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

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.

Related Posts

• Unified Communications in the Real World
• VoIP Still a Two Horse Race
• On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya

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
• VoIP Still a Two Horse Race
• On The Way to Unified Communications – with Avaya