Recently in Communications Enablement Category

Kim Tae Keuk, the CIO of LG Electronics gets it.

"A lot of CEOs want their CIO to be a business partner, not just a master technician. One way to do that is to become true experts at the company's business processes and then help innovate those processes"

To me, the business value of Unified Communications comes when UC is integrated into business processes leveraging vendor-agnostic integration software such as Nortel's ACE. It's all about accelerating these business processes by reducing human latency.

Kim is right when he says that CIO can mean Chief Innovation Officer... and software-centric UC can be a key enabler.

Nortel just released Release 2 of their Agile Communication Environment, communications integration middleware that can help create communications enabled applications across multivendor communications environments. In my mind ACE represents one of the crown jewels of Nortel technology.

Multivendor Hotdesking is highlighted as a key new capability, which had been developed for HSBC as a lead user.

Of course, single vendor hot desking is a feature of most IP Telephony systems, allowing users to walk up to any IP phone. log-in and take it over.

What's very interesting about the Nortel solution is that it can work across IP telephony and UC vendors and even include desktop video systems (like those from Tandberg), a key differentiator.

Nortel has adaptors for Cisco, IBM Sametime, and Micrsoft OCS, but needs to address Avaya and Siemens environments to address a much broader market.

Maybe one of these will become reality, sooner rather than later, if Nortel Enterprise is acquired.

In these economic times, application innovation that can positively impact customer service and revenues, or increase business effectiveness or decrease costs, are as important as ever.

One of the fundamental steps in achieving application innovation is to recognize that human delays slow business processes and that this costs enterprises real money. By decreasing or eliminating these human delays, enterprises can experience a significant and positive transformation by accelerating "time to X" -- time to decision, to revenue, to service, to support, to product; and by delivering increased business agility, accuracy, service velocity and business productivity.

The industry approach to this challenge is communications-enabled applications, which generally speaking allow
1) users to invoke UC functionality directly from within business application; and
2) business processes to directly initiate context-based UC communications triggered by some 'event'.

So customers often ask me "what are the sweet spots for communications-enabled applications in my enterprise?"

I would offer that the top characteristics of processes that can benefit most from UC enablement are as follows:
1) Processes that need the help of a subject matter expert
2) Processes with enough transactional volume and of long enough duration to be significant
3) Processes where there is a large elapsed idle delay due to lack of communication
4) Processes that have a direct touch with customers and partners
5) Areas with a lot of failed transactions

Once you have identified a business process that could be accelerated through communications enablement, only consider truly open software-centric solutions, such as the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE). ACE has been designed from the start as vendor-agnostic communications integration software, that is a foundation for pre-packaged applications (such as hot-desking deployed by HSBC), and for customized communications-enabled applications, and as a toolkit for enterprise, SIs and ISV application developers.

How sweet it is!

The industry has been talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) for almost a decade.

Now there's CaaS- Communications as a Service. CaaS is, I believe, going to be all the buzz for the next decade!

Why do I say this? CaaS is all about adding communication services, like conferencing, IM and video, into any online network service, whether for businesses or consumers. This includes social networking sites, online gaming, IPTV, as well as business-oriented SaaS offerings such as salesforce.com.

That's what Nortel's recently announced CaaS Transaction Broker is all about- initially targeting IBM's LotusLive, a new hosted social networking and collaboration service designed to help business customers maximize productivity.

How important is this for Nortel and its customers. According to Dell'Oro, Nortel is the worldwide leader in carrier VoIP and has maintained that position since 2002, having shipped over 100 million carrier IP voice and multimedia ports to over 320 carriers globally. So the opportunities are significant.

Avaya made some noise at its recent analyst conference about its SIP App Server, an enterprise retrofit of its Ubiquity offer for carriers.

Should you be interested?

Not if you are interested in....
• Products today (Avaya is talking about 2009)
• Multi-vendor environments (Avaya is paying lip service to multi-vendor, but there's no reference to anything but Avaya)
• Integration with your SOA environment (nothing here for you since this was designed for carriers)
• Development toolkits ("will eventually open it up to ISVs and customers")

In contrast, the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE) is ....
• A shipping product with announced customers like HSBC
• Multi-vendor out-of-the-box and interworking with Nortel Communications Servers, Microsoft OCS, IBM Sametime, Cisco CUCM and Tandberg video (interoperability with Avaya infrastructure is coming out soon)
• Integrated with Websphere Application Server and with Microsoft environments
• A foundation for pre-packaged applications (such as hot-desking), customized communications-enabled applications and a toolkit for enterprise, SIs and ISV application developers.

Finally, Avaya is just now folding communications-enabled apps into its UC organization, so integration of their SIP App Server with UC may take a while.

On the other hand, Nortel totally subscribes to the view promoted by UC Strategies, a consortium of industry analysts, that Unified Communications is "communications integrated to optimize business processes". That's why ACE is tightly integrated with Nortel's UC solutions (our own and those developed with Microsoft and IBM).

HSBC is a global financial institution, with a multi-vendor voice network with well over 100,000 phones, and a large Tandberg desktop video environment.

One immediate problem they were trying to solve is how to make their management team more productive when traveling across HSBC locations. Not being able to connect in the financial industry can be traced back to loss of revenue opportunity and poor customer service. If HSBC had a single telephony vendor and was only concerned with telephony, this would be an easily addressed problem.

But what HSBC needed went well beyond single vendor telephony hot desking.

HSBC turned to Nortel with its service-powered, single number, voice and video, hot desking application, driven by a presence-enabled corporate portal. Truly cool!

Central to HSBC's unified communications strategy is the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE), a very hot product judging by customer interest.

ACE is a SOA-enabled communication integration application, which delivers a number of services (e.g. click to notify, aggregated presence, context, location). It includes adaptors to Nortel and non-Nortel call managers, as well as to video systems (e.g., From Tandberg), and can integrate with Microsoft OCS and IBM Sametime desktops.

While initially targeting 1000 users, HSBC plans to expand this ACE application across the globe, a strong testament to the value proposition delivered by Nortel ACE.

This just in from a friend, JohnT, who is a Technical Director at a UK SI.

"Last night I tried to attend the Cisco Collaboration Summit. Just to be clear, this was a Web conference run by one of the world's biggest conferencing vendor using their own in-house Webex conferencing service to announce enhancements to their UC and conference offerings. We had to pre-register so you would think that they could plan for it to go smoothly. Well, when I first tried to join I got a message saying "Close your browser" (what, all of my sessions?) "and restart in 1 min 23 secs" (...and counting). So I did and got server error messages several times which indicated that the servers were overloaded (or under-spec'd as we server guys say). After 30 minutes of retrying I finally got a screen saying 'webex.' and 'waiting for video.webexlivestream.com' but no video."

His closing message to me was "Don't bet your conferencing solution on these people".

My read is that Cisco's plan to use this 'platform to integrate UC into business applications', puts enterprises at risk and doesn't meet their primary needs.

CXO's tell us that, while there is a place for SaaS (and it better be reliable), communications-enabled applications must be deliverable on secure and reliable platforms they can deploy in their own data centers.

The Nortel SOA-based Agile Communication Environment enables communications enablement of business processes, is vendor agnostic and spans both enterprise and hosted environments.

Last week, I met with an investment bank, who was very impressed with our UC application solutions for its Sametime environment. The focus of our discussion was around Nortel's Agile Communication Environment (ACE), our solution for both Sametime integration and communications enabled applications.

During the lively discussion with the institution's networking, desktop and application folks, it became clear that UC presence alone was of limited business value compared to context-enhanced UC.

For example, the stock price drops- knowing a financial analyst is on the phone may be of little value, but knowing that the analyst is speaking to a client who has shares in the stock has great value.

ACE, SOA-enabled communications integration middleware, can be used to deliver this additional context to the business process.

The bank was also interested in ACE as a toolkit, which would allow its application developers to leverage its capabilities with its home grown applications.

The institution is in a highly competitive market. Time is literally money. Nortel ACE brings context, not just presence, to the bank, which means shorter time to decision.

IBM's Websphere is 10 years old.

Back in 1998, there were 25 developers. Today, there are 6000 across IBM and another 10,000 developer partners (including Nortel), serving some 100,000 WebSphere customers.

The initial focus was on rapid development of web apps supporting HTTP, Servlet and Java environments. WebSphere has since evolved to being a SOA platform, including connectivity to many systems, such as Oracle databases, SAP and Siebel CRM. It now includes a suite of products including the WebSphere Application Server (WAS), which is based on open standards such as J2EE, XML and the new Web Services standards.

And WebSphere continues to evolve with increased scalability, and expanded support for social computing, rich Internet applications, and Web 2.0.

Wintergreen Research reports that WebSphere has a 64% market share, against direct competitors such as Oracle's (BEA's) WebLogic, and open source challengers such as JBoss.

This is all to explain why we have chosen IBM's WAS as the first framework with which to integrate the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE). Integrating with IBM's WAS, and associated WebSphere products such as WebSphere Modeler and Portal, allows Nortel to achieve higher performance, speed and simplicity in accelerating deployment of customer Communications Enabled Application solutions based on ACE.

It's a software world, and ACE will integrate with other environments, such as Microsoft BizTalk and .NET, and SAP's NetWeaver.

Contrast this with Cisco's network-centric SONA approach which many believe will be a bottleneck rather than an accelerator of business accelerating applications.

Drew Martin, Sony Electronics CIO, recently talked about his experience during the October wildfires that threatened the company’s San Diego area HQ and data center (the building only sustained minor damage). One of his takeaways from his experience was that he wished he had a reverse-911 system in place, much the way his local school district was able to communicate school closures to all parents.

I hadn’t heard the term reverse-911 before, but it’s very much of a class of applications that can be communications enabled to speed up processes.

Reaching out to all employees during a natural disaster is hopefully a once in a blue moon scenario, but what about reaching out to emergency response teams and directing those that are closest to the emergency and have the requisite skills and equipment to deal with it in the most effective fashion? In a hospital environment, code reds happen relatively frequently.

With the proliferation of devices and communications modes (telephony, IM, email) and introduction of location tracking capabilities and presence, notification services can become much richer and more intelligent than ‘brute-force’ telephony-centric reverse-911 systems today.

A key enabling technology is a SOA-based communications enablement framework, such as Nortel’s recently announced Agile Communications Environment which in its first substantiation is based on IBM’s Websphere, which can interoperate with multiple vendors’ communications systems across enterprise and carrier environments.

Notification is but one important class of communications-enabled applications. Do you have a plan in place to accelerate your business?