Recently in Unified Communications Category

At his VoiceCon keynote in Amsterdam earlier in the month (Amsterdam), Royal Dutch Shell's Group IT Architect Johan Krebbers positioned UC (built on OCS) as a key element of Shell's global collaboration strategy (80% of teams in Shell are global!), tightly linked with their information sharing strategy and built around a single user experience.

He also stated that OCS was Shell's voice platform of the future, stressing that even today, the OCS feature set is adequate for many employees, many of whom are mobile and comfortable with soft phones.

Traditional PBX vendors should be worried by Microsoft's entry in the PBX market.

But Nortel is not among these. You see, we agree that the future of telephony is as a software UC application, and the future of Nortel is in software and services. To accelerate our transformation, we have developed unique alliances with Microsoft under the Innovative Communications Alliance, and with IBM with a particular focus on SOA.

But as William Gibson wrote: "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed", and clearly Shell is at the tail of the curve.

In contrast, I am meeting next week with a successful insurance company that is 'very risk averse' in both financial and technology terms, and is just now starting to look at how to evolve their TDM telephony system, focusing predominantly on hard phones. They are just not ready for OCS-style telephony and UC.

So Nortel's unique value proposition is to help our customers meet their immediate telephony needs, while helping them evolve at their own business-driven pace, towards a suite of best-in-class UC applications, whether based on OCS, Sametime or Nortel's. Furthermore, we provide communications integration software (the Nortel Agile Communication Environment) and services that accelerate the business through communications-enabled business processes across multi-vendor networks.

Contrast this with the likes of Cisco and Avaya, which talk about software and openness, and then push the customer into a vertically integrated silo'd approach.

The recent OCS 2007 R2 announcement by Microsoft highlights the growing set of telephony feature provided by OCS.

This includes for example,
> Attendant console and delegation
> SIP CO trunking
> "Response group", providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing, and
> Single-number reachability to mobile devices such as Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms.

So what is Nortel's response to user interest in OCS telephony, particularly for mobile and nomadic users?

Nortel is actively working with Microsoft, and our customers, to demonstrate the value of OCS, including its telephony features. This can be done through a variety of pilot programs that give customers the chance to test drive OCS, and ultimately to integrate it into their enterprise telephony environment. These are fully supported by Nortel Global Services, leveraging core competencies in voice and data, and in Microsoft technologies.

Whether you're an existing Nortel telephony customer or not, these trial opportunities offer a great chance to see Nortel and Microsoft solutions and services working together.

So Nortel is distancing itself from traditional PBX vendors (including Cisco) who pooh pooh OCS telephony, by embracing these UC telephony solutions under its unique alliance with Microsoft.

I recently attended a Nortel Contact Center Customer Advisory Council, involving a number of leading edge customers.

This included companies from a diverse set of verticals: for example, a healthcare provider, a pharmaceutical, a retail bank, a global semiconductor tools vendor, an SI, a retailer, a food services firm. These folks get UC, because they have been doing it for years.

Why do I say this?

I would offer you three rationales for the notion that to a large extent the contact center environment is a precursor of what we are doing with UC.

1) Contact centers is a great example of aligning IT with the business. This is pre-requisite to any successful UC deployment.

2) Technically, a contact center consists of a set of specialized capabilities that we now generally associate with UC. Sure the language changes: for example, in contact centers we speak of skill-based routing.... in UC, we speak of presence and personal agents. But many of these concepts are being extended from agents to the general employee base (at by the way a considerably lower price point) and then back to the contact center in the form of UC-enabled capabilities (as we are doing in OCS-enabling our contact center offering).

3) The real value of Contact Centers comes when they are tightly integrated with customer service processes, just as the transformational values of UC come with UC is embedded in business processes, what we call communications-enabled applications.

What do you think?

Nortel's Business Communications Manager UC portfolio (including the just announced BCM 450) has been rated #1 by Dell'Oro.

Let me look under the UC covers as to how unified communications plays in the small medium business (SMB) market?

It certainly plays in companies that are communications intensive (e.g. real estate offices), have a high proportion of information or knowledge workers (professional offices), or are highly mobile (real estate agencies). In fact, Goldsmith-Agio-Helms, a global private investment banking firm, was the first company to implement UC across its entire employee base- with just over 100 employees, clearly an SMB.

But it doesn't stop there. For example, one of our customers is a family owned business out of the northeast US, Hancock Lumber.

Unlike enterprises, SMBs typically don't ask for UC per se, but rather are looking for integrated communications solutions that solve a business problem or significantly enhance business operation. They obviously see real value in unified office-in-a-box solutions, which deliver UM, message forwarding, meet me conferencing, CTI, intelligent contact center and more.

Simplicity and demonstrated business value are table stakes.

....and, given a chance, they'll box you in too!

UC without effective presence and IM is like telephony without dial-tone.

So here we have Cisco spending your contributions (remember the Cisco Energy Tax) to acquire Jabber to give them IM for their un-unified UC story. Does this result in a 41st server to deliver UC?

UC has to unify both the end user experience AND the underlying infrastructure, and I don't see Jabber moving Cisco towards the latter objective.

If UC is in your future, you may be interested in this book and associated certification program.

It is targeted at IT professionals and decision makers in organizations considering UC deployments. It focuses on how UC deployments must be designed from a business process perspective, rather than as driven from a technology perspective.

The information provided is generic and applies to whatever supplier you have or are considering

You can review the first three chapters on-line, including a Forward by Nora Freedman of IDC.

If you go down the UC certification path, you will tangibly show increased value as an IT professional.

With its recent acquisition of PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, the word on the street is that Cisco is positioning to strike at Microsoft's Exchange crown jewels.

This is not inconsequential for "Microsoft shops' looking for UC solutions.

Cisco has been telling enterprises to buy their UC now, and that interoperability with Exchange/OCS environments will come later.

The relationship between Cisco and Microsoft is already pretty precarious on the UC front with competing UC solutions. Given that Exchange is very tightly linked to Microsoft's UC strategy, the likelihood of any meaningful interoperability is increasingly doubtful.

Contrast that with the alliance between Nortel and Microsoft. The Nortel Converged Office for the Communications Server 1000 is the first and only fully qualified IP PBX for integration with Microsoft OCS 2007.

First, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, then the London 2012 Olympics chose Nortel technology.

One ... and then two golds.

Then General Motors Place in Vancouver, the home of the Vancouver Canucks hockey team, decided to go with Nortel to deliver a UC experience to their fans.

That's a hat trick.

Now the New York Mets baseball club is loading up the bases in their new 42000-seat Citi Field stadium with Nortel technology , making it a technology showpiece.

That's a grand slam for Nortel and our customers.

If you're like me, the people with whom you work are all over the place. So how do you get the job done? You have some traditional tools: phone calls, email, audio and video conferencing, web presentation tools. You have new tools such as Unified Communications and telepresence if you're lucky enough and the people are in the right place.

Do these cover all aspects of how work is done? I would suggest no.

Think about the last time you had an on-site team meeting with your virtual team. Surely you had a kick off by the team leader, maybe some workshops (typically split between presentation and dialog modes) and lots of side discussions (in the back of the room, in the hallway, over coffee).

Where did the value come from? Some from the kickoff and workshop presentations... lots from the workshop dialogs, coffee breaks and side discussions. And what about the value of bumping into someone with the critical knowledge you need?

Does UC address these capabilities? Only partially. For group discussions, UC unifies audio or video conferencing, but these turn to noise during coffee breaks! Side discussions can be done in a limited way via IMs- a poor substitute for having a rich verbal interaction with a peer.

So what's the answer?

Enterprise-grade virtual reality solutions that incorporate avatars tagged with employee directory information (name, photo, role), integrated with UC and other business-oriented collaboration tools, and with business processes. This environment supports presentation, group discussions and ad hoc side meeting, the latter two enhanced by 3D audio, which allows two or more people in close virtual proximity to have private side discussions... just like real life.

Is virtual reality a reality for business? It soon will be from Nortel. We just announced our development of web.alive (part of our CTO Innovation Program), and our acquisition of 3D audio expertise and technology from DiamondWare. Web.alive is a software application accessible from a standard browser. You invoke its capabilities when it makes sense to better get the job done.

I've used web.alive and it delivers on our vision for unified communications and beyond. Very neat, simple and effective.