Patent Problems for UC Adoption?

The Unified-View – January 26, 2008

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Will Patent Battles For Both Software and Hardware Interfere With UC Progress?

Recent industry news contained a report that Apple and AT&T, along with other communication carriers, were being sued for patent infringement of “visual voicemail” by Klausner Technologies, after Klausner won a settlement from Vonage in October 2007.

The inefficiencies of the traditional Telephone User Interface (TUI) have long been known, and “unified messaging” (UM), one of UC’s main applications, was particularly aimed at alleviating that problem. That kind of integration started at the PC desktop, but with the growth of mobile “smartphones,” has progressed to “multimodal messaging” and other online applications.

Then the second shoe just dropped with a small California company, Minerva Industries, Inc., filing suit against Apple and most of the other mobile handset makers for their newly granted patent on the hardware device design that supports all the different user interfaces of a “smart phone.” However, it doesn’t claim to “unify” or integrate these functionalities at the software level, just incorporates them all in a single handheld device.

So, how many more ”UC shoes” will drop in the complex world of UC hardware and software technologies?

Will “Visual Voicemail” Hold Up In Court?

How will UM fare in the courts? The need to have a better user interface to manage voice messages is certainly not new, having been implemented ages ago starting with the integration of voicemail systems with desktop email interfaces. That basically allowed the email interface to display and provide direct access to information about a voice message in the way that text message information was displayed.

For mobile cell phone users, UM did the reverse; it delivered an email message received by an email system, through the voicemail system, that contained a text-to-speech (TTS) playback of the information about the email message, as well as the text message content itself. This enabled email to be delivered more quickly by using the real-time notification capability of voicemail to proactively place a phone call to deliver new messages, rather than wait until the recipient can check their mailboxes.

Next Generation of “Visual Voicemail” is Already Here!

Now, however, UC, with its flexibility to use presence technology to determine the best way to make contact with a person, as well as allowing the contact recipient to independently choose the messaging medium regardless of what the initiator (sender) will use (text, voice), may also change the visual voicemail game.

With the power of mature speech recognition, visual voice messaging has started moving to greater flexibility and efficiency, through what is known as “voice-to-text messaging.” Offered primarily as a service to mobile users who need relief from the inefficiencies of managing the retrieval of voice message content, voice-to-text messaging allows the caller/initiator to have the convenience of voice input, but then allows the recipient to easily visually review and manage the disposition of the voice message as a text message. (Access to the original recording segment is also available for playback in the event the transcription is inadequate, e.g. a name, foreign word, etc.)

So, the question is this, will this next generation of call and voice message management upstage the old patent for voice mail retrieval, by using SIP and presence to bypass making a phone call attempt first, and relegating voice messaging to simply being a contact-initiator/respondent option for message input on a mobile multimodal device, while all other message management functions converge under the umbrella of next generation UM?

Why Should You Care?

Certainly, if you are a service provider and a patent interferes with your UC service offerings because of either the mobile devices or the software that they will require (servers, clients).

Certainly, if you are a software developer of mobile applications (business or communications) that will be constrained from offering your products on any end-user device.

Certainly, if you are an enterprise UC technology provider and can't exploit seamless use of different modalities on a device-independent basis..

Certainly, as an end user or organization representing end users who will be prevented from enjoying the efficiencies of universal UC innovation at a reasonable price, along with freedom of choice in services and devices.

Comments? Contact me at artr@ix.netcom.com

Comments on "ASAP" Business Calls

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

January 30, 2008

Comments On Ending “Telephone Tag” With UC-based “ASAP” Calls

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

In my last column, “ Adding ASAP Voice Calls to UC,” I described ways to place a phone call that would recognize the fact that callers may want to have a person-to-person voice conversation as soon as possible, but that callees are really not very available, unless that is their job, e.g., as a call center agent for enterprise customers or as an emergency first responder.

In general, business contacts, whether internal to the organization or outside of the organization (sometimes referred to as “information workers”) fall into the category of rarely available. In fact, an old call activity statistic still holds true, that over “70% of calls within an enterprise do not reach the intended party” and result in voice mail messages or a hangup.

Recognizing that fact, the new UC capabilities for both contact initiators (“callers”) and contact recipients (“callees”) should be put to work to make business communications more efficient and effective for both parties. In other words, we should not be playing the old “telephone tag” game with UC and more flexible, personalized, multimodal endpoint devices such as desktop “softphones” or mobile “smartphones.”

“ASAP Calls” Generates Response

Some of my readers responded to the article with practical concerns about how they see exploiting UC for their business phone call requirements. This reflects the need to personalize business UC capabilities at the individual end user level. So, rather than preach the general “Gospel of UC,” here are their constructive comments.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Art,

Rather than just leaving voice mail, I'd like a presence-based system that would
automate requests for callbacks based on both parties’ schedules. The caller would
allow caller ID to identify themselves to the recipient and then select two
categories; one for ID category [customer, vendor, employee, etc.] and the other
for their perceived level of urgency. 

For example, I could call a vendor and their system would give me the option to
request a callback using voice recognition. I'd ID myself as a potential customer
with a low level of urgency. My system would sync with the vendor's system [I know
I'm dreaming] and eventually put the call through based on both parties’ preferences
[as previously scheduled]. 

So, if I scheduled my presence setting to accept low urgency calls on Friday
afternoon between 3 and 5 pm, and the vendor was available at that time as well, the
call would be put through without either party doing anything other than answering
the phone and listening to a voice clip regarding the topic.

Doug Baumwall

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A.S.A.P. & Siemens:

This sounds very similar to the "Call Back" functionality of a traditional PABX, TDM or IP,
which also tracks the "status" of the particular terminal called. When the called party
either ends his current conversation by hanging up or the called party returns to his or
her phone and makes a call (alerting the PABX) that the user is now "available". This
feature is, in effect, only available to users on the same PABX or PABX’s QSIG networked
together for this specific functionality (very difficult to implement in a multi-vendor
environment.  It has never really worked over the Public Switched Telephony Network even
where ISDN is being used.

It would appear that the same issues would arise in the UC world when the same
circumstances are met. SIP presence, for example, can be linked together with telephony
availability similar to the old CTI (either first or third party) associated call control
software with a telephone. However, complex SBCs and SIP trunking are required to, say,
Integrate Company A's presence solution (Microsoft OCS) with Company B's Presence solution
(Avaya SES). These are capabilities which will have to be provided by operators (or some
sort of DNS for presence information).

But there is a very large question of security in this case, as you don't always want to
have your presence information available to all. 

Secondly, presence is only as good as the human administering his or her Presence. How
often is the presence information being published by one or more platforms (i.e. telephone,
mobile, email, IM, etc...) collated into a single interface via UC actually wrong. The user
has simply walked away from his or her desk without changing the presence status?

The real usefulness of email lies in the fact that it is effectively both a real-time and
delayed-time mode of communication for which alerts can be presented to a number of devices
different simultaneously (like twinning between your desk phone and your mobile phone). The
"called" party can then evaluate whether or not they wish the communication attempt to be
real-time(immediate answer) or delayed time. 

For me, the real effectiveness of UC is the real-time negotiating and transitioning between
the available modes of communication once a connection" or "contact" has been made. An urgent
email to user A, is alerted on his mobile phone as he is out of the office on the road (as
well as his email and IM client's). He reads it and immediately from his device attempts to
set up a call with the sender. The sender is not Available on the phone but is able to message
(email, IM, SMS), the conversation continues in the negotiated mode between the 2 people.

Working in this way, however, (negotiating an agreed upon mode of communication from a
multiple number of modes) is a massive cultural change for the employees of most
organizations. I agree, however, that this will be something expected by my 15 year old son in
5-10 years when he hits the workplace.

Thanks!

Regards

Christopher Alderman

Sr. Convergence Sales Consultant

BT Global Services | Telecomlaan 9 | 1831 Diegem | Belgium

T:  | M:  | F: 

E: christopher.alderman@bt.com  | BT Meet Me PIN #

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Art,

 I have to wonder how long such a system would be in place before vendors, cold-callers,
and other pests invent a way to use it to force their way onto my "desk".

While I certainly support the idea of getting important people in touch with me ASAP, I'm
worried about letting a caller specify their level of urgency. They already manipulate
their Caller ID data to get past blocking filters and  social engineer higher level contacts.
Just imagine what they can do with new features and functions. 

The features I'm still trying to set up are, "Call Forward - someone who cares" or
"Busy - Go Away!".  

 Pete Romfh

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“ASAP Calls” - What Do You Think?

I am not sure what users should call a UC-based phone call attempt that won’t necessarily result in an immediate voice conversation, but it sure shouldn’t always end up in “Voicemail Jail” and “Telephone Tag!” What do you think? Let us know what we should this new way of communicating that will be descriptive of what we really want. Send your comments and opinions to artr@ix.netcom.com

COMING SOON!

Go to www.ucstrategies.com to read my upcoming daily UC Commentary, which critically reviews the important enterprise user developments in Business UC and not just tons of “me too” announcements.

"ASAP" Phone Calls With UC

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

January 19, 2008

Adding “ASAP” Phone Calls To UC

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

With all the flexibility that UC technology is bringing to business communications, we really need to expand our traditional perspectives of making phone calls to have a voice conversation with a particular individual. With wireless mobility increasing individual accessibility, but not necessarily availability, and instant messaging and texting (SMS) encroaching on the need to have voice conversations for real-time contacts, we need to focus on bringing more efficiency to how we insure having a voice conversation in a timely manner.

The Call Appointment

We know the traditional procedural etiquette that requires manual coordination to schedule a call at a certain time at certain contact numbers. However practical that approach may be, it does contribute to the new bogeyman of business process efficiency, “human latency” because it adds two sources of delay.

· The time to set up a mutually agreeable time and contact location. (God forbid, that the appointment has to be rescheduled due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control!)

· The inherent delay created by scheduling the appointment at a particular time in the future, rather than at the earliest moment possible.

Of course, if the subject of the discussion is not time critical, the delay shouldn’t really be of concern; that’s how we organize our time most efficiently. However, if the situation is more pressing, and we have to be more reactive and responsive, then having a voice conversation becomes more time critical.

The Blind, Ad Hoc Phone Call

The telephone has always operated in this mode, where the caller (contact initiator) places the call to phone number (a location), hoping that the recipient’s line is not busy (“unavailable”) and that the person in question is there and able to take the call immediately. Traditional TDM call handling technologies can be employed to enable the call to be completed immediately even if the call recipient is on the phone (call waiting), at a different location or wants to route the call to someone else (call forwarding), or defer the call for a later time because of other priorities (caller ID, call screening, voice messaging, etc.).

If the call couldn’t be accepted immediately by the recipient, then traditional “caller messaging” using the telephone-answering mode of voice mail systems came into play. In addition to accepting a voice message from the caller for subsequent retrieval by the recipient and allowing it to marked as “urgent,” it also allowed the caller to escape from “voice mail jail” and transfer to a pre-assigned extension number.

I don’t know about you, but I have been finding more and more situations where the caller is advised by the recipient’s mailbox greeting to “Please don’t leave a voice message; send me an email!” In addition, pressing “0” to reach a line person often results in an error announcement saying there is no one at that number.

So, what’s a caller to do when they need to talk to a particular person very quickly and they are not really available at that moment? Leaving a message is just not good enough!

Using UC Intelligence to Manage Ad Hoc Calls – “ASAP”

My friend, Rich Tehrani, publisher of TMC media, tried to describe the solution to the above problem as “just in time” communications - he didn’t like “unified communications!”

I privately reminded him that the term comes from the manufacturing industry, where inventory costs can be minimized by ordering material at the last minute, “just in time” to fill outstanding orders on time. On the other hand, you don’t want to have time-critical discussions or deliver important information at the last minute, which could easily cause big problems. Such communications should be completed as soon as possible (“ASAP”)!

http://www.tmcnet.com/news/2005/nov/1215913.htm

In an executive interview a couple of years ago with one of my startup company clients, OnState Communications, they had come up with a business communications service that they called “Pending Communications.” Their approach was to act as a “personal secretary” for an end user who could not accept a phone call at the moment. Rather than simply taking a message, the service would exploit the power of “second generation of presence management” to track the availability of the recipient and coordinate (“orchestrate”) a conference call between the two parties when both were available. I preferred to describe the service as “ASAP,” which tells you what the service will do for you.

Siemens Has “ASAP” Capability In Its OpenScape Communication Suite

My friends at Siemens have long been in the forefront of exploiting SIP-based telephony and presence technologies. In a new article discussing the results of a survey they sponsored of next generation communications users (Generation Y), they highlighted the fact that in order to attract new business staff in the future, organizations will have to support the multimodal flexibility and efficiencies of UC communications that they have grown used to as consumers. (An industry colleague pointed out that factor after I omitted it from my list of justifications for enterprise migration to UC. This is where end user demand for UC is starting to emerge.)

In addition to describing OpenScape’s familiar presence management capabilities to support UC, they mentioned the ability of a contact initiator to set an “Alert” to track the availability status of a recipient and when both parties are available to take a call, automatically initiate the connection. So, I call that an “ASAP” call, which has the following characteristics, suited for UC:

· The contact initiator doesn’t have to specify where the recipient is

· The contact initiator is ready to take the call immediately as well as whenever both parties are available

· The contact initiator will also have controls to manage the limits on keeping an ASAP call active, as well as any alternatives actions.

This is an intelligent and more efficient approach to the use of telephones for voice conversations when there is no guarantee of availability.

Now all we need is the long expected “federation” of such services between users outside of the same organization.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com

(I know! If you are like me, who has time to write anything, let alone keep up with all the things to read! )

COMING SOON!

Go to www.ucstrategies.com to read my upcoming daily UC Commentary, which critically reviews the important enterprise user developments in Business UC and not just tons of “me too” announcements.

Rosenberg's "Third Law" To Impact UC

Copyright © 2008 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

January 4, 2008

End User Mobility and “CEBP” To Start Driving Enterprise UC Movement in 2008

By Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

We all know that IP telephony for real-time voice conversations is rapidly replacing TDM telephone systems in both residence and enterprise markets. It’s just a matter of time. However, the real change in business communications is the move to multimodal “unified communications” (UC), which enables more flexible choice in initiating, receiving, and responding to all forms of contact with either people or automated business process applications.

UC has been slow to evolve until now, both because the technology is still being developed and standardized across both wired and wireless networks, and because personalized, multimodal end user devices to exploit such flexibility are just now becoming available where it counts, to individual end users. The latter started with the big splash made by Apple’s iPhone, last year, but is quickly being emulated by other mobile “smartphones” makers that can handle both voice conversations and all modes of messaging.

Because so many technology pundits have jumped on the UC bandwagon touting vague productivity payoffs and are publishing commentaries on how to do “UC,” I am going to focus on some key enterprise usage perspectives on UC that should really drive UC planning requirements.

In particular, I see the following important UC-related changes taking place in the enterprise market during 2008:

1. Growth in mobile, multimodal “smartphone” device usage for both business and personal contacts and information access. This will enable “anywhere, any time, any mode” of communication contact with people. With the announced moves to “open” mobile operating systems (e.g., Google’s Android) and the elimination of “walled gardens” restrictions by wireless carriers (Verizon) on devices types and mobile application software clients, the way is paved for exploiting change 2.

2. Business process applications increasingly becoming real-time “contact initiators” to specific individuals for time-sensitive, business workflow processes to deliver information messages to those personalized mobile “smartphones” (as well as to desktops). Such messages, in conjunction with application-oriented software clients, can also offer various customized real-time response options, including online transactions or contacts with other people.

3. The combination of these two trends will reinforce “Rosenberg’s Third Law” to increase end user needs to be device-independent and UC-enabled as both “contact initiators” and “contact recipients” in the context of business process applications.

This shift toward converging business process applications and personalized mobility for end user contacts means that UC planning must start with identifying and reevaluating business priorities for UC applications at the individual end user workflow level. Until current and future requirements are properly prioritized, new technology implementations and procurements will not be practical. (See reference to analyzing business process “value chains” for UC at the end of this article under “Farewell BCR Magazine, Welcome ‘No Jitter’!”)

Desktop UC vs. Mobile UC

Clearly, new desktop UC applications are evolving (slowly) because of screen-based, multimodal devices (PC “softphones,” IP screenphones), with the help of the big desktop application providers like Microsoft and IBM, and desktop IP telephony providers like Avaya, Nortel, Mitel, Cisco, and Siemens. However, the more critical shift in demand will come more quickly with new multimodal “smartphones” for mobile business users, who require the flexibility of UC as both contact initiators and contact recipients more than an office-bound user with multiple devices sitting conveniently on the desktop.

Such communication mobility must support ALL contact activity away from the desktop (not just away from the office), and personalized handheld devices, converged for both off-premise business and consumer needs, are a major change from traditional enterprise controlled telecommunications and business application management. Since business users will typically be using both desktop and handheld devices, seamless functional interoperability and interface consistency between them will be important for migration planning.

Business Process Applications As UC Contact Initiators – “CEBP”

The business requirements to increase communication efficiency through the flexibility of UC applies not just to people who initiate and receive business contacts, but also to automated business process applications that monitor various operational activities and critical events that may require human involvement. Just as a remote customer with a problem needs live assistance from “virtual” staff resources, business processes that can monitor and automatically detect problems, have the same requirements to notify appropriate personnel.

Of course, we don’t really expect software applications to initiate and carry on voice conversations and discussions like people do, but delivering time-critical information in voice may be necessary because of the situational needs of the recipient. In addition, automated online transactions may also be carried out using speech input, combined with speech or visual output.

Proactive information delivery to individual users by business process applications, as opposed to people-initiated contacts, was aggressively launched by Avaya with its Communications Enabled Business Process (“CEPB”) technology development. Note that business process analyses and consulting are key to using such technologies.

“Rosenberg’s Third Law” of Business Communications Revisited (Again) – Mobile Information Access vs. People Access

Perhaps the biggest point of confusion in defining business UC comes from the need to access/deliver information quickly vs. the need to access a person. A couple of years ago, I suggested that each of these needs actually would reinforce the other. I called this “Rosenberg’s Third Law” of business communications.

The logic of most business process workflows confirms such a view, because “human latency” in being able to communicate with people has always been recognized as a primary source of organizational inefficiency and poor business process performance. With web portals and mobile devices increasing the speed of information access, the pressure to also speed up access to people will only accelerate.

People “availability,” rather than just “connectivity,” coupled with the growing use of mobile devices and UC multimodal flexibility, is the new metric that business process efficiency will be dependent upon. That’s where the new power of connectivity presence and availability management will become critical, not just internally within the enterprise, but “federated” between people in other enterprises and with consumer customers.

Farewell BCR magazine; Welcome “No Jitter!”

December 2007 marked the final issue of one of the most respected names in the business communications industry, Business Communications Review. Web publishing allows faster, global distribution of information, as well as greater interactivity between readers and writers, extending the value and the life of any published content. This will be particularly practical for tracking the evolution of UC technologies in the enterprise market.

One of the hallmarks of BCR magazine was that it highlighted the objective insight of the best minds in the telecommunications industry, avoiding the hype for particular products or services. We trust that the new BCR web site, www.nojitter.com, will preserve that tradition of quality, insight, and objectivity. So, welcome aboard!

As noted earlier, No Jitter is also a site that has started publishing a series of excellent articles by UC implementation expert Marty Parker, from UniComm Consulting, on the subject of enterprise UC application value chains for business communications. For more information on evaluating “UC Communication Hotspots,” where new UC applications can provide real value to business processes, please see the first in this series of articles covering the specific needs of different vertical industries.

What Do You Think?

Let us know your comments and opinions by sending them to artr@ix.netcom.com

I know! If you are like me, who has time to write anything, let alone keep up with all the things to read? Thanks anyway and Happy New Year!

Mobile UC To Push Business Communications in 2008

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

December 16, 2007

How Mobility and UC Will Really Change The Pace of Business Communications in 2008

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Perhaps I should start off this piece with the recent important news that Verizon Wireless is going to open up its network to any device and any application that meets minimum standards. Although this doesn’t immediately solve all the problems of interoperability and support that multimodal UC communications demands both inside and outside of the enterprise, it is a good sign that things are starting to change in a constructive way. This announcement comes just a week after I challenged the wireless carriers to support open mobile OSs, device independence, and any enterprise applications that need to contact mobile subscribers.

UC Means ALL Business Communications

Now that the term “unified communications” (UC) has subsumed real-time telephony, wired and wireless connectivity, and all forms of messaging, it has become synonymous for all aspects of business communications. It has also become increasingly difficult to define everything that UC is really supposed to do for the enterprise. Microsoft and its Alliance partner Nortel wisely recognized this problem last year, and proceeded to establish hundreds of demonstration sites around the world in order to show business management what UC does for business operations and end users, rather than just explain how the technology infrastructure works.

This marketing strategy follows the advice given by a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Chip Heath, to business leaders in a McKinsey Quarterly interview for delivering a “message that sticks” to their various enterprise constituencies. Heath’s research into successful communications highlights the need for “simplicity, concreteness, and surprise.”

Because UC will affect people both within and outside an organization (business partners, customers), it is essential that the benefits of UC resonate with everyone involved in business communications. One way to highlight new benefits is to simply describe, in concrete ways, how business communications will be different from the way we used to do things in the past, particularly in the use of the telephone. Because every end user will have different perceptions of value from UC application capabilities, they really need to see where “the shoe fits” their particular operational needs and job responsibilities.

Simplifying The User Perspective of UC – Contacting People Quickly Any Way

From the bottom line perspective of business performance, UC is all about making contact and communicating with people easily, flexibly, and quickly in a variety of ways. This is important to any enterprise because people are key to business process efficiency and revenue generation performance, but are not always accessible or available for every form of contact, either as contact initiators or as contact recipients. In addition, real-time contacts now increasingly include text messaging alternatives to voice conversations, such as two-way Instant Messaging exchanges and immediate text message delivery through SMS to mobile devices. With the growth of online social networking, even simple messaging is getting more multimedia.

Since business process efficiency is usually most dependent on initiating contacts, ease and flexibility must be provided for those functions. This applies to both human initiators, who don’t necessarily know who is qualified and available or how to contact them at any point in time, as well as to any high-value automated business process applications. Such applications have the same contact initiation problems as people to proactively make real-time contacts directly with appropriate human recipients (notifications, alerts, confirmations, etc.).

Because communicating with people has now become multi-modal, i.e., real-time voice/video conversations and instant messaging vs. asynchronous voice /text messaging using a variety of wired desktop or mobile wireless devices, there is no single, common way to contact people any more. For maximum business process flexibility and efficiency, therefore, people must be able to both initiate and receive contacts in whatever form works for them individually at the moment. Such flexibility will be dependent upon both the devices and communication services available to them at the moment, as well as upon their dynamically changing environmental circumstances. Furthermore, if a real-time contact with a person is not possible at the moment for any reason, then, if appropriate, contact on an “As Soon As Possible” (ASAP) basis must be efficiently facilitated.

In order to achieve such business contact efficiencies with people, as opposed to traditional social “person-to-person” contacts, they must shift to “person-to-process-to-person” contacts, where intelligent communication processes optimize contact flexibility and time efficiencies for all parties. Such ‘contextual” intelligence removes the need for contact initiators to be responsible for personally knowing how to contact a person quickly and easily. The benefits will be not just faster work flows that pay off to business operations wherever people are involved, but also in lower costs for business process task performance, less “pain” in contacting people, and greater individual user productivity in doing their jobs.

“Concreteness” and “Surprises:” How Will Mobile UC Change Traditional Business Communications?

Because communicating with people is always going to be different for individual users and their business environments, every business and every end user will see different “surprises” in using UC capabilities. So, rather than separate out concrete examples of UC, I would rather point at the fundamental changes and innovations in communication alternatives that will emerge and evolve through UC capabilities. We have already seen dramatic changes in business communications simply because of new forms of contact, e.g., the emergence of email, voice mail, Instant messaging, cellular phones, SMS, Push-to-talk, etc. However, making them all interwork dynamically, seamlessly, and more efficiently under the umbrella of UC is a different ballgame. UC is not necessarily about changing the various ways of contacting and communicating with people, but rather about enabling individual users to dynamically and selectively exploit both old and new ways of communicating that are most efficient and effective for their individual needs at the moment.

On the other hand, traditional telephony will be a big target for the most drastic changes in business contact procedures, since it has traditionally been based upon the inflexibilities of wired connections, restrictive user interfaces, and location-based devices. So, not only will business calls “integrate” with flexible messaging facilities, but, from a user perspective, all aspects of traditional call management will be changing as well. Much of what will happen to business call management will be derived from the experience of traditional customer call center technologies that can now be implemented more efficiently through IP telephony infrastructures and multimodal endpoint devices.

Here are some of the basic functional ways that UC will change business communications (telephony, messaging) for both users and the business processes that they are involved with:

· “Contextual” Presence and Availability – The ability to talk to a person will become more dependent upon both the context of such need and the real-time availability of any qualified person. Such contact contexts will be derived from many on-line information sources (Reports, documents, databases, messages, address books, availability dashboards, etc.) that will reflect current status and availability for real-time contacts, as opposed to a simple asynchronous message.

Bottom line: Contact initiators will not have to wait or waste time figuring out who and how to contact a person that can assist them, both factors that contribute to the “human latency” inefficiency in business process performance.

· Proactive Notifications From Automated Business Process Applications - Rather than depend upon a particular human to manually monitor situations that may require real-time attention, e.g., in service environments, then have them attempt to contact other people to resolve such issues, automated monitoring processes will be able to initiate and coordinate all necessary human contacts directly with any available staff resources and any affected service users.

Bottom line: Problems are identified and resolved more quickly with minimized human latency because of limiting communications accessibility to only specific people. Such proactive, multimodal contacts will be applicable to internal enterprise personnel, business partner personnel, and, perhaps most importantly, to customers who may be negatively affected.

· Multimodal Messaging Communications - A major benefit of UC is the flexibility it offers for both contact initiators and recipients to communicate in any form that is most convenient at the moment. That includes all forms of voice and text messaging, whether from a desktop or a handheld mobile device, exploiting “unified” message mailboxes for either business or personal contacts. Such flexibility enables individual users to communicate as soon as possible in any messaging mode that is available to them, without regard to what facilities the recipient(s) have.

Bottom line: Contact initiators will not have to wait or waste time figuring out what form of messaging will work for their message recipients, including immediate urgent message notifications and delivery.

· “Instant” Conferencing - For voice conversations and conference calling, UC facilitates “instant” conferencing connections, independent of location and particular type of device available to a call participant. However, because such real-time contacts are not always immediately possible for all participants, UC facilities can initiate and coordinate conferencing arrangements to be implemented on an “As Soon As Possible” basis.

Bottom line: Contact initiators will not have to waste time figuring out how to coordinate any two-person or multi-party conference voice or video call, where specific participants are not necessarily known, are located anywhere, have different availability schedules and priorities, and use different communication devices and services.

Because conferencing is critical to improving business process workflow bottlenecks, and because business travel, particularly in a global economy, is difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, the cost reduction and productivity benefits of teleconferencing provide the greatest benefits to any form of distributed enterprise operations.

· “Transmodal” Communications - Not only will end users have greater choices in selecting a particular form of communication contact that suits their immediate circumstances for contact initiation, but they will also be able to dynamically and seamlessly change and escalate from any form of contact to another modality that is more appropriate. This would include moving from a non-real-time-to a real-time connection, moving from text messaging to voice calls, or moving from a person-to-person contact to a multi-party “instant” conference.

Bottom line: Contact recipients will be able to respond more effectively, quickly and easily by switching to other modalities of communications than selected by the contact initiator. In some case, e.g., where a message exchange proves to be inadequate, the shift to a voice conversation can be quickly and mutually performed without disruptive delays.

Note that the “bottom line” business benefits are not simply focused on reduced technology costs, but rather in making business contacts easier and faster for the end users, and therefore faster for the business processes that such end users are involved in.

Preparing For Change – Communicating With Multimodal “Smartphones”

The “telephone,” as a personalized communication device for two-way communications and information access, is already changing from being simply for person-to-person voice conversations. The addition of visual and text entry interfaces is changing the voice and Touchtone -only device to being able to communicate much more flexibly and efficiently with people, business process applications, and services. By enabling handheld wireless mobility, the next generation of consumer, the teenagers, is already exploiting maximum personalized accessibility for all of the above activities.

Enterprise organizations therefore need to prepare for how their end users will use the new “smartphones” devices, both handheld and at the desktop, in ways that may be different but hopefully more efficient and effective than the legacy voice-only phones of the past. Although some people are claiming that the mobile “smartphone” is going to become much like a PC, as a handheld device with I/O limitations, they won’t really be the same for information access.

With handheld mobility, we have to rethink the different ways that end users will be able to communicate optimally for business in the future. This will include all communication functions as either contact initiators and contact recipients who will be communicating:

· Desktop-to-desktop

· Desktop-to-mobile

· Mobile-to-mobile

· Mobile-to-desktop

Managing The New I/O For Business Process Applications – People!

Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), being aggressively pushed by Avaya, lends itself nicely to automating applications by including people as output targets and not just information output devices like printers, displays, storage, other application servers, etc. The big difference, of course, is people are smart enough to be able to do something useful with such information without being pre-programmed to do so.

As a consequence of dynamically contacting people within business process workflows, business management has to insure that such contacts with people are both flexible and part of the workflow design. This really means treating everyone in the business process as a notification contact point, including available internal staff resources, external partner staff resources, and, last, but not least, affected end users including customers. It also means that UC capabilities have to be available to all contact recipients in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of CEBP.

Needless to say, adding this kind of contact initiation intelligence to the design of application workflows is something new for traditional online application designers who never had to worry about who the end user was (except perhaps for security access purposes), or how to contact them. Now, time-sensitive, high value, automated business process applications that will exploit the benefits of UC and CEBP, will have to integrate with presence/availability and “skills-based routing” processes in order to deliver the message to the right person(s) in the fastest and most effective way.

So, IT has another reason to get interested in UC wherever it is automating any business process application contact initiation from a status monitoring perspective, as well as simply enabling “contextual” contact initiation by a user indirectly through any online application (“click-to-contact”). This is where the innovative use of UC will start to appear in every business environment, as enterprise organizations start rethink the use of the telephone business communication needs in the context of UC and mobility.

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

More on Enterprise Mobile UC and Googles Mobile OS

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

November 11, 2007

How Can Enterprise Mobile UC Applications and Mobile Operators Benefit From Google’s Android Mobile OS?

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

Everyone with an interest in mobile communications is talking about the Google announcement this past week of its Android open source mobile OS. An “open” mobile OS can open the doors to not only increased consumer usage of different types “smart phones” for multimodal information access, personal contacts, and entertainment needs, but also to support enterprise-controlled mobile business applications (especially Communications Enabled Business Processes or CEBP) for their increasingly mobile employees, business partners, and, of course, their mobile customers.

Unlike Apple’s iPhone announcement at the beginning of this year, which highlighted the iPhone’s beautiful design and form factor to attract consumers, Google aimed at the software infrastructure that will support ANY device design and mobile application that a consumer might want. This leaves the door open for both handset makers and application developers to compete with their own creations for the personalized needs of individual users. Such needs, however, may well be for business usage that must interoperate with enterprise applications.

The U.S. Wireless Carriers – A “Fly in The Ointment?”

My first reaction to the open source approach at the OS level was that it could help lower the costs of both mobile multimodal devices and network services across the board to expand usage in both the consumer and business markets. I also suggested that because the flexibility of adding personalized user applications can add more usage revenue to carriers and service providers, coupled with the potential added carrier revenue from advertising on the smart phone visual interface, the Google announcement would help remove or minimize the traditional “walled gardens” of the wireless carriers. Freedom to access enterprise-controlled applications will be critical to support business users who will want a single, multimodal mobile device and access service for both personal and business use.

Skeptics voiced concern that the wireless carriers, who get most of their revenue directly from individual subscribers, will still “lock up” any phone device that uses the Android mobile OS, in order to control their traditional consumer service offerings. However, because many of those same subscribers are also business users, their multimodal capabilities must really support enterprise UC applications. So, not only will carrier restrictions on mobile devices be disturbing to consumers, as already reported from AT&T’s iPhone experience, but they also stand in the way of carriers generating more usage revenue from mobile business applications that demand device independence. That’s “Cutting your nose off to spite your face!”

Exploiting Multimodal Smart Phones For Mobile Business Users

IP telephony developments have already introduced the notion of mobile phones being able to exploit premise-based wired VoIP and Wi-Fi connections, as well as cellular services from wireless carriers. With capabilities first demonstrated by Avaya with cell phones from Nokia and Motorola under the label of “Extension to Cellular,” what is now referred to as Fixed Mobile Convergence allows business users to use their office number and PBX features from their cell phone, while their personal cell phone number still provided direct access for personal calls on the same mobile device. In addition, cellular connections can be automatically switched to a lower-cost Wi-Fi connection when in range of a premise–based Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) or femtocell.

Now that the mobile communication stakes have jumped up from just voice calls to multimodal communications and business process applications, its time to reconsider the role of mobile devices for both consumer and business UC applications. This is necessary not only to provide personalized flexibility for all individual user communication needs, but also to separate the technology responsibilities of the enterprise for business communications from the particular multimodal mobile device (and network service) that an end user chooses for both personal and business accessibility.

Mobile Enterprise Applications – “Join Them, Don’t Fight Them!”

Inasmuch as the carriers have always wanted to get “wholesale” group subscriptions from the enterprise markets, the software move into open mobile device operating systems can enable enterprise-controlled software clients to share a subscriber’s mobile device. On the other hand, enterprise organizations always want to maintain security control over access to their applications and information from mobile employees, as well as over their business usage charges. With a mobile OS on the device that supports multiple software clients controlled by application servers belonging to either the mobile operator or to an enterprise, everyone, including the individual end users, can be satisfied.

So, with recent consumer FMC announcements from carriers such as BT in the UK and T-Mobile and Sprint in the U.S., combined with the flexibility of new, multimodal mobile devices and mobile operating systems, the path to converged, but manageable, business and personal communications looks promising. This trend will be further reinforced by consumers who bring FMC into their home environments through services like HomeZone from Wanadoo.

What Do You Think?

So, what do you think will happen will mobile devices and services at this point in the UC enterprise evolution game? Will business organizations follow the lead of their Web experiences or stick with traditional wired, premise-based telephony thinking?

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

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

You might want to now consider the impact of Google’s mobile OS move upon Microsoft’s UC strategy. Microsoft UC applications can still play nice with devices that exploit open Android OS capabilities.

New UC Blogs at UC Strategies.com

Check out my contributions to the new UC Blogs on the UC Strategies web site, where it will be easy for you to put your two cents in on the controversial issues facing enterprise migration to UC. Remember, UC is NOT just about telephony or person-to-person communications!

Google's Android Announcement and Mobile UC

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

November 9, 2007

The Battle For Enterprise Mobile UC – Google’s Android Mobile OS

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

The two big changes that are disrupting traditional business communications are the Internet and wireless end user mobility. Both of these capabilities are also driving the evolution of unified communications (UC). Google’s big announcement this week about it’s open-source mobile OS (“Android”) Open Handset Alliance, is theoretically challenging Microsoft, Symbian, etc., about their role in mobile UC and business applications, as well as the business models that will control mobile service offerings.

First, by going the open source route, it will help break down the traditional “walled gardens” of the carriers. Secondly, with Google’s well-established dominance of web-search and associated advertising revenues to monetize mobile information content, their approach will fit in nicely with new, multimodal “smart phones.” Couple that with enabling their offerings to be free or much lower costs, guess what service providers and subscribers will opt for!

For another market perspective of the open source impact of the Android announcement, check out this Research Alert from Saugatuck Technology at:

http://research.saugatech.com/fr/researchalerts/403RA.pdf

So, how will that affect enterprise UC users?

As I have frequently stated in my Unified-View column, mobile business users are the ones who will get maximum benefit from the flexibility of UC because their contact modality will be constantly changing. Sometimes they will need a visual interface, sometimes they will need a hands-free/eyes-free speech interface (driving a car). More recently, with improved speech recognition as a convenient form of input, interactive interfaces can now be a more efficient combination of speech input, text input, and visual output (multimodal interface).

As I have also stated frequently, UC flexibility must support mobile device independence, and as business users start using mobile consumer services and devices that can support business applications, they will expect enterprise UC to support their mobile device of preference. Enterprise security issues can be software controlled with enterprise-provided software clients installed on those open devices to take care of any information or user communication access that is in the governance responsibility of the enterprise. Personal, consumer services (entertainment, social contacts, etc.) can still remain functional, even if the business features are shut down by an enterprise.

What this really means, then, is that mobile devices will become the personalized choice and responsibility of business end users as long as the device operating system enables separate control over business information and communication activities from personal stuff. That kind of mobile security management technology is already available from a number of providers, so the concept just needs a proper operational environment in the form of multimodal devices and an open, mobile OS that supports it all.

New Mobile Device Coming Soon - What Will End Users Go For?

The question now is, what impact will the Google offering have upon personalized, handheld mobile devices, and which combination of mobile device and mobile OS will end users go for? Microsoft has already reacted to the announcement, as well as some bloggers who have made critical comments to the effect that that is all that it is at this point, an announcement. Some critics said similar things about Microsoft’s venture into UC with OCS 2007. However, at this point in the evolution of UC technology, we are looking for both long term direction as well as short term availability of technology that can be both useful and future-proofed.

What Do You Think?

So, what do you think will happen will mobile devices and services at this point in the UC enterprise evolution game? Will they follow the lead of the Web experience or continue with traditional enterprise telephony CPE thinking?

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

You might want to consider the impact of Googles mobile OS move upon Microsoft’s UC strategy.

New UC Blogs at UC Strategies.com

This article also kicks off my first contribution to a new blog venue focused on business UC evolution. So check it out!

Using Hosted Services to Migrate to UC

Copyright © 2007 Unified-View, All Rights Reserved Worldwide

October 26, 2007

Feedback From A Large Enterprise on The Role of Hosted UC Services

Art Rosenberg, The Unified-View

As you can tell from all the press that is being generated by Microsoft’s entry into the world of unified communications, which includes IP telephony, SIP, and VoIP networking, there are many perspectives being thrown at enterprise IT organizations as to how and why they should move forward in migrating to UC. For the smaller business enterprises, the pressure is also starting to build for the VAR channels to jump on the moving UC train. But, the old CPE VAR game may have to change; because it is no longer a matter of selling just CPE-based TDM telephone applications and wired desktop phones, but also device-independent, hosted/managed IP-based UC service options as well.

What About Large Enterprises?

The new complexity of UC, coupled with personalized mobile devices, is bringing the migration challenge to medium and large enterprise organizations as well, and hosted/managed services can play a useful role for them in “crossing the chasm” to UC. One of the highlights of Microsoft’s OCS Launch in San Francisco on October 16^th, was the participation of large end users who were trialing the new technology. I not only had the opportunity to hear the presentation given by Rolf Hansmann, Head of Common Services Architecture and New Technologies, for Sanofi Aventis, one of the world’s largest global pharmaceutical companies, but also discussed practical UC implementation issues with him.

As already reported, Hansmann made a clear case for both collaborative interaction speed and flexibility, as well as for complete security, in his company’s development cycle for new pharmaceutical products, the value of which is enormous to their bottom line. However, in a personal conversation following his talk, he acknowledged the potential need and value of using secure, hosted services, while at this time relying on complete control through premise-based technology,

Here is an email exchange that followed up on my conversation with him at the Microsoft OCS Launch.

From: Arthur M. Rosenberg [mailto:artr@ix.netcom.com]
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 4:08 AM
To: Hansmann, Rolf PH/DE
Subject: Good meeting you

Rolf,

I enjoyed hearing your presentation at the Microsoft Launch in San Francisco, as well talking with you afterwards.

I have long been focused on the end users' needs as a prerequisite for what the enterprise must supply in the way of technology services. I certainly appreciate your concerns for information security and I think that can be done by managing information access and limiting personal storage of such data. However, once a person knows the information, how can you possibly prevent them from giving it to someone else in some form or another? There obviously has to some amount of "trust," as well as tracking of individual communication activities.

In addition to security concerns, I think making business contacts more efficient, simplified, and flexible is a general need that UC will help make possible. Given that UC technology will provide such improvements, the next big question is how the enterprise should "migrate" to that future.

I am providing a link to my Microsoft UC white paper that was published back in July. While I certainly appreciate your concerns for having premise-based control over all information and communication activity, I think we are heading towards a hosted/managed service environment that will facilitate the migration to new communication applications, regardless of where the server and client software end up residing.

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

I am also providing a link to my latest article in BCR magazine that addresses the need for hosted/managed services because of the greater complexity of the UC technologies. Of course it will be most applicable to the SMB market, which doesn't have much in-house IT expertise at all, but I think even larger organizations will find it difficult to create or maintain all that constantly evolving software that gets tied into UC. On the other hand, who will you trust to do that in the future? (You have already mentioned your disappointment with some “UC” software offerings so far, along with high hopes for Microsoft’s OCS.)

I welcome your comments as a "hands-on," real-world enterprise user, and was glad to hear that in your environment, there is beginning to be a "viral" acceptance of UC capabilities from end users. Are you collecting any metrics of productivity yet?

Hope you had a safe trip home.

Best regards,

Art Rosenberg,

The Unified-View

From: Rolf.Hansmann,@sanofi-aventis.com
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 4:08 AM
To: Arthur M. Rosenberg [mailto:artr@ix.netcom.com]
Subject: RE: Good meeting You

Arthur,

For me, it was also a pleasure to meet you. I see from all your comments that great minds are thinking very similarly. This is true for almost all areas we talked about and the ones you mention in the eMail. The discussion about the combination of technical security measures and personal trust is one of my favourite discussions with security departments.

I already told them that for total technical security, we can block the network, but for keeping all the secrets a large organization has, we would need to kill all the employees knowing the secrets! (Social hacking is still the easiest way to get information.) So you are absolutely right! In the real world there are two different kinds of boys: one sort puts the nice marbles into the pocket, looks at them at home, and does not show them to anyone else. The other kind of boys take their marbles to the schoolyard and play with the other boys. Yes, this includes the risk of losing marbles, but it is the only way to win more as well.

So, for me security in the confidentiality area is a balance you always need to work on. Do not make it too easy for the competition (and the Chinese) to get your secrets, but do not stop the flow of creative juices within your own organisation. I think Microsoft OCS (MOCS) found a perfect balance for doing this with its Transport Layer Security. It is hard for the IT people to install it, but there are zero additional hurdles for end users to use it.

This leads me to the other part of your eMail and thinking - the external service idea for UC and other services. I am with Dilbert. He said that what we can count on for the next decade is inexperience and ignorance - and that is what will make your ideas useful. IT personnel, mainly the higher levels, often have no clue these days about new technology details and architecture. They are able to address budgets and they are able to reorganize their staffs. Then, IT middle management follows and often do not even try to innovate, but also focus on reducing operational budgets. If organizations would stop concentrating of saving operational cost and concentrate on understanding how IT technology is changing, almost every implementation project could be done for a minimum savings of 10 times less up to a maximum factor of some thousand times cheaper.

In Germany there is the Hercules project claiming to provide non-military communication for the Bundeswehr, our army personnel. They already spent 8 billion € on that for 100,000 people in Germany and claim that they need more money. Comparable projects in the business world do the same thing for 100,000 people worldwide for 5 million €. So my take is, that if IT management would be able to understand the new, “smart” infrastructures and consultants would head in the same direction, they would save tremendous amounts of money in implementations.

Under those circumstances, I would bet on using an internal smart infrastructure as we are doing (and proving with this that we are a good IT managers). But, under the current reality in many organizations, I would agree with you in your BCR article and say, “Given the inexperience of most IT organizations in implementing large but smart and cheap infrastructures, it might be better to start with an external service for commodity functions.”

Regarding productivity metrics, I need to say it is too early to have them for Microsoft OCS. We can speak about Exchange Conferencing here and we do have some of those activity statistics, which can be the baseline to calculate ROI savings from usage of that application.

I need to repeat: I enjoyed the discussion with you and I enjoy continuing that by eMail.

Rolf

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