On Monday, Cisco confirmed that it was still experiencing problems with its Cisco.com web site, portions of which have been inaccessible to customers and visitors for most of the day.
Perhaps Cisco should hire Nortel Global Professional Services to manage their website and keep it from going down;)
I recently participated in a SIP interoperability panel at Interop in NYC. My four Cs of SIP compliance: complementary, carrier, co-integration and competitive.
> Complementary connecting third party clients and gateways to comm servers. Allen Sulkin, a VoIP analyst, observes that many customers are taking their Cisco SIP phones and re-using them on other vendor's comm servers, thus preserving their investment.
> Carrier meaning enterprise-carrier SIP trunking. SIP trunking is supported by carriers worldwide and is important for managed service plays. We are also heavily engaged in carrier IMS deployments within the cloud, these based on multivendor SIP interoperability. In this case, the carrier technology groups invest heavily in making SIP happen.
> Co-integration, for example leveraging SIP in our integration with Microsoft OCS. We (Nortel with Microsoft) are leading the industry in testing implementations of SIP RFC 3261and TR87 (CTI over SIP) to integrate our respective products.
> Competitive SIP trunking between multivendor PBX networks. Don't expect a lot of cooperation- e.g. I don't expect to see another PBX vendor join Nortel's developer partner program, or vice versa! That said we have Avaya and Cisco call servers in our labs to test basic interoperability. Historically, leveraging each vendor's interoperability with carriers has enabled PBX-PBX interoperability.
SIP is critically important to the industry, but SIP compliance is a many sided coin. Do my four C's help?
I recently met a large national retailer and the chief architect asked me about the realities of SIP (the Session Initiation Protocol). He saw SIP as the path to plug-and-play telephony.
The topic is one of confusion among enterprises, so let me summarize my views on SIP, a cornerstone of unified communications). SIP is critically important to the industry, but you need to understand what SIP is and isn't, and then create expectations that reflect this.
First of all, the IETF does not generally standardize SIP features, and there is no finite limit on the number of features which can be built using the SIP protocol. The concept of counting features is a vestige of the practice in the telephony community.
Secondly, connecting a SIP phone to a SIP-enabled PBX yields a different result than connecting the same device to a SIP-centric platform, such as our multimedia communications server or our open source-based UC software solutions for SMBs.
Thirdly, there is no SIP certification process for SIP feature operation. In that sense, SIP is more like SNMP than like WiFi, but higher up the stack than either.
So what's the major driver for your interest in SIP: cost reduction, flexibility and agility, backward or forward investment protection?
Communications enabled applications can accelerate your business. For example, Global Crossing is an early adoptor of unified communications, and leverages LCS and OCS APIs to accelerate exception handling within their service provisioning process.
But business acceleration does not rely on communications enabling your business processes. Accelerating human rather then electronic processes can be achieved by targeting unified communications deployments.
In my Oct 25 blog, I talked of the 500+% return on investments that Forrester's 'composite company' saved through business acceleration through UC (a summary was presented by Elizabeth Herrell at the OCS event in NYC). If you can quantify the savings associated with Elizabeth’s top six areas, then you are well on your way to developing a business case for UC.
Here’s her list:
1) accelerated projects through access to key decision makers
2) access to experts and better and more timely collaboration
3) faster problem resolution (e.g., can help address last minute problems encountered after major investments)
4) improved customer experience and a potential for increased sales by meeting customer needs in responsive way
5) reduced internal travel (in Nortel, after every web conference, we are asked on-line to evaluate the experience and identify if travel was avoided)
6) shortened sales cycle and increased revenues by providing better connectivity to field/sales folks
Which of your business processes are most heavily impacted by human delay today?
Human delays are slowing down your business processes and this is costing you real money. Communications enabled applications are highly transformational for enterprises by accelerating 'time to X'- time to decision, to revenue, to service, to support, to product; and enabling increased business agility, accuracy, service velocity and business productivity. Users should be able initiate Unified Communications sessions directly from the business applications they use; and business processes should be able to be accelerated by directly initiating Unified Communication sessions (e.g. IM notifications) without human intervention (e.g. triggered by some event).
So how do you generally go about do this, once you have identified a business process that you want to accelerate through communications enablement?
1) Open Ecosystems: Communications enabled applications can only become mainstream if they can leverage a large ecosystem of software developers and use well-established software development tools and frameworks. The answer therefore lies in making communications services available to business applications through Web Services and SOA.
2) Orchestration for real-time services: SOA is an architectural style originally designed to add flexibility to application development. With communications-enablement of application, orchestration of real-time services becomes tablestakes.
3) Network/vendor-agnostic: The capabilities made available to applications (e.g. check presence, notify, locate, call, bandwidth request) must be independent of the underlying communications technologies and the vendors involved. Vertically integrated network-centric approaches just don’t wash.
4) Cross-domain: In many cases, the value to the business will be greatest if communications enablement can cross domains defined traditionally as carrier-enterprise, wired-wireless, public-private, enterprise-partner.
The corollary of the above is don’t go with vendors, who position communications enabled applications built on network centric architectures, allow communications enablement only for their products and only in enterprise domains.
If you buy into this, you may be interested in our recent industry-forming announcement.
So, what are some of your business processes that could be accelerated through communications enablement?
I have spoken to a number of Cisco VoIP customers who questioned how to proceed if they want to go with Microsoft but aren't ready to move to Nortel.
I answer these questions in the following way:
1) Recognize that Cisco and Microsoft are direct competitors in the UC space (Chambers and Ballmer agree on this point) with very different UC visions (network vs software centric). Therefore expect Cisco and Microsoft to drag their feet on interoperability today and in the future. As one Microsofter observed "Cisco was the last major PBX vendor to offer remote call control with us". Even with interoperability, Cisco will continue to promote their agenda: one customer observed "why else do I need a Cisco Presence server when I want OCS to be my single my presence engine?"
2) Cap investments in Cisco VoIP, and get on a better path to software-centric UC. One approach promoted by Microsoft is to use OCS telephony, wherever it meets the needs. Another approach is one used by one large petroleum company: they are deploying Nortel IP Telephony in three regional data centers as integration points into LCS/OCS and interoperability point into their large non-Nortel installed base of PBXs. This is a slight variation of Microsoft marketing speak "UC, as you are".
3) Either embark on roll-your-own deployment or turn to a partner/SI. Don't leave it to Cisco because their bias will not work in your favor.
4) However you decide to evolve your IP telephony environment, down the path, you will be able to take advantage of Nortel OCS value added capabilities, such as our reservationless conferencing system tightly integrated with OCS, or our integrated branch solution embedded with Microsoft UC technology.
That's my thoughts. And yours?
A Harris poll identified that 61% of workers surveyed said that email is their primary mode of communications at work while only 31% said phone. Companies like US Cellular have declared ‘email-free Fridays’ in an attempt to bring down their share of 40 billion person-person emails, sent daily on a global basis (USA Today 10/06/07). At the same time, Gartner says that 85% of business processes are slowed down by human latency.
People love to talk, just not voicemail tag (some people even send emails to say ‘read my voicemail)…….
People love email, just not spam and being copied on everything under the sun…….
People love video just not its complexity…….
People love their personal directory of friends and contacts, just not managing different contact lists (some people use their cell phones rather than their desk phones because of their cell phone directories).
As a result, people are less productive, and more importantly customer responsiveness and business effectiveness suffers.
So unified communications can be viewed as a unification of the user experience to allow optimal use of the available communications modes. One other perspective; ‘optimal use’ has to be defined by the business in terms of accelerating time to X (where X is decision, service, support, revenue or problem resolution). Simple! Add a pinch of presence and you get a very interesting value proposition.
What problem are you trying to solve with unified communications?
I presented at the New York City Technology Forum and sat in on Dave Pogue’s keynote. Dave is the New York Times Personal-Technology Columnist and prolific author. He obviously has a flair for acting, dramatizing his technology insights, including ‘cell phones are a racket. You have to bet on how many minutes you are going to use, and if you guess too low you are … and if you guess too high, you are ….”.
My data tells me that enterprises around the world give service providers about $500M every year in exchange for bandwidth and connectivity services- well over 35% of this goes for cell services! While there is a lot of value in mobility, enterprises are looking at ways to reduce and at least better manage these recurring costs.
What you don’t know, you can’t manage.
Do you know how much your company is spending on cell charges? If the answer is no, then you better get a handle on this significant expense and, in any case, look at ways to reduce it.
IT-101 tells you that managing your service providers is a good place to start. Technology can help on two fronts: reducing local and LD minutes, and reducing out-of-plan roaming charges. Extending PBX features to your cell allows you to carry your calls over your internal network, thus avoiding toll charges. Any way to leverage the Internet (at home, at hotels, and hotspots) can also be the path for lowering your cell charges. This includes using your laptop or leveraging dual mode devices.
In either case, the end user is king. You have to incent him/her to change their behavior by delivering benefits that outweigh the pain.
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