November 2007 Archives

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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)…….

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 ….”.