BusinessTechFeed » Communications

At Orange Business Live – a View from Gartner

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 02:27:25 +0000

Peter Sondergaard from Gartner, spoke today here at Orange Business Services Orange Business Live 2010 event. He gave an over arching view of the challenges facing business and CIOs today, where – in his words – IT is shifting its focus towards towards balancing risk, cost, growth and innovation. I’ve attempted to catch what he said in this post.

Gartner lists amoungst CEO’s key business priorities that “IT-enabled changes will be a key element in post-recession strategy” – That means IT departments need to be more agile, or they will simply get outsourced. IT doesn’t control the economy, the environment, or the proliferation of technology, but it must deal with these three issues, said Peter.

The issue of business moving to Asia loomed large (as mentioned in the keynote earlier in the day). Can you accord a $25/month Salesforce.com solution if you have sales teams that are paid $100/month? We must “revisit behaviours” because the world is changing. The environment we have come into is one that is suffering from an erosion of trust as well – with $30 Billion of Lehman assets being found today, people are questioning the capabilities of businesses.

Risk is not just ‘security’ risk, it is using technology to manage risk across the business (cf BP and risk management). IT also gets to pick up responsibility for dealing with carbon cost remediation, and dealing with the proliferation of devices and data at the same time.

A couple of soundbites from Peter:

“There are a billion transistors for every human on early”
“The number of SMS messages on a daily basis, exceeds the number of people on earth”
Don’t find the new things in the data centre, it is at the edge where data is created.

The end user owns and innovates. The job of IT is now to facilitate that.

Social Computing was identified as trend #1.

“Business that block access will be loosers, those that support it will be winners” Peter Sondergaard.

Trend #2: Device proliferation. The ongoing consumerization of IT. Different device form factors, entertainment, and always on technology. The term “context aware computing” was new buzz word of the session for me – IT that knows: Who you are. Where you are . What you are doing. “Location is the key to context, and time is the trigger.”

Trend #3: Advanced analytics. Not the backward looking analytics that we are used to, but forward looking-pattern sensing models that sense weak signals in the data, and bring those signals back into the organistion to inform and alter strategy. Interestingly the examples Peter gave were, to me at least, actually ones that used social technology to connect consumers and product organisations.

Trend #4 Cloud computing, or rather its evolution. It is clear that everyone is still struggling to define what cloud computing is. Gartner has their one definition, but everyone, not just every organisation, but individuals too, have their own perspective. There are key themes though: service elasticity, scalability and internet technologies.

Peter gave a touching eulogy for Unified Communications – A technology full of promise, that has been firmly jumped by social media. That’s not to say people aren’t deploying it – there are, in droves, is is just that it has moved along the hype cycled to deployment and is now business critical and business sensible. It’s just that the ‘spotlight’ has moved on. Unified Communications is business as usual.

Garnter reaffirmed that mobiles (smart phones) are the emerging path to a ubiquitous technology platform. We are only a few years away from 80% of users having smart phones (if we aren’t there already). That’s world changing stuff.

All-in-all, a lot to digest. There was a healthy Q&A with Orange Business Service customers at the end, with Cloud Computing being a clear top of the agenda. From my perspective, being a CIO has never been more challenging. Now, it’s been getting harder from a long time.

VoIP Still a Two Horse Race

Benjamin Ellis — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 20:38:52 +0000

According to Dell’Oro Group figures released this month, the VoIP marketing is still a two horse race between Cisco and Avaya. The market for IP Phones grew by 10 Percent, which is a promising sign. They have also reported that the Unified Communications market grew in the third quarter of the year. The top two Unified Communications vendors, Avaya and Cisco, both posted double digit revenue gains, compared to last quarter.

“The second half of the year is typically stronger for the Enterprise Voice market, and the third quarter of this year was no exception for the Unified Communications segment,” commented Alan Weckel, Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Although we expect vendors to experience strong fiscal year-end results in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010, we do not expect vendors’ fiscal year-ends to be as strong as they were prior to 2008 for quite some time,”

Things are growing, but we’re still a way off the boom years of VoIP. The gradual migration continues, and the leading players remain much the same.

MiFi – WiFi that goes with you

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:39:25 +0000

There’s a gadget that has had our interest for a little while now. The first encounter was in St James’ Park, where this wallet sized device was enabling the real-time uploading of photos in the middle of a picnic. Vodafone has now launched the Novatel Wireless Intelligent Mobile Hotspot 2352 – or MiFi to its friends – available on a data package from now.

Best described as a Mobile Broadband Hotspot, the MiFi acts as an 802.11 (WiFi) access point for up to five devices, which it then connects to the Internet via a mobile data connection – the MiFi has a SIM card tucked away in the battery compartment. In our trials, the device lasts up to 4 hours on a single charge, which is reasonably impressive for an access point. It is small and light (it tucks easily into a pocket in a jacket or a bag). Switch on, then fire up your laptop/iPod Touch/WiFi device of choice and surf the net anywhere up to 10 metres away from where the MiFi has been put down.

The MiFi supports a reasonable selection of 802.11 security features, to limit its use to selected devices, where that is a requirement. It also supports a MicroSD card (which can be up to 16GB), enabling local file sharing via a web interface. A very nice additional feature that boosts its usefulness on the road. The connection speeds (via the mobile network ) are up to 5.7 Mbps on the uplink and 7.2 Mbps on the downlink, which puts it firmly in the broadband space, with very attractive upload speeds too.

Initially the MiFi is available from Vodafone in Germany, Romania and Spain. The device seems a good fit for:

Mobile teams – enabling collaboration and share data access.
Road warriors with more than one device requiring mobile data access.
Small group meetings in venues without WiFi.
Telemetry/mobile monitoring with WiFi enabled sensors.
Backup connectivity for small offices that are WiFi/DSL based.

On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 20:29:59 +0000

Recently I met up with Christopher Barrow at Avaya’s Guildford offices to talk through Avaya’s latest moves, and the evolving world of communications enabled business processes. Chris is an Avaya old hand, having been with the company through its many iterations, most recently as Product Marketing Manager for Avaya in the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. We talked about the state of collaboration technology, from the use of solutions like Sharepoint to managing with mobiles in the enterprise.

Avaya’s focus is increasingly on unifying the user experience, from the desk phone to the mobile phone, from the office to the road. Avaya views workers as existing across one of four solution domains, based on in-office or remote, and fixed or mobile: the desk based worker, the tele-worker, the mobile worker (on-site, but no desk) and the road warrior. It is a nice segmentation, and one that proves useful in understanding employee needs.

Recent licensing changes by Avaya mark a shift in how the solutions are sold. Essentially, rather than the old model of buying a number of licenses for each of the different modes, you can now purchase one license per worker to cover all of the modes. That means you don’t have to worry about changes in the split of your workforce, which will make life easier for IT departments and Human Resources alike. I suspect that it also reflects increasingly dynamic work places, as businesses continue to adopt modern working practices, the working styles in use are changing.

The in-premise mobile workers are addressed with Voice over WiFi, while off-site workers make use of Avaya’s 1x capabilities to reduce mobile costs and provide a single telephone number. The functionality effectively extends the PABX out to wherever the user is. Interestingly, Chris sees more use of privately owned mobiles by employees.

The Avaya solution enables separation of business and personal calls and costs, together with the ability to set up a “business profile” on the user’s mobile handset. This means IT departments can integrate user-provided mobiles with the corporate phone system, something that is becoming increasingly common as mobile phone choice becomes more of a fashion statement than a technology choice. The solution’s text to speech and speech to text functionality allow a reasonable degree of hands-free use whilst on the move – from looking up an employee’s number, to reading the subject of an urgent email.

Telephony is becoming less and less of a stand alone application, with Microsoft, IBM and Cisco, as well as Avaya, pushing unified communications. From click-to-call desktop applications, to email integration, this is the future of the phone system. Despite Microsoft’s wrangles with the OCS APIs, Ayava still integrates seamlessly with the Microsoft software environment. I’ll tackle that topic, together with some case studies, in part II.

Collaboration and Unified Communications – TechwiseTV

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:42:30 +0000

TechwiseTV is running ran a webinar on UC and collaboration, together with a real-time conversation via Twitter, (under the tag #twtv): “Pushing the Boundaries of Collaboration”

I am of the view that effective communication and collaboration tools are the best competitive weapon that any business can have. As the description of the webinar said, “[they] overcome the technology walls between organizations, while preserving security.”

Unified Communications, which is really something of an umbrella term, is starting to pull together the various communications channels that exist in a business. One of the exciting developments is that new advanced features, such as presence information (so that you can see if I am available before you waste your time trying to call me), has the potential to be federated (joined up – see this post) across different businesses, or at least across different business units.

David Knight, Director of Product Management for WebEx, ran through the WebEx infrastructure – the data centres and interconnects, and how they monitor and manage it all. This MediaTone network, which is the backbone for Webex, was discussed in reasonable detail. It comprises 9 global datacenters, connected via a real-time optimized network.

One of the challenges of any Internet based service is that, no matter how good the application provider’s networks, you are still at the mercy of the ISP providing you access – something to bear in mind when choosing your ISP.

Cisco have now added Wiki functionality into the team space offering (a nice way to reduce email dependency), which is good to see. Wiki’s are an excellent way to collect and consolidate information. The team room can be customized (there is a widget framework to enable custom collaborative applications).

The webinar also featured a section on the Cisco Learning Network and Cisco professional certifications. That sight, slightly amusingly, seems to be hosted by collaboration software provider Jive Software. Anyway, the learning network is looking for the next real IT star to build a documentary around, following their path to certification. It will be a talent competition, complete with audience voting. A chance for 15 minutes of fame for the backroom guys.

Unified Communications in the Real World

Benjamin Ellis — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:18:48 +0000

I caught up with Russ Kirk of Grey Convergence at IP08 last week to talk about Unified Communications in the enterprise. Grey has made a name for itself over the last few years, with its specialist team of Microsoft OCS gurus. They are one of around 8 certified Microsoft voice partners in the UK (although many of the others call on Grey’s skills).

Russ Kirk of Grey Convergence

There are very few people who know Microsoft’s OCS product well, and even fewer with real life experience of using it. Grey’s skills cover Unified Communications, collaboration and identity management. These are not such odd bed fellows, since OCS delivers collaboration, and none of this stuff works without a decent user store (hence the requirement for identity skills).

Grey were an Parlano partner before Microsoft purchased that outfit, to flesh out their persistent messaging portfolio. Talking with Russ, it was clear that Grey position themselves as IP telephony agnostic, working with Cisco, Nortel, Mitel and Ericsson.

They see a strong ROI-based deployment model of unified communications, but one that isn’t limited to softphones. Russ was quick to point out that Microsoft do a hard phone as well as their software client. Many businesses want to remove their reliance on the phone handset – a notoriously high cost item – but more importantly, HR departments want to get users away from a fixed desk mindset. UC somes as part of a later HR-driven change agenda, moving away from the traditional fixed desk, complete with family photo.

Taking that a stage further, and thinking about road warriors, UC is competing on the handset (in Windows Mobile devices), and also with mobile voice quality. Microsoft are careful to position the two types of voice as complementary, and Grey follow that line. As a side note, research shows a strong relationship between utility, convenience and voice quality. Get the first two right, and quality is less of an issue, or visa versa.

Road warriors are the easy win for UC, says Russ, but the 9-5 desk folks benefit from integration too (click to call):

“There is enough benefit there to justify deployments, without even looking to road warriors”

With a built in directory (hence Grey’s focus on ID management), user’s workflow is improved. Future applications can build on that too. There is a word of caution in this area from Russ:

“people want to run before they can walk… they want to do all of the application integration and get the benefits as soon as they have done their first deployment… …You need to take a busines consultancy, change management approach. Get the infrastrcture right and build from there…”

Very valid opinion, especially considering that many businesses don’t even have a remote working policy in place. Grey focus on mid-size financials, accountants and lawyers, government and education. Typical deployments have 10,000s of thousands of users. Microsoft OCS still makes sense for businesses with 50 users and up, but more so in the mid-hundreds of users.

I asked Russ why a business should think about a third party like Grey, rather than managing the deployment in house. He pointed out that for 500 or so users they have a quick start package. This gives a fixed price, from install onwards, and is most cost effective than working with a traditional systems integrator. They hand hold the migration, based on expertise gained with 8 years of doing IPT deployments. The migration is the tricky bit, and uses one-time skills. Making the go live a success is essential, especially when it comes to telephony.

When Blurred e-mail Goes From Bad to Worse

Benjamin Ellis — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 20:04:13 +0000

The proliferation of mobile devices and mobile users has had an unexpected consequence: e-mail is going non-corporate. Although they will rarely confess to it, many employees are redirecting work e-mails to private e-mail addresses so that they can pick messages up while on the move, either via webmail or mobile devices.

Why is that so bad? Well, it moves the security boundary for the corporate e-mail firmly outside of the corporate firewall. Hackers have recently had quite a bit of fun with a certain vice presidential candidate’s email (for the full back ground check out Michelle Malkin’s “The story behind the Palin e-mail hacking“. There are many different services out there, and the way that they handle authentication (the usernames and passwords) varies widely. A wily hacker could have access to a mailbox for months if not years before anyone realised.

What to do? The immediate sensible reaction might seem to be a big crack down, but actually it would be more productive to look at employee’s needs and provide mobile e-mail access. Monthly costs are now very low (on a par with line rental or a broadband account). It might also be time to take another look at a corporate webmail solution for laptop-based remote users.

You might not want users stuck in the office, but you don’t want their email running free!

Nortel Butts Heads With Cisco

Benjamin Ellis — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:39:04 +0000

It looks like Nortel is taking a leaf out of Juniper Network’s book and going head to head against Cisco with their latest cartoon-esque campaign. Buzzing across traditional media and via the social media chain…

“Today’s decision-makers are the most connected, best informed buyers in history,”

Lauren Flaherty, chief marketing officer at Nortel.

Too right Lauren. It features the Nortel energy efficiecy calculator (found here). You have to register to use it (cunning piece of lead generation there Nortel). Nortel are pushing the notion that Nortel kit uses significantly less power than Cisco.

We are a little stuck on the green bandwagon right now, but that is no bad thing. It is nice to see Nortel putting issues like this to the fore. [There was a broken link on the Nortel site, it is now fixed - fast work, well done!]

The actual page is here. They are claiming to reduce energy costs by up to 40%. See you what you think… It is based on a Tolly Group study. I’m not saying anything else.

TechCrunch 50 – ESME?

Benjamin Ellis — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:43:44 +0000

For those in the 2.0 world, this week was mostly about the TechCrunch50 – where a bevy of start ups compete to show their wares and try to win TechCrunch love. To cut to the chase, the winner was Yammer. The reason that is note worthy here is that Yammer is an enterprise offering – not very Web 2.0. ”Yammer is Twitter with a business model. ” says TechCrunch….

As Alan posts at Broadstuff, and as I’ve repeated like a stuck record all year, the money for the 2.0 crowd is ultimately in the enterprise. Not the big money, but the bulk of the money (ask me to explain some time).

The Inquisitr might be a little tongue in cheek with its list of wining ideas for TechCrunch50 2009 (worth clicking just for the LOLcat, srsly…), but as Alan says, they are on to something with the idea of jumping the technology into mainstream business IT. Get ready for the rush, it will probably arrive on a cloud too.

Meanwhile, the corporate IT vendor world is putting it’s 2.0 clothes on too. In a terrifying parallel – perhaps caused by sub-atomic disturbances from CERN - ESME has been born. What is ESME? It’s a plurk conversation that turned into a SAP Mentor project, and then to DemoJam. ESME is the Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment. Twitter for Enterprise. Hang on? Is there an echo on the blog? Haven’t we been here before, at least twice.

Unlike earlier ideas of business twitter, ESME seems a very complete offering. There are instructions on how to use the code for yourself, and a desktop client too. Whilst many businesses are still trying to get to grips with Instant Messaging, the world has moved on. We are into persistent chat now, baby. And we can have it – either via Yammer, or open sourced via ESME. Time to get you staff chatting, Enterprise 2.0 style.

Mobile Business VoIP – Moving Target?

Benjamin Ellis — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 22:49:44 +0000

There is a fair amount of chatter in the Blogosphere about an apparent shift in Nokia’s VoIP strategy – take this one from GIGAOM: “No VoIP In New Nokia N-Series Phones? Is Nokia Turning Its Back on MobileVoIP?”

Nokia has been pushing the envelope on the Fixed-Mobile Convergence front for quite a whole. For those who’ve missed out on the wild excitement of FMC and UMA, it is a vision that would see fixed and mobile voice coming together. Something that would actually be an exciting development for office telephony. The architectures usually employ Wi-Fi to bridge the final gap between the fixed office LAN and the mobile handset – which also opens up the potential for using public Wi-Fi hotspots (QoS permitting).

Image seemlessly switching between a GSM Mobile call and the same call via Wi-Fi onto the office LAN. Of course there is a fly in the ointment: It is a touchy subject for both mobile operators and business users. Calls over the LAN to another user on the network are free, obviously. Calls over the GSM network aren’t. As is often the case, one person’s cost saving is another’s revenue loss. In this case, the mobile carrier, and that is one of the potential big issues with FMC. And the man in the middle? Well, unsurprisingly it is the handset vendors. Back to Nokia.

Handsets like Nokia’s N95 enable VoIP as well as GSM calls. It’s not as seemless as it could be yet, but there are some very interesting apps out there. Take Fring as an example, it also includes instant messaging capabilities and Skype. Before you it out of the window as too consumer, think about the cost savings of IM and VoIP against your business mobile bills.

However, it seems that new Nokia handsets, like the N78, are missing this functionality. Garrett Smith, VoIP insider picks up the story:

This is a sticky situation for Nokia (and other handset manufacturers) since both the carriers and the carriers customers are Nokia’s customers; each of whom want something different. Nokia obviously played it safe with this move, siding with the carrier…

Garrett posted a further update today, after Nokia’s PR company touched base with him. The whole situation is complicated further by the desktop telephony vendors, who will want a slide of the action too. Cisco has Wi-Fi handsets and others are making a play for the convergence space too. Somehow all of this has to glue together, and suddenly you are bumping into the world of unified communications. It’s a big piece of pie to swallow.

You can obviously still install 3rd party apps to give VoIP on the handset, providing the network operator doesn’t block VoIP, but that it far from an integrated solution. Ultimately, as a business user, minimum overall cost and complexity are key.

In Europe, especially in the scandinavian countries, mobile voice has existed in the office in the form of DECT phones for quite some time. Reduced wiring costs and increased mobility for users are just some of the benefits. The magic will happen when it all gets down to one handset. One that will work outside of the office as well as inside, giving the full deskphone experience.

That’s still a way off, and by the look of Nokia’s new handsets, it is potentially getting further away…

Twitter Business? Business Twitter.

Benjamin Ellis — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 14:42:49 +0000

Can a Lonely Bird Survive?

This little chap fell out of his nest outside of my office. He was ok, but it got me thinking about a long piece on Twitter over at The Go West blog. It references Adam’s fuller article in Fortune “The True Meaning of Twitter” from earlier this month. Both are a fairly representative taster of the swirl around the Twitter microblogging/messaging service: When will it make money? And how?

The reality is there are lots of ways that it could, but the one that interests me is the use of twitter for business communication. It is one that seems least likely. Twitter differs from blogging in that it restricts users to a single line of text at a time, think of the length of a mobile SMS message. It differs from standard enterprise instant messaging in that it is a one to many, rather than one to one communication method (think website, rather than phone call). It is also persistent, in that the messages remain after a user signs out or updates.

Microsoft have invested in persistent messaging technology, and it is something that has been around in the finance space for quite a while. However, it has uses in many other types of business. It is a great way for remote staff to keep up to date with the business buzz, or to keep in touch with contacts at business partners. Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s chief technology officer is a keen Twitter user (see “Another view on Twitter“):

What I use Twitter most for is to share “What I am thinking” rather than “What I am doing.”

Instant messaging clients let users set a status message (as do social platforms like Facebook), but IM clients don’t usually keep a history of those messages. It is that journal (of thinking or doing) that is most interesting from a business communication perspective, since it allows staff to ‘checkin’ on each other actually disturbing their workflow. The sales team can know if there is a problem booking orders, or they can get a heads up about delayed shipments. It’s much more efficient than everyone phoning in and the same message being repeated 10 times – you can see my twitter stream, and Redcatco’s as examples (all be it outside-the-firewall ones).

The nice thing about the tool is that it is lightweight, fast to set up and easy to use. On the Twitter service, updates can be left as public (for all the world to read) or they can be set as private, enabling only people with permission to see the updates. I have heard of a number of early stage startups using Twitter with private messages as their communications backbone.

There is a fly in the ointment. Twitter has had a number of high profile outages. Also, what if you want Twitter inside of the firewall, rather than outside of it? Well there is an answer, but it isn’t Twitter.

Automattic, the people behind blogging platform WordPress, have produced a WordPress theme that enables you to turn a standard WordPress install into your very own Twitter-like microblogging service. It’s called Prologue. It also makes use of WordPress tags to enable messages to be associated with, for example, projects. You can see how Automattic have used it here.

Blogging and microblogging should be part of a business’s communication strategy these days, both for internal use, as well as for external (both marketing and non-marketing) use. Services are still coming and going, but the format is here to stay.

BusinessTechFeed » Communications

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