Bill Gates Leads Microsoft Into UC and IP Telephony

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 20, 2007

Bill Gates Grabs the Multimodal Torch of UC

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Microsoft’s highly promoted Launch of it’s Office Communication Server 2007 in San Francisco last week was well attended and well documented in the technology press. There should really have been no “new” surprises, since Microsoft has been well publicizing and testing its strategic unified communications (UC) technologies directions for quite a while now, and it has long acknowledged that they are far from being completely finished.

So, the big deal really is about how seriously they are ready to move into the traditional small and large business telephony markets with UC software vs. hardware. Perhaps the biggest indicator of this serious thrust was having Bill Gates take the lead for Microsoft in publicly challenging the diminishing role of hardware-based PBXs and their proprietary desktop telephones in providing voice communications to business organizations and application processes as part of the new, converged world of flexible, “multimodal” unified communications.

Microsoft is not merely saying they have new and better software products that will handle IP telephony and voice messaging traditionally supplied by the telecommunications industry, but emphasizing that they are also supporting the new paradigms of multimodal “presence” management, and more intelligent, “contextual” contact initiation within an enterprise. However, they are still working on making standards-based “federated” presence for telephony available across both enterprise and consumer boundaries to enable what I have dubbed “transmodal communication” to provide increased flexibility and efficiencies for individual and business process productivity.

All this is in addition to reducing the basic costs of implementing and supporting traditional business telephony needs. Inasmuch as Microsoft is already perceived as a leader in the increasingly dominant use of business text messaging (email, IM), it is now moving help to drop the UC shoe on the future role of IP telephony and voice and video conferencing.

Simplifying UC Complexities for End Users

Because extending the capabilities of telephony under the umbrella of multimodal UC also increases the procedural complexity of business communications, Microsoft has focused on the goal of simplicity for its converged UC software products. Keeping the user interface simple is dependent on exploiting both visual interfaces and speech recognition, and both forms of communication interaction were demonstrated during the launch program, including both self-provisioning management and operational usage features. The bottom line of Microsoft’s UC launch was not merely to focus on IP telephony capabilities, but as Bill Gates repeatedly mentioned, to support the flexibility of “multimodal communications.”

Although he didn’t use my term of “transmodal communication,” Gates and other Microsoft speakers frequently described just that in the many examples given of coming UC flexibility. That is where end users can dynamically escalate from one form of business contact to another (asynchronous messages to IM to phone calls to multi-party voice and video conferencing), as the specific communication situation requires. So, come on Microsoft, say it!

UC Migrations And Partnering

By now it is pretty obvious that multimodal UC is not a single, simple “application” within a single enterprise or enterprise location, but rather the seamless interoperability of all forms of business contact and information delivery to people. That means it covers a variety of business communication needs, different business application and communication servers, using different kinds of endpoint devices, and across different kinds of networks. Making all this work efficiently and effectively will mean adding new capabilities, features, and functions, in addition to slowly replacing old, proprietary technologies that TDM telephony is noted for. This, in turn, requires serious partnering, at both the hardware and application software levels. Partnering was a big highlight of the OCS Launch, and you can read all about that in the press write-ups and Microsoft proclamations.

One of the effects of Microsoft’s strong push into the telephony side of UC is that it will be polarizing the industry in terms of interoperability and with other technology and service providers all taking positions relative to both UC in general and specifically to Microsoft relationships. As technology developers move into UC offerings, there will be a lot of overlap and choices, including the options for CPE, hosted and managed services. This overlap will show up particularly in the reseller channels, where the biggest battles will take place for the large SMB market that is ready to get rid of archaic key systems and is ripe for what UC and mobile devices have to offer in the way of services.

As we have pointed out repeatedly, migration to UC will be able to exploit hosted services as a cost effective way for business organizations to selectively “pilot” applications and learn what UC can do for their specific, high-value business processes. Forget “best practices” – just do it to find out what works best!

The Microsoft UC Software Pie

Besides Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, Microsoft showed off it’s other UC software applications, including:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services

Microsoft Live Meeting

Microsoft Roundtable (videoconferencing)

Part of the Microsoft UC Launch agenda was also to identify the strategic operational role that UC could play in some selected vertical industries, i.e., Financial Services, Manufacturing, and Healthcare.

Other Comments About The Microsoft UC Launch

I was planning to quote other sources of objective and interesting comments about the big Microsoft Launch, but there were so many that I decided against it. However, I do want to point you to the practical observations of the UC Strategies team that attended the Launch event and who had the opportunity to talk to various customers and partners who were exposed to Microsoft’s new technology.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

My Take on Microsoft’s Approach to UC Migration

I authored a recent white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise transition planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of evolving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the UC evolution can start with adding IM/presence management, unified messaging, mobile devices, and IP softphones. You can download a copy of the white paper by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Maximizing Enterprise User Benefits of Unified Communications

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 10, 2007

Maximizing The Benefits Of Unified Communications

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As the definition of what everyone means when they say “unified communications” (UC) becomes clearer to the various business enterprise constituencies, it is also becoming more evident that the benefits of UC will be very dependent upon the technologies that end users can selectively control. If a user has NO device for communicating, then all the networking and application servers in the world won’t help a bit!

What is really happening, however, is just the opposite. End users are going after maximum communication flexibility with all forms of contact and media converged and interoperable on a single desktop or handheld endpoint device. Why? Because individual users have different communication interface needs at different times, depending on where they are, what they are doing, whom they are communicating with, and especially when they are mobile and must deal with a variety of “rich” information.

When we talk about the benefits of UC, we can look for specific enterprise business process efficiencies (“macro-productivity”), as well as at the benefits to the individual end users in doing their jobs (“micro-productivity”). Obviously, the latter will impact the former, so it is important to include both perspectives.

New International Survey Ties End User Interest in UC to Teleworking Benefits

One of the major factors holding up enterprise UC migration has been perceived as relatively low end user adoption or “demand,” for UC at the desktop. This, in turn, has forced business or IT management to find other justifications for implementing UC capabilities. A new survey of both end users and IT management sponsored by Dimension Data Holdings focuses the role of UC on facilitating work productivity in the “virtual” workplace. Because telework (or Flexi-Work as they call it) directly benefits individual end users in a very personal way, in addition to addressing basic issues of staffing and retention for the business organization, it may be the “secret sauce” that will drive greater user demand for UC implementations.

The survey involved 390 IT managers and 524 business end users who use a PC for work at least fifteen hours a week in thirteen countries. Although there are some variances in UC adoption between end users in different areas of the world (Europe, U.S., Asia, 3^rd world countries), there are no surprises in seeing newer forms of communication gaining increased traction with end users.

More Real-time Business Communications Through Text

Now that text messaging has become real-time (IM, SMS), it is competing with voice telephony as THE most common form of real-time business communications. Not that conversational voice doesn’t have some useful advantages over text, such as being more efficient and delivering more emotional content for discussions, but like everything else, voice conversation has its place. That “place” is going to very dynamic, because increasingly mobile people can’t necessarily talk or listen all the time or in every environment. That is also where the most benefits of UC will be realized, when UC enables contact with people “any where, anytime, any how.”

The new survey reconfirms findings of an older ACM report I cited from last year that compared email and phone calls with face-to-face meetings, and showed email being perceived as equal in importance to phone calls. This new study surveys also covers use of both Instant Messaging (IM) and mobile text messaging and shows increasing growth of all forms of messaging over phone calls

Here are the reported and not too surprising end user results on leading business communication applications, for both usage and perceived personal productivity:

Communication type - % Using -% Helps “Productivity” Most

E-mail - 100% 70%

Telephone (Wired) - 80% 53%

Mobile phones - 76% 52%

Instant Messaging - 66% 27%

Note: Instant Messaging is not fully accepted for business use within many enterprise organizations.

The Two Kinds of Live Business Contacts – “Person-to-person” and “Person-to- Anyone Available”

Contacting people in business is not as simple as always knowing exactly whom you want to talk to. If it is a matter of getting up-to-date information, computer and network technology is minimizing the need for contacting a live person to get such information through online, visual and speech interfaced “self-service” business applications. If it is a matter of getting live assistance of any kind, then network and presence management is now bringing greater choice in locating and contacting someone who is qualified and available in whatever form of contact that is feasible at the moment for both the contact initiator and the contact recipient. This kind of contact technology has evolved from the sensitive demands of customer support contacts (call centers) to what is now useful to anyone doing business with or within an organization. That’s what we expect UC to deliver as benefits to both individual end users and the business processes they are associated with.

So, it’s not just a matter of changing the voice telephony “pipes” to VoIP connectivity, because that alone will do nothing to facilitate making contacts with people. You still have to know who they are, where they are, how available they are, and with what kind of contact modality that will work all parties involved at any given moment in time. Otherwise, as a “contact initiator” (caller), you can waste a lot of personal productivity time, but worse yet, delay the business process or problem resolution involved. That’s what UC ROI is really all about!

So, What Can Help UC To Be More Effective?

It should be very obvious by now that personalized wireless mobility is going to make a big difference in making people more accessible. That applies not only to “person-to-person” contacts, but also to “person-to-anyone” contacts and to evolving “automated business process (applications) –to- person” contacts, recently referred to as “CEBP” (Communications Enabled Business Processes). As individual users become more accessible through a variety of personalized mobile devices, pre-authorized business process applications will be able to selectively drive timely, proactive information delivery and notifications, which can be followed by a variety of self-service or live interaction options with the information recipients.

Again, it’s not just a matter of presence management (connectivity status, location, availability), but also the flexibility of mobile, multimodal communications which will allow the contact initiator to quickly and efficiently communicate, in real-time or asynchronously, in any modality acceptable to the recipient.

Communication mobility will provide the following kinds of benefits to UC:

· Make both contact initiators and recipients more accessible to communication contact (though they may not be available for every modality of contact).

· With multimodal mobile device flexibility, both the contact initiator and recipient will have greater flexibility of choice for messaging exchanges and transitioning to real-time conversations.

· With UC, which subsumes unified messaging capabilities (UM), the messaging options will also be improved, where the message originator can exploit the convenience of speech, while the message recipient can exploit the efficiencies of text retrieval.

· Responding to any form of messaging will also be flexible, since the respondent can choose whatever form of response is most convenient or appropriate for the respondent, regardless of the original message format.

· Mobility will also facilitate “instant,” multi-party conferencing when rapid decision-making is required and the appropriate people are physically located anywhere. This includes dynamically transitioning from messaging exchanges to multi-party, IP-based voice and video conferencing.

The bottom line of such flexibility stemming from the combination of mobile access and UC multimodal communication options will be faster contact initiation and faster response from people, both which are key to improved business process performance. For people who are not mobile themselves, the people they are trying to contact might very well be, so mobility requirements have to be viewed from both sides of any person-to-person contact.

Implications For UC Planning

It will not be enough to simply install just VoIP networks, IP-PBXs, Unified Messaging servers, or SIP-based desktop phones, because, without multimodal mobile devices, end users who are key to high-value business process will not be able to communicate as efficiently and flexibly as possible. Whether it is as a contact initiator, a recipient, or a respondent, when push comes to shove, maximum mobile flexibility can make a difference! (Think of emergency health care or other emergency situations.)

For this reason, all UC migration planning must also consider the individual end users involved and insure that they are equipped to exploit UC to the maximum required for their job responsibilities and for the priorities of any associated business process applications. This should tie in with plans for “mobilizing” the enterprise work force, as Nokia has noticeably done within its own organization and documented in their book last year “Work Goes Mobile.” What mobility migration shares in common with UC migration is the emphasis on business process values and priorities. You must “kill those two birds with the same business process stone!”

The mobility question of course also highlights the issue of fixed-mobile telephony convergence (FMC), where we have wide-area cellular networks for off-premise access, premised-based Wi-Fi and WLANS, and shades of wireless networks starting to appear in between (Wi-Max). The enterprise challenge is to enable any user’s endpoint device to be interoperable across such networks in order to insure mobile accessibility to key people in high-value business processes, wherever they may happen to be.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or .

Are You Ready For Microsoft’s Big UC Launch on October 16^th?

I authored a recent white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise transition planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of evolving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the UC evolution can start with adding IM/presence management, unified messaging, mobile devices, and IP softphones. You can download a copy of the white paper by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Business Communication "Pain Points" Need UC

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 4, 2007

Now That UC Technology Is Getting Real, The Ball Is Back In The Enterprise End User’s Court

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Today was the first stop of CMP Media’s VoiceCon Tour 2007, which focused on the realities of migrating to unified communications (UC). Now that UC technology is becoming real as communication software products and services, it is time to look at how end users, both inside and outside of the enterprise organization will exploit new UC capabilities as part of their business processes. This is not only practical from an implementation perspective, but is also necessary to provide business justifications for enterprise management.

What we originally referred to several years ago as personal “micro-productivity” for individual users and group “macro-productivity” for all end users involved in a business process, has now been expanded by the UC Strategy experts who organized the VoiceCon Tour day-long program. In order to plan for implementing UC technologies, both analysts and technology providers are now urging enterprise organizations to tie in specific, high-value business processes to communications activities, under the label of a “Business Process Zone.”

Most of the program sessions discussed practical questions about how to go about implementing UC capabilities based upon business end user needs and business process payoffs, rather than just infrastructure questions and IT responsibilities. The technology providers who participated in the discussion panels were all in agreement that operational business needs have be identified and prioritized as a prerequisite for any intelligent implementation planning. Business management has to know what business communication problems they want to solve first, which can then be translated into UC capabilities for specific categories of users, both inside and outside of the organization.

Business Process “Hot Spots”

Marty Parker, now a principal of Unicom Consulting that is dedicated to assisting enterprise organizations in planning and implementing UC technologies, provided useful guidelines to the audience for “starting at the top” to find critical delays in communications that cause inefficiencies in high-value business process work flow procedures. Such “communication hotspots” should the initial targets for selective UC implementation because they can more easily justify implementation costs and minimize the scope of the UC project to very doable, non-disruptive levels of effort.

Because UC technology is comprised of a variety of communication application components that may be used both independently by end users (desktop and mobile messaging, telephony, voice/video conferencing), as well as integrated with a variety of different business process applications, it has been difficult to “see the forest for the trees.” However, UniComm Consulting and UC Strategies have put together a very useful framework for organizing such technologies in an objective way to enable business analysis needs to correlate with the new functional capabilities of UC technologies. For more information about this planning framework, check out the information provided on the UC Strategies website about “UC Solution and RFP Templates.”

New Siemens User “Painpoint” Productivity Loss Study

A highlight of the program was a preliminary announcement by a panelist from Siemens, Graceiela Tiscareno-Sato, Global Marketing Manager for Unified Communications, who discussed some key findings from an objective study of business users around the world and their loss of productivity because of “fragmented” communications. This study was also sponsored by UC Strategies, and a copy of the report can be downloaded, as well as a podcast interview about the results, can be found on that web site.

The bottom line of the study was to show that real productivity losses can result from inefficient business communications, most of which can be translated into hard dollars. Such losses will not only be felt by the enterprise organization, but obviously also by the individual users. With the next generation of business workers already conditioned to be mobile and multimodal in their communications, UC capabilities will therefore become very critical in attracting and retaining valued employees.

Graciela offered three key steps for enterprise IT to follow:

1. Help identify key business employees and the business/communication application processes they use (She suggests asking HR who those people are!)

2. Look for available technology that will “unify “ those communication processes

3. Help “pilot” those business processes to learn what UC can do for productivity and “pain points.” Such pilots can also use hosted services to facilitate implementation.

The VoiceCon Tour reflects a step forward in educating the enterprise market, especially IT management, on how to move forward towards UC. I was told by one of the attendees, obviously not an IT person, but a business user, that she was very pleasantly surprised to learn what new UC capabilities can do for users and business communication procedures. She apparently was now going to become more actively involved in pushing for UC.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

Are You Ready For Microsoft’s Big UC Launch on October 16^th?

I authored a recent white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise transition planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of evolving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the UC evolution can start with adding IM/presence management, unified messaging, mobile devices, and IP softphones. You can download a copy of the white paper by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

UC, Hyperconnectivity, Caller Text Messaging

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 25, 2007

Why UC Needs “Hyperconnectivity”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Let’s face it! UC is not simple. It is more complicated than just voice telephony or any one particular form of messaging, because it is really a “mix and match’ of multimodal communication capabilities that individual end users will selectively exploit depending upon their personal needs. For person-to-person contacts, this means that both contact initiators and contact recipients will have choices in how they want to (or have to) communicate at any given moment in time.

UC, and it’s unified messaging components, is also forcing the convergence of wired and wireless network communications, because timely communications requires personalized, location-independent, mobile accessibility. This convergence is having a disruptive impact upon how business organizations support their end user UM/UC communication needs with a combination of internal technology and external services. It is also creating a lack of terminology to properly describe new communication infrastructure problems and their solutions. So, I was happy to see Nortel come up earlier this year with a good descriptor for the network problems that UC (and mobility) will be generating. They called it “hyperconnectivity,” which they define as the “state in which the number of devices, nodes, and applications connected to the network far exceeds the number of people using the network.”

This emphasis on providing adequate network capacity for the flexibility that UC will offer end users is probably one of the reasons that Microsoft has strategically partnered with Nortel, because network hardware management is not Microsoft’s cup of tea. They are more interested in the operating systems, business applications and user interfaces that will feed network traffic, and will leave network technology management to the likes of Nortel, Cisco, and other network infrastructure providers.

The “Chicken and the Egg” – What About “UC Traffic?”

While it is indeed necessary to plan for adequate network resources to handle the different types of converged communication traffic that will be flowing between people and application processes (let alone directly between applications), I have to agree with the concerns voiced by UC consultant Nancy Jamison in her latest comment on UCStrategies.com about ”What I Didn’t Hear Much of At VoiceCon.” Apparently there was a lot of emphasis on the future of UC applications and features, ROIs, and interoperability, etc., but little discussion of the impact of “UC traffic” upon network resources and how that will be handled.

To make matters even more complex, because the flexibility of UM/UC will really pay most importantly for mobile users, network resources will have to support all forms of wired and wireless connectivity between different kinds of user endpoints. However, because individual mobile end user communication needs will be dynamically affected by personal activities, their choice of contact modalities (i.e., real-time vs. asynchronous messaging, voice vs. visual text), may fluctuate wildly. This will affect end user behavior as both contact initiators and as contact recipients and change the kind of network traffic they will generate.

This is the problem domain that Nortel is addressing with it’s focus on “hyperconnectivity,” but, no matter what you want to call it, it means that IP networks will have to be device independent, very flexible as to what kinds of communication traffic they will handle, and as to how much capacity and priority they can provide to the various forms of voice and video communication contacts.

The flexibility of UC to enable users to easily choose any method of contact initiation vs. what contact recipients will choose to, can change network usage in two ways. Escalating the response to an asynchronous email or voice message by a “click-to-call” action will increase network demand, while downgrading a voice call attempt to an IM exchange or a voice/text message will reduce network demand. Similarly, converting a voice message to text will make message retrieval and storage more efficient, both from a user productivity and system resources perspective. Listening to a text message via text-to-speech will be convenient for eyes-free mobile situations, while preserving the efficiency of the original text message.

So, how much network capacity will be required to support all of the above? How can the enterprise plan for unknown future network traffic without first learning which users will be doing what with UC capabilities?

UC Applications – Increasing “Speed of Contact” vs. “Ease of Use”

Although the success of UC will be very dependent upon simplifying the user interface for managing multimodal communications, “ease of use” alone will not be enough for efficiently completing business contacts. For example, everyone looking at UC is excited about using a simple visual interface, i.e., “click-to-call,” to initiate a phone call, that is not enough to insure contact. It has always been pretty easy to initiate a telephone call (if you knew the number), but that didn’t mean the call attempt would be successful; in fact, the old statistics that around 70% of business call attempts “fail” might get much worse because it will be easier to initiate call attempts to people who are just not available. With mobile phones, call screening is also contributing to that increase of failed real-time contacts because users who are mobile don’t want to be interrupted by low priority contacts.

As UC industry attention increasingly focuses on satisfying the end user with easy-to-use application interfaces and simple procedures, the importance of “real-time” contacts has not diminished. This is especially true for contact initiators who now have plenty of non-real-time messaging options and will (hopefully) use real-time contacts more selectively when really necessary.

Presence management, along with the single contact approach of UC (“one number”), will be effective mechanisms to facilitate more efficient real-time contacts. This will be true for “person-to-person” contacts (phone calls, “push-to-talk,” or IM), or “instant” group conferencing by voice, video, or IM. This technology approach doesn’t necessarily make the calling procedure easier, but it will speed up successful call connections, vs. failed attempts, particularly for person-to-person call attempts. That, in turn, will increase what I will call the “speed of use” of IP telephony.

Increasing “Speed of Use” for Caller Messages

Legacy voice mail systems emulated telephone answering machines at the recipient’s end of the phone line, because there was no other way to quickly know the availability of the recipient without actually making a call. In addition, there was no good way to send a location-independent message before electronic messaging. (Remember the handwritten pink telephone message slips?)

One of the severe limitations of legacy voice mail systems, however, was that outside callers did not have the same privileges for initiating a voice message to a subscriber’s voice mailbox as another subscriber on the same voicemail/phone system. For one thing, outside callers could not directly access a voice mailbox without first attempting to make a phone call attempt through a voicemail auto-attendant or to a DID number. One would think that with new multimodal “smartphones,” universal email addressing, IP telephony, UC, and presence management, it’s time for a change!

Now that everyone is (1) already using electronic messaging, (2) will increasingly be using multimodal desktop or mobile “smart phones,” and (3) will soon be able to check a recipient’s (call) availability status with federated presence management, there is an opportunity to increase the “speed of use” for caller messaging too. Why should the “smart caller” continue to be at the mercy of a recipient’s “dumb” voice mailbox? Why can’t contact initiators quickly and easily create and send any kind of message as soon as they find out that the recipient is unavailable for a voice conversation?

Because short voice messages are easier and faster for callers to create, especially when they are mobile, voice will remain a convenient form of contact forever. This also applies to the ability to send voice messages as attachments to an email message, rather than typing text. However, retrieving and managing voice messages is still not so efficient for the recipients, and using mature speech recognition technology to convert voice to more manageable text messaging is becoming a new, more efficient “call answering” service for busy users.

Technology developers like CallWave, SpinVox, TalkText, and SimulScribe are driving consumer market interest in voice-to-text messaging through service offerings that provide greater personal productivity efficiency to contact recipients. However, as I pointed out in a previous article, it won’t be long before enterprise organizations will also want to exploit such services to minimize the drain on internal voice messaging resources.

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

White Paper on UC ROIs and Transition Strategies

I authored a recent white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise transition planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of evolving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the UC evolution can start with adding IM/presence management, unified messaging, mobile devices, and IP softphones. You can download a copy of the white paper by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

UC Rubber Meets Enterprise Roads

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

September 14, 2007

Where the UC “Rubber” Meets the Enterprise “Road”

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

This is a follow up to my last article about low “demand” for UC. Although TDM telephone systems are very gradually being replaced by IP-PBXs and desktop IP phones, along with IP-based voice mail and “unified messaging” products, when it comes to full-blown unified communications (UC), market movement is still relatively slow. However, the telecommunications industry is going through a disruptive cycle of change, where it’s not just a matter of adopting new communication technologies, but also replacing some of the ways the traditional telephone is used.

We are still going through a “hype” cycle, where UC concepts are being promoted for all kinds of business and personal communication benefits, but, as real products and services are announced, business organizations have to get serious about how UC can affect the way they operate. This will require first understanding what UC technology will actually do for various end users and for those business processes that involve those end users. That means “UC applications,” and I don’t mean “VoIP!”

UC Applications

Using Blair Pleasant’s VoiceCon Fall presentation in San Francisco on the market structure of UC as a frame of reference for what functionality end users will see, the key UC application areas were identified as:

· Voice/Telephony (“VoIP”)

· Collaboration (conferencing, information sharing)

· Instant Messaging (IM)/Presence

· Unified Messaging (UM)

· Business Process/Applications (Communication enabled applications)

All of the above can support the flexibility of multimodal communications between end users within the same business organization, with individuals in other organizations, or with customers/constituents. However, there will be differences in how the various business market segments (and their customers) will transition to UC in the next few years.

The Barriers to UC Migration For Everyone

First and foremost, all business market segments are very confused about what UC is, what the benefits are, and how they should implement it. Clearly, the confusion is centered mostly around the telephony part of UC, since that is what is changing dramatically. This confusion is affecting both end users, who don’t understand what the changes will do to them as callers and call recipients, and business management, who don’t understand the benefits to their business processes.

IT staffs are another obstacle to UC migration for several reasons. They may not know what UC application capability to implement first, how to do it, or how to support it. They may also see such new technology as a threat to their job security, especially if UC comes in the form of hosted or managed services. Couple that with low demand from both business management and end users and there is obviously going to be resistance to changes to the status quo.

The Small Business - The “S Market”

I took advantage of my participation in TMC’s Internet Telephony Expo in L.A. this month to discuss some of the barriers facing business migration to UC. In particular, I was concerned with the “Small” business market, since that is a big market segment, as shown in the chart below provided by one of my panelists in discussing IP telephony as a hosted service.

Theoretically, small businesses should be easiest to migrate to UC for several reasons:

· They don’t have big investments in legacy TDM phone systems to protect

· They don’t have big IT staffs and are therefore good candidates for faster implementation through hosted and managed services

· They already probably use hosted email services

· They probably are extensive users of cellular services to be always accessible to customers and business contacts

· UC capabilities will enable the small business to enjoy the same competitive technology benefits of IP communications as larger organizations

· Decision-making can be much simpler and usually made by business owners management

While it would appear that the “S” market should be moving forward quickly into UC, the fact is that they are not moving that fast. There seem to be a number of barriers that are getting in the way.

For the small business market, which is dependent on value-added resellers (VARs) to give them advice and support in implementing telephone systems as CPE, the convergence of telephony with all forms of IP communications (email, IM, mobility) from multiple technology providers under UC, is challenging because of new expertise they don’t have yet. Furthermore, because software-based UC applications are moving towards hosted subscription services, the VAR’s haven’t adapted their thinking about generating income from equipment sales and maintenance to software maintenance and subscription sales.

Larger Business Organizations Have More UC Homework To Do

For the bigger companies (Medium, Large enterprises), things are a little more complicated because they have more locations, more customized business process applications, greater investments in legacy telephone systems, and larger IT staffs who will not be experienced with IP telephony technology, nor with application convergence and mobility issues of UC. All this will require greater justifications for change, as well as practical priorities for a selective transition to UC application technologies.

One major planning obstacle will be the operational Line of Business management, who should be able to identify the important business process problems that can be alleviated by UC capabilities, the relative ROI value and priority of such solutions, and which key end users really need UC capabilities (e.g., mobile, customer-facing users). They should also be able to identify pertinent, high-value business process applications that can integrate with UC capabilities (Communications Enabled Business Processes) to achieve faster workflow performance. But who is educating their thinking about requirements, UC capabilities, and benefits for their business operations? The CIOs? Vendors?

“Alignment” of IT With Business Management in Large or Growing Companies

A recent study by Bain & Company found that companies grew faster and lowered costs by making their IT staff more “effective,” rather than through simple “alignment” with business management. Their definition of “alignment” has been primarily to simply give individual business units raw IT resources to throw at their different problems. But if neither business management nor IT knows what their end users need in terms of communication flexibility and work flow efficiency, this will be like the “blind leading the blind!”

In one of my panel discussions on the role of “SIP In The Call Center,” which is a pretty technical view of IP telephony and UC for customer contact applications, my panelists from both Nortel and Genesys agreed that getting business process management involved in defining operational application needs was a key prerequisite before asking IT to plan any SIP-based contact center implementation. So, my definition of “alignment” for UC implementations includes the following steps:

1. Educating both business management and IT about the operational work flow benefits that UC can provide.
2. Having IT understand what work flow and communication problems both business management and end users currently have, their relative priorities for business activities, and which specific end users will be involved (both within and outside of the organization).
3. Having IT research pertinent new technologies to supplement or replace current technology that meet business and end user requirements, including hosted and managed service offerings
4. Pilot and test UC applications that are high priority to determine how effective they will be and what the transition impact will be for those users that will be affected.
5. With the results of the above, IT can then justify practical implementation recommendations because they have been exposed to practical experience pertinent to their own operational environments.

Needless to say, since UC technology is still evolving and “best practices” can’t replace the steps mentioned above for any business environment, it will be practical to enlist the services of independent and objective consultancies, which can supplement internal resources with their UC implementation experience and awareness of available UC solution alternatives. One newly formed consultancy that has both long-time telephony and messaging experience and now specializes in UC planning and implementation is UniComm Consulting. (http://www.unicommconsulting.com/).

What Do You Think?

You can contact me at: artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360.

White Paper on UC ROIs and Migration Strategies

I authored a new white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise migration planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of moving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the migration can start with adding IP softphones, mobile devices, and unified messaging. You can download a copy by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two leading enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the need for identifying individual business user requirements for UC.

Microsoft's Enterprise UC Migration Strategy

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

August 6, 2007

Microsoft Leading Technology Scramble
For UC Market Positioning

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

On July 26th, Microsoft made a big deal of its Release to Manufacturing (RTM) of its Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) and Office Communicator 2007 client as its precursor to pushing into the unified communications market this fall. What is most interesting about Microsoft’s marketing strategy is that is not pushing to replace TDM PBX systems first, but suggests that “VoIP As You Are!” and Unified Messaging (UM) are a practical and less disruptive way to migrate to UC.

With the convergence of all business communications around IP, there is bound to be hot competition from the various technology provider “silos” as to who will supply what pieces of UC. However, everyone is finally acknowledging that the real business ROIs of UC will not simply come from technology cost savings, but from individual user productivity (including enterprise personnel, business partners, and especially customers) and, more importantly, business process efficiencies that are dependent upon people contact. The real drivers of UC migration will therefore have to come from end user demand and line of business management priorities, not just IT implementations.

I authored a new white paper describing UC ROIs and practical approaches to enterprise migration planning that highlight Microsoft’s UC product positioning for simplifying the challenge of moving to UC. Rather than start with replacing existing wired desktop phone systems, the migration can start with adding IP softphones, mobile devices, and unified messaging. You can download a copy by going to the UC Strategies web site at:

http://www.ucstrategies.com/Migration_to_Unified_Communications.aspx

Comments On The White Paper

An analyst for BetaNews has commented on the white paper and you can see his remarks at:

http://www.betanews.com/article/Office_Communications_Server_Heads_to_RTM/1185480763

I got his attention on the subject of “UC Migration: Where Do You Start?” by leading off with the statement “It all depends!”

Clearly, every business organization has to establish its implementation strategies and priorities based on the following:

• Business process values
• End user contact needs based upon business process priorities and personal work environments
• Existing technologies that must interoperate with new UC elements
• Internal IT support resources and expertise

• Budgets

Obviously these will vary from organization to organization and between different vertical market segments. So, there is no “one size fits all” for UC and it will be complicated to match new technology capabilities to existing business operations.

What Do You Think?

I will be clarifying more details from this white paper in future articles, so feel free to send me your questions and comments. You can contact me at:

artr@ix.netcom.com or (310) 395-2360

The iPhone and All Your Customers

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

June 29, 2007

What Will Have To Happen To Customer Service When Your Customers Get Their iPhones?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Today’s the big day for Apple’s new iPhone and all the pundits are speculating about its impact on the market for a variety of reasons.

Back in January of this year, after Steve Jobs first introduced the coming iPhone product to the world, I welcomed the arrival of a device that would make UC real for end users. Although converging IPod music entertainment with multimodal communications has been a major attraction for the consumer market, I see the innovative multimodal device interface design as step forward in the migration in the migration to mobile unified communications. However, I also highlighted some of the initial iPhone deficiencies for business users in the enterprise market reported by industry pundits. Now that the iPhone is about to be delivered to the drooling consumer market, it is time to look at what it will do to enterprise communications from a customer contact application perspective.

I have discussed “Consumer UC” in the past as something that will require traditional telephone call centers to get ready for the “multimodal customer,” and the iPhone release is the tip of the multimodal contact center iceberg. This event should be a wakeup call for every organization to get serious about migrating their customer contact operations towards the future. That migration will range from supporting IP and wireless network connectivity to training multimodal agents to dynamically support “transmodal” customer interactions. That’s a major overhaul of legacy call center operations and will pose serious questions for both IT management and contact center operations planning.

Raising the customer contact bar - What if a lot of consumers have an iPhone or similar “smartphone”?

A practical way to look at what’s coming down the pike for contact centers is to simply assume that a lot of consumers will soon get an iPhone or a competitive “smartphone” equivalent. Although one of the big drivers for consumer interest in the iPhone is because it has integrated IPod entertainment capabilities into a mobile phone device, it is also of interest because it also offers the convenience of multimodal, unified communications capabilities, including unified messaging and web information access. So, what will that mean for enterprise contact centers and satisfying the customer experience?

Here are some logical perspectives:

1. Because the iPhone is a multimodal device that will be carried by individual customers, it will be “always on” and personalized.
2. It will be used for “person-to-person” contacts, information delivery, and multimodal self-services.
3. Because of richer, multimodal self-services, the iPhone/smartphone will be able to exploit the benefits of self-services to a greater degree than traditional telephones or cell phones.
4. Because environments constantly change, the mobile user will initiate customer contacts with different modalities, depending on a combination of:
• The communication need,
• The initiator’s preferences, and
• The environmental circumstances.
5. Increased information richness of self-service applications, enabled by multimodal mobile device interfaces, will help reduce the demand for live assistance.
6. We can assume that presence will be involved for managing contact access for all real-time contacts.
7. Use of email and IM will be more efficient because they can exploit links to information and documents by URL links, rather than enclosing attachments.
8. Email from customers or customer service will also be able to exploit speech input rather than typing, e.g., JOTT, another way making voice messaging more efficient and manageable for customer contacts.
9. Voice messaging will exploit speech recognition to convert voice messages to more efficiently managed email, although the iPhone Visual Voicemail stresses only the control interface of voice messages.
10. Mobility will be a new driver, in addition to global customers, for customer contacts to be initiated 24x7, driving further change to the old peak-hour traffic models of traditional call center activity.
11. Mobile customer accessibility through multimodal “smartphones” will also impact traditional call center queuing for live assistance in several ways, including:
• Call back rather waiting in queue
• IM and text messaging options
• Dynamic escalation between communications modalities (“transmodal communications”), e.g.: escalate from email, voice mail, SMS, IM to voice conversation (“click-to-talk”)
12. IM and presence management will facilitate collaborative interactions between enterprise personnel in supporting customer assistance in real-time. (First Contact Resolution – FCR)

There are other ripple effects upon enterprise customer contact/support requirements that will stem from the consumer adoption of the iPhone and other successful “smartphones.” So, Apple and AT&T’s “coming out” party will herald the advent of multimodal customer contact and all the consequences of satisfying new customer contact experiences. Most importantly, it will push enterprise organizations to really start rethinking their old call center operations from a UC perspective and start planning their migrations to multimodal customer contact.

The good news! Hosted and managed services will ease the transition to multimodal customer care

Although the industry watchers originally started off with concerns only about enterprise movement to VoIP and Internet Telephony, it is becoming increasingly clear that the real driver of UC migration will be the customer-facing support of business process applications that will require the flexibility of mobile and multimodal communications. That will apply not only to where the revenue “ROI” comes from, the customers, but also to the customer-facing support staff wherever they are located. That’s where the capabilities of the multimodal iPhone, coupled with both customer contact response flexibility and proactive information delivery will drive business communications into the UC future.

Inasmuch as the multimodal customer contact technology is still evolving and internal enterprise IT resources have little or no experience with converged communications, business organizations are not really ready to take full responsibility with internal staffing for new UC technologies. So, why should they?

This is where the new, software-based complexities of multimodal contact center technologies, coupled with the power of flexible distribution of computing resources and support staffing, will be pushing the enterprise market towards the practical benefits of rapid time-to-market from hosted, multi-sourced technology migration services. In particular, with the new offerings of hosted, multi-sourcing service providers that can quickly migrate existing contact center technologies to the multimodal customer environment, the enterprise pain of first developing a comprehensive RFP for all customer contact applications before fully understanding what will really work for different customer contact needs, can be significantly reduced in time, effort, and costs. It’s not just “try before buy,” but rather “learn before migrating,” because only experience can determine the choice of implementations required.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements.

A New Service For Enterprise UC Planning

The Unified-View, together with the industry experts at UCStrategies.com, is developing a standard end-user online survey service that will be made freely available to enterprise organizations to help gather UC/mobility profiling information about current end user business communications activities. This information will help enterprise management to:

1. Gather information about which individual end users or work groups need UC capabilities the most
2. Identify the related business process that will determine UC migration priorities
3. Help align the value of improved UC capabilities with the ROIs of business processes.
4. Help identify and quantify the mobile and UC activities associated with specific individual users and their business contacts that should also be provided with UC capabilities
5. Enable the organization to plan specific migration training needs for individual end users or end user groups, in accordance with a practical migration implementation schedule.
6. Enable the enterprise to compare before and after changes in business communication efficiencies and business process benefits by basically using the same survey for “migrated” users as a “before and after” comparison.
7. The service will also allow enterprise organizations to “benchmark” individual users or different groups within the organization for evaluation purposes. In addition, it is planned to allow such information to be benchmarked in Unified-View market research reports across enterprise organizations, to identify differences in end user needs between different vertical market segments, and identify “best practices” for UC management.

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

News From UC Strategies

To better understand the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UCStrategies.com web site for the latest, most practical insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UCStrategies.com experts at TMC’s IT Expo.

UC-based Kiosks

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

June 8, 2007

UC Going After the On-premise Customer – Will The Wired IP “Smartphone” Become the New, Multimodal Applications Kiosk?

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

UC capabilities originally targeted business communications on a person-to-person basis, where the contact initiator knows the specific contact recipient and just needs the flexibility of different communication modalities for maximizing individual and group productivity. However, it is no big secret that the real business “ROI” of converging information/communication technologies will be coming from three primary sources:

1. Speeding up revenue generation from customers
2. Reducing operational labor costs to get 1
3. Reducing technology costs (TCO) to support maximum customer access

All of the above are geared to contribute to the bottom line of any business activity with customers, and the Web has become the fastest growing form of customer access to business activities because it is “always-on,” multimodal, and “virtual.”

Generating Revenue Faster At The “Point-of-Sale”

Getting revenue from customers faster means that customers are getting their needs satisfied more quickly, including getting live assistance with the purchase of goods and services. This can happen wherever the customer happens to be initiating their transactions, including:

· From a wired phone

· Online at a business web site

· Mobile, using a personalized wireless device (laptop, smartphone)

· Visiting a “brick and mortar” branch office or retail location

Although e-Commerce has significantly displaced some traditional brick-and-mortar business activity, there are many kinds of businesses that still require customer visits to retail locations or branch offices. This is where self-service business process applications can be highly customized and simplified for on-premise devices to quickly service simple customer needs without the costs and delays of on-premise live assistance. A familiar example is the ATM machine located at banks and other remote locations for simple banking transactions (deposits and withdrawals).

However, as we all know too well, every self-service application may require live assistance and for premise-based business activities, such assistance must be immediate and based upon the device that is supplied on-premise. This is where the benefits of premise-based business process applications can benefit from IP communications capabilities, shifting from an on-line interaction to a real-time voice conversation with live assistance. Although this may sound like a traditional IVR call center situation where a caller presses ”0” to talk to an agent, this is much more focused on specialized, live “point-of-sale” transaction applications that are key to revenue generation. The question is, how will UC help that happen?

Putting the Premise-based Customer Contact UC Opportunity in Perspective – “Contextual Contact Initiation”

Most telephone customer contacts originate off-premise, where there has been little application control over the consumer’s communication device. Even with premise-based phones, the chasm between telephony and business applications limited voice application interfaces to the complexities of standard telephone device TUI.

We have always had premised-based telephones available for use by both visitors/customers to contact live assistance, usually via an operator, e.g., an airport, a hotel, department store, etc. We have also always had different kinds of application-based, online information and transaction kiosks in public locations, often with a separate wired telephone alongside to initiate an independent voice conversation with live assistance. In both cases, the telephone contact was totally controlled by the customer/visitor who would then have to explain what kind of information or assistance they would need.

Online premise-based PC applications are more flexible and efficient because of their dedicated and customized rich, transaction-oriented interfaces, e.g., ATM machines. However, when live assistance is required, the traditional voice connection must still be activated over a separate telephone line. With VoIP and IP telephony, the combination of rich, online information and data transactions with live, contextual voice contacts can make premise-based self-service applications much more efficient and productive, yet easily supported by live assistance “on demand.”

Some Examples

The lodging industry always has visiting customers, better known as “guests.” Guests always have both information needs and assistance needs while on the premises. The former was traditionally taken care of by a combination of hotel information reference books and the use of the in-room television set to access information from the hotel computer systems. For live assistance, however, the traditional room telephone was available as a separate means of contact unrelated to the information delivered over the TV set.

Although originally announced back in 2001, Avaya created a new, applications oriented “Concierge” phone for the opening of the new Wynn hotel in Las Vegas. It was an IP phone with a screen that was able to do display all kinds of hotel and local area information like the in-room TV, but also had the option to initiate context-based outbound phone calls related to the displayed information. The desktop “smartphone” form factor simplified the application user interface and avoided the complexities of a general-purpose PC. For business travelers who need to do “work,” however, this was not the device for that purpose.

Cisco is also moving in this direction, having formed a “customer business transformation” consulting team that is doing the business process analysis for their customers to come up with UC solutions that exploit the benefits of multimodal IP phones. Listen to the examples cited in Blair Pleasant’s recent interview with Cisco’s Manjula Talreja that enable UC-enabled communication devices to support self-service business process applications in point-of sale environments.

Consumers are being given new capabilities to search for nearby locations of products and services that need to be seen, transacted, tried on, or discussed face-to-face. But, once on premise at these locations, the opportunity to get information and execute transactions on a self-service basis needs to be simplified by customizing the user interfaces around the specific business application process involved. General-purpose computer interfaces are not what is needed for “point-of-sale” activities.

Summary

While UC is very heavily oriented towards the flexibility of multimodal devices for a variety of person-to-person contacts, it is also going to be useful to the “point-of-sale” customer environment, where the customer is only a visiting contact initiator, who will use a premise-based device designed specifically for simplified self-service functions, and, if necessary, to immediately access live assistance within the context the customer’s activity. (“Contextual contact initiation”)

While such premise-based activity may be limited in volume compared to growing web-based e-commerce and mobile usage, it is certainly a critically sensitive factor for revenue generation for businesses that are visited by the customers.

What Do You Think?

Send your comments to me at artr@ix.netcom.com.

Attention CIOs: Watch this great recent Webcast from Avaya and Microsoft on the practical “Why’s” and “How’s” of migrating to UC!

Go to: http://cxolyris.cxomedia.com/t/833300/379459/8118/0/

This discussion with the two dominant enterprise communications technology providers in the text messaging and telephony worlds highlights the practicalities of migrating to UC and also underscores the UCStrategies.com industry-wide initiative for identifying individual business user requirements.

A New Service For Enterprise UC Planning

The Unified-View, together with the industry experts at UCStrategies.com, is developing a standard end-user online survey service that will be made freely available to enterprise organizations to help gather UC/mobility profiling information about current end user business communications activities. This information will help enterprise management to:

1. Gather information about which individual end users or work groups need UC capabilities the most
2. Identify the related business process that will determine UC migration priorities
3. Help align the value of improved UC capabilities with the ROIs of business processes.
4. Help identify and quantify the mobile and UC activities associated with specific individual users and their business contacts that should also be provided with UC capabilities
5. Enable the organization to plan specific migration training needs for individual end users or end user groups, in accordance with a practical migration implementation schedule.
6. Enable the enterprise to compare before and after changes in business communication efficiencies and business process benefits by basically using the same survey for “migrated” users as a “before and after” comparison.
7. The service will also allow enterprise organizations to “benchmark” individual users or different groups within the organization for evaluation purposes. In addition, it is planned to allow such information to be benchmarked in Unified-View market research reports across enterprise organizations, to identify differences in end user needs between different vertical market segments, and identify “best practices” for UC management.

Stay tuned to the UCStrategies.com web site for initial availability of the UC Profiling service. We are in discussions with all the major UC technology providers to support this initiative to help both their customers and sales channels plan their UC migrations properly and effectively.

News From UC Strategies

To better understand the different perspectives and issues involved with implementing UC technologies, go to the UCStrategies.com web site for the latest, most practical insights on migrating the enterprise to UC.

UC Industry Update including Highlights from VoiceCon Spring

You can also review the presentations given by the UCStrategies.com experts at TMC’s IT Expo.