It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged about the hospitality industry, although I always pay attention to the telephony infrastructure (Ok, the phones in the room and behind the front desk) wherever I stay. I’ve seen a lot. There is a lot of old Nortel out there, particularly as they had a hand hold in the hospitality industry early on, for example. But more and more I’m seeing newer, higher end phone sets in rooms, along with newer entertainment options as well.

Last July Mitel announced that the JW Marriott Indianapolis had selected and deployed Mitel’s Unified Communications solution based on its Freedom architecture. Mitel’s UC solution is a pure IP voice infrastructure spanning all 33 floors and over 1000 guest rooms, as well as the adjunct 104,000 square feet of convention space. The hotel has used this infrastructure to give guests new services not possible before, such as web-based information and other services on the phones in the rooms, as well as mobility options for guests.

When I was at the Cisco Collaboration Summit in Miami earlier this month I got to take part in a site visit of JW Marriott Marquis and Hotel Beaux Arts in Miami. This is a unique hotel from the perspective that it is a Marriott on the lower part, and an embedded smaller hotel on the 39^th floor. It is also technologically unique as well. Cisco, along with partner Modcomp, used the Cisco Connected Hotels framework to combine 12 Cisco technologies to deliver guest services, including physical safety, Medianet, video and collaboration.

The hotel has the most pervasive and creative uses of video I’ve ever seen in a hotel.  Up in the ballroom, which can double as a basketball or tennis court, is the biggest video board in the world, at 450 feet, made up of 52 inch Cisco LCD Professional Series display boards. This screen is amazing and multi-use. A basketball team could show replays, corporate events could show video presentations, etc. I could think of all sorts of uses. What came to my mind were those embarrassing childhood videos that brides and grooms sometimes torture each other with at weddings. But Cisco took this idea farther by saying that guests could use video devices to record and stream video during or after the wedding/reception. I don’t know about this one.

The hotel has video signage throughout the building for guest services, Cisco IP phones with video-enabled screens, and a TelePresence concierge in the lobby. The latter is almost a test case on how to introduce TelePresence to the mass market. They have positioned the board at some distance away from registration. However, during peak hours when there can be a line, those in the back of the line could have the opportunity to interact with a life-size video concierge that can show them restaurants options, Google Maps, menus, etc. The hotel says that they will be placing a printer there shortly so that guests can print out things such as Google Maps and directions.

For guests, there are wired and wireless options, including being assigned a wireless IP phone in their room, which they can take with them throughout the property. Guests have the option of using TelePresence rooms for meetings, can also request a mobile video concierge so that they can interact with a concierge without leaving a meeting room.  Once in their rooms, guests have multiple options of services on the phones, and the hotel has used the same for targeted advertising to guests. For example, during a slow time in the spa, they might put an ad on the phone with a discount during a specific time period that the person can get by mentioning a code on the display, or perhaps get a free drink or appetizer in the restaurant.

Finally, Cisco also took too care with security by using Cisco Physical Access Control, and Cisco IP Video Surveillance technology, coupled with Cisco Emergency Responder for 911 calls. This was really a great hotel, and don’t even start me on how nice the rooms were. I didn’t want to leave.

Tags: Collaboration, Mobile UC, Video by Nancy Jamison
2 Comments »

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.

—–

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
1 Comment »

On the same day as the big news that Google had announced the intent to acquire Motorola Mobility, another acquisition in the UC/contact center space emerged - Nuance made their next acquisition of the year by announcing their intent to acquire Loquendo - a wholly-owned subsidiary of Telecom Italia, for roughly $75M.  I was and wasn’t surprised by this move at all. After all, Nuance has been on an acquisition bender for years, but it still had my eyes open wide for moment, before turning to check out the Google Motorola announcement.

At first blush, what this acquisition gives Nuance is a lot. Loquendo, known for its wide variety of languages and text-to-speech voices (32 languages and 76 voices) is one of the biggest alternatives to Nuance in the realm of speech technologies.  By acquiring Loquendo, Nuance expands the company’s technology portfolio (with some overlap such as the core recognizers, biometrics, etc.), and gains a bigger geographic reach and presence, including support for more Latin languages.

To take from the Nuance press release, “Nuance intends to expand its operations and accelerate growth in four key areas:

Advanced Voice Solutions for New and Emerging Markets - Nuance and Loquendo’s combined technologies will advance groundbreaking voice capabilities through robust TTS, ASR and voice biometrics offerings - broadening Nuance’s global footprint especially in Europe and Latin America.

Strong Global Customer and Partner Relationships - The acquisition provides Nuance’s and Loquendo’s customers and partners access to the industry’s largest and most experienced voice and language portfolio. Loquendo’s technical expertise and talent, combined with Nuance’s global R&D resources and market strength, will accelerate a robust product and services roadmap to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for customers and partners.

Robust Language Support - Loquendo has strong proficiency in Latin languages, providing Nuance the broadest language support in the industry with the goal to drive natural, conversational interactions across a number of industry segments in the user’s preferred language. 

Innovation - Both companies offer sophisticated voice-enabled technologies. Together, Nuance and Loquendo will be able to accelerate innovation through a new center of excellence for speech research, based in Turin, Italy. This expands upon Nuance’s existing research and development facilities in Sunnyvale, CA, Burlington, MA, Aachen, Germany, Merelbeke, Belgium, Zurich, Switzerland and Montreal, Quebec.”

While good for Nuance, it does shrink the pool of alternatives to Nuance, which has some partners, who use more than one speech vendor, or are looking to expand to other vendors, concerned.

I thoroughly expect Nuance to have a lot in the way of announcements this fall, although it would be too early to hear about much of the impact that the Loquendo acquisition would have on their portfolio. However, one thing I’ve been talking and writing about is how formidable Nuance would be if they would get their assets in order. That is, with all the acquisitions they have done, they have a huge amount of technology to combine, and for years we have seen bits and pieces come out in new releases in different divisions, but not one cohesive R&D plan as to how they can cross utilize all of their different assets.  Nuance has a self-service/contact center division, a mobility division, healthcare specialty, dictation and imaging products, and others, but we really have yet to see one cohesive set of cross-indexed/developed products, with combined reporting, analytics and development tools.  OK, am I dreaming here?

One of Nuance’s competitors in speech, Microsoft, has the same issue; lots and lots of technology in different areas, and the capabilities to draw from one area and apply it to another. Cisco does as well — think Cisco’s investment in video technology, and their ability to apply that in areas from pure Telepresence, to UC, collaboration and the contact center. Microsoft has the same breadth of technology to draw from, and the more they can draw from one area and apply it to another,  the more formidable a competitor they become. 

Along those lines,  in a Microsoft tech blog this week it discussed the fact that Microsoft has taken the Microsoft Tellme speech assets and applied them to Xbox Kinect and Windows Phone for command and control - interesting stuff and fun video at the end. If Nuance can start to combine all of the assets they have, from an R&D perspective, and bring them to bear on all of the areas that they have a presence in - mobility, contact center, healthcare, etc., then the more formidable they become, and that has to be pretty scary for those remaining vendors still out there.

Back to business - One thing that the Google and Nuance announcements had in common was the acquisition of patents. Patents are like gold in tech. Well, half the time. You are either profiting from them or defending them. With Google, they recently lost out on the bidding war to acquire the patent assets of Nortel, which numbered in the thousands. They struck gold with the Motorola acquisition, as they are acquiring in excess of 17K patents.  

With Nuance it is the same thing. Loquendo brings a lot of patents to the party as well, and patents is something Nuance has used in the past to stave off competition with patent infringement suits. On another note, however, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you, and the later happened to Nuance this month when they lost their legal battle with Vlingo. Vlingo successfully defended against 30 patent infringement charges, when a jury in Federal District Court in Boston found that Vlingo did not infringe on U.S. Patent No 6,766,295 (the ‘295 Patent) entitled “Adaptation of a Speech Recognition System across Multiple Remote Sessions with a Speaker” .  Additionally, all claims in ‘295 patent have been found invalid by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) in a reexamination proceeding

However, we know who the real winners were in that battle - the lawyers $$$$$$$$.

Tags: Collaboration, Contact Center, Speech Technologies, Video by Nancy Jamison
No Comments »

This morning Cisco introduced three software products, continuing its parade of customer collaboration offerings that started with a deluge late 2009 at the collaboration summit they held in San Francisco. Each announcement since that one, that contained something around 60+ products, has built on that base.

Because of talk in the industry on social media, the most interesting of the three is SocialMiner, which provides social media monitoring, queuing and workflow. This will allow Cisco contact center customers to monitor social media networks, mine customer posts, and then sort and deliver actionable interactions to different customer care teams, who then can reply to customers in real-time back through the channel that they posted on. I got to see this in action with Cisco’s Flip Video team, who was an internal “beta” customer, and it really brought to light how useful using social media as a customer care channel could be, as seeing it live as opposed to just talking about it is so much more vivid because you get to see the kinds of things that customers post.

With SocialMiner there is no forced routing to agents. Instead agents can pick, reject or postpone taking a tweet, Facebook posting, blog, etc. Any agent can pick from an alert. In this iteration of the product there will be a “bubble” that says there is social media work in queue. When I saw the product all sorts of questions popped up for me including how much of an interruption will this be for an agent if they aren’t dedicated to that one channel, what happens if two agents go for the same interaction at the same time, etc. This is a work in progress, and just as we saw with Cisco Pulse and some of the other products introduced in November, a year ago, by July, Cisco had refined the products so much more that most of my questions were answered. I expect the same after more customers start using SocialMiner. After all, all the vendors who are adding social media are breaking new territory here. I think it’s exciting.

Door number 2 is Cisco Finesse, which a Web 2.0 collaboration desktop for the agent, which is a container, or as Cisco referred to it “a modifiable cockpit” that integrates collaborative applications into the agent desktop to help agents improve the customer experience. This is a merging of Cisco Quad, announced (again) last year, with traditional contact center functionalities.

Finally, door number three is (real name coming soon) network-based rich media capture that records conversations on the network, and allows agents access to captured media through simple interfaces. The solution supports recording, playback and storage, so that agents can mine valuable information about customers; hopefully improving customer satisfaction and all those other business goals we continually talk about.

So let’s get to “What’s in a Name Part II”. Back in September I blogged about how naming conventions have changed in high tech, and how it was helping unified communications and other areas including customer care. The blog is here, but in it I said, “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. ”

Here you have it. Cisco Finesse and Cisco SocialMiner. When Blair Pleasant and were getting to see the demo of SocialMiner last week and heard the name, we both thought the same thing. We had to step back for a second because to us, SocialMiner reminded us of the company CallMiner. But we both came to the same conclusion that it is a great name because it says what the product does, and just because it reminds us of a company, which has an equally great name for that same reason, it won’t to everyone. To most people it will be another name in a string of useful product names. Similarly, Cisco Finesse, doesn’t evoke images of what the product does in terms of it being an agent desktop, but makes perfect sense in playing off what it should enable an agent to do. Score 2 for Cisco on the names.

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
No Comments »

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
6 Comments »

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
2 Comments »

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
4 Comments »

I spent a few days in San Francisco at the Cisco Collaboration Summit. John Chambers, as always, did an amazing job of positioning Cisco as a leader and innovator. I totally agreed with Chambers when he said that the technology for collaboration is the easy party, but changing a company’s culture is hard, and it’s especially hard to change the way people work. He noted that collaboration needs to be driven from the top down to match a company’s business goals. It also leads to new business models, such as how to respond to a hurricane, or how you move operations to the data center.

Jim Grubb, Demo Master, demonstrated the Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform (ECP), which lets users create and share social content and expertise. ECP brings together people, information, and communities in an integrated collaboration experience. Customers will have to wait for this, however, since ECP is just going into beta trial today with some key accounts.

Here’s the basic idea behind ECP. Similar to IBM’s Lotus Connections and products from smaller Enterprise 2.0 companies like Socialtext, ECP is a social software portal application that lets users form team spaces and communities of interest where they can search for individuals with specific expertise, share information, and collaborate and communicate. As Grubb demonstrated, communities can be dynamically created based on a project, for example, and people and resources can be brought into the community quickly and easily. Based on tags and other criteria, users can search for individuals based on skills or expertise and bring them into the community. Using Cisco’s UC tools, users can integrate real-time voice and video capabilities, and send IM’s, initiate real-time voice and/or video calls using click-to-call capabilities. They can also invite other people to join the discussion. Community members can share blogs, wikis, videos, documents, and other information within the shared community workspace.

Cisco acknowledges that other vendors have similar social software tools, and they’re not the first ones in this area. However, there is a gestalt that occurs when ECP can be integrated with Cisco’s UC tools, allowing for a richer collaborative experience, with real-time voice, video, and chat capabilities.

Tags: Unified Communications by Blair Pleasant
4 Comments »

The Sunday New York Times article entitled “Living Apart for the Paycheck”  detailed how the economy is forcing more and more couples to have commuter marriages. This in turn caused me to reflect on the use of unified communications applications in the personal/home environment. I have written many blogs about unified communications, but applying unified communications to the home environment is a new. Read my take of this new development on my Blog, The User View, “Video Technology Aids the Enterprise and Families Alike“  at http://www.jamison-consulting.com/blog/ .

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
1 Comment »

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Blair Pleasant
No Comments »