It was a slow week in Telecom, UC, etc., or at least last week felt that way. Perhaps, other than hearing that Wes Hayden left his position as CEO of Genesys to become president of Nuance’s Enterprise Communications division, a lot of announcements seemed aimed at keeping attention on the big player’s UC offerings, ahead of Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 debut. For example, Nortel and Polycom announced the addition of HD Video and Telepresence to Unified Communications, and IBM made public promises of tighter levels of integration between its own UC platform and its new, free Lotus Symphony productivity suite. Still, I expected to hear something earth shattering as fall is typically the season when many big player analyst events occur.
Cisco
Going back a couple of weeks, Cisco held their Unified Communications Analyst Summit in Toronto, and they had a mouthful for us. We heard about futures as well as their vision of customers moving to the Unified Workspace; basically as one presenter put it, “free from email and liberated from the desktop.” The Unified Workspace is the idea that any combination of devices, applications, operating systems, and networks that we use to conduct business, can be significantly different at any given time on any given day, and that we should be able to create and optimize our workspace no matter where we are, on whatever type of device, using which ever business/communication applications we choose to use. Plus the Unified Workspace should be seamless as we move from one place or device to another, dishing up a consistent user experience.
A core premise of the Unified Workspace, according to Cisco, is that social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, along with SMS, instant messaging and other communication applications, are replacing people’s reliance on email, and are expanding the way we collaborate and communicate. They had some pretty nifty demos to highlight the possibilities of this too.
Of course, being Cisco, it’s all unified through the network, allowing you to create your own workspace on the fly by accessing UC applications on the network, or connecting to others on a different network. So, it shouldn’t matter if you leave your desk, continue on your cellphone in the car, and continue working in a WiFi café, the network knows which device you are on and provides you with the services you need in that particular workspace. Another critical component of this is presence, so that you know who else is on the network, what their availability status is, and you can connect to them, through voice, IM, etc., collaborate on documents, bring others into your virtual workspace, etc. This is pretty cool stuff if they can get it all to work.
Microsoft UC Launch
In another corner of the UC ring, I attended the Microsoft UC launch in San Francisco on Tuesday, hoping for big things. My impressions, however, was that there wasn’t anything particularly earth shattering here, but that is mostly because the industry has known about the launch for such a long time. Apparent, however, was the large number of partners that have climbed on board the Microsoft bus and are producing products and customers, and customers were in evidence from the highlighted ones throughout the program to customers I heard about in the partner pavilion. The overall tone from speaking with partners is that they are now ready to roll out UC in a prepared fashion to suit customers, even if it’s just one application at a time.
As for applications/products at the launch, I guess if you can call it this, some of the more sexy things, other than OCS itself, included RoundTable, Microsoft’s new, pretty affordable conferencing device, which has a 360 degree camera, and “voice-following” capability, which captures who the speaker is and highlights their image on a separate screen in the meeting. RoundTable works with OCS 2007 or Office Live Meeting 2007. Unfortunately, I missed the demo, so I can’t comment on how good it is or not. Additionally, Office Communicator 2007 was pretty slick.
As for getting a feel for real deployments, when I was in the partner showcase I spoke to BT, who said that they have a dozen UC pilots out so far, and are adding one a week, at least in the Northern California area. So I asked what a typical UC deployment is for them, they responded by saying that at a minimum it is OCS, IM and conferencing – specifically Roundtable. My impression was that interest among customers is extremely high, and that BT is rapidly training techs to support it. Avanade, Microsoft’s joint venture with Accenture, also had lots of customer momentum stories to tell. One customer at the event spoke passionately about the need for security in UC, and said that one big selling point for him with Microsoft was their ability to do encryption and authentication down to the phone level, which he claims he has never seen with any other vendor. If every prospect was as passionate about UC as this guy, the market would move much faster.
In all, it seemed like a slow week or so in telecom, but maybe its just because we are making progress on what we already have on our plate.