Dimension Data held their analyst day in Boston this week. Six months past the acquisition of Dimension Data by NTT, the day was a blend of catching up on Dimension Data, results of the NTT acquisition, and initiatives in the industry trends of the day - most appropriately, cloud, for example, but thankfully not overhyped.

The event refreshed the feeling that I had about Dimension Data, first fostered several years back, that they are a different type of systems integrator.  What I mean by that is they act like a company that develops and deploys their own products, even though they sell, integrate, and implement solutions from other vendors; most notably Cisco and Microsoft. They have their own test labs for those products, extensively use and test them - and push the limits of them - internally as well.  Two years ago I talked a lot about Dimension Data’s use of UC, throughout their organization; particularly IM, presence and video, and this has only gotten stronger since then.

It was clear from presentations, but more so from talking in breakouts and at dinner that they extensively use what they sell. More importantly, the company does what real systems integrators do best - take all of that experience and get competing vendors, like Cisco and Microsoft’s products to work together. If you are a shop that has a Cisco network, for example, and a heavy investment in Microsoft, and want to deploy UC? Dimension won’t play favorites. They will figure out which of those two options will best suit your business and make it work for you.

Didata has implemented these solutions on an impressive scale. For example, Didata does most of the big TelePresence implementations for Cisco, having deployed over 350 of the big TelePresence rooms since the product was introduced. In addition, they have deployed more than three million Exchange seats (one third of them in the cloud), and one million OCS seats (including some Lync seats), as well. These were just a few of the statistics we saw at the event, that in total were quite notable.

NTT

As for the NTT acquisition, which was three years in the making; I have to say that as an analyst that loves to watch the results of the myriad mergers in the communication space over the years, this one is solid.  The two companies now cross sell each other’s products, work on joint solutions to enhance their portfolios, and have focused on how to use each company’s strengths to run things better operationally. For example, they are working on how to start offering clients a seamless end to end service; being able to take a trouble ticket and following it through the whole process.

Both companies were concerned that the acquisition would be a value-added one, with minimal impact on partners, particularly carrier partners, and so they strove to prove to their partners that they would continue to do business as they did before. Both companies wanted to be clear and proactive in their communications with their service provider partners, and this thought was mirrored in the comments made by the two customers Didata had on the customer panel during the event.

The customer panel had three participants; one from Kabel Deutschland and two from Global Crossing. Global Crossing said that they know that Didata has gone through changes, but they don’t have any concerns on their side, that it is business as usual. Kabel said that NTT is such a big player in the market that this isn’t the first time they have been touched by NTT, so they are fine with this.

The panelists had some specific comments on their relationship with Didata. For example, one of the participants from Global Crossing said the three words that come to mind when thinking about Didata are reliability, credibility, and honesty. He said that it is easy to work with them t, no matter what solution is being implemented. For example, they rarely go to Cisco TAC instead of Dimension Data. They don’t have to. He said that they can open a trouble ticket with Dimension Data, and this includes anyone from tech to admin at any level.  He said that one of the key issues for Global Crossing is that they just want to open up a ticket, get the information and move on, so one of the biggest things about the relationship with Didata is the tech support availability.

Another person said that they can call in with a question, not have a part number of contract number, and Didata will work with them, and not just ask for a credit card number to bill for a call. In essence, they are really easy to work with.

Culture

What makes Dimension Data different, and also has helped the merger work? It’s the culture and people. Although I’m sure they didn’t steal the phrase “great place to work” from the now defunct, ROLM, playbook (GPW as it was called was an essential theme at ROLM), Dimension Data uses that phrase in the same way. Their culture is around making Dimension Data a great place to work, and employee surveys play that out, particularly in the Americas. The attrition rate before and after the NTT deal was very low, and Didata is continually striving to keep it that way.

I know it sounds like I’m crowing about Didata, but in my three years or so with working with them, I’ve found nothing that speaks differently to the sentiment within this blog. If I had three things to say about them it would be GPW, easy to work with, and talented. Finally, I second the thought that Blair had in her summary of the event, in that this was one analyst conference where my BS meter did not go off either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: Collaboration, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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I ran across this blog by Houston Neal of Software Advice.com, on seven great applications for IP-PBXs in the medical field, which is a good start to laying out what can be done in different vertical markets with IP, particularly in the medical field, which is ripe for transformation. Houston points out, that in his practice of advising companies of free software to help in business, that in the medical field he believes that there is a lot to be gained by integrating IP-PBXs with electronic health records (EHR) and practice management systems. I couldn’t agree more. He then lays out the seven great applications he feels would be the result of combining voice and data using open source technology.

I’ll leave you to read his blog, but here is his list with some of my comments.

• Patient screen-pops - this isn’t just something that would benefit medical practices, in the traditional PBX world, its 21 year old technology that even today is so underused that it has most contact center analysts tearing their hair out
• IP faxing - Couldn’t agree with Houston more. Whereas faxing has gone the way of the Dodo in some fields, in others, such as medical, it’s still a big necessity.
• Appointment reminders - Sure thing, and lots of other outbound reminders, from pre-surgical instructions to education.
• Find me, follow me
• Dunning Voicemails - Hmm. I like this title about as much voicemail jail, and prefer to call it outbound collections or something like that.
• vPrescribing - Otherwise known as automated prescription refill. This is even better when combined with education for the patient about the drugs they are taking.
• Patient-centric recordings - IVR with personalization - extremely hot in the industry right now.

That is enough on my comments on his list. Here are a few I think he missed.

• Radiology dictation using speech recognition packages. I doubt this is open source free at the moment, but streaming dictation reports over an IP Network to a database that is then accessible to all parties that need that information is a great application.
• Unified communications applications other than find-me-follow-me. How about collaboration software, presence, IM, video. All of these can greatly enhance the productivity of medical personnel.
• Expert agents outside the contact center - IP Telephony provides a great opportunity, particularly when combined with UC functionality, of being able to bring in experts into a call with a doctor or patient, that aren’t part of the contact center.

OK, that is my short addition of what I’d like to see. I’m going to go check out some of the other verticals Houston works with.

Tags: Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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Microsoft released their Visual Search beta on Bing this morning. It’s pretty cool, particularly if you are a visual person. I played around with some of the categories they had listed to show off the application. One category, dog breeds, really shows how this software shines, compared to doing searches on Google. I’ve done this search before when trying to show what certain breeds of dogs look like, for my kids. Visual search is cool. Click on dog breeds and up come boxes with the individual dogs in them, just like if you pulled open a big file drawer and could see all the files. Go and try it.

Easily laid out to help, the screen allows you to sort by size of dog, either by clicking on a “sort by size button” at the top, or sliding a scroll bar labeled as such down the side. On the left side are popular subcategories that some one might want to click on, such as “most obedient”, “hypoallergenic”, etc., Below that are sub categories under the heading “narrow the search”. For example, categories include grooming needs, size, temperament, etc. Once you narrow your search, then you get links to the best choice for what you are looking for.

I loved it. But it’s more than that. The visual component is what got me. Let’s take “popular books” as a category. Sometimes you know the author or the name of the book, but sometimes you have just seen a book around and can’t remember either of those. Click on “popular books” and up come dozens of covers. I instantly recognized several my fellow airplane passengers had been reading last week on a plane with me.

While just playing with it seems like a toy, it does have the potential for enhancing unified communications and mobility applications, particularly multi-modal applications. Giving people visual choices, even on a small screen can speed up their ability to make selections, and the visual component spurs memory recall. I’d like to see how developers will incorporate this function into applications.

For now I have to quell my desire to go to Barnes and Noble.com rather than work. :) I now have to quell my desire to play longer with Visual Search. It’s fun and useful. Oh oh, I hear “greatest movies” calling me. Back to work.

Tags: ADA communications, Mobile UC, Unified Communications by Nancy Jamison
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I just attended the second annual Voice Search Conference in San Diego, organized by the non-profit Applied Voice Input Output Society (AVIOS) and Bill Meisel (president, TMA Associates, editor, Speech Strategy News). Voice search encompasses a wide range of applications from speech-enabled directory assistance and mobile applications, to speech analytics in the contact center.

Best said by the conference brochure, the conference was held “to address the disruptive role of speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile and Web applications. Voice Search 2009 addresses the disruptive role of speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and multimodal user interfaces in mobile, Web, and call center applications.” As a way of description, it goes on to say: “Voice Search can find information quickly by a spoken request. In a mobile environment, Voice Search helps address the limitations of a small device for text entry. It creates the option of a uniform user interface executed within the network and largely (or entirely) independent of the specific device.

On the Web, Voice Search can allow audio or video files containing speech, including podcasts or video clips, to be searched by content. A text inquiry can not only find relevant content on the Web, but the location in that audio file where keywords were spoken.

Voice Search makes voice and text more interchangeable. For example, voicemail can be transcribed and stored as text for easy scanning and retrieval.”

Note that the conference description says that the focus is speech technologies as used in mobile, web and call center applications, with no mention of UC. However, unified communications was everywhere at the conference from session topics to panel discussions, which was not at all the case in last year’s event. As a gauge of industry awareness, the interjection of the term unified communications across a speech technology conference shows how pervasive the concept is becoming.

That usage came in many forms from speakers who focused on unified communications, lots of talk of UC in general in sessions, to speakers talking extensively about the business capabilities that are being facilitated by the use of voice on mobile devices; which is a big part of UC. In one of the panels that I moderated, for example, Steve Gutierrez, from Dialogic, spoke on “Unifying Networks for Unified Communications”, which talked of the nuts and bolts of the network. In many of the contact center sessions, I heard plenty of mention of unified communications as well.

Similarly, unlike last year where the focus for mobility applications was just what kinds of things you could with your voice on a device, this year’s focus on mobility and multimodality, included user interface design, speech-enabled mobility applications such as 800-GOOG-411, Vlingo, and 800-CALL-411, and newer productivity applications such as the speech-to-text conversion of voicemails to text.

In one of the most amusing talks of the show, Gary Wright of Applied Speech Resources did a presentation, “A Year Using Voice Search”, in which he chronicled his experiences over a year intentionally using voice search on his mobile device, everyday, and on impromptu road trips. His questions at the outset of the year included do voice search applications live up to the hype?, for what tasks are they most useful, how do phone-based search and multi-modal search differ, and what is the user interface experience.

In addition to ferreting out all manner of interesting UI improvements, supported by some frustrating, but amusing anecdotes, Gary delivered his list of things that worked well as a user and suggested improvements for vendors.

Overall, the conference had exceptional presenters and presentations, carrying on the legacy which was the AVIOS and Meisel conferences of the past. Unlike many conferences I attend that are rife with vendor presentations that border on advertisements, many of the presentations at Voice Search reflected research studies into speech technologies, or real-world deployments of applications. I’m not sure if the show name is too broad or not specific enough, but I would invite any UC player to attend next year’s event.

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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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
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In August I blogged on No Jitter about Voxeo’s self-service and contact center capabilities, and on their acquisition of SIP-provider, Micromethod Technologies. At the time I made the case that due to some of the capabilities that this acquisition would bring, that it wouldn’t be long until Voxeo came out with a UC story of its own, seeing as it now had so many of the pieces to do so. I won’t reiterate all the details as you can read the blog by going to the August archives on the No Jitter site.

However, today, Voxeo announced a further acquisition, that when you dig down into it only confirms that Voxeo is moving closer to a compelling unified communications strategy, but just won’t admit the launch date yet. This morning they announced the acquisition of VoiceObjects, another self-service and tools provider for VoiceXML applications, similar in make up to Voxeo. The differences, and hence the compelling reasons behind the acquisition, are that VoiceObjects, with its headquarters in Germany, has a strong European base, and a base of customers that includes some of the largest self service customers (they mentioned in the 4-5K port range).

Both companies provide self-service. Both are enmeshed in VoiceXML. As Voxeo put it, Voxeo brings simplicity at the VoiceXML/CCXML browser level and VoiceObjects brings simplicity at the application server level. Both have great tool sets for application development. But Voxeo has that huge developer community and myriad small and medium (primarily) applications. VoiceObjects developers and has medium to large implementations.

What VoiceObjects also brings to the party are some capabilities that will enhance Voxeo’s ability to get into the unified communications game, and strengthens their multi-channel strategy. For example, Voice Objects has support for video and SMS. They also support USSD, a GSM standard that allows a user to establish a session and gain IM-like capabilities, but also menu based offerings, such as news, etc. SMS sessions can be initiated within USSD if the user wants, and USSD can be used while roaming too.

Now Voxeo has the pieces to produce full scale unified communications applications when they finish this acquisition and the work of integrating the products from this acquisition and the last into their product set. The UC baby is due soon; we just don’t have a date yet.

Full content of August NoJitter Blog at http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2008/08/stealth_player.html

Tags: Mobile UC, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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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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Enghouse Systems Ltd., and its more well-known US subsidiary, Syntellect, acquired Envox Group AB this week. Speaking just of Syntellect and Envox alone, both have communication development platforms, extremely similar products and practices providing speech self-service and contact center solutions to the enterprise and hosted markets.

At first I wondered, consolidation play or something else? Certainly it’s a consolidation play. With more than 1.24 million IVR ports and more than a million contact center agents worldwide; this obviously gives Syntellect a leg up in the market share category. It also broadens their geographic coverage from a partner perspective too. But it is more than consolidation. Without going into deep detail about the nuances of their different product sets, it also gives Syntellect more product options quicker than they might have had alone. For example, Envox has broad support for a number of media types on their platform, which Syntellect does too, but this will give Syntellect support for media such as video and SMS right away. So, whereas the contact center industry vendors talk up video, it certainly isn’t prolific yet, but the addition of this capability will position Syntellect customers to take advantage of video as more uses for it in the contact center become apparent. I also believe this will speed up any potential move on Syntellect’s part of providing customers with unified communications type functionality.

Envox customers will also benefit from Syntellect’s product portfolio as well. Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management suite brings a fully featured set of multi-media contact center capabilities that can leverage the existing Envox platform ports. Also, Voiyager, Syntellect’s superlative development and testing solution for VoiceXML applications that I have regularly blogged about will be a bonus for Envox customers. If Syntellect could combine Voiyager with some of the development tools that Envox has it would be a knock out. Just a thought, if this merging of product sets is done well.

Tags: Unified Communications, Unified Communications Information by Nancy Jamison
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