Recently in Unified Communications Category

My last speaking engagement was a keynote at ITExpo in Miami.

At VoiceCon in Orlando next week, I'll be speaking in three sessions:
Monday, March 30, 2009 from 1:30 to 4:30 in a tutorial on UC vendors run by Marty Parker
Tuesday, 2:30 to 3:45 on a panel called Presence: Dial Tone of the Future?
Wednesday, 12:45PM to 1:15 in a Nortel session on our Open UC solutions.

At other times, I will be at the Nortel booth (#808) demonstrating web.alive, of which I have spoken often. Cool stuff.

Maybe we'll see you there. Please drop by.

Centralization of IT resources has been the path to lowest TCO, whether we are talking about application processing, or data storage. Centralization provides higher utilization of servers and reduces server costs, reduces operations costs including power, staffing and management and provides increased agility to accommodate network changes (e.g. new sites, unexpected growth, site decommissioning).

But obviously both centralized and distributed IP Telephony are viable options. So what are the key factors to consider.

In my mind there are five:
1. Remote Site Business Model: Are you employee or customer centric (remote offices or branches in my lingo), and/or are your sites run as under separate budgets or are they centrally budgeted?? This impacts service levels, as well as performance and feature needs.
2. Reliability, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: What is your business priority in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery? For example, you can have a call server a safe distance away, take over call processing when the primary server fails. For example, IP Telephony provides you new options to address business continuity shortcomings of traditional PBXs.
3. Scalability: Not a big deal for a medium enterprise, but if you are very large, centralization demands simplification, for example in number of servers required.
4. Reliability and Network Bandwidth: The key questions are how reliable is your IP network and at what cost can it be upgraded, and what is acceptable business impact in case of network failures.
5. Business Economics and Migration Risk: Balancing business needs with the network costs (which increase as reliability is enhanced) and IPT costs (which decrease as you centralize) is a critical factor in choosing between centralized and distributed solutions. Likewise investment protection can play a big role as well.

The two technology factors (#2 and #3) is why Nortel's CS 2100 solution is winning many very big deals: it delivers carrier-grade reliability with unmatched scalability to 200,000+ users on a single server and is well suited to data center deployments.

Whether you are a large multinational or a smaller regional enterprise, you should carefully assess your business needs and the degree of centralization and distribution that best meets these needs.

I met yesterday with a number of customers of the regional branch of the Nortel user association (INNUA), and talked to them about our open UC solutions and the transformational nature of communications-enabled applications and business processes.

One attendee asked about the ability to invoke UC from within dashboards, since they were always open, and included corporate directory access and business related data.

I recalled a discussion I had with a CIO of a financial institution (a computer-centric world if there is one) who said "we run Sametime, but aren't interested in the Sametime client. We want UC to live in our email client"- a dashboard of a different sort.

Continuing along, I discussed the opportunity to deliver appropriate UC functionality to information workers (in many bank, tellers don't have access to email- it's a distraction), who live in a small number of key applications, and to service workers who don't have computers at all (or have a handheld device that is designed to do a few role-related functions- e.g., a barcode scanner running price check and inventory apps in a retail environment).

What do these three cases have in common (dashboards, UC in email clients, UC for info and service workers) have in common. While I am quite happy working with my UC client, they are all examples of users wanting to simply access UC where they live, and not have additional clients/complexity imposed on them.

How can this be achieved? Communications integration software available as a solution or as a toolkit with adaptors to multi-vendor voice/video and data infrastructures and with the ability to integrate into your application environment whether based on Microsoft, IBM or HP or whatever.

We call it the Nortel Agile Communication Environment (ACE) and in addition to communications-enabling your business processes, it allows you to deliver UC where your users live.

Key capabilities announced earlier this week include "the availability of new context, which will enable richer collaboration capabilities such as location and presence features." What does this mean in practical terms for OCS customers. Let me give you two examples.

We can now offer increased safety of lone workers through active tracking and application-initiated communications, by enhance Microsoft OCS by combining application-initiated communication sessions and GPS-based location information. Consent-based tracking to monitor safety of remote worker (for example social workers entering a potentially hostile environment) through periodic password based updates, failing which an alert is sent to supervisor or law enforcement agency

We also enable employee and partner communication with the right people in real-time by allowing UC initiation from any phone number or email address on any web page or web-enabled app. How do we do this? By embedding the complete OCS contact menu for any phone number or email address within web-enabled business application, whether it's ERP, HR and CRM. This allows click-to-communicate using email addresses, phone numbers or extensions from any Web page.

OCS gets richer with UC Applications and Services from Nortel, giving you bigger business value from your UC investments.

than one thing in common with Nortel..

Like Nortel, Global Crossing is a strong advocate of SIP and has developed a suite of SIP trunking services.

And like Nortel, they are working with Microsoft. Under the Innovative Communications Alliance, we are continuing to work to transform communications towards a software-centric environment, while Global Crossing is stepping up to meet the trunking needs of enterprises embracing OCS 2007.

These have come together in news that Global Crossing has demonstrated interoperability between OCS 2007 Release 2 and its SIP trunking offering. Sprint announced a similar offering.

This is an important step in evolving OCS into a telephony platform in the context of UC- most would agree that there is still much work to be done though OCS today can meet the needs of some types of users. Interestingly, Nortel can help enterprises embark on this road in a way that maintains the integrity of the end-to-end telephony system, while leveraging their existing investments (so critical in today's economic climate).

Earlier today, I presented in an ITExpo keynote session on UC. Surprisingly good attendance and some probing questions on mobility, converged networking , CEBP and the future of the desktop phone.

The theme of my talk was on Open UC.

I started by stating that Nortel was open for business, highlighting the fact that we are on track to deliver on the $300M, 10-year IPT contract with SSA. Support of our product portfolio to fulfill customer needs is also continuing- just visit Lenovo's elounge, the first highly deployment of web.alive, the product of Nortel's continuing innovation program.

I then talked to Open UC in 4 dimensions:
1. Open UC at the desktop, whether Exchange or Lotus Notes based, or based on Nortel's own MCS cleint or based on SCS 500 client, our open source UC solution for SMBs.
2. Open UC applications, whether for customer service, or for employee or group effectiveness or for business process acceleration.
3. Open UC into back-office environments for communications-enabled applications, whether based on Microsoft, IBM or JBOSS (e.g. Sun, HP) environments (as we have done with Orlando Regional Health).
4. Open UC over any voice, data or video infrastructure whether based on Nortel, Cisco, Tandberg or whatever (as in the HSBC solution)

I was very happy to see that IT Expo seems to have fought off the economic slump. Maybe that's a good omen.

O yes, it's been running for 10 years, so congrats to Rich, Greg and the gang. I think I spoke at the first one and many in between.

Presence is an important feature of unified communications (UC), but is it really enough?

I say no. Presence is only an element of context.

Here's what I consider to be the four key dimensions of contextually enhanced UC:
> Identity/role: Knowledge of the identity and respective roles of individuals in a work flow is essential to any context-aware communications. The preferences, interests and other attitudes of a user may have a great influence on how information supply is to be carried out and what information is to be provided.

> Presence/Reachability: This is information on the state of the user, and includes physical activity and applications being accessed. It also includes the disposition of the user reflecting his or her priorities at a particular time. Reachability denotes the sum of all communication media a person has at his/her disposal and is able to use at a given point in time.

> Location: Location is about where, in which direction and how fast. It also includes information on the surroundings, such as people and objects/devices near an entity.

> Situation/Activity/Event: This includes the business process needs for reduced time to X, various entities in the decision making process, the urgency of the matter at hand, and any relevant real-time and/or historical content, potentially delivered as notifications and alerts. Even external conditions (e.g., traffic or weather) may impact decision-making activities.

Contextually enhanced unified communications has the potential of delivering substantial added values for end users as well as for communications-enabled applications.

What do you think?

This was one of the questions raised late last year in an interview I did with Greg Galitzine.

My response:
A suite of software applications will deliver unified communications, which I view as "Communications integrated to optimize business processes". UC not only unifies the user experience by integrating all forms of communications with desktop applications (dominated by MSFT and IBM), but also unifies the IT infrastructure through software. UC multi-vendor environments will be brought together through communications integration software and embedded into workflows for:
• revenue growth and more engaging customer service
• enhanced user communications and business effectiveness
• richer collaboration and enhanced group effectiveness
• better asset utilization and accelerated business processes.

In two words: Open UC.

Quite a headline in these economic times.

In fact, WiPro received the Network World Asia IT All Stars Award 2008 for its innovative use of technology (specifically Nortel UC) to keep up with recruiting 20,000 new employees per year, this across its 55 industry-facing 'Centers of Excellence' spread across the globe.

WiPro may not be a household name to some. It's the world's largest independent R&D Services Provider with over 95000 employees serving 928 clients, including IBM, Microsoft and Hyundai.

What's the technology behind WiPro's business solution? Nortel Unified Communications based on its MCS 5100 and the Nortel IP Phone 1535, a high-resolution IP video phone (which, by the way, is unique as a desktop device having both wired and WiFi connectivity).

This innovative use of technology helps WiPro interview the right people on a face-to-face basis by simply dialing a phone number. Interview costs have dropped significantly, while the quality of the recruiting process has been maintained.

More broadly, the UC solution deployed by WiPro offers comprehensive UC functionality, delivers Nortel's level of reliability with security and performance, and integrates well with WiPro's existing systems & processes.

Congratulations to the WiPro team.

You might have missed it, but Nortel is the worldwide leader in Carrier VoIP (cf. Dell'Oro Group), having shipped 100 million IP Powered Home and IP Powered Business. ports to 320 carriers, and to two thirds of IDC's worldwide listing of top 20 carriers.

Nortel is no slouch in enterprise VoIP either, and service providers are key partners in this regard.

For example, Verizon Business has just announced that it is adding a new IP PBX platform, the Nortel CS 1000 to its portfolio. The CS 1000 SIP trunking capability has been rigorously tested and certified with Verizon Business, providing agility and improved price performance over legacy ISDN approaches.