“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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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.

Related Posts

• Collaboration and Unified Communications – TechwiseTV
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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…

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