“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.

Related Posts

• Mobile Business VoIP – Moving Target?
• On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya
• Britannic Technologies – Convergence in Communications

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.

Related Posts

• Britannic Technologies – Convergence in Communications
• VoIP Still a Two Horse Race
• Collaboration and Unified Communications – TechwiseTV

Niall Anderson – CMO Global Crossing – gave some background on GC (see here and GC have blogs here).

Tim Stone – Cisco - cited Forrester’s study, which identified collaboration as a key critical success factor. He listed the following drivers:

• Business/financial – globallization, scale -> speed, productivity.
• Legal – compliance/governance, policy, security.
• Technological – continuus connectivity, real-time info, web2.0, SaaS.
• Societal – green, mobility, consumer-driven.

With SaaS and Web 2.0 seen as growing and disruptive – something I’d heartily agree with. He also provided some comfort to the gather IT crowd in the form of Gartner’s view of continued IT spending growth.

Tim also suggested that the following business priorities were key:

• “Save to invest” – save, then invest the saving in getting more savings.
• Unlock employee potential – which I’d put in the productivity bucket.
• Drive true customer intimacy.
• Distance yourself from your competitors.

And that technology would enable the transition to a borderless business… with employees working across the silos within the business and beyond. Technology had to meet the following demands to achieve this:

• Employee needs: why can’t i work form home. let me use a mac…. “The New Workspace”.
• Partners -  give me equal access.
• Customers – give me faster better services. Let me contribute.
• Business leaders – transform our customers, transform the world.

“The network is the platform for colaboration” is a convenient phrase for Cisco, but it is increasingly one that rings true, with video conferencing, unified communications and Web 2.0 based social applications. Cisco see teleprescence generating as much trafic as the whole of today’s Internet – quite a scary thought. They see the future IT architecture as a mixture of on-premises and SaaS with an API layer above it it. The would provided “the unified workspace” with collaboration applications: Cisco apps, partner apps, customer apps. Note that Cisco position Webex as SaaS (see earlier post).Cisco are focussing their efforts on adding intelligence into the network, and that has been their differentiation strategy for quite a while.

Tim touched on the ‘green IT’ issue, and talked about the Cisco eco board, responsible for: power steering comitte (reducing power consumption inc power consumptions of power). “98% of emmisions are not from IT… look elsewhere for savings” he said. My perspective is that IT can actually tackle those issues with things like intelligent buildings and collaboration apps, so I’m not sure I’m on the same page there. 50% of world emissions come from buildings. Tim pushing home working as an environmentally positive. The jury is out on that one (a good article here), but there are other good reasons to make sure that you have broad home-working capabilities.

Paul Butcher – President and COO of Mitel Networks – was next up, and quick to point out Mitel’s strength, especially in the UK. There are 25 million Mitel users around the world. His take on market demands was that users want to have seamless connectivity with their usual office (working from home, hotel, wifi hot spot, evenoffice functionality on their cell phones). Also that customers want to talk to a live person, a gentle knock against IVRs and speech to text systems.

Paul predicted that by 2010 we would be dealing with carbon metrics and disclosure. Something key to understand, given that 40% of the cost of running a data centre is power. He had some other interesting energy statistics:

• An office = 16.4kw hours/square foot, per year.
• 7% of that is for lighting.
• Data centre is 575kw hours/square foot, per year.
• 50% for IT equipment. 43% for cooling. Quite sobering.

He cited IDC’s YOU, Me and Green IT 2008 report, which suggests:

1. Financial savings.
2. Protecting the environment.
3. Supporting corporate values.
4. Regulatory requirements.
5. Improve the brand.

It is getting close to the point of spending more on cooling and power than on the servers he said. Reduce travel, but keep teams and business processes connected. Mitel appear to be working closely with Sun, and showed an integrated Sun Ray box and Mitel phone. A typical PC 80 use Watts, while the Sun Ray uses closer to 4 Watts. Of course you still need to factor in the power used by a display and by the servers, but it is an impressive energy saving none the less. ”Let’s talk green” said Paul. Good to hear, Paul!

Robert Jones - Avaya’s inimitable mobility/uc man was on the stage. Entertaining as ever, he cut through the marketing hype. Build a more productve work force, don’t waste time and money, he said. His 4 steps to Unified Communications: 

1. One business number for staff  - for desk phone plus mobile phone.
2. Location independence.
3. Desktop integration – drive productivity.
4. Presence – real time communications

Very much in-line with Avaya’s offering of course.  He talked about One-X, which is a multi-leg mobile call solution. The challenge? Training mobile users to use FMC and getting them to change their habits to save money.  Avaya are also launching the Intelligent Presence server, which supports XMPP and SIP simple. Most businesses haven’t yet cracked the presence problem, but it is a key productivity tool, at least for communications.

Jim Craig – Sun Microsystems – talked about the three phases of computing, comparing applications on the client, Hybrid – apps on desktop then client server (eg SAP), and display only – app on the network – SaaS, web, display protocols. The Sun Ray was the main focus, with its model of no local data and smart card login. A solid state solution, with no moving parts and low power consumption. A 76% ROI according to the Forrester TEI paper.

John Sharp – KHA continuity – rounded off the external speakers, and dealt with ICT continuity management.

Definition: “ICT continuity is the capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and disruptions in order to continue ICT services at an acceptable predefined level”.

He gave an overview of BS25777 (which complements BS25999). It is a code of practice (art II), not a specification. Effectively a management systems standard (that builds on ISO27001 and ITEL v3) and will feed into ISO 27031. It outlines 6 principles: protect, detect, react, recover, operate, return. Sound stuff.

The Britannic team put on an excellent event (and I wrote that before I and some others won a prize). The business has grown from strength to strength and earned itself some very loyal customers. The day included a presentation of some of their customer case studies, but it was talking to the existing customers there that really impressed me. They had found real solutions to real business problems. IT at its best.

Related Posts

• On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya
• A Cloud Computing Tour – London CloudCamp
• VoIP Still a Two Horse Race