enhance your enterprise’s “business processes”, assuming you know what they are or can derive them.

In early September, Nick Jones of Gartner had the audacity to put forth the polarizing notion that UC is some sort of Ponzi scam http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_jones/2010/09/07/is-unified-communications-the-biggest-scam-since-ponzi/  This created quite a stir and (at last count) 27 comments both pro and con. It is still referred to in recent No Jitter posts. Of course, some UC pundits will write this off as a spurious Gartner analysis input which has little credibility, only Gartner’s Magic Quadrant with vendor rankings has “value”. The gist of my response to Nick-which I’ll stick with-was “It (UC) is overhyped, undefined, and un-measurable, but unfortunately the tag has been adopted by enough vendors, media types and others so that right or wrong we’ll all have to live with it. There’s no doubt that advanced and converged communications (IP and otherwise) can (eventually) improve an enterprise and how it does business. BUT in a down economy there are lots of alternative bangs for limited IT bucks. I don’t think a UC vendor or analyst’s “trust me” with or without B-School white paper will be the closing argument for moving to UC (whatever it is). One would think any CIO, COO, CFO or CEO would want real ROI as opposed to the proverbial marketing song and dance.”

Soon after the Ponzi reference and its analyst reverberations were felt, Microsoft announced the renaming of OCS to Lync. It was a timely event, in my opinion, because for months overall UC perception needed some sort of shot in the arm. There’s nothing like Microsoft and its resources (i.e., money) to boost any IT market opportunity. Unifying enterprise voice, instant messaging, applications/desktop sharing and video and audio conferencing into a “new, connected communications experience” was the theme of the Lync announcement. Nothing new here but welcome nonetheless as a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s vision for UC. In many respects, Microsoft was and is the primary driver of UC and this was clearly reflected in the sycophantic responses to Lync by the UC analyst claque.

To a one-time voice switching guy like me, Microsoft is hardly ignoring VoIP but continues to integrate it into their “stuff” (software, servers, etc.) in lieu of separate (IP) PBXs. By now, Lync’s voice functionality should be robust enough and user-acceptable. How fast users will dump operable PBXs for the Microsoft equivalent in these difficult economic times remains to be seen.

A mere two days after Lync, Avaya’s Flare came on the scene. The Flare “experience” and the “non-tablet” Desktop Video Communicator have been adequately discussed and dissected on these pages and elsewhere. The impact for me is that Avaya, the classic voice/PBX-centric UC participant, has done something innovative and out-of-character. It took “chutzpah” to do this, good for them. The announcement underscores the emerging importance (at least to vendors) of flexible, portable video conferencing and tablet-like devices. As for price points and whether the dogs will eat the dog food, as always, time will tell.

As noted, the Microsoft and Avaya announcements came when UC, by any definition, needed some positive press. Mission accomplished on that.  Moreover, as far as I could determine, neither vendor tied their announcement and its contents to any mystical enterprise workflow improvements, reduction in “human latency”, or other UC pseudo-science rationale. Perhaps, the Apple-like approach may be taking hold, namely, easy-to-use solutions to real definable problems and provide an enjoyable “experience” in getting there.

The final September item of note was the No Jitter article by Zeus Kerravala of The Yankee Group on Cisco’s near-term UC strategy http://www.nojitter.com/feature/227500594. This created a firestorm of 19 comments and spawned a separate posting by another blogger commenting on all the comments! Why all the excitement? It was all about Cisco vs. Microsoft and there are a lot of strong opinions about that. Sort of like Fox vs. MSNBC on a political topic. Opinions, yes, market share demographics, not really, since those vendors as well as most others do not have a common definition of UC, and in some cases, even its scope. However, if you’re keeping score at home, Microsoft seemed to have the edge in UC mindshare.

September was definitely interesting, let’s see what October brings. As for the name game, one can hope that the fuzzy UC tag is sent to the recycle bin if and when adult supervision arrives. It would be useful to have a more descriptive set of terms rather than one misused global label. My initial suggestion is Advanced Converged Communications (ACC) and its 4 dimensions-voice/telephony, messaging/presence, conferencing/collaboration, and mobility. More on this at a later time.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Jay Brandstadter
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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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Last week I accompanied a system integrator in the Midwest to meet with and help educate several of their customers about unified communications and building a UC strategy. In addition to the Midwest hospitality and better weather than I expected, I got some good insights into what these customers are thinking about regarding UC. I was gratified to see that these customers really understand and appreciate what UC can do for them in terms of saving time, making workers more efficient, increasing collaboration between work groups, etc.

One thing that came across loud and clear is that Microsoft did a heck of a job getting OCS out there for enterprise IM and presence. All of the companies I met with have OCS implemented to one degree or another, and most also have Sharepoint and Live Meeting. Several of the customers are Nortel shops, which makes me wonder if part of Microsoft’s success is based on the now-defunct ICA relationship between Nortel and Microsoft, although I tend to doubt it. Side note: Avaya stated that the ICA relationship has been terminated, although the two companies will continue to work on how they engage with each other, but Nortel (now Avaya) will no longer resell OCS. It will be interesting to see if this impacts OCS sales in any way, but it’s doubtful.

It’s clear that OCS is getting lots of traction, and vendors will have to work hard to compete with and displace Microsoft in the UC arena. A good portion of the customers I met with are Cisco shops, but none are using Cisco Unified Presence Server or Cisco Unified Presence Client – or any other presence/IM solution other than OCS. While none of the customers are using OCS for call control and don’t have any immediate plans to do so, none had gone the next step to integrate OCS with their PBX/IP PBXs. I’m glad to see more companies using IM and presence, but I wish more of them were actually integrating these capabilities with their voice capabilities to get more of the benefits that UC provides.

Some of the companies I met with clearly see the benefits of integrating OCS with their voice switches, but a variety of issues have prevented them from doing so. In some cases, the IT people are aware of the benefits of UC and acknowledge that the people in their companies could greatly benefit from it, but don’t want to deal with the integration or cost issues involved, and feel that they have enough to do without adding another layer of complexity. Others want to move to UC, but realize that in their particular environments it will be a major undertaking based on their existing technology and infrastructure.

For many customers, the will is there – they just need a good way to move to the world of UC. It needs to be simpler to implement and integrate all of the various pieces (data network, telecom environment, carrier networks, etc.). The vendors need to do a better job of working with each other to simplify integration and interoperability, and to help customers migrate. And to those vendors that would rather battle with Microsoft than accept the fact that they’ve made huge inroads into the unified communications world, I suggest you work harder to find ways to coexist in a multivendor environment, and to provide the necessary tools to your partners to help them support their customers’ mixed environments. Companies want to move to UC – let’s help make it easier for them.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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While the waiting game is over regarding the winner of the auction for Nortel Enterprise, there are still many unanswered questions – mainly the who’s and the what’s.

Who – we heard from Avaya and Nortel in a press/analyst call that Avaya has agreed with a minimum employee transfer of 75% of Nortel employee work force at the time of close of deal. Note – at the time of close of deal, not today, not last week. Who knows how many Nortel employees will still be around by December when the deal is expected to close.

Also, in a letter to the Nortel troops, Nortel Enterprise President Joel Hackney stated that Avaya will employ about three-quarters of Enterprise Solutions employees globally. This includes the full Nortel Government Solutions workforce and most employees who work wholly or mainly for the Enterprise Solutions business in countries with an Acquired Rights Directive (ARD) or similar law. ARD or similar laws apply in many of the countries in EMEA and require that employment automatically transfers to the purchaser upon an acquisition of the business. Outside of Nortel Government Solutions employees and those employees in countries where ARD or similar laws apply, we expect that a minimum of about 60% of the remaining Enterprise Solutions workforce will be offered employment with Avaya.”

If you’re a non-Government Solutions or non-ARD employee, you now have only a 60% rather than a 75% chance of being retained. And the Avaya employees aren’t all safe either – if someone from Nortel is retained but their job duplicates that of an Avaya employee, then the Avaya worker may be out of a job. I’ve known many of the Avaya and Nortel folks for a long, long time, and I certainly wish them the best and I’m keeping my fingers crossed for them.

Now for the most important part – the what. What products will remain, which will move forward with the company, and which will be set out to pasture? Will it be CallPilot or Modular Messaging? BCM or IP Office? ACE or Aura? And where do the Nortel products fit in Avaya’s Aura vision? Avaya is still working on its Aura story and now has to figure out how to leverage the products and platforms that Nortel brings to the table.

There are very few areas where there is no overlap (data solutions excluded). The one product that is sure to go forward in the Avaya line up is Nortel’s Diamondware (Nortel acquired Diamondware last year). I hope that Avaya recognizes its value and continues with development in this exciting area, particularly with Diamondware’s special audio capabilities. Similarly, I expect to see Avaya leverage web.alive and be more aggressive in this area.

I hope to soon get some of my questions answered regarding the future of the combined company, but I’m not holding my breath. It will take the company a long time to figure out its new product portfolio, and customers on both sides will have to guess as to the life expectancy of the products they have installed.

Of course, all this assumes that the DOJ doesn’t decide that this acquisition is anti-competitive and prevents it from happening. This is pretty unlikely to happen, as there are still lots of vendors in the telephony and contact center markets.

I was really hoping for a more creative outcome, such as Oracle, SAP, or an application vendor acquiring Nortel in order to communication-enable its applications. But alas, our industry has never been known for its creativity.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
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Mitel

Offsetting the bad news about lay offs at Mitel was their product announcements at VoiceCon. The glitziest is Mitel’s new TeleCollaboration product, due out in Q1′09, that adds to the growing number of telepresence products in the industry. TeleCollaboration is a combination of Mitel’s conferencing and collaboration software, video from Magor Communications (www.Magorcorp.com) and Mitel’s conferencing units and handsets.

Although Cisco TelePresence seems to be the gold standard for video conferencing these days, it costs gold to implement. Although Mitel didn’t announce pricing yet, they assured me that it will be a fraction of the upper level Cisco product. I’ve been happy to see others add to the stack of affordable solutions, particularly when they add productivity enhancements as this announcement does by providing collaboration and recording capabilities in the meeting. Still, they also provide life-sized video and spatial audio as part of the package.

An additional announcement Mitel made was SiMple Personal Licensing (SMPL) of their UC products, which includes role-based software licensing, taking into account roles of different user types within an organization. Their packages in the typical basic, standard and advanced format are designed to make it easier to deploy UC. They have bundled pre-integrated packages by user type, but also provide the flexibility for an organization to add additional applications off a laundry list of UC features. The packages are:

• Basic User - someone who might not even have a PC. Package includes a hard or soft phone (including hot desking)

• Standard User - Someone who has a PC and to whom communication is important. Package includes basic plus voicemail with unified messaging and a basic UC client

• Advanced User - Someone with a PC and who is reliant on communication in their job. Package includes standard plus voicemail with UM, mobile phone twinning, and an advanced UC client with presence.

Mitel also announced their own UC client and did some product renaming - Mitel Unified Communication Express 2.0 (formerly Integrated Office Companion), Unified Communicator Advanced 2.0 (formerly Your Assistant Premium), and Unified Communicator Mobile 1.6 (formerly Mobile Extension)

Avaya

Avaya advanced the user interface for UC with the addition of a speech-to-text (STT) solution for converting voicemail messages into text, delivered as an email to the end user. The voicemail then becomes an optional .wav attachment. The solution allows users to read voicemails, keep written records of them, allows them to respond via email or voice and the converted messages can be saved and searched on. SpinVox, one of the initial entrants in the STT area partnered up with Mutare Software; a developer of interactive voice and web applications, to deliver the solution to Avaya. STT is integrated into Avaya Modular Messaging unified messaging and is available in English, French, German and Spanish. It includes Mutare Software’s EVM gateway and comes with SpinVox’s STT messaging service.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
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I have a love/hate relationship with Avaya.

Way back in the pre-email, pre-cell phone days, when I started as an industry analyst with Dataquest, one of my clients was AT&T.  AT&T was a company I always admired and at one time in my checkered career I even tried to get a job with them.  Their human resources function was as screwed up as most big companies’ but that’s another story.  While AT&T was my client at Dataquest I had a great relationship with them.

As you know, AT&T begat Lucent which begat Avaya.  As the voice messaging industry was winding down in the ‘90s Avaya stepped in and acquired another company that I admired and had as a client, Octel.  As a result, I had lots of former Octel friends and former AT&T friends at Avaya.

This past Saturday, November 1^st 2008, marks the ninth anniversary of the founding of my company, Saddletree Research.  It also marks the beginning of my relationship with Avaya hitting the skids.  The love affair still existed back in 1999 due to the many friends I still had at Avaya from my Dataquest and In-Stat days, but I could instinctively feel things starting to change as any jilted lover can.

These days my relationship with Avaya is something akin to Avaya being a former girlfriend after a particularly acrimonious breakup.  We don’t have anything to do with each other except once a year when Avaya invites me to their annual analyst briefing.  We smile at each other and reminisce about the old days and better times, but I think we both know that we’re never going to get back together.  Avaya only dances with the big guys these days, like Gartner and Yankee, and select special friends.  I’m an independent in every sense of the word.  Gartner and Yankee are the football players.  I’m the soccer playing nerd.  A polite exchange of smiles is about as far as I get with Avaya.

When I go to their annual analyst fandango I endeavor to be civil and take in what they have to say.  Still, I have to admit it’s like seeing the old girlfriend that you never really got over.  Life has moved on and all parties have survived, but there’s still that faint feeling in the pit of the stomach.  The truth is I really don’t want to like Avaya anymore but they occasionally do something that still brings back happier memories of days gone by.

This year I connected with the usual Avaya suspects who gave me the simultaneous polite smile/brush off combo, but I also met some interesting people with surprisingly innovative ideas.  Most of these interesting people are recent additions to Avaya so they may not have been told the analyst relations rules yet.  I found these people to be candid and sincere, which were not traits that I had come to associate with Avaya over the past few years. 

One of these interesting, mold-busting people I met was Avaya’s relatively new vice president and general manager of unified communications, Steve Borcich.  When we sat down to talk I was expecting the rote Avaya company recitation from Steve but instead I found a guy who was, to use an already overused expression, thinking outside the box.  We talked about UC in general and in particular about how it could be applied in various business environments.  For example, Steve had thought through how UC could be applied in retail settings like the big box do-it-yourself stores to locate expert help regardless of which store an individual worked in.  He even talked about bringing in experts from outside the store who would provide customer assistance while at the same time promoting their own businesses.  Common sense but pretty smart nonetheless.

The idea of federation, as Steve described it, isn’t a new one but the way he described the use of UC in a federated arrangement showed that Avaya has been giving UC some serious thought beyond just beating the competition.  Steve’s idea of extended customer service could certainly be applied to the contact center and beyond.  I was impressed.

I still met plenty of Avaya people who looked me straight in the eye and told me they would do something when I know they had no intention of actually doing it.  I can usually tell who these people are and they haven’t let me down yet.  On the other hand there are plenty of new people at Avaya and they have to be given a chance to prove they’re different.  I hope some of them are reading this blog.  Don’t let us down.  People like me are counting on people like you, Steve.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Paul Stockford
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