On Rad's Radar? - tele-presence Archives

Polycom Gets Some Cash

2012-05-11T17:22:31Z

So Polycom announced that they will "divest its enterprise wireless voice solutions business to an affiliate of Sun Capital Partners, Inc. for gross proceeds of approximately $110 million in cash." I was confused by this until I realized it is a sliver of their business and represents DECT and Wi-Fi handsets only.

Polycom is in the process of remaking themselves from a hardware IP Phone company to a video conferencing solution provider. This was a way to get some cash and start selling off pieces of the business that don't fit that focus.

One Quick Note About Cloud

2011-04-05T18:44:31Z

I keep reading all these projections for Cloud and I have to wonder: Has everyone forgotten that a good portion of this used to be Hosting? Shared Hosting; Managed Hosting; Dedicated Server; Collocation; Digital Hands. This isn't new. Plus it isn't like RackSpace doesn't door knock to see if a business has a server to move to their data center. So there is going to be plenty of growth in Cloud.

Remember that SAAS is everywhere; best example is email. It's QuickBooks online. It's e-filing to state and federal apps. Everywhere. We just never called it that before.

Stephanie Mosca wrote an article today about the growth of enterprise mobility and many other segments like all kinds of conferencing, cloud comm and collab (UC 2). Of course, there is growth in these sectors because a couple of years ago, sales were slim to none. So I get the media buzz about the growth, but let's keep in mind that 35% of $1 million in sales isn't moving the multi-trillion dollar IT or telco needle much.

But all this media buzz and ground breaking growth means get onboard NOW! Learn as much as you can and look for opportunities. This segment will only grow.

Chat With JCurve About 2011

2010-12-16T01:51:10Z

Eli Johnson, Business Development Manager at J-Curve Technologies, chats with me for about 13 minutes about Broadsoft Connections 2010, Hosted UC and the obstacles that Cloud Communications providers face in the new year.

J-Curve offers Hosted PBX providers an outsourced customer service and tech support option.

Expectations in 2011 with Jon Arnold

2010-12-16T01:43:24Z

Jon Arnold joins me for a chat about what to expect in 2011. We touch on Acme Packet, SBC, security, outages, IPv4, Cloud and Social CRM. It's a full 25 minutes.

Were There Highlights in 2009?

2009-11-25T20:25:02Z

Ken Camp's Year in Review prompted me to write this. It's been an interesting year. SIP, UC, Cloud, Merger. That's really how I see the blur that was 2009. I attended so many conferences this year. The highlight was speaking at so many. So to the organizers, like TMC, thank you so much for letting me have a podium.

Ken points out Voxeo. I point out Ifbyphone.

Many regional CLEC's and VoIP Providers had positive moves this year. A round of applause to Hunt Telecom, Socket, PBX-Change, FreedomIQ, Sonic.Net, Kinex, Smoothstone and Telesphere. (Full disclosure: I worked with many of these companies so I saw the growth first hand).

I saw so much M&A activity this year despite the economy. We also saw XO clean up its balance sheet.

We saw Agents get cut and get mad - even as the Channel seats at the carriers became musical chairs in 2009. So many Channel folks moving around, I got dizzy with all the business card exchanges at the shows. (Reminder: keep your LinkedIn profile up to date and with a non-work email so you can stay in touch). I don't know if it is growth in the Channel, but lots of carriers and master agents were hiring channel managers this year.

TCA had a good year, seeing agent numbers increase. The TCA is currently working on a Code of Ethics and a Best Practices Guide for Agents for 2010. (Join in! It's a work in progress that can use your input.) Is a Certified Agent coming?

We never saw the BTOP and BIP money. Well, ConnectedNation saw the mapping money. This probably hurt gear makers more than carriers.

The FCC got bogged down in Net Neutrality and Broadband Policy without revamping a single thing. I was hoping the "new" FCC would actually do something. Guess not.

SIP Trunking seemed to be all anyone was selling in the VoIP space. Dis-a-ppointing in a Big Way! Why? PRI replacement is like Toll-Replacement -- it's cost savings not productivity improvement. We have all this technology -- and we just can't message it or sell it. (And believe me I have been writing and talking about it all year!)

Amidst all the M&A, we saw Charter, Nortel and Fairpoint file BK (bankruptcy) in 2009.

UC - more people tried to define than use it this year. Just so you know, Telepresence is NOT UC. It's shares components though. Again lots of buzz about this - like there was buzz about HD Voice - neither one likely to hit the big time soon due to the fact that the networks aren't ready yet.

One valuable lesson this year: cheaper bandwidth does NOT mean a good thing. I had many clients get cheap bandwidth - and they got what they paid for.

Lots of outages at data centers too. After Katrina and other disasters, you would think that reliability and redundancy would be the key questions.

Also, so many big data breaches this year, that when you combine it with outages and lack of redundancy, spell a problem for Cloud, Virtualization, or whatever else you want to call hosted server architecture. The highlight would be SalesForce.com reaching a billion in revenue. It sort of proves out the SAAS (hosted app) model.

It was the year of the apps too. Aside from SAAS, iPhone, Blackberry, Google, Broadsoft - everyone got an app store. I don't know if that resulted in revenue, but it probably helped many folks waste a few hours per week. I'm wondering when the IP Phone will become more than just a desktop phone and more like the mini-computer it is today. If you have all these apps on your mobile, why not on your phone on your desk?

This was the year that Twitter took off. I mean, once Oprah got on, that was it. It being the peak. Social media is a time suck without discipline and goals. (Something most people don't have in real life let alone online). Two quick things on social media: it's about conversation and it's just a bunch of software programs that let you publish your message, so engage and be interesting.

WiMax, 4G, LTE - yawn!

Nothing really rocked this year. Did I miss something?

Happy Thanksgiving

The UC Conversation Continues with XO

2009-06-19T12:59:48Z

Tech Data's Senior Product Sales Champion for UC was at the event last night. I spent a few minutes chatting with him about his position, but couldn't really get a definition of UC out of him. Polycom and tele-presence are what he pushes - to me that's not really UC. HD Voice? No we leave that up to Polycom and the vendors. Seems even a tech company has a problem wrapping the head around Unified Communications. (UC doesn't mean the latest gadgets).

XO has some components to build a UC bundle - overlay IVR, Broadsoft SIP Trunking, some straight forward Hosted PBX (with a limited feature set), and Hosted Exchange for the email integration piece.

If the UC Champion thinks UC is tele-presence and video conferencing, what does that say about well defined the term is in the Industry?

Can UC Save You Real Dollars?

2009-05-07T14:39:58Z

We hear a lot about Unified Communications today. UC this and UC that. Even Cloud Telephony and UCaaS. It's kind of crazy.

The main buzz is around the savings from UC. If you have a distributed workforce, then Unifying on a Communications platform with a collaboration module can improve productivity. "IT leaders argue the technology can help businesses increase productivity, cut costs and reduce their carbon footprint," according to a NetworldWorld article.

The productivity gains only come if the technology is easy to use, reliable, and intuitive. By intuitive, I mean, that unlike some CRM and telco software platforms, the software was created with the user in mind and doesn't require a lot of thinking on how to do something. It needs to be like WYSIWYG. "Getting people to change the way they work required his team to pay special attention to training," states Mike Close, CTO of Danone, from the same NW article. Danone rolled out a UC system globally.

Anything done by committee means it will be drawn out and frustrating. The current collaboration software I have seen are really just document sharing applications and some white boarding online. Users need something like Bud Light's Drinkability and Drawing. Maybe a desktop sharing app or white board where everyone can "take control". But I digress.

UC's benefits come from a geographically dispersed workforce or a virtual office setting. It's similar with VoIP. If you are making a lot of in-state calls to other branches, the cost savings from VoIP diminish. When people are working on the same project but aren't in the same building or city, making progress is tricking because audio conference calls, IM/chat and email are one-dimensional. Video conferencing, webinars, document sharing, white boarding - all can lead to productive gains. It isn't a monetary gain per se, but what company doesn't want to be more productive? Plus when you are getting stuff done, employees are more satisfied. No one likes being stuck on the perverbial treadmill.

The carbon footprint is a big issue today. All about Being Green. With video conferencing, especially tele-presence and UC, travel will shrink some. This has a tangible benefit in budget savings but don't discount the carbon footprint shrinkage.

It looks like a lot of the UC hype is based on Productivity gains and time savings, not so much real actual dollars. Aspect rolled out Microsoft OCS globally and is seeing over $1M in real savings. (Read the story here). So there are real dollar benefits to UC if it is rolled out correctly with proper training.

HD Medical Video

2009-02-24T18:55:35Z

Now here's where a niche really pays off.

"Rivulet Communications, whose technology enables flawless HD medical video on the hospital IP network, has raised an $11.5 million round from ATA Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Performance Equity Management and Scorpion Capital Partners... The company won several patents for its technologies, which include its wide-area network Internet Protocol quality of service technology in 2008. ... Its technology helps high priority network traffic avoid bottlenecks, speeding real-time traffic and maintaining video quality. It can be used on existing networks."[TechJournal South]

Tele-Presence and Video Conferencing and HD Voice are services on the growth path, but certainly HD Medical Video is a specialization.

TelePresence with WBS Connect

2009-01-19T18:17:26Z

At the IT Expo West, WBS Connect had a great booth that was a Tele-presence suite - fully tricked out. I interviewed Scott Charter, managing partner of WBS Connect, at the show, but after reading IP Business magazine's write-up, I thought that mine would look like a rip-off.

The key component of the WBS TelePresence offering is that WBS is working on being vendor agnostic or the translator. Right now, Tangberg talks to Tandberg and Cisco to Cisco, but how does Tangberg talk to Cisco's rooms? Using H.264-SVC and WBS Connect as the translator. It's a great way to put all that transit to work.

IT Folks Chatting About Communications

2008-12-09T15:33:39Z

During a discussion online, some interesting items popped up.

Companies ban Instant Message. One IT Security Consultant looks at the irony of it here. Tele-Presence is all about improved efficiency in communicating -- no more phone tag, less voicemail, that kind of thing -- but how will that be implemented in a corporate environment that locks it down?

Social networking like LinkedIn and Twitter are becoming commonplace among the marketing set. Maybe instead of banning these things in a corporate environment, you embrace it and set policy. Here's an article from CIO.com on LinkedIn etiquette.

It boils down to tools. Will you give people the tools that they can use to be effective at their position? If you are that worried about security, do an audit and train your people. Manage by walking around. Most theft is internal or social engineered. You can train against the social engineering, but if someone wants something bad enough they will figure out how to get it. It's just a shame that can't get that passionate and creative about the job.

Tele-Presence versus Video Conferencing

2008-09-09T02:56:30Z

Andy Abramson writes about how video conferencing from a client company like SightSpeed is better than Cisco's Tele-Presence. On Sept. 22, Brian Carroll is having a tele-seminar on "Email vs. Phone vs. In-Person Meeting". Keith Rosen, a respected sales coach, would tell you that, especially in today's economic climate, nothing beats a face-to-face or a phone call. Keith writes about how Sales 2.0 is diluting inter-personal communications. (If you have ever received an email from someone that using text messaging a lot, you will see what he means).

As one commenter wrote to Andy, Tele-Presence is a richer experience. Well, it should be for equipment that is in excess of $50K per site. Even this price barrier is being removed by companies like WBS Connect leasing out tele-presence rooms for business use.

Another point is that many tele-workers don't want to shave and dress for video conferencing. There's no IT guy at the home office to help with the video conference set-up. Messing with the webcam and the software is a pain and when you have so much to do in 8 hours, dialing a conference bridge is easy. Even that isn't fool-proof as quite a few times stuff has happened to hamper that easy tool.

Maybe the differentiating factor will be personal interaction. When I see couples at restaurants and one or both are on the cell phone, I have to wonder what are they doing. That's a live person that traveled to meet you. Talk to that person. And the yakking in the car while driving WITH other people in the car. This society is in for a wake-up call and it will come when most of us are too weak to fight back.

You can't get a human on the phone but ChaCha pays humans to run your Google search while you are mobile. Go figure. Maybe the differentiator to a sale will be the personal touch.

Is travel is mess? Yes. Will virtual conferences replace real ones like IT Expo West next week? No. It's about the hand-shake; the meals, drinks and ideas shared. It's about getting a read from someone live. That is not easily replaced. That said, tele-presence as a 3-D meeting experience might work for second or third meetings to go over details or brainstorm or for product demos or training.

Video conferencing like SightSpeed and tokbox can replace phone calls (if we can figure out how to make them on demand like a phone call instead of scheduled). And I need to start replacing some IM and email with the phone. I pay for a landline, a VoIP line, and a cell phone. I need to use it more and the keyboard less.