Enterprise Connect | TalkingPointz

Tag Archives | enterprise connect

My Enterprise Connect Awards

By Dave Michels on April 4, 2012 in Telecom

Enterprise Connect 2012 took place last week in Orlando. It was a very good and very busy conference. The mood was good, the products and services were great. Overheard too many times:

We are not a technology company, we are driven by the market.
Unified Communications? You must mean Collaboration.
iPad = tablet = consumerization = mobility

On with the Awards

Best Keynote: Avaya. I enjoyed all of the keynotes this year. In a keynote, I look for: articulate vision, report card, announcements, flawless demonstration, and compelling presentation. Most unique keynote goes to Siemens Enterprise – more of a fireside chat. Continue Reading →

Comments { 4 }

Innovation Showcase Part 2 (Video)

By Dave Michels on April 2, 2012 in Telecom

Vidtel and Nuvixia present on Wednesday morning at Enterprise Connect 12, Orlando.

The Innovation Showcase seeks younger companies making an innovative contribution to enterprise communications.

Comments { 0 }

Innovation Showcase Part 1 (video)

By Dave Michels on April 2, 2012 in Telecom

Hookflash and Wrike present on Tuesday morning at Enterprise Connect 12, Orlando.

The Innovation Showcase seeks younger companies making an innovative contribution to enterprise communications.

Comments { 0 }

The DeskPhone – Friend or Foe?

By Dave Michels on March 30, 2012 in Telecom

Should the desktop phone be viewed as a visitor or long term resident?

Earlier this week, I posted Discussing Cloud Trends at UCStrategies. It includes a prediction by Televerse CTO that desktop phones are doomed. In that post, I take issue with it, their death is greatly exaggerated.

Meanwhile, the subject also came up at Enterprise Connect 2012. Let me clarify my position:

The primary folks that insist the phone is dead are the hosted folks (some exceptions). They are enamored with recurring services and hate on-prem hardware. They generally pitch no up-front costs, but if you are a laggard and insist on a phone you are penalized and asked to buy them up-front (which defeats the value proposition). Since most hosted providers don’t make phones, and don’t profit from them – they sell whatever they can at the lowest possible price to get the recurring monthly subscription. The phone itself offers no meaningful part of their value proposition, raises the cost of admission, and complicates deployment.

The other group that pitches the death of the phone is Microsoft Lync types. Interestingly enough, these phones do offer some unique value and benefit, but again Microsoft doesn’t sell phones. They do indeed profit from them, but Microsoft see’s itself has a software company. The bigger issue is ROI – Microsoft see’s the phones, even their branded phones, as a barrier to a quick ROI. If they can convince their customers to eliminate the phones – the ROI and deployments are much faster. The Microsoft customers that presented at Enterprise Connect 12 all agreed phones are for laggards.

But there is a much larger group that still likes phones. Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, ShoreTel, and Siemens Enterprise all support softphones, but believe their physical phones offer a compelling experience. I’ve written several blogs on phones and believe they are in need of a major update/facelift, but do not believe they are going away anytime soon. The fact the conversation – the death of the phone – has continued for about five years now, could be seen as a self evident proof of exaggeration.

The vendors and strategies are, of course, just part of the argument – what does the customer want? Here the message is more confused. Customers like low prices, and initial costs are lower without phones. However, headsets are a non trivial expense and don’t last as long as phones. A phone has a reasonable lifespan of 5-10 years. A headset has a reasonable lifespan of 1-2 years, but typically don’t survive employment churns. Phones can be capitalized, headsets typically are not. Since a nice headset can run $300+ and a basic phone can run $150 – the low cost champ isn’t so clear.

On the other hand, phones are easy – anyone can walk up to a phone and use it – donning a headset and accessing a softphone tends to be more personal. Not a problem at YOUR desk, but we tend to be at other desks more often than before.

The key to the phone is to maximize the experience of a fit for purpose device. If the phone is treated as an afterthought – or as an analog set equivalent – it is doomed to fail. If the phone is tightly integrated into, and optimized for, the communications process it will flourish.

Innovation Showcase 2012

By Dave Michels on March 5, 2012 in Telecom

We are doing the second annual Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect later this month.

This is a great opportunity for younger companies to get some enterprise love. Enterprise Connect actually provides booth, hotel, and travel for the selected companies. This year, we received 15 applications and had a hell of time picking four. The parameter for selection is quite broad – innovative approach to enterprise communications. That’s three words (innovative, enterprise, and communications) that few people actually can agree on meaning. As policy, we do not publicly list companies that were not selected as we don’t want to suggest they are not innovative. The four companies selected for the showcase this year are:

Hookflash enables rich, real-time voice, video and text in an innovative new combination with social media. Hookflash is a “social business-real-time communications” platform providing a new way to communicate and collaborate. The first service/client/app, “Hookflash for iPad” is designed for the iPad.
Nuvixa delivers value to its enterprise customers by dramatically improving the way they communicate using video. Nuvixa is leveraging the meteoric growth rate in 3D sensing sparked by Microsoft’s Kinect Sensor to bring an incredibly rich palette of end-user functionality to the on-line conferencing space. This revolutionary new functionality had only been possible with dramatically more expensive niche solutions.
Wrike provides project collaboration software that helps companies get things done in real time. Customers rely on Wrike for working on their tasks and projects in the cloud. Wrike also is the first app to bring a flexible graph model for work data: all project ideas, details, schedules and discussions are connected in one spot.
Vidtel enables any-to-any cloud video communications. The Vidtel Connect service allows enterprises to keep their video systems securely behind their firewalls, yet reachable with a simple email-like Vidtel calling address. Additionally, enterprise video systems (e.g., Polycom, Cisco, LifeSize) can interoperate with consumer-grade video communication technologies (Skype and Google Talk) with the Vidtel bridging service.

Continue Reading →

Comments { 0 }

Clouds Forming Over Orlando #EC12

By Dave Michels on February 27, 2012 in Telecom

Enterprise Connect (#EC12) is coming-up at the end of March in Orlando. Lots of Pre-EC activities are already filling my days. This year’s event looks to be shaping up nicely. Corporate wallets are opening again, R&D is up, and the vendors actually have some exciting products to share.

This year, I expect lots of cloud stuff at Enterprise Connect. I think ShoreTel buying M5 in Feb was the tip of the cloud iceberg. The premises vendors have mostly ignored or causally experimented with cloud solutions – I think this year is the inflection point. But few have really brought to market a reasonable hybrid model which I think is the end game.

The other cloud, virtualization, is also big news. How big? Mitel is returning to EC and probably dragging VMware along with them. Recently Mitel expanded its virtualization footprint to include softphones on virtual desktops including call centers -using VMware View. The patterns seems that Mitel innovates on virtualization, and the others follow (but the gaps vary widely). With just about every vendor pushing virtualization, you’d think VMware oughto buy a booth…

Speaking of which, IBM isn’t on the exhibitor list either, though IBM is doing a keynote presentation. I assume the keynote will say if you want to know more about IBM to tweet them or like them. IBM doesn’t do UC, they do social. If you are in a social setting at EC12, tell someone about IBM. If it’s UC solutions you are seeking they can be found in the exhibit hall. Continue Reading →

Comments { 1 }

Wanted: CIOs

By Dave Michels on December 7, 2011 in Telecom

Coming up at Enterprise Connect will be the 2nd Annual Innovation Showcase.

Enterprise Connect is the biggest UC, Voice, VoIP, communications event each year for enterprise communications. In addition to all the major vendors – there’s lots of CIOs and buyers there too. Last year, fairly last minute, we created the Innovation Showcase, to identify young companies that are offering an innovative product or service in the name of enterprise communications. That’s a wide berth! “Enterprise Communications” includes voice, video, text/SMS, IM, conferencing, collaboration, contact centers, messaging, social networks, and more.

Being such a big conference, focused on big customers, Enterprise Connect isn’t an inexpensive show for exhibitors. But the show organizers realize innovation often comes from smaller young companies – so the companies that get selected for the Innovation Showcase not only get a booth-Kiosk, but even an allowance toward travel. Even better, they get to demonstrate their products in a short pitch on the keynote stage. The exposure is phenomenal to enterprise buyers, analysts, and media. Four companies will be selected. Better mousetrap required. Continue Reading →

Comments { 0 }

Multi-Modal Communications 3

By Dave Michels on May 11, 2011 in Telecom

In this third and final post to this series, I will take a look at a few enterprise focused examples of multi-modal communications.
Companies in this post: Avaya, Fonolo, Gold Systems, Google, Proton Media, Radish Systems, Radvision, Siemens-Enterprise, and Skype,
Let’s start off with Avaya and their One-X Mobile Agent. Avaya always try to demo too much and confuse the point, like in a recent keynote they showed how a video call can go to voice mail. What they were showing was a dynamic multi-modal call, but what people saw and heard was a failed communication attempt or botched demo. They redialed and were connected. In the video below, they sow more multi-modal magic, but confused the message with a 5 minute hold time and resolution requiring a local technician. Those points were included attempting to show the features call back and geo location lookup and conference.

Radish Systems. I met Radish Systems through the Innovation Showcase at Enterprise Connect, the company was one of four companies selected to present and exhibit at Enterprise Connect 2011. Radish takes the IVR of yesterday and combines it the smartphone of today and delivers a new type of IVR- Interactive Video Response. The notion allows a call center to push pictures to the phone while on a phone call. The applications are limitless.

Check out this video hosted by the CEO of Radish Systems. Theresa Szczurek gives several examples of what ChoiceView can do, but the more pertinent ones are the hotel booking and the florist call. In the hotel booking, the reservation agent provides views of the rooms while on the call and then sends a map to the hotel. The florist example also sends pictures of products, but more importantly understood exactly where Theresa was on the website before she called. These examples illustrate the power of complementing voice with multi-modal communications.

Honorable mentions go to Siemens Enterprise and Radvision, both of which have incorporated two way video and collaboration sessions with the iPhone and iPad. Also, Fonolo brings context and state to the IVR.

So far, most of my multi-modal examples require a smartphone. But Smartphones are not the only multi-modal device. Nor does the multi-modal part have to be on the remote end.

Terry Gold, CEO of Gold Systems, gives an example of how the Vonetix framework upgrades Microsoft Lync to a multi-modal Call Center. It is a brilliant concept, IM to speech for the agent to communicate with a caller in queue.

Another interesting form of multi-modal communications is the notion of simulated conferences. I am happy to admit I didn’t get this at all and was sure this notion was just stupid. The only one I have tried is Avaya’s WebAlive service which I wrote about here. Contrary to my initial thought, this isn’t just a game version of conference calls, but actually fills a hole as a viable form of remote collaboration.
Audio conference calls are not engaging. Shared desktop or PowerPoint sessions are a step up, but still pretty easy to get distracted with other matters like email or buying shoes. Video conferencing is a bit intrusive and potentially expensive. Simulated meetings address all that – efficient, engaging, and collaborative. WebAlive is also reasonably priced for small business.
Proton Media offers a similar technology for Microsoft Lync environments. That makes three now of the four Innovation Showcase presentees in one blog post. Be sure to check out Innovation Showcase next year at Enterprise Connect (Proton Media, Fonolo, and Radish Systems). This is a great example of mulit-modal communications – engaging video, audio, documents, and this notion of distance. With WebAlive, everyone can hear the speaker on the podium, but otherwise, two way audio is limited to people near you (and you can move around). I also like in WebAlive that you can pick up a phone and make a call or hit the webscreen on the wall and visit/share a website.

Of course, no multi-modal conversation is complete without Skype – which makes video, IM, voice, and desktop sharing a free ubiquitous service. My problem with Skype is some limitations that I think should be gone. For example, SMS is rapidly becoming the communications technology of choice when a short note will do. The problem with SMS it is requires giving out a direct cell number which is problematic on multiple levels. This is another topic for another post, but we need to stop communicating with addresses that frequently change and focus more communicating with people. Google Voice gets points here – allowing people to keep their number (and SMS address) regardless of cell phone carrier or even if they have a cell phone. This is a solution that Skype should offer, but doesn’t. I also don’t get why Skype offers such crappy voice mail as an add-on fee. I can send an IM that queues until the person comes online, but not a voice message.

I will also recognize Southwest Airlines for actually calling me in advance last week (before I got to the airport) notifying me that my flight was cancelled. The recording provided online rebooking instructions and also offered to transfer me to an agent. All of which not only allowed me to manage my time, but manage my communication modal as well (they also sent me an email – oddly no SMS though).
Multi modal communications is where it is at, and a strong contributor to the demise of the POTS line. A simple thing like the equivalent of SMS on home POTS lines could give copper lines an significant injection of relevance.
Last and final point is the APIs of modern UC solutions offer a tremendous amount of potential to use multi-modal tools to communications enable business processes (CEBP). Examples are deep and rich – automatic notifications or reminders, tools to locate people with specific skills, or manage emergencies. The list goes on. The fact is, a lot more can trigger a phone call (or txt, or IM, etc.) than a finger these days.
See also
Multi-Modal Part 1
Multi-Modal Part 2

Comments { 0 }

UC Is Free

By Dave Michels on April 25, 2011 in Telecom

Phillip Crosby published “Quality is Free” in 1979, and it became a key contributor to a global revolution in manufacturing practices. Previously, “Quality” was associated with goodness, or luxury rather than conformance to requirements. Quality was also considered intangible. Crosby both defined and explained how to measure quality leading to huge gains in customer retention and profitability. The conclusion was obvious, despite the costs of quality (process management, inspectors, sampling, etc.) that the ROI was compelling – at a minimum it was free.

Extra legroom … Supersize fries … In a world where we’ve gotten used to paying for upgrades, it’s rare that an extra feature doesn’t bring extra cost.

Initially, telephony vendors positioned UC features as optional and expensive bolt-ons, but the complexity of multiple servers limited its suitability to larger enterprises with extensive IT skills and budgets. UC was considered a “luxury” item for aggressive early adopters rather than organizations with real budget constraints. Plus, UC was loosely defined and took on a slippery “I know it when I see it” flavor.

But the costs and perceptions of unified communications are changing – and today you can get for cheap what used to cost extra.

At Enterprise Connect 2011, 11 major vendors presented UC solutions, each with the four UC building blocks: IM/presence, conferencing (audio, web and video), mobility and extensibility. Each supplier presented its UC pricing for the standard configuration. The per-user-per-year average prices for the UC-only configurations were down more than 50% from last year, to $38 per user per year (software, hardware and maintenance for 2,000 users for three years). Costs are dropping while the solutions are becoming more integrated and more extensible.

Read the Full Post at Voice Report

http://www.thevoicereport.com/2011-04-21/UC-is-Free

Comments { 0 }