Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com - Nortel Archives

Check out a Webinar on Telecom Visibility 2.0

2012-03-20T17:41:14Z

For over 20 years I’ve been tracking Unimax a company that has been the only pure-play moves/adds/changes solutions provider to large enterprises around the globe. Andrew Hunkins was the founder/CTO/CEO throughout the years and my most memorable meetings with him were at the Harry Newton/CMP Computer Telephony EXPOs also known as CTEXPO in Los Angeles, California. A huge accomplishment for the company Hunkins founded was lasting – it’s been around since 1985!! This is a big deal.

It is worth mentioning that Hunkins has moved on from the company but he/Unimax made national news when after the Iraq war they were featured in BusinessWeek because they lost a partnership deal in France because there was a brief spat between the US and the French over the Iraq war.

You remember, when we were briefly calling French Fries, Freedom Fries and body odor French perfume – admittedly I might have been the only one speaking the latter – but I know you were thinking it.

Unimax has evolved over the years and Minnesota-based company is sponsoring a webinar on TMCnet which will discuss how organizations can increase their telecom visibility and reporting. I would have called the webinar using big data and analytics to manage your disparate PBX and communications systems across the campus and/or globe but admittedly that is a really long headline.

But you get the idea. The webinar takes place in a couple of days and thanks for working with me during this brief commercial message from our sponsor.

Chinese Nortel Hack Unconfirmed by my Sources

2012-02-16T01:33:35Z

Although reports have been swirling regarding Chinese hackers breaking into Nortel's computers for over ten years in order to steal trade secrets, I have been unable to confirm such a breach took place. I have tapped into a few high-level sources and they were unaware of anything like this happening - the internal Nortel employees would almost certainly need to know if such an attack was taking place.

After all, reports say that even Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski had a computer which was compromised.

One of the reasons Nortel went bankrupt had to do with Chinese competitors Huawei and ZTE undercutting Nortel on price for carrier wireless and other products. So it easy to understand why many would easily believe that Nortel had been hacked.

And hacks from China are not unusual - they have happened to numerous US companies and even government agencies.

But again, would you not let your company workers know if this was the case?

Siobhan Gorman has a story in the Wall Street Journal on what happened at Nortel and it seems there is enough information to make you believe the hack was real. But still, I remain skeptical that the breach if it happened was on such a massive scale. I reached out to Siobhan in order to see if there are any public documents which would enlighten us. I will advise you if I hear of anything - please drop me a line if you know of anything as well.

ITEXPO East 2012 Miami Out of Office Message

2012-01-24T22:15:59Z

While I digest the super-strong, mind-numbing Apple growth numbers which propelled the stock to a high of $460 per share after hours I have just set my out of office message for next week when I will be at ITEXPO. The message is below in case you want to use something similar. And for your convenience here is the first show daily from the event – which covers news from Sprint, AT&T, Whitespace Alliance, Panasonic, Accedian Networks, Cycle30, FaxSIPit, Phone.com and Polar Media.

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Thank you for your message. Starting Jan 30th I will be at ITEXPO (www.itexpo.com) in Miami.

This is the global tech and communications conference - covering cloud, MSP, super WiFi, 4G, M2M, Patents, SIP, VoIP, HTML5 and featuring keynotes from Google, Sprint, Samsung, The FCC and Sir Terry Matthews.

On Friday, Feb 3rd @ 1:45 pm I give away a new Mustang - You must be present to win so I hope to see you there. (http://goo.gl/vkqrd)

Have a wonderful week and enjoy the New Year.

New Interactive Intelligence Quick Spin Cloud Contact Center Trial Portal

2011-10-17T14:00:00Z

Coming off the first six months of 2011, Interactive Intelligence enjoyed cloud-based revenue growth numbers of 58% while orders increased a whopping 146% during the same period. Moreover, the cloud accounted for 26% of the company’s total new order dollar volume in the first half of 2011. Company CMO Joe Staples said the following to me in a meeting in New York, “We are seeing a huge shift towards the cloud.” He continued, “It is talked about in every single deal we are in.”

As a refresher – the company started selling a hosted solution in 2005 but relaunched its cloud-based communications as a service or CaaS solution in 2009.

And when you have a successful service, you always look for new ways to expand – in order to bring it to a larger audience. This is why the company has launched Quick Spin – a new trial site which is designed to allow companies to kick the tires of the hosted service before they buy. Staples explained that some of the functionality has been removed – typically items which require training to use properly. What you get is full unified communications including conferencing, desktop call control and enterprise IP PBX as well as contact center functions such as ACD, basic IVR, reporting, analytics and on-demand recording. Some things not included are predictive dialing, workforce management and post-call surveys.

The Quick Spin Start Page

Joe tells me you can set up the service in about an hour – and you can have a total of ten users, 3 workgroups and five skills. Moreover you can have 10 keywords or phrases you can use for speech-analytics.

The Quick Spin Settings Page

Here is the interesting part of my discussion – Interactive Intelligence is chosen by customers in-part because of their long-experience in the market. The reason this is interesting is the company has been in the contact center space since the mid-nineties which makes their longevity years longer than many newer cloud-based vendors. When the company stormed onto the call center scene in the nineties they differentiated themselves by unifying communications across once-disparate boxes for IVR, ACD and PBX… For the first time, you could have a single unified system handling most everything you needed your contact center to do. But for years, the company was considered a newcomer going up against more established players like Melita, Rockwell Electronic Commerce, Lucent, EIS Davox and Aspect. In the cloud-based contact center space they are now an established incumbent.

The Quick Spin Workgroups Screen

Of course there are other reasons the company is winning in the cloud such as their use of virtual machines for each customer as opposed to multi-tenant architecture. Although for most situations, multitenancy works well at isolating user sessions, virtualizing each company’s sessions adds even greater isolation to user data each customer uploads to the Interactive Intelligence cloud. As an added bonus - Interactive allows customers to migrate from the cloud to an on-premise based solution. This feature is obviously a great option for companies who aren’t sure if they are ready to move to the cloud forever.

For companies looking to trial Quick Spin, you will go through a brief qualification phase to make sure you are a real company, not a competitor, etc. Then you are off and running with 2,500 minutes of use or 14 days of service – whichever comes first. Joe tells me companies will likely not use the system in a live environment but rather as a trial system. One of the benefits of note is the supervisor screens and reporting are both of production quality meaning you get a great feel for what it would be like to become a customer.

The Quick Spin Start Configuration Page

Of course any new technology takes time to be taken seriously but hearing that all discussions with new customers mention cloud and moreover that 26% of the company’s approximately $200M in annual revenue comes from cloud-based solutions shows that as far as customers are concerned, the move to cloud-based contact centers is very real and not slowing down.

Latest Trends in Speech Technology, CRM, IVR, Collaboration and Cloud Computing

2011-08-14T23:45:22Z

Speech analytics in greater demand

At the recent SpeechTek 2011 conference in New York I gained some great insight into the state of speech technology. For example, Jeff Schlueter of Nexidia told me his company’s speech analytics solutions have been in greater demand in this current economy as the desire to control costs has led to increased adoption of speech analytics. In addition, the company has released version 9.0 of its Enterprise Speech Intelligence product suite which cuts the TCO in half and allowing for customers to handle even larger amounts of data.

Voxeo goes big

The idea of handling larger systems was echoed by Dan York of Voxeo who told me the latest version of the company’s new VoiceObjects 11 solution has scaled for a mix of global carrier and enterprise customers to handle 20k ports. More importantly the ports are all linked into a private cloud of sorts allowing central reporting across the VPN, a central console, full resiliency, redundant failover and one-click roll back in case there is a problem which quickly needs to be undone. York explained the company has also rolled out Prophecy 11 which adds HD voice, IPv6 and fax support. One good bit of news is wideband audio makes it easier to recognize voice because as York explains, “There is a lot more data to analyze.”

New player Novauris intrigues

Competing against established players like Nuance, Microsoft and Loquendo isn’t easy but Novauris, a newcomer to the speech technology space has already inked some deals with tier one OEMs and carriers and they have a specific niche where they think their performance is best in class. Specifically, accessing very large sets of databases such as addresses, names of people, product catalogues, IPTV and electronic programming guides, local search and directory assistance. The company works with Angel and SpeechCycle in the call center space as well – doing name and address recognition in the cloud and passing back the data via XML in real-time.

Industrial speech apps boost productivity

Wavelink Corp has been in the mobile device management space for many years and its Avalanche software has been upgraded to 5.2 providing increased capabilities in terms of reporting, organizing devices, security, location-based services and two-way messaging between administrator and user devices. Moreover, in a conversation with Jay Cichosz, he tells me the company has been enjoying success in the industrial market where the company’s terminal emulation solutions help workers more efficiently manage packing and shipping logistics via handheld devices. Moreover, by speech enabling these apps – his customers have seen productivity gains as floor workers no longer have to glance at a watch or PDA to see what they need to do next – they can now just listen and respond with voice as well. The company’s Speakeasy voice solution was upgraded this past March and differentiates itself by being priced very competitively and doing the speech processing on the mobile device in order to save precious bandwidth on factory-floor networks which typically aren’t designed to handle bursts of multimedia traffic.

Microsoft to abstract devices for more seamless experiences

Last year, Microsoft introduced me to their Xbox Kinect gaming system with built-in speech recognition and I was very impressed. To date though the gaming system has been better known for its motion detection – allowing the body to be the controller than its speech technology. This will potentially change soon as speech has now been put into the SDK.

In my meeting with Grant Shirk, I also had a chance to use Windows Phone 7 Mango and as Shirk explained some areas of speech integration are apps, search and address book. By the way, the new Mango OS supports 500+ new features 4 of the top 15 requests for improvements included speech.

I asked Shirk about his thoughts regarding HTML5 and he believes there is a lot of opportunity for speech to be integrated into HTML5 and moreover, he said companies HTML5 investments generally start with customer interactions and he said, “Speech is a natural interface.” When queried about where Microsoft sees itself in these spaces, he replied, “We are in a great position to provide services to help companies build cross-channel experiences independent of device.” To me that makes the company sort of a super-middleware provider of the future and in some ways, Adobe’s new Edge tool I just covered will be competitive with this vision.

SAP feeds customers feeds

SAP is best known for a suite of software solutions used to help companies get products from manufacturing to the customer, allowing them to collect money and pay taxes – and just about everything in-between. In a conversation with Anthony Leaper and Dr. Volker Hildebrand, they told me how the company sells their solutions in bite-sized chunks and also makes rapid-deployment solutions available for delivery in 6-8 weeks. Sales, service and marketing are just some of the areas where such packages are available.

One of their latest announcements is Sales onDemand – a feed-based system which brings structured and unstructured data together in a collaborative, Facebook like way. Similar to Salesforce Chatter or Cisco Quad, the company is targeting very large companies and will also release Service onDemand. These two products will work together allowing salespeople to see a feed of customer late payments or service requests. Leaper believes SAP has an advantage over Salesforce because his system is more integrated allowing all objects in the CRM database to be seen while he sees Chatter as a bolt-on solution.

The challenge for SAP is they are late to the game but they may see these new releases as a way to protect and cross-sell to their installed base and speed-to-market has to be balanced with interoperability across the company’s ever-expanding software suite.

Turning Oscar Madison communications into Felix Unger

The Odd Couple was a favorite TV show of mine as a kid featuring a very Messy Oscar Madison who was roommates with a very neat Felix Unger. I couldn’t help thinking about these two when I met with Alok Kulkarni of Cyara Solutions and his customer Sam Jackel from Westpac, Australia’s largest bank with 6-7 million customers. Cyara provides next-generation premise and cloud-based solutions for simulating, testing and monitoring IVRs, voice biometrics, outbound dialers, voice callback and other contact center systems and applications.

And what they did for the bank was to help them take disparate solutions handling IVR, speech, complex routing algorithms, Websphere, java apps and more and integrate them more efficiently to dramatically improve customer satisfaction. A three-year project resulted in customers being able to get to the information they want via phone in only 14 seconds. This is down from 90 seconds – a significant improvement. To get an idea of what challenges the company had, every time there was a customer interaction, messaging needed to traverse a number of different firewall hops and pipes between Telstra, IBM and Westpac networks causing potential packet loss, latency and jitter.

In addition, by using automation, the need for human testing has been reduced by 50% - allowing these testers to be deployed for more sophisticated testing.

The bank is thrilled and says they view Cyara as a key plank in their strategy around quality and efficiency and use the company for end-to-end regression, systems integration, functional, stress, performance and load testing and real-time monitoring of the customer experience in the production environment. You generally don’t get such a large company to give such a glowing testimonial to a relatively new company so I thought it worth sharing.

Zoho’s Appleization

In a conversation with Sridar Vembu and Raju Vegesna of Zoho they explained to me their take on the future of computing. Sit down before continuing because this is a really big deal. The software market is going through a gut-wrenching change. Consider, even the most complex apps can be put out in a few weeks because of the maturity of the latest development tools which can be constructed atop existing frameworks. And once released, distribution of these solutions has been commoditized through app stores. Basically, software is on the verge of being commoditized and if we learned anything in the PC Vs. Apple war it is that a slick, simple-to-use interface is worth far more than a commoditized solution.

Subsequently, Zoho, a company with a suite of 30+ cloud-based solutions is working on making their interfaces even simpler to use. I got an early glimpse of their new CRM software and was very excited about the new and much-cleaner interface which loses no functionality in its pursuit of Apple-like simplicity.

What I like best is the ability to tie together email, office apps, CRM and everything else so users don’t have to bounce around between a myriad of apps on the desktop to get their work done. An early pioneer in the cloud space, Zoho is now up to 1,500 people and is profitable and experiencing 100% YoY growth.

In two weeks you can expect a new solution, Contact Manager which the company bills as CRM for the beginner. For more on Zoho, check out this video interview TMC’s Erik Linask conducted with the company late last month in San Jose.

So there you have it – if you made it this far, thanks and be sure to catch up on other articles from Speechtek from TMC’s Tammy Wolf:

Will AT&T, T-Mobile Merger Slow Wireless Innovation?

2011-07-25T18:46:59Z

AT&T has done an incredible job of getting special interest group after group to endorse its merger with T-Mobile, saying it will provide better broadband access for minorities, rural subscribers and just about any group of people you can think of. The broader gay community too has endorsed the merger - apparently transgender-Americans have been hoping for the day when there was one less GSM provider to choose from.

Here is how the system works - AT&T has hundreds of thousands of workers and inevitably large numbers of them in myriad groups. This in turn coupled with large contributions to various organizations and associations is rewarded with the reciprocal endorsing of anything AT&T requests.

To help grease the wheels even further, AT&T has further upped its lobbying budget by 58% according to PC Magazine.

AT&T is doing the smart thing by getting rid of its sole GSM provider allowing it better negotiating leverage in its roaming agreements with foreign carriers and gaining the ability to raise rates with one less major competitor to depress market pricing. It will also gain more leverage when negotiating with hardware and software companies.

An anti-merger video by the Free Press Action Fund

If the US government blocks the deal it will be because the remaining major companies AT&T and Verizon will have so much share that they are effectively a duopoly at about 80% - allowing them to raise prices at will.

Again, if you are an AT&T or Verizon shareholder, you likely want this merger to happen and AT&T is serving its short-term shareholders well by seeking this transaction.

But the challenge I see is that with one less major telecom carrier in the US it becomes that much more difficult for innovative start-ups to launch, get funding and hold their breath long enough for a carrier to buy from them. Sprint and T-Mobile have been fairly aggressive working with smaller companies that provide FMC solutions for example and because of this, funding has flowed into a bunch of companies serving the needs of the telcos. To make matters worse, Alcatel-Lucent has struggled for years to make money in this new landscape of shrinking carriers and NSN is really having problems making profit. Moreover, Nortel well bankrupt largely because of a single wireless contract it missed out on so obviously the challenge here is for the telecom hardware and software ecosystem as a whole.

So with less competition there will be less need to innovate and subsequently telecom equipment providers will have more trouble making money, getting funded and spending on R&D. This in-turn will cause a negative feedback loop where there are less companies innovating and Verizon, AT&T and a host of other carriers have less advanced services to offer. This in turn will eventually reduce revenues for carriers.

But this outcome will take a while to happen because investors aren't thinking about these issues, they are still licking their lips trying to take part in a telecom deal like the one where Skype sold to Microsoft for $8.5B.

AT&T should know these dangers and they probably do - but it is possible they are giving up on services. After all, IMS was supposed to unleash a wave of new applications and the carriers were going to share in the profit. Well the the app store quickly brought an end to that hope.

But then again, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam is set on bringing what he calls the innovation from wireless, into the wireline side of the business. But if Verizon really wants an environemnt where there is lots of innovation, one would imagine it would be very vocal in opposing the AT&T, T-Mobile deal. To date they haven't said much.

So for AT&T, Verizon and a host of other larger carriers in the global market, this merger could make it more difficult for them to find the next killer service like SMS. But then again, if you own one of the two major wireless superhighways, you may not have to offer anything in exchange for increasing your toll prices.

TMC Dallas Video Interviews 2011

2011-07-25T15:57:02Z

Recently I spent some time in Dallas doing video interviews with companies in the Dallas, Texas area and during the course of the discussions I was able to get a sense of where the markets have been and are going. The vast range of different opinions really comes together into a few themes.

They are simply that wages and turnover rates in India are skyrocketing meaning some jobs may be headed back to the US. This is offset by an interview with King White of the Site Selection Group - an organization which helps companies decide which countries and states they should locate in. He tells us that states with higher taxes are less attractive and subsequently deter companies from opening there. Simply stated, voters electing candidates who consider raising taxes are likely killing the future job prospects of their state.

This is also the case in elections of congressmen, senators and obviously presidential elections.

On the tech side, there is an increased push towards video, wireless, small cells, mobility and the call center space is enjoying renewed growth and energy.

For more details, browse the descriptions below, view the videos and read the articles.

COMPANY			Description
Site Selection Group	Video	Article	Learn how higher taxes kills jobs
Varaha Systems	Video	Article	Mobile solutions - voice, data and video
Airband Communications	Video	Article	Fixed wireless for business
Vanillasoft	Video	Article	Inside sales automation
Airwalk Communications	Video	Article	Small cells and the future of mobile & wireless
Sipera	Video	Article	Unified communications security, simpler SBCs
ABP	Video	Article	Death of value chain PBX distribution
Mavenir	Video	Article	Mobile 2.0 discussion
Working Solutions	Video	Article	Home agents, social, call center technology
Alepo	Video	Article	IT solutions for wireless carriers
Conexion One	Video	Article	Hispanic outsourcing services
ViewCast	Video	Article	Coding formats for video delivery
Doublehorn Communications	Video	Article	SMB broadband communications, SIP trunking
Samsung	Video	Article	Mobile phones, devices, content, smartphones
Reallinx	Video	Article	Better broadband, security, VoIP service & support
Spectrum Corpo	Video	Article	Contact center monitoring, data analysis
ICON Voice Networks	Video	Article	Was Iwatsu America. Now more strategic US focus
Epygi	Video	Article	More scaleable phone & video solutions
Artisan	Video	Article	Infrastructure as a service - wholesale, pure-play
MinuteMan UPS	Video	Article	Extended run-time UPS systems
Facetcorp	Video	Article	Flexible, customized PBX systems
Fonality	Video	Article	The move to cloud communications
Telstrat	Video	Article	Workforce optimization, coaching, analytics
Novo 1 Contact Centers	Video	Article	Call center agents coming back to the US
Telstrat 2	Video	Article	Evolution of the call center, recording 2.0

Are you using Lync or USING Lync?

2011-07-18T08:22:24Z

Thought leader and noted UC analyst Blair Pleasant is skeptical that 70% of the Fortune 500 are implementing and using Lync. But Steve Ballmer tells us that 70% are on Lync. As we all know, there is a difference between using something and really USING it. Especially when you consider how many workers a typical Fortune-class company has - does a few people per 100,000 constitute real use? We need more accurate usage numbers to back up his claim.

The interesting thing is you can likely argue that almost all companions use Skype in some capacity - and as it merges with Lync - you could say virtually all companies of any size use Lync. I wonder what Blair will have to say about that.

PSTN Death is Near

2011-07-07T14:13:04Z

I vividly remember driving my car in 1999 – two years after the company where I am CEO, TMC decided to launch Internet Telephony Magazine and thinking VoIP was going to change the way communications works and eventually kill the PSTN. It seemed to me that within five years most of the world would make the transition as the cost disparity at the time was quite large between the PSTN and VoIP connections. Moreover, there were a myriad of free calling services using VoIP such as Dialpad which were ad supported, putting even more pressure on traditional telecom networks.

Within a few years the dotcom and telecom bubbles burst (we collectively said goodbye (details) to Dialpad and its competitors) and the cost for using the PSTN dropped substantially in order to better compete with IP communications alternatives. So my internal projections which I am not sure I ever wrote about before turned out to be too optimistic.

The period between 2001-2004 could easily be referred to us the nuclear winter of VoIP – well communications in general is more like it – not to mention tech. But the last six years has seen continuing evolution in IP communications with VoIP peering and SIP trunking just some of the latest solutions to make a cost savings and productivity–boosting technology even better.

And from the consumer standpoint – they all know about Vonage, Skype – have cell phones and use IM and social networking to communicate. So it will come as little surprise to you that according to an article from TMCnet’s Peter Bernstein:

As of May 2010, 23% of respondents lived in a mobile-only household
37% of adults in the 18-24 and 30-34 age groups lived in a mobile-only household
Only 6% of the US population will still be served by the public switched telephone network (which is defined as TDM access line service) by the end of 2018

Simply stated, the PSTN is dying.

Industry leader and past TMC conference speaker Tom Evslin a person who I couldn’t respect more, even suggests the government needs to get involved to ensure there is universal access as we enter a transitionary period. Specifically he explains that USF dollars help maintain the network and as more high-value customers leave it, there are fewer dollars to maintain service in areas which are expensive/hard to reach and potentially devoid of alternatives.

Specifically he says:

Although it offends my free market sensibilities, I think government also must be involved in assuring that everyone who now has PSTN service has access to either a broadband or cellular communication alternative.

BTW – it is always tough to argue with free-market sensibilities – my confidence in the government doing anything right beyond putting out fires, enforcing contracts, and keeping us safe through the military and police force is pretty low. Of course this is in part because I see the law of unintended consequences rearing its ugly head virtually every time the government acts. See Net Neutrality: More Unintended Consequences and Dear Government, Please Stop "Helping" Us for details. Want more? Google effectiveness of Obama stimulus.

But getting back to the discussion on the PSTN – Bernstein suggests a separation between the pipe and service business. But are we to rely on the government or a separate monopoly to upgrade these pipes for us or is it better to allow a combined service/pipes company provide both? In the latter situation, the combined entity has increased incentive to upgrade the pipes quickly so as to provide value-added services over the connection.

Of course in my example I assume that one company will be responsible for maintaining both a copper and fiber network – would it make sense to have multiple companies maintain networks which are unprofitable for one company to maintain?

Moreover, would it be better to wait for Congress, the Senate and White House to come to an agreement on which fiber pairs should be run to our homes? Or will a separate company manage these networks and if so, who runs that? Will the FCC decide? By the way, is the new company regulated? Will it be forced to dig up and replace the technology from time to time? And finally, who pays for it?

Of course this situation is far from simple to solve and I wonder if satellite providers may not be a missing puzzle piece requiring more study. Then there are new technologies such as white spaces/super WiFi which could theoretically work in a meshed capacity to solve some of the remote access issues we now face.

I’d love to hear from you if you have some thoughts on how to resolve the situation and bridge the gap.

Be sure to check out TMC’s Super WiFi Summit, September 13-15 in Austin, Texas to learn more about this promising technology and how it could could be part of the solution to sunsetting the PSTN.

Avaya's Support Strategy Emulates Successful Cancer Diagnostic Systems

2011-06-23T22:03:29Z

It is an unusual occurrence for me to receive a call from any company to discuss their support. Generally the media gets all warm and fuzzy about tangible things like new product launches – scoops and items you can put in the category of breaking news. Ironically though if you ask most companies what differentiates them from the pack, service and support is typically the most common answer. Yet, I can’t remember other companies asking me to meet their new head of global services.

And yet perhaps one of the most important things you need to do when you have a complex system of networks carrying packets full of voice and video communication is to ensure it all operates at peak efficiency. In other words the area which could be most important to a customer – getting a communications and/or networking system back up and running after an outage is often an afterthought. It is hardly discussed.

But still, I was a bit surprised when the offer came from Avaya to meet Mohamad Ali, President of Avaya Global Services. The company’s PR team was so excited about the meeting I decided to take it. I was tentative – but walked away impressed.

Ali started the conversation telling me he is passionate about service and this is to be expected – but what is more interesting is that he doesn’t come from the service and support space. In fact his background is quite different and most impressive. He worked for IBM where he led and integrated many acquisitions such as Cognos, FileNet, Ascential Software and he also was the program director of the GSM semiconductor business and co-led the PricewaterhouseCoopers acquisition which transformed the company. He has also worked for Adobe and has an EE Bachelors and Masters from Stanford.

The reason this is important has to do with the fact that Ali can be doing anything – he could be heading up M&A at Avaya, managing the design of products and a whole host of other initiatives. When I mentioned this the response was that Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy is a visionary and has said the company should be investing heavily in services and service technology as a differentiator. Moreover he said Kennedy was willing to put a key person in this role – which to me says a great deal.

The cancer connection

So half the story is about the resources Avaya is dedicating to support the other half is that Ali is looking to radically simplify support and to dramatically reduce time to resolution. And where he received his inspiration is interesting. It turns out that he heard a presentation from a cancer researcher at Mass General who spoke of the evolution of cancer treatment. It was once necessary for doctors to try treatment after treatment to determine the correct drug which needs to be prescribed. In other words a hit or miss process. But then a machine was built which matched biopsy results to the right type of gene mutation allowing improved results.

The goal then is to imitate the workings of the machine described above – and in doing so create true service innovation and of course differentiation. One point he made was that Avaya systems have diagnostics and alarms allowing for lots of output on which to perform diagnostic analysiss. He contrasted this to a competitor (he didn’t mention any by name but obviously Cisco) which has a lot of disparate boxes making this task more difficult. Of course Avaya recently acquired Nortel – bringing a few disparate boxes into the mix as well.

The night shift

One technique the company uses is simulating traffic at night in order to pinpoint problems with critical and other systems. This can be done across the contact center products, switches, voice and video systems. Ali tells me Nortel gave Avaya access to excellent diagnostics and these will be incorporated across the product line soon. Moreover, not everything is covered across the product portfolio is covered yet but they are working on getting all the diagnostics to cover all the products.

Streamlining Support Advantage

One of the biggest pieces of news from Ali’s department is the new Avaya Support Advantage model features two packages Essential Support and Preferred Support. Essential Support is the basic level of support. It’s targeted at those customers who require solution level remote technical support, and also software updates and patches. Preferred Support includes all the features of Essential package and more comes with remote monitoring that alerts Avaya within 90 seconds of receiving an alarm, and it can drive up to 20 percent faster resolution times, on average, due to increased visibility via around-the-clock monitoring. Plus, it includes Avaya EXPERT Systems.

Moreover, support pricing has been detached from the underlying product making it easier to determine the price based on a standard schedule. For customers who have multiple support contracts there is the option for co-termination and synchronized billing going forward.

Some of the benefits to customers are easier management and budgeting, less paperwork, less bills, reduced time to resolution and better customer service.

Nortel and Avaya users to benefit

Nortel and Avaya Support are expected to both improve as the best features of each will be rolled out across the other product line. For example there is now lifetime support across the Nortel portfolio and an emergency response program designed to help Avaya customers with catastrophic failures.

A more difficult support future

Ali mentioned the architecture of communications moving from centralized management approach to highly distributed service with multiple servers at the edge and in the cloud. He went on to mention that UC is becoming more unified and voice, data, video, IM and SMS are being used through a unified environment. He mentioned that Aura helps unify these modes of collaboration and Avaya’s diagnostic technology leverages Aura at the intersection allowing multimodal analysis in a holistic manner.

Like I mentioned at the top – service and support is usually a talking a point in my vendor discussions and it rarely comes up in detail. Avaya seems to be committing serious resources into differentiating itself in this important area. Now the question becomes how important does this become to enterprises? We know IT departments are constantly being asked to do more with less – perhaps now is the best time for Avaya to be making this push. In addition to customers, I am looking forward to seeing how the rest of the information technology and telecom market responds to Avaya’s cancer treatment-inspired support improvements.

Now You Need to be a Lawyer to Understand Tech?

2011-06-23T14:57:15Z

It seemed to start off slowly but now the trend is gaining momentum - lawsuits over patents in tech are everywhere and its tough to make decisions which are best for your company when you aren't sure if the products and services you are purchasing are infringing on the patents of others.

I must say that when the number of stories of tech patents gets to the dizzying level we are seeing today, it isn't good for anyone. Well except lawyers of course. Sure it is great to protect peoples' inventions but at the same time there are some very silly patents out there which are being used to "extort" money out of companies who have successfully put together a suite of products and services consumers want.

Solving the problem is beyond the scope of this entry but to get an idea of what set me off take a look at some recent stories in the patent space:

Quad: The Death of E-mail and Cisco's Social Enterprise Ambitions

2011-06-20T21:42:20Z

Quad moves to the cloud, has native Cius tablet support and offers better interoperability

Last week I took a train into the city from TMC’s Connecticut HQ to spend time with the Cisco Quad collaboration team – using Cisco telepresence technology and it was a fascinating look into the company’s foray into a post-email, collaborative enterprise world. First things first, I wrote about Quad and spoke with Murali Sitaram VP/GM of Cisco's Enterprise Platforms unit last September and since then Quad has not been talked about much in the media and has limited buzz in the market. Moreover, Cisco is repositioning itself – lightening up on consumer products meaning much of the company’s messaging has been in other areas of the market including launching consumer telepresence product UMI – something which should never should have gotten the green light.

So I was skeptical at this point and went into the meeting trying to figure out if Quad has a future. Bottom line is Quad is enterprise Facebook with real-time collaboration built in and the idea is it allows easy searching of repositories of information – meaning the knowledge a corporation gains transcends the brains of the few people involved in information creation and it can be intelligently woven into training programs or called upon to more easily answer questions at a later date.

Imagine you are an auto manufacturer working on a green car initiative which flops. A few years later, a new manager reintroduces the idea – you can now go back and analyze the WebEx conference calls, telepresence and other video, presentations and knowledge bases associated with building a green car the first time around. You should be able to learn from your mistakes more easily because there is a record of what went wrong.

More importantly, if we live in a world where Congressmen are comfortable enough sharing photos of their private parts on Twitter, certainly it is time for the typical enterprise worker to start utilizing enterprise social networks as well to become more productive. Although one would hope the worker will deploy a bit more discretion before hitting send.

Quad goes cloudborne and targets smaller enterprises

The meeting didn’t blow me away but it is definitely worth sharing what I learned as Quad could become very important if e-mail does become less utilized and social networking does become the defacto standard for communications within organizations.

Probably the biggest news is Quad now will support enterprises as small as 1,000 users (down from 3,500) and be supported by cloud-based vendors allowing an organization to use Quad in a SaaS configuration. Moreover, the new 2.5 release will allow integration of activity streams and watch list functionality to enable users to better define and filter the content they consume.

Quad: See us on the Cius

I have yet to test the Cisco Cius tablet (ironically Cisco just invited me to a Cius event next week as I write this) but Quad will work on it natively which could make people who buy these tablets happier that they integrate natively with Cisco collaboration tools. Then again, Quad will work on a variety of mobile devices including iOS so this may not be such an important point. We will have to wait and see how it works.

Extending the Quad across campuses

Cisco has extended interoperability within Quad allowing it to work with enterprise IM clients Microsoft OCS 2007, IBM Sametime, and Cisco Jabber. This means a Quad user will be able to initiate and conduct an IM conversation with users of these other collaboration systems. It’s worth pointing out Quad also works with EMC Documentum and Microsoft SharePoint 2007.

Microblogging and template support

There is now support for hashtags, multimedia and other file attachments and of course messages beyond 140 characters. There is also template support allowing an admin to assign them to a community or a team.

Who are the hosting partners?

Depending on your geographic area, you can work with Capgemini, ACS a Xerox company or Infosys.

Suggestions and recommendations – enables semantic components to shine

One area of interest to me is the suggestion and recommendation functionality which comes in handy when using consumer social networks and even LinkedIn. Cisco’s solution works in a similar fashion by doing things like suggesting connections of other people within your company who have similar expertise. This could come in handy not only in a company like Google where people spend so much time working on secondary projects but since suppliers and partners could be on Quad together. It allows you to gain better visibility into your counterpart(s) with your partner or customer company.

Quad to become more visible

I asked Murali about why Quad hasn’t been visible with regards to marketing and PR and he told me it will be more visible going forward as it knits all the Cisco products and services together. I got to thinking though – this was also the case a year ago yet I’ve spent months looking at millions of dollars worth of TV ads for enterprise and consumer telepresence – much of it turned out to be wasted. And I am left still wondering – if Quad is as good as Cisco says it is then why aren’t we seeing it more? Generally when a disconnect like this exists between a vendor’s actions and words, we learn later of an underlying conflict. Perhaps I am wrong but I remain skeptically optimistic we will see Cisco start to promote Quad and more importantly we will start to see my fellow journalists start to write more enthusiastic pieces regarding its growth and future potential.

Quad SMB & Fremium?

I also asked about whether Quad needs to go SMB and have a free model to get smaller companies excited and hooked. Sitaram mentioned he didn’t think this made sense at the moment and utilized Yammer as an example of a company who does this but isn’t very financially successful as a result. I was thinking more Salesforce.com Chatter but I didn’t get a chance to ask about it.

Final thoughts

I am an advocate of using technology to boost productivity and make companies more productive and the research tells us the future will be one where email is less important and enterprise social is more important. And for Cisco the move from hardware to software makes sense as it is potentially more profitable (unless you’re Apple) and if you own the social collaboration platform you have a greater chance of selling the components which work with it. Routers, IP telephony systems, telepresence, videoconferencing are just a few of these and going forward, Cisco will be able to offer more software solutions which will have higher adoption rates because they work seamlessly with their collaboration solutions. IF this strategy is successful, over time, Cisco will become a threat to Microsoft and potentially Google, Oracle, SAP and others.

But of course this is the best-case scenario – Cisco isn’t batting that well lately and there are challenges the company faces as it decides which businesses to keep and which ones to get rid of. Moreover, Cisco is not known as a software company and quite frankly, Chatter is a lot easier to start using and deploying as it is in the cloud and free. Sure it doesn’t have the built-in IP communications and video bells and whistles but a Salesforce.com partnership with Polycom or Avaya could easily rectify this situation.

Another challenge Quad faces is Facebook or LinkedIn deciding they want to own enterprise collaboration and rolling out a product which competes head-on. Then there is Skype. Now that Microsoft owns them and the Internet telephony software is integrating more closely with Facebook, perhaps the stage is being set for a SharePoint/Lync/Facebook/Skype combo which will one-up solutions like Quad, Chatter, Twitter and others.

It is worth mentioning another challenge with enterprise social solutions in general. With infinite repositories of corporate intelligence you face potential legal issues where discovery could create volumes of information which could be used against you.

The one constant is change – and I am reminded by Warren Buffet’s famous statement which I am paraphrasing – where he said he doesn’t understand technology. What he meant is he could look at a market leader like Coke and know 20 years from now they will still be the market leader. In tech, he said, this is much tougher to do. And boy is he right. The analysts tell us the next generation of worker will demand social tools and in order to attract the best talent you will have to have a social enterprise. The question is how does the enterprise make a social enterprise decision today which will be the right one in the long run? For Cisco’s part, they are saying the right things – but for my readers, I would wait to see Quad become a more common story and gain more momentum before plunging in with both feet.

Mitel to Come Out Swinging, Will They Connect?

2011-06-02T01:50:24Z

This past January I wrote a piece which compared Mitel to ShoreTel titled Is ShoreTel filling the Nortel Void and since the post Mitel has been in a state of flux with a new CEO Rich McBee recently joining. When the opportunity presented itself to come to the Mitel Business Partner Conference titled Mitel Freedom – in Florida, I jumped at it in order to get more perspective on Mitel’s strategic direction and future.

The conference officially kicks off tomorrow morning but I wanted to give my readers as much information as possible before things got going. Tonight I had a sashimi (no, the other one – without the rice) dinner with Ron Wellard, GM and EVP of Mitel Communications Solutions, Jim Davies the CTO and Jay Nichols the VP of Sterling Communications – the PR firm handling Mitel. It was a candid discussion allowing my readers and I access to a wealth of information about the company and where it sees itself in the future.

In short, there is an opportunity being opened up in the reseller channel by the Avaya acquisition of Nortel and Mitel says some Avaya customers aren’t happy with the way the integration is being handled. This they see as a huge opportunity to become the number two option to Avaya in very large accounts.

One way of looking at such a statement is asking what is taking so long? After all, in October of 2009 Mitel CEO Don Smith and President and COO Paul Butcher told me the same thing more or less – and obviously the results haven’t backed up the rhetoric. Moreover, my article discussed virtualization and how Mitel’s early lead was going to give them a competitive advantage. My dinner conversation went down the same path.

In fact, I am told that more than half of the Mitel channel partners have sold a virtualized solution. We all know of course from experience that when a reseller sells one of anything new, this doesn’t mean they know what they sold or how to configure it, etc. If you have been in the communications space long enough you remember the learning curve it took to get from TDM to IP. Still, this figure is impressive.

And this takes back to the premise of why Mitel is doing so much more poorly than ShoreTel. I mentioned part of the problem had to do with simplicity of ShoreTel solutions compared to Mitel and others. Last month, ShoreTel CMO was proud to mention (video) simplicity and lower TCO are part of the reason for the company’s success.

So in response, Mitel is embarking on simplifying its product lines and core businesses. They see what ShoreTel has done and are reacting accordingly. Another area of improvement I stated was the company has been “dark” which from the media and customer point of view means the company isn’t in the news, being discussed, putting out releases, etc. We can expect this to change according to my dinner conversation.

Another interesting discussion point was that the ShoreTel approach was to make voice look like a data solution via an appliance-driven model. This was mentioned in a complimentary fashion – because as we know IT is making more voice decisions each day.

But Mitel has a not-so-secret plan to out ShoreTel, ShoreTel when it comes to simplicity and the secret-sauce as you may have guessed is virtualized communications solutions. If you think about it and voice is indeed an application in a data center, why does it need an appliance? It should behave like other applications and be allowed to run on virtualized systems so they can be hosted in the cloud if needed and managed like other virtualized servers. This is where Mitel’s close ties to VMware come in – other communications server (or PBX if you are old enough to know the term) companies are also rolling out virtualized solutions but Mitel tells me they are farther ahead in this space than others. I will learn more tomorrow at the conference and will be sure to share.

So the point is that Mitel thinks they can leapfrog ShoreTel in simplicity by providing the easiest virtualized communications solutions – including client products and BTW don’t expect the company to roll out a tablet now or in the future thank you very much – they will be device-agnostic. But they do believe that in the post-PC world we live in (I am typing this on a laptop so the phrase may be a bit premature – but you get the point) that virtualized communications solutions will make more sense. Especially when you realize in a bring your own device world, you may allow users to “own” their devices and the apps on it but when they want to work on anything in the corporation they will have to connect to a locked-down machine or instance of their apps and/or desktop.

Another interesting point is that some of Mitel’s customers are happy they embraced virtualization early as it allows traditional telecom types to have a career path within the data center beyond voice.

The new CEO Rich McBee comes from Danaher – one of the very few companies where I am a shareholder. I bought the stock years back because it was a diversified conglomerate and would be somewhat resistant to a downturn in any segment. Moreover in speaking with companies acquired by Danaher I was intrigued by the sophisticated processes the company brings to its portfolio of companies. But from a marketing perspective companies like Fluke and Tektronix are poor marketers. Both companies have tremendous brand equity and are able to survive based on reputations going back decades. As an example when I was in engineering classes at UCONN, the oscilloscopes were all made by Tektronix.

Mitel however is a different animal. It purchased Inter-Tel in the US which had a strong brand and replaced it with Mitel which wasn’t very well known. We have gone over how quiet the company has been so no need to rehash that. Moreover we have discussed the hundreds of millions of lost value this merger produced primarily as a result of not continuing the successful branding Inter-Tel was doing. In other words, Mitel in the communications space does not have the brand equity of say Cisco. And now things are even more challenging as there is competition from more established open-source solutions, a renewed Avaya with Nortel more completely integrated and cloud communications vendors coming out of the woodwork. The only good news is Cisco is in relative disarray compared to its old self and many companies see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take some market share.

But questions regarding better messaging and execution can only be answered by well – execution. Can the company brand all of this change successfully? Will dealers jump ship from Avaya, ShoreTel and others to carry Mitel solutions? Will customers learn what Mitel is doing and see the future or will they sigh and ask their current communications solutions providers to duplicate it? Time has a way of answering most questions but for the life of me I am not sure I will ever figure out why I ate raw conch tonight. Just kidding – it was really good.

Avaya SMB Event Features Cake Boss

2011-05-17T13:40:54Z

Avaya Press and Analyst SMB Live Blog.

At an Avaya Event here in New York City, the company is set to detail its plans to migrate Nortel users to Avaya's IP Office 7.0. According to Isabelle Guis (pictured) General Manager of of the SME Communications Business Unit, the company now has 30 million users - 14M of those came from Nortel and there are 7 million total IP Office users - with 200k systems being sold last quarter.

Here are some shots of the event so far.

10:00 am EST Kick Off

Announcer addresses audience from TV via video Small business make is vital to Avaya.

Dr. Alan Baratz takes the stage. He transitions to a video of happy customers "Thinking Big."

IP Office was designed for small to medium businesses and can scale to 1,000 users. 60% YoY growth - almost 150% QoQ growth in sub-20 end of market. Over 30M users. Vast majority are legacy - BCM and Norstar from Nortel and 15M on a combo of Avaya products including IP Office.

Can now unplug Nortel handsets and plug them into Avaya IP Office system and can auto-migrate your data - phone configuration, user personalization and voicemails. It takes 10 minutes to an hour and about 15 minutes on average to go from Legacy Nortel to Avaya.

This means no new cost to upgrade phone system.

All carriers which sold Nortel systems will also now sell IP Office systems - 0% attrition.

Live demo of a phone being unplugged from Nortel system to an IP Office system - now testing all the features and functions such as message waiting lamp.

New capabilities. Can use softphone now - demo shown on a Mac laptop.

Konftel demo of their speakerphones which are now interoperable with Avaya.

iPad demo - basically a mobile client.

10:30 am EST

Howie Gold, IT Director of The Agency Group joins the stage to tell us about how his company got started in booking bands worldwide - from Pink Floyd to Led Zeppelin. They have 130 employees who are extremely mobile and it is a 24x7 business. Mobile twinning is a great feature he said as it is useful no matter where he is. Voicemail to email is another technology which is useful - in a loud club for example.

The softphone is the best feature as you can make calls from anywhere. The company president will not travel without his softphone in place. This solution has changed his behavior as he used to make one call and round-robin to all employees to speak with them all. He now calls whenever he needs someone and does it an extension at a time.

Coprocessor coming in fall so you don't need a new application server - it will be a feature card. Also web based management and hybrid-CPE/cloud and one-X mobile client coming soon allowing you to interrupt and listen to voicemail live.

The cloud-based solution will allow companies to pay as they go - not purchase but instead lease software. Since they have the #1 CPE position in SME they can help their customers utilize new apps without the need to purchase products and services. You can for example buy IVR time if you are a florist needing more capacity around holidays.

Flare experience on IP Office coming - will be more focused on external communications for SMEs as in the enterprise more of the calls are person to person - internal.

10:50 AM EST

Tom Mitchell Senior Vice President and President, Avaya Go to Market takes stage.

"We are 100% partner driven."

Gives example of how a doctor is using IP Office to make frequent calls reminding elderly patients to take the appropriate amount of medicine at the right times. "Alan (Baratz) has laid out a very feature rich road map and partners are key to this. We have 9,000 partners worldwide."

Carrier and other partners take the stage for panel discussion.

Avaya has fully engaged SME market. Strong interaction between Avaya and partners. Perfect time for IP Office to be in place. "Great time to be an SME business partner."

SME business doing well but enterprise is slow. Companies are looking for productivity and cost savings.

11:15 AM EST

Cake Boss star Buddy Valastro takes stage and discusses how technology has helped the company evolve from a mom and pop to where it is today. he has been working at the bakery since he was 11. At age 17 his father passed away and he dropped out of high school to manage 30 employees and fill big shoes.

He saw the future - making cakes that were different - cakes which were tough to make but ones which supermarkets weren't able to make. From there it was bridal magazines to Food Network Challenge to TV news shoes and more.

He now has three TV shows.

He gets 1-1.5 million hits per month on his website but doesn't sell online - he needs good partners to help him grow. From there he transitioned to Avaya relationship. He detailed how he has 150 employees and can soon have 500 or more - they have a new building as well.

He made the audience laugh when he detailed how GPS allows him to track drivers who could be taking a break at any time.

He concluded explaining how he is not a technology expert but he uses it to help him do his job better.

Now the cool part begins - we are going to be on an episode of the Cake Boss.

12:00 PM EST

Check out this working video conferencing and IP phone cake made out of yes, almost 100% cake and Avaya technology. Even the table is made of cake! We are about to eat some now.

Sorry readers - Avaya and the Cake Boss producers have requested we keep this photo secret until it airs in June/July. It has been deleted for now.

7/26/2011: Embargo has been lifted - here are some great shots of the cake and apparently I will be on TLC tonight at 7:30 pm with video of me eating lots of cake.

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One last point - thanks to my eagle-eyed readers who pointed out that the Konftel acquisition - the second largest maker of conference phones has resulted in devices which are rebranded and are interoperable with Avaya's communications systems. The speakerphone above in the middle, rendered in cake is what one of these devices looks like - only not as delicious. ;)

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Here are a few more photos of the Cake Boss to make up for the fact I had to remove the shot of the actual cake - which is quite amazing - to see and eat.

Tehrani's Train Fixed

2011-05-17T11:38:43Z

It took about 45 minutes or so but the stuck train is moving for now and I can't wait to get off this thing and start recharging all my gadgets at the Avaya Press and Analyst meeting today in New York.

The conductor explained the reason for the stop was all the high tech electronics on the new train. Then again he may have said the problem had to do with trekking and hydroponics - like I said - you can't understand these guys - no matter how new the train. :)

Location:The Esplanade,New Rochelle,United States