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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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