Cisco’s TelePresence was worth the wait. Last week I finally had a chance to participate in a TelePresence meeting, with David Hsieh, Cisco’s Senior Director of Marketing for Emerging Technologies, after missing the opportunity to see it demonstrated last December at Cisco’s annual analyst conference. Although much has been written about the upfront costs of deploying TelePresence, when I experienced it in person, heard first hand about productivity gains across Cisco, reduced travel costs, slashed carbon footprint, and business transformation for customers, cost just didn’t seem that important.

Although I wasn’t able to attend SpeechTek last week in New York, I did talk to a number of people who were there, along some of the vendors who were exhibiting. Based on the show floor and announcements this month, the industry has made a lot of headway into automated customer support, mobile applications, and entrance into emerging markets, such as unified communications. Here is fraction of what I missed.

I have to say that I love the whole concept of Unified Communications, but, after wading through the flood of press and meetings during and post-VoiceCon I keep getting struck with thoughts on what is missing from UC. It is broadly applicable and complex, not the neat little bucket that unified messaging was when it was first talked about. In the early days of UM, our biggest worry was where were the voicemails, faxes and emails being stored? Not so with UC. We have layers of complexity that most companies haven’t begun to think about. Plus we have several industries if you separate data from telecom, which are pushing the concept of unifying communications for the betterment of business and mankind, not just one, so how do we get there from here? Here is where all the vendor hype is. There is made up of real deployments, with ROI, applications working seamlessly together, unhindered on well run and provisioned networks. The middle of here and there is where it gets scary.

I checked in with LumenVox this morning, after missing them at SpeechTek last month. With all the press that Microsoft and Nuance get (not that I have anything against either), its still nice to know that other speech technology vendors are not only thriving, but really helping niches in the market.

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.

I spent much of last week in sunny Phoenix at Interactive Intelligence’s partner conference, which was quite a show. For a company of roughly 600 people, competing with the likes of the Cisco’s and Avaya’s of the world, they are doing all right. After 15 consecutive profitable quarters, cash flow is up, sales are way up, and they keep getting awards like Indianapolis’s sixth fastest growing company, placement among Indiana’s 50 great businesses, and just missed cracking the 200 mark among the top 500 Global Software and Services Suppliers – the company ranked 209th in this year’s Software 500, up 21 spots compared to last year.

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Dimension Data at the Cisco Unified Communications Summit in Toronto in September. Dimension Data, founded in 1983 and headquartered in South Africa, is an IT services and solutions provider with vast expertise in networking, security, operating environments, storage, and contact center technologies. They aren’t your typical systems integrator/VAR outfit either. They are huge; managing over $12B in network infrastructure around the globe. In fact, they have built out over 2000 IP networks in just the last three years, and are heavily into unified communications. They are also a Gold partner for both Cisco and Microsoft on five continents, and just recently received a Cisco Master Unified Communications Specialization designation.

In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.

It’s December. I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions, plus I’m not a unified communications vendor, so I don’t have a New Year’s resolution list for how I can help further the development of unified communications. I also don’t care to blog about my UC predictions for 2008, as there are plenty of others out there who will probably do that. However, I’m capable of believing in Santa, and as one of my friend’s tells her children when they ask her about Santa - “You have to believe to receive.” So, I thought I would put together my wish list for the Twelve Days of Unified Communications, with some help from my friends in the industry. I talked to a dozen or so vendors on what they would like to see happen in UC in 2008, and whether they had any input as to how they are helping further these wishes. Not surprisingly, in many cases these wishes reflected their own ongoing initiatives or pet peeves (attributions of which I have left off for reasons of anonymity). However, for the most part they tended to have a lot of commonality in what they wish for.

On the second day of UC the industry gave to me what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

My second day of UC wish is a particular interest of mine. What SMB loves is to be the center of attention. Don’t we all enjoy that? But its my opinion that when it comes to unified communications the industry hasn’t done enough to educate small and mid-sized businesses on the impact that UC applications can have on their networks, nor have we done a good job of educating SMBs as to the possible pitfalls of blindly adding on applications without proper network assessment and planning. Then there is the issue of security. SMBs may not want vendors to muck with their data, but its not uncommon for someone selling into those businesses to have to educate them on the value of backing that data up, let alone what the impact would be on the security of that data if new applications are added that might create security holes. Therefore, wish number two is a stronger focus on the SMB market.

On the third day of UC the industry gave to me an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

This wish is all about putting a microscopic lens or focus on the assistive technology (AT) side of “any time, any place, anywhere, through the device of choice”, or other catch phrases the industry has used over the years. I was inspired to add this as one of my wishes because of discussions with my blind friend, Karen Parsegian, who started to go blind about seven years ago, and had the lights go completely out on Christmas morning five years ago. Some Christmas present that was. Since then, she and I have had many discussions about what I am working on, with me (probably) boring her about unified communications and speech technologies. Now she is a veteran speech technology user herself, as a good proportion of her communications life revolves around having text-to-speech as her personal reading assistant, (and bar code and digital thermometer reader) and speech recognition as her phone navigation aid. Karen is adamant that “people in my business world” think about incorporating assistive technology design into their products.

On the fifth day of UC the industry gave to me five phone rings
voicemail industry girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

Five phone rings. What is that all about? In the unified communications world, five phones ringing represents the next generation of find-me-follow-me. But in this world, its not so much about five phones ringing in a row trying to track you down, or a chorus of all five devices going off at the same time, its about access and choice and mobility.

On the sixth day of UC the industry gave to me applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

The true value of UC is in integration. UC is about integration of business applications and communications within the office and in mobility applications. In unified communications, it shouldn’t matter what the client is, as long as you can get to the information and applications that you want and need. Further, just like the proverbial duck sitting calmly on the water and paddling furiously underneath, that integration all happens underneath and users shouldn’t know about it. My day six wish is for UC applications to be as plug and play as email, in that we all have our own favorite email client, but we don’t care what our friends and colleagues have as long as when we hit send, they get the message. Of course, it would be nice if they all sent and received messages the same way so that everyone gets embedded pictures and you don’t have to click through eight forwarded envelopes to get to the joke (my own personal rant about my friends use of AOL).

On the seventh day of UC the industry gave to me overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.

This is all about going green. How could anyone that reads a paper or goes onto the Internet not see the issue of green initiatives as a hot topic? My day seven wish is the second, along with assistive technology, that is about companies doing more to promote what they have or are doing. Day seven is that companies talk more about their green initiatives because we don’t hear enough about them. If we don’t hear about it, then customers don’t hear about it, and in order to go green customers need to be able to make intelligent choices when choosing vendors. In fact, Siemens recently held a webinar, entitled “The Green Contact Center – Making “Green” Work for you”. In it they held a poll with the question “Do you believe that a significant number of customers would be positively inclined to buy from vendors who publicly demonstrate a commitment to the Green initiatives?” Approximately 95% responded yes. Therefore, day seven is a wish to hear about green.

On the eighth day of UC the industry gave to me eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

OK, so I really don’t want to see eight CFO’s bilking investors, although we really haven’t had much of a good financial scandal to talk about since the last days of Lernout & Hauspie. But you try finding anything in unified communications that rhymes with milking. It’s really hard, and I said up front that you had to forgive me for my poetic license in rhyming with the original 12 days song.

On the ninth day of UC the industry gave to me interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

It’s all about the user experience, and what is closer to the user than the application or device user interface. In UC one of the sexier technologies used in user interface design is speech recognition. As one of my primary research focal points I’m a big fan. In fact, I finally caved and bought a Blackberry Pearl this year just for voice-activated dialing (VAD) (I know. I’m a little slow on these things sometimes. It’s like the shoemaker not having any shoes). So, when one of the vendors that I talked to about unified communications wishes, wished for better speech recognition as an interface in mobile devices I jumped on it. Therefore, wish number nine is that ASR and UC vendors continue to overcome reliability issues for ASR used in unified communications applications, make them even simpler, and find even more useful ways to incorporate both ASR and TTS into UC application design.

On the tenth day of UC the industry gave to me no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing,
eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

My day 10 wish for the twelve days of unified communications is short and sweet. On day ten I wish that we no longer have much need for pagers beeping because UC works and companies are buying it. If this were the case, then pagers would be superfluous because people trying to contact, and business events that would require a notification be sent to you would know where you were and if you were available, and would know the best way to get a hold of you. You in turn, could control when and how you were reached – one of the key goals of UC. Blissfully, the rest of us wouldn’t hear “If you would like to page this person, press 5” anymore, or be subjected to an overhead page. Sigh.

On the Eleventh day of UC the industry gave to me, the value of video, not hyping,
no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing
CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing
five phone rings
the voicemail market girds
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

Its not that we don’t have video out there; we sure do and it’s a mind boggling amount. At Cisco’s C-Scape I believe the figure that was mentioned was something like 250 billion videos were produced in 2007. That is mind boggling. That includes videos incorporated into Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube, and social networking sites etc. Some estimates have Internet video increasing four fold by 2011. However, my day eleven wish is certainly not for that number to increase, although it will undoubtedly hit some mind numbing figure by the end of 2008. No, I’m wishing for businesses to “get” the value of video too, not just consumers, and for vendors to help them “get it” without the hype.

On the Twelfth day of UC the industry gave to me, figuring out the plumbing,
the value of video, not hyping,
no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing,
CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.

Darn. It’s Christmas and I woke up this morning and there was no Cisco TelePresence system under the tree. Sigh. I didn’t have any place to put it anyway, so it’s on to the twelfth day of unified communications.

Since reduction of power consumption was one of my 12 Days of UC wishes in December, when my colleague Samantha Kane-Mackay started an Earth Hour 2008 group on Facebook, I personally glommed onto it. It sounds like a simple thing; turn off your lights for an hour. Sydney, Australia did it last year. On March 31st 2007 they turned off the lights in the city with the result of reducing their power by 10.2%, which is the equivalent of getting 48K cars off of the road for that hour. Started by the Australian branch of World Wildlife Fund, this year the effort is going global. As of this writing they had dozens of cities signed up, 376 companies, and thousands of individuals. March 29th, 2008 is the day, at 8 pm in your time zone. Go check out Earth Hour 2008 and sign up yourself and your company.

Yesterday Siemens Enterprise Communications announced OpenScale, their new global brand name for managed and professional enterprise communication services. At the same time they stated that they would be investing heavily in strengthening their existing global service infrastructure, and capabilities for delivering software-based unified communications services. I found the announcement interesting from a couple of perspectives. The first is that because of Siemens size relative to some companies that have in the past few years started to provide managed services, it gives much more weight to the emphasis in providing managed services across all application areas. It also puts Siemens squarely in the same camp with the big boys, IBM, Avaya, Cisco and BT, who all provide global managed services offerings, and are delivering UC.

Last week ShoreTel held its first industry analyst conference, in San Francisco. This was a good thing, as the subject of my blog, brand recognition, involves the analyst community too. I’m assuming the majority of my colleagues know who ShoreTel is – a purveyor of VoIP switches, contact center, and unified communications software – but I bet that not many of them previously knew ShoreTel to the depths we went last week. Even I didn’t, although I have to admit I should have as I’m married to a ShoreTel reseller, hear about them all the time, and use their products every day.

There are dozens of conferences and trade shows every year tugging at the attention spans and calendars of customers, prospects, and analysts alike. Next week we have two great competing shows in the VoIP, telephony and unified communications space with VoiceCon in Orlando and VON in San Jose. In that case with topics, products and vendors being equally represented at both, my decision to attend was based on time and geography more than anything. Not so with the new Voice Search Conference that was held in San Diego this week as it was a must attend event for me. We have a lot of shows to choose from, but so few focused on speech technologies as the driver, even if those technologies are now being applied to contact centers, UC, mobility applications and other areas.

This really is a story about audio conferencing and a meeting I had with Wyde Voice at the VON conference in San Jose yesterday. Unfortunately, its not about Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, although that is pretty much what I had for lunch at the show with back to back vendor meetings (bless those vendor candy bowls). In any case, there were a number of great technical tidbits that Wyde offered up about their new wideband audio conferencing technology, but the one that grabbed me the most, that I’ll talk about first, is that they will be offering voice verification as part of audio conferencing, and this is something I haven’t seen or heard about before. Being the speech girl that I am, I like it. It’s like combining peanut butter and chocolate.

At CTIA Wireless yesterday Yahoo Inc. announced a collaboration with speech start-up Vlingo in which Vlingo will provide the speech recognition to compliment Yahoo’s oneSearch search technology for mobile phone applications. Marco Boerries, EVP of Yahoo’s Connected life division; the one that focuses on mobile products, did a demo of the new Yahoo! oneSearch at CTIA, by asking the application where is the best play to play craps in Las Vegas.

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending an analyst briefing on Dimension Data. For whatever reason, prior to Cisco’s UC summit last fall I hadn’t paid much attention to Dimension Data, but since sitting in on that presentation, I’ve been keenly interested in what they do and their business model.

It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:

In April, Cisco announced a sales milestone of 500 TelePresence units ordered since the product was launched a year and a half ago. That might not sound like a lot, but we aren’t talking about cellphones or Barbie dolls, but really big video conferencing rooms and equipment. It also makes Cisco the current front runner in selling really big telepresence solutions, and it speaks volumes about how important this type of technology is for business. Companies are investing in video conferencing.

In April, Blair Pleasant and I conducted a UC end user productivity study, under the UCStrategies.com brand. The study focuses on how end users use UC and how it impacts their productivity. Rather than targeting the IT managers who are responsible for implementing and running the UC systems and asking them what they felt the impacts of UC were, we surveyed and interviewed the real end users who use UC to find out how, or even if, UC is helping them be more productive and effective in their day-to-day jobs. The study focused on four different job types – executive/management, operations (including engineering and IT), sales and marketing, and back office operations, particularly human resources. Go to my home page to click on the download.

Last week when Blair Pleasant and I had finished our UC end user benefits study we did a webinar on the findings that was sponsored by Genesys and CMP. Out of that we had a number of follow up questions from the audience, including quite a few from our colleague Art Rosenberg, who posted a review of the study on UC Strategies.com.

Siemens Enterprise held their global analyst event last week in beautiful Vienna, Austria, and in addition to wanting to get an update on the business, possibly every analyst in attendance was eager to find out if Siemens was going to announce which company would take over the enterprise business. However, as Brian Riggs of Current Analysis pointed out in his ‘Siemens Enterprise: June Wedding Postponed’ (loved that title) blog on NoJitter, there was no long awaited news on who the lucky partner would be for Siemens – yet. However, that didn’t stop many analysts at the event from trying to squeeze shreds of info out of Siemens execs as to who it might be, yet they remained strong and didn’t and couldn’t say.

It’s the dog days of summer in telecom. Just what are the dog days? According to Wikipedia “The phrase Dog Days or "the dog days of summer", refers to the hottest, most sultry days of summer. They are a phenomenon of the northern hemisphere that usually falls between July and early September but the actual dates vary greatly from region to region, depending on latitude and climate. Dog Days can also define a time period or event that is very hot or stagnant.” It’s no only hot in here, since I dropped the kids off at camp and came home to my closed up house and an air conditioner that wasn’t working – and tomorrow is when the heat wave is supposed to start, it’s also that stagnant time of year in telecom.