AudioCodes and Microsoft to present
“Migrate to UC with Microsoft Lync” educational webinar series

Monthly webinar series to feature presenters
from Microsoft and industry-expert guest speakers  

One of the projects I've been working on this last month is a eight-part monthly educational webinar series focused on enterprise  migration paths to Unified Communications (UC) with Microsoft Lync. 

My goal of the eight-part webinar series is to educate businesses and the partner community on various Lync deployment options, best practices and technical “tips” on how to effectively make the migration to a full Unified Communications environment with Microsoft Lync.  I've worked dilligently to secure a group of industry experts,  VSPs, VARs, and Microsoft as presenters for the series, responding to feedback from previous event attendees who continue to ask for more in-depth  sessions with greater technical detail, more “how to” content and additional customer case studies.

Guest Speakers

The UC Migration webinar series will feature presentations from:

• Thomas Binder, Architect Voice CoE,  Microsoft
• Michael Nelson, Vice President of Integrated Access Solutions (IAS)
• Pascal Menezes, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft
• François van Hemert, Architect Voice CoE, Microsoft
• Kam Toor, Senior Program Manager Lead, Microsoft
• Jon Morrow, Senior Program Manager – Unified Communications, Microsoft
• Chris Sheridan, Solutions Architect, Sentri and a vTSP for Microsoft

…and others to be announced

Webinar series abstract:

Unified Communications with Microsoft Lync offers to dramatically improve employee efficiency and reduce communications costs.  But how does the typical business make the migration from existing PBX or IP-PBX systems to a complete UC platform with full mobility enabled? It's a complex process that we've broken down into eight easy-to-understand steps. Join us for this webinar series to hear guidance from Microsoft, AudioCodes and a number of guest speakers that have made the transformation from a "we've always done it this way" legacy environment to a cutting-edge, UC-enabled business on the move.

Schedule of Dates and Topics:

Session	Topic	Partners	End-Users
1	Implementing IM/Presence/Voice & Video	2/14/2012	2/16/2012
2	Emergency Services and E911 with UC	3/13/2012	3/15/2012
3	Moving off the PBX / Moving SIP Phones to Lync	4/10/2012	4/12/2012
4	SIP Trunking – Turning on the Cost Savings	5/15/2012	5/17/2012
5	UC Mobility - Taking it on the Road	6/12/2012	6/14/2012
6	Branch Office Deployments and Survivability	7/17/2012	7/19/2012
7	Call Recording and Compliance with UC	8/14/2012	8/16/2012
8	Unified Messaging - Integrating the Desktop	9/11/2012	9/13/2012

 

Participation Drawings with Nine Chances to Win!

In appreciation for attendee’s participation in a post-event survey, AudioCodes is holding a drawing for an iPad 2 after each event and a vacation voucher at the completion of the entire series.

Registration Information

I hope you do join me and the panel of great presenters.  This is a great opportunity to learn from "some of the best" in the industry.  For registration information, visit the webinar information page at:

www.audiocodes.com/uc-migration-series 

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I'm here at ITExpo East 2012 in the Miami Beach Convention Center in Miami Beach, FL (yes, someone has to pull this duty) and we just finished up the opening panel titled:

“E-SBCs: Handling Users, Applications and Enterprise Networks"

Joining me on the panel was a group of esteemed group of competitors, sharing our respective thoughts on Enterprise Session Border Controllers, their role in today's network and the future. Here's a quick summary of what we discussed:

What are the barriers that have held back further SIP implementations and E-SBCs? - education, awareness and organizational issues between the telecommunications and networking expertise within businesses.

What drives the adoption of E-SBCs?  Security (worry about a security attack or breach), but interoperability seems to be the widest need for E-SBCs.  Many UC applications need some SIP format manipulation to facilitate communications.

Miki form Sonus speculated that with the new SIP Trunking offerings coming from the tier 1 service providers, we'll see a greater need for interop and E-SBCs.

We discussed the interoperability issue, from both a technical and business perspective - fixing SIP messages and allowing existing systems from different vendors allows a more "migratory" path, avoiding a rip-and-replace event and the expenses incurred.

Next we moved on to the issue of federation and business-level peering.  We at AudioCodes have federated with a number of our partners, suppliers and customers.  The experience changes the way you work and allows you to instant message, see presence and share your desktop with those you federate with very easily.  Expect E-SBCs to be an active enabler to federation and peering.

At the request of a session attendee, we also spent some time discussing reliability and issues that result in a single-point of failure.  The panel agreed that both HA pairing and Branch Office Appliances were available and part of the solution.

As a final topic, we looked ahead and it was agreed that federation/peering will be transformational to businesses and E-SBCs.

Plenty more going on this week - I'll be sure to share the highlights (and save the low-lights).

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It's that time of the year for both a look back at 2011 and a look ahead at 2012.  Here's my personal list of the Telecommunications Industry's Good, Bad and Ugly:

The Good 

Unified Communications has finally hit critical mass this year.  As evidence, 2011 marked the one year anniversary for Microsoft Lync, scoring some significant customer wins. Avaya, Cisco, Shoretel, IBM and other vendors are seeing the conversation change from "if" to "when" Unified Communications is adopted in businesses.  UC and it's transformational change in communications has made a significant impact here at AudioCodes and created some great business opportunities across the equipment maker and software supplier ecosystem.  While at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we saw a fantastic commitment to Lync from Microsoft and strong interest from the partner community. 

SIP Trunking has also started to gain real traction in the market this last year.  Through most of 2009 and 2010, we did a lot of talking and education on SIP Trunking, but the market penetration was pretty slim.  In 2011 we finally started to see real progress in SIP Trunking implementations and successful customer case studies.

The Bad

Rebuilding Silos - Avaya's decision to implement licensing fees for Session Manager "sessions" that connect to non-Avaya devices has put a serious damper on the concept of "open SIP" solutions and effectively killed future growth of their DevConnect program.  The licensing fee puts third party devices at a serious pricing disadvantage vs. Avaya sold devices - essentially creating a closed platform based on SIP (an open protocol). We kiddingly call the change "The Avaya DevDisconnect" program.  It worries me that other vendors will take the same path - choosing to create significant hurdles that would prevent integration of other third-party devices on their communications applications.  Such a move seems like a 180 degree turn around, heading back to the vertical silos of the last decade.

In a possibly related change, Avaya also pulled the plug on the SIPcenter, squelching a regular and informative venue for information about SIP products and technologies - I hope someone steps forward and fills the gap.

The Ugly

I was once again reminded what life would be like without market competition in a personal billing dispute with DirecTV this summer.  I'm sure you don't want to hear the details, but let's just leave it at "I'll never do business with DirecTV again".  With limited options for television service in rural locations, I can only imagine what would happen if there was no market pressure from competitive satellite provider DishNetwork.  Similarly, I was glad to see that the Justice Department put the brakes on the merger of AT&T and Tmobile - choice and competition is good and the only leverage consumers have over near-monopolies.

A Look Ahead at 2012:

Unified Communications and Peering/Federation - now that UC has hit critical mass, there is significant productivity and cost savings motivation to implement peering or federation between businesses.  The rewards of HD calls, IM, presence and desktop sharing far outweigh the complexity of implementation.  UC Federation has a social "viral" effect that will push businesses to make the jump to UC or be left out.  The productivity change is dramatic, very similar to the broad adoption of inter-company email back in the early 1990's (which was often scorned as too risky and expensive).  Can you imagine doing business without email?  I lived it - it was not fun.

Cloud Communications - watch for one of the big on-line retailers to launch their cloud-based communications suites - targeted at the SMB/SME markets.  A huge boon for the small business owner - a few clicks on a web site will get full UC-enabled communications without the data center infrastructure needed by large businesses and enterprises.

Decline of the Desk Phone - you've heard me flip-flop on this issue a couple times, but until I personally pulled the plug myself this year, I didn't believe people could live without a dedicated desktop device.  After our Lync upgrade and a new DECT wireless headset, I gave my desk phone a good six months to prove that it deserved the square foot of desk space.  At the end of the six months I could count the number of times I used it on one hand.  Back in the box it went.

Economic Recovery - this time for real.  The housing collapse has taken it's toll, the Euro markets will get untangled, and with one less war to fight, we can start to focus on our domestic economic health.  Watch for a tempered, but moderate improvement in the markets, jobs and opinion polls.  This will surely make the 2012 presidential race a close one - a race too close to call this early.

With that, I'd like to also share my appreciation for those of you that take the time to read and respond to "The SIP INVITE".  I look forward to another year and hope you have a safe and happy New Year.

PS: I also don't think the world will come to an end on December 12, 2012 - the Mayan priests underestimate our resilience.
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Many vertical markets have requirements to record and retain their interactions with customers and clients.  Financial service brokers and agents need to take telephone orders from their clients and keep a record of the call to resolve any potential disputes.  Medical staff need to record doctors orders, protecting both the doctor and the hospital staff.  This type of recording a not an option, but a mandated compliance issue that has blocked potential deployment of Unified Communications in these markets.  Because of the complex architecture and flexibility of UC solutions and Microsoft Lync, there has not been an easy way to record all of the voice conversations all of the time.

Full-time compliance recording is very different from the client-based recording found in the Microsoft Lync client.  The client recording is initiated by the user and records the conversation on the client PC.  This puts the burden of both activation and storage on the user (which is unlikely to maintain regular usage).   Full-time compliance recording is usually done in the data center, tied in tightly to the core of the network where storage is centralized and plentiful.  Full-time recording is also initiated automatically by the call-control engine.

The challenges of full-time compliance recording has been overcome with today's announcement of the certification of AudioCodes SmartTAP for Microsoft Lync.

With AudioCodes' SmartTAP, partners and businesses can now integrate a compliant recording in their Lync deployments, resolving the need for recording and broadening their addressable markets to include financial and health care sectors.

Learn more about call recording and it's use in Lync deployments or visit AudioCodes at the upcoming ITExpo East 2012 held in Miami.  AudioCodes will be exhibiting in booth #607 and presenting on a number of topics at the event, sharing this new recording and other Lync solutions at the event.

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This week I was fortunate to be invited to speak at the ScanSource Communications Partner Conference, held in Memphis, TN.  The event brings together the strategic reseller and vendor partners that work with ScanSource Communications to create leading communications solutions.

Since the event was hosted in Memphis, the attendees had the unique opportunity to visit the ScanSource Distribution Center, located just outside the city limits.  Being a big fan of "How It's Made" programming on TV, I was sure to attend and soak up the noise and mass movement in the 600,000 square feet facility.

Housing close to $30M in inventory with an order fulfillment accuracy rate of 99.9% is no small task.

While at the facility, we were lucky to see a truck-load of AudioCodes media gateways in the receiving area.

The facility features a technologically advanced “picking, packing and shipping” conveyor system with 40 lanes.  The entire facility is air conditioned and protected by a 1 Megawatt generator that allows the facility to operate for over three days without power or refueling. 

We were also shown the 40,000 square feet of system integration space - where various components can be brought together, software loaded, configured and packaged ready for delivery right to the end-customer site.

Thanks to the folks at ScanSource, not only did we get an opportunity to network with many of our reseller partners, but I now have a new appreciation to the word "logistics" and the effort that goes behind prompt and accurate delivery of our media gateways and other products here in North America.

Now if they'd only tell me how to get out of here... Continue Reading...

It seems that many of the market watchers were surprised with yesterday's announcement that the US Justice department filed suit to block the planned merger of t-Mobile and AT&T.  Honestly, I was not surprised that the merger is going to court. 

With the US down to four national mobile carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile), competition is at risk.  Outside the major metro areas, not all four carriers are ubiquitous, meaning that choice often falls between two or three carriers.  It's easy to envision a situation with Sprint falling to a distant third-place and a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon resulting.

For those fuming over "big brother" sticking it's nose into private businesses - the huricane this last weekend has reminded us that our mobile telephone infrastructure is a critical resource for commerce and emergency communications.  Letting something so important as mobile communications fall into the hands of a duopoly would put far too much control in the hands of a small number of executives with unclear motives.

Also, consider the number of every-day businesses that depend on mobile communications (both voice and data) to operate their businesses.   From cab drivers to UPS, many need mobility to effectively operate their businesses.  If coverage, congestion and pricing get fouled up as the result of a non-competitive duopoly, what happens to them?

So, what happens next to T-Mobile?   Most likely they will continue to play the role of smaller, but more innovative carrier.   With their international flair and product ideas often coming from Europe, expect them to play an important role in pre-paid and and cost effective data services.  AT&T isn't known for their innovation - with the exception of signing a deal with Apple for exclusivity on the iPhone. 

In my mind, four national carriers is good for the country and good for business.

Related articles

• U.S. Government Sues to Block AT&T Merger (forbes.com)
• AT&T, T-Mobile Merger Blocked by Justice Department (abcnews.go.com)

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The First Step Toward Unified Communications

If you've been following me over the last few years, you know that the transition of communications to SIP Trunking is something that I've been tracking/advocating.  It seems a natural next step in the evolution of business communications and only one part of an migration to Unified Communications.

However, taking the step can be a challenge for many businesses - especially in a shaky economic environment.  A major swap out of a corporate PBX can be very disruptive, requiring retraining of already over-worked employees.  A flash cut to new technology can be risky.  Already stressed companies find it difficult to take on additional change.

To help make the first step a good one, we've developed a "Getting Started with SIP Trunking" migration strategy. This strategy deals with many of the issues that have held back SIP Trunking, giving businesses an opportunity to "ease" into the new technology and architectures.

I'd like to invite you to join my good friend David Byrd at Broadvox, my colleague Nancy Patterson and me for a webinar on Wednesday, August 24th at 2:00 PM EDT.  We'll discuss a five step process to introduce SIP Trunking and eventually migrate businesses to a full Unified Communications solution.

Click Here to Learn More or Register
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Say you manage a global contact center business - offering valuable customer contact services to a range of companies.  One of those companies offers you an opportunity to dramatically expand your business with them, but where do you find the educated and hard working employees to staff your expanded contact center?
 
We just wrapped up publishing a very intriguing customer case study with VXI Global Solutions, a business process outsourcing firm based in Los Angeles that was facing that exact challenge.  How did they expand their workforce in a cost effective way?  Their plan calls for opening new facilities in Nevada, Texas and Ohio giving them access to the staffing, but how do you connect these new employees to the contact center in a cost effective manner?   SIP trunking from IntelePeer to the rescue!

To learn more, you can read the entire VXI Global Solutions case study and learn how VXI integrated SIP Trunking from IntelePeer into their existing Avaya predictive dialer with an AudioCodes Mediant 3000 Media Gateway.


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Going mobile

So far, we’ve unlocked the power of Microsoft Lync for unified communications in your customer’s head office and branch offices – now there’s only one frontier left to tackle before we can call this solution complete: mobility.

While many businesses today leverage mobility to provide access, communications and connectivity to their highly-mobile employees, many of them do so without integrating it into their unified communications environment. That means that mobile workers are missing out on the many advantages enjoyed by their office-bound counterparts, including presence and instant messaging. Not only are they working blind, they’re paying more for the ability to do so – using up minutes from their expensive monthly allotment and almost inevitably being driven into fees for overages.

Fortunately, there’s an app for that.

AudioCodes’ MobilityPLUS mobile applications are available for iOS, Android, Nokia Symbian and Windows Phone platforms, and bring many of the now-familiar unified communications experiences to mobile workers’ smartphones. Click-to-call, presence and IM are all a breeze with MobilityPLUS. Continue Reading...

Survivable Branch Appliances

So far, we’ve brought your entire customer’s organization into the unified communications world.

But what about businesses that have many branch or remote offices – retail locations, bank, insurance companies and others that are spread out over the country or even the world?

In this penultimate step, we bring those remote offices into the scope of the solution. What these remote locations need is the ability to get through to Lync and use SIP phones and trunking, but with some back-up survivable trunking to make sure they’re not taken down by outages. We’ve worked closely with Microsoft to create a line Survivable Branch Appliances (SBAs) that do just this job.

Our SBA lineup comes in 30-, 120- and 480-port versions, and includes all of the unified communications functionality we’ve talk about in the six steps leading to this one. AudioCodes SBAs take care of data (routing, WAN termination, firewall), voice (secured SIP trunking through enterprise-class session border controller) and advanced applications like support for SIP phones, smartphone integration and passive recording through Lync.

And it does all that in one neat box that can be easily tucked away in a branch office’s wiring closet. Continue Reading...

Moving to SIP Trunking

Over the last few step in our eight-step guide to unified communications, we’ve introduce da lot of new capabilities and functionality that will not only make sure the deployment is a success, it will drive end users to demand access to the new tools.

Now it’s time to start making this deployment just as exciting to management – and if there’s one thing the C-suite can behind, it’s the idea of saving serious money. To make that happen, it’s time to introduce SIP trunking and downsizing or eliminating traditional PSTN trunks. In reality, this is a step you can take at an earlier point, should you choose to do so, or should getting those cost savings on the table earlier be of prime importance for customers.

Getting started is as simple as upgrading the Mediant 1000 gateway we introduced way back at the beginning of this guide to add Enterprise Session Border Controller (E-SBC) capabilities. If you’re done your planning right throughout the process, this should be as simple as adding software key on the gateway, but in some circumstances, you may have to swap out a module or two. Continue Reading...

Moving off the PBX

In any big project – and let’s face it, going from a traditional telephony system to a fully-integrated unified communications system is a big project! – there’s a step at which the point of no return is past – where the hardest work is done, the old system is just about retired, and everything you do from there on in will add more and more value to the overall solution.

In step five, we cross that Rubicon. It’s time to get rid of the PBX.

Over the previous four steps, we’ve taken care of a lot of the steps to reach this goal – now it’s just a matter of rounding up the stragglers, as it were.

From fax machines to analogue phones in public places where hosting an expensive SIP phone doesn’t make sense, there are bound to be some devices in your customers’ environments that simply aren’t going to make the trip to unified communications as easy as the SIP-compliant parts will. But we’ve got a solution that will keep them in the new solution and working as good as ever, or better!

To make this happen, we’ll add an FXS module to the Mediant 1000 gateway we’ve been building on since the beginning of this process, or (as was possible with SPS in the last step) we’ll bring in FXS as a stand-alone appliance. Once again, SPS will take care of connecting the analogue devices connected to those FXS ports to Lync.

As sad and lonely an image as it creates, the PBX is now ready for retirement. Continue Reading...

Adding SIP Phones

At this point, we’ve addressed voicemail via Exchange, IM, presence and collaboration and voice and video, and structured your client’s network for the new converged workload through the first three steps of our journey towards complete unified communications.

You may notice that we haven’t touched phones yet. Now, with the trunk line connected to the AudioCodes Mediant media gateway, it’s a good time to think about phones. Because although the hype around unified communications is all about communicating via softphones and using just about any device an end user wants to use to stay connected --- there are still are a lot of people that want to or have to use a phone, whether it’s some of the time or all of the time.

Fortunately, that’s easy enough to do.

Now, we’d love it if every customer were to rip and replace their existing phones with brand new SIP phones. And we’d especially love it if they’d do so with our AudioCodes 320HD IP Phones. Continue Reading...

Adding Voice and Video

There’s no getting around it – this a big step. In our first step towards a true unified communications solution for your customer, we moved voicemail over to Exchange UM. In the second step, we made the significant change of bringing in Microsoft Lync, giving your customers access to great instant messaging, collaboration and presence, all under IT’s control.

Now, we’re going to add a whole lot more value to Lync by getting voice and video flowing over the network. Continue Reading...

Step 2: Introducing Microsoft Lync

In step one of our eight-step approach to helping your customer get to true unified communications, we covered off the small but important step of getting voicemail linked up through Exchange Server UM, using an AudioCodes Mediant 1000 media gateway to translate from TDM to SIP.

In step two, we start to really introduce exciting new features and functionality for your customer – it’s time to introduce Microsoft Lync, Microsoft’s all-in-one corporate instant messaging, collaboration and presence system.

The key to success with a Lync implementation is to make sure it gets used. Metcalfe’s Law (the value of the network goes up exponentially as the number of nodes on the network increases) applies here, so it’s best to get as much of your customer’s organization up and running as quickly as possible. If you’re going to start with a sub-section of the organization though, go with rolling Lync out across a functional team, like sales or marketing. Once the members of that team are using the power of Lync, with integrated presence, instant messaging and collaboration, world will spread quickly through the enterprise, and users who haven’t been moved to Lync yet will be beating down IT’s doors demanding access to the new collaboration tools.

Once everyone’s up and running and starting to get to know Lync, it’s probably a good time to do some introductory training. Continue Reading...