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.

I read iLinc’s recent announcement entitled “iLinc Web Conferencing Customers Reduce CO2 Emissions by One Billion Pounds” and was immediately interested. I’m really on the Green bandwagon (although I haven’t bought a Prius), and I’m intently interested in video conferencing’s impact on the user - particularly the unintended impact on the user – those things that companies haven’t dreamed would happen when they introduced their conferencing products.

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.

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 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 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.

I just got a notice that two of my ‘Twelve Days of UC’ wishes - the value of video and going green - are being addressed in a first of its kind town meeting that is being shown to a live audience during Cisco’s keynote session at VoiceCon in Florida on March 19th. Former Vice President, Al Gore, Cisco’s Chairman and CEO, John Chambers, and Cisco’s EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Sue Bostrom, physically separated from each other by thousands of miles, will meet together in a virtual unified communications environment, to talk about how technology innovation can play a part in mitigating climate change. Using Cisco TelePresence, of course, these three will virtually meet on stage in front of live audiences in London, England, Orlando and several other places. Those attending the keynote will get to watch the live discussion via a TelePresence system that will be placed on stage, while others will get to see it in several other TelePresence rooms around the world. Those unable to attend can view it live as a streamed webcast session.

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: