December 31, 2013
Happy UC Migrations In 2014
By Art
Rosenberg, The Unified-View/
UC
Strategies Expert
It’s the end
of 2013, and even though there has been much talk about “unified
communications (UC),” there really hasn’t been much action! Part of the reason
is that there is still a lot of confusion about what “UC” really means and it’s
not just about IP-based, person-to-person voice call connections or (VoIP).
The future of
business communications is rapidly being accepted as becoming more mobile,
multimodal, IP based, and integrated with business process applications, but
what does that really mean for legacy PSTN-based telephony systems?. The major challenges for every organization,
large or small, for moving forward towards that future are twofold. First,
understanding how and where the benefits of using the new communications
technology will apply to the various operational needs and priorities of the
individual business operation. Secondly, planning a minimally disruptive and
cost effective migration from their current communication technologies.
The UC change
will basically impact how the legacy wired, premised-based, PSTN-connected
telephony system will be subsumed by wired and wireless cloud-based Internet
connectivity services, and how Communications Enabled Business Process
applications will replace person-to-person contact activities. Such change will
obviously be an evolutionary one, so most organizations will face the old
syndrome of “one foot on land (CPE, PSTN) and the other in the canoe (cloud
services, WebRTC).” So, it will be important to use technology that is flexible
enough to connect the old with new.
I usually like to focus on what the end users
will need and want from communication user interfaces, but there is no question
that infrastructure and connectivity that end users don’t see, are equally
important for implementation planning. Patton
Electronics is a well-established technology provider in Europe, but less
well known in the U.S., that is focused on providing the connectivity
technology to connect all the old endpoints with all the new business
communications endpoints required by both organizations and service providers
that must migrate to the UC future. As every organization starts their migration
planning towards IP Telephony as part
of UC enablement, they will need the connectivity flexibility that Patton’s
SmartNode and integration services with Microsoft and IBM UC platforms can
offer.
Smartphones
and tablets are changing the landscape
of most business applications, expanding end user multimodal access to
information and people for both consumers and enterprise employees. BYOD
concerns have required organizations to find a way to keep job-related
activities separate from personal use of a user’s mobile device. This was done
with technology described as “dual persona” container sandboxing on the mobile
device, where the business container is controlled by the organization, and the
user controls the personal container.
Since
consumers and BYOD employees get their mobile devices and services from the
wireless carriers that also provide network access connectivity, it is no
surprise that wireless service provider AT&T, came up with a cloud-based
“dual persona” capability for online business applications under the label of
AT&T Toggle (SM). To complement Toggle, AT&T just announced a
trial of a mobile app (Toggle Voice, based on AT&T's
RingCentral offering) that provides an old mobile phone capability for using
two phone numbers for separately initiating, receiving, and billing business
and personal phone calls. Such a personal/business dual-reach capability has
been demonstrated in the past by companies like Broadsoft, Movius, and Divide,
but AT&T might be unique among US carriers in offering this combination of
a secondary business number within a business container.
The service
convergence of real-time voice calls with online mobile apps will have a
significant impact on how end users will interact with companies, especially as
customers who need live assistance within the context of online self-service
applications. Because mobile consumers can now directly access such online
applications for information and transactions through business websites, they
will use such access as a first level of engagement, rather than with
traditional PSTN phone calls or other modes of contact.
Similarly,
because mobile consumers can now be contacted anytime and anywhere, business
process applications can be authorized by customers to initiate automated
notifications for important, time-sensitive situations (airline flight canceled
or delayed, bank account status changes, health monitoring alerts, etc). Such
notifications can also provide for convenient, “contextual” responses as well
as flexible access to available live assistance.
“Dual Persona” Mobile Devices Are Not Enough
Many industry
observers, including myself, have long talked about the need for mobile devices
to accommodate secure use of both business and personal communications and
applications. That is being accommodated by various mobile clients and APIs
that control different “containerized” online interaction functions on a mobile
device. However, there may be several
“personas” that an end user can require, not just a single job-related one, or
a single “personal” one. For this reason, BYOD must include the ability for end
point devices to use separate and secure “interaction personas” that are
personalized for each individual end user. (“BYOP?”)
As a starting
point for business communications, job-related personas will typically be
implemented by organizations to support their mobile employees and business
partners. However, since every business user is a also a consumer and therefore
a customer of a variety of public service and product providers, mobile
customer services will also have to be accommodated for personalized
information access via “mobile apps” and proactive customer notifications. This
will be particularly important for health care and financial services.
Customer
services are moving away from legacy telephone call centers and IVR
applications to support multimodal mobile consumers. This is particularly
critical for “BYOD” mobile users who will be using a variety of smartphones and
tablets, with different form factors and mobile operating systems, for all
their mobile interactions with people and online applications.
Mobile devices
must therefore be able to securely and efficiently support different modes of
IP communications between people (messaging, phone/video calls, social posts)
as well as personalized interactions with a variety of business process
applications designed for consumers/customers. In particular, every
self-service “mobile app” will need to provide “click-for-assistance” options
that will be UC-enabled for the user’s choice of multimodal communication.
(This covers a lot of different activities that must be managed by a single
mobile device, but the basic mobile device technology that has already been
developed for both network connectivity and application access security, needs
to be expanded and customized to cover all the real world use cases.
It’s still
early in the service development game, but multimodal mobile devices
(smartphones, tablets) are rapidly being adopted by all types of end users
(BYOD). This is driving the need for mobile communication service providers to
securely support separate controls for organizational employees, business
partners, customers, and consumers with what I call personalized “Interaction
Management Spaces” on their individual mobile devices.
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