As we head into 2008, there are several aspects of the unified communications evolution that I think are going to be key areas to watch - my personal watch list. This time of year, we all share our predictions and the things we think are going to be hot in the coming year, so I'm going to share a few of mine.

Mobility
Mobile solutions are going to be one of the hottest communications areas in the industry in 2008. This year we saw the iPhone and a handful of advanced handsets from Nokia, notably the N series. Together, these new generation handhelds have set the bar higher for mobile phones. They have more memory, faster processes and enhanced functionality. WiFi is rapidly becoming the norm too.

What was once a mobile telephone has become a far more robust Internet device. Web browsing, text messaging, playing audio and video media files have become routine features that users expect in a mobile device. Beyond that, synchronization is quickly becoming more important. Google's recent enhancement to allow tighter sync between Google Calendar and Blackberry. That's a step ahead. Gmail has already been pretty accessible from a number of handhelds. Those advances will continue, although I don't really expect we'll see an exponential leap from Google - just continued advances over time.

RIM will become a larger force in 2008. Nokia dominates the mobile handset market, but the truth is that Nokia's strength is in consumer devices. The highly acclaimed N series I've had the pleasure of testing (N73, N93, N80i, N95 and N81) are fabulous, feature rich handhelds, yet they all fall short of being a useful enterprise business phone. I haven't had access to a Nokia E61 or E62 that have full QWERTY keyboard, but Nokia's lack of depth in competing with RIM in the business market is pretty clear.

RIM's new WiFi-enabled handset is rumored, but they've been partnering and working with a lot of other companies. RIM dominates the business market and has become the de facto standard. Windows Mobile fell dormant and isn't really a factor in the market today. I've spoken to friends at a couple of the wireless carriers. Windows Mobile is also plagued by flawed hardware that runs the highest customer return rates of any. The Motorola Q, for example, has proven a huge disappointment.

I expect to see RIM start eating into Nokia's consumer customer base in 2008. For many of us, carrying both a work and personal cell phone has become something of a pain. It might seem trendy to carry multiple phones. It might make some people feel important. Ego aside, it's another device to keep charged, another gadget to worry about losing, and a general hassle. Nokia may have to race to catch RIM in finding the right mix of business and personal use.

The iPhone, or iPod Touch are neither one at a point they're viewed as suitable business devices. They play directly to a different market. And while that market will continue to thrive, it's only a piece of the mobile handset market.

VoIP
I mentioned mobility before VoIP for a reason. Not long ago I wrote a couple of posts describing VoIP as plumbing. I think the key for me in the coming year is that VoIP for VoIP's sake will fall off the radar. VoIP is simply another transport mechanism for something more important - voice services. While voice services will rise in importance and evolve, VoIP as a technology has reached the level of what would typically be called a sustaining technology. It's no longer a disruptor in the voice services industry. It's simply another facet of the architecture.

There are areas within VoIP that will continue to make huge advances. Session Border Controllers (SBCs) will become more important than ever. SIP peering will continue to rise and more and more enterprise establish a SIP-connected presence with voice services. Companies like Covergence and Acme Packet will continue to lead the advances in these areas. Edge control of voice services will migrate to IP at a steady pace.

Mobile VoIP will continue to rise, as more handsets are WiFi-enabled. I don't think most users will care. The quad-band handset will be the norm before the end of 2008, with many handsets providing some integrated support for some VoIP-based voice service. What users will want, what they'll really buy, isn't a technology, but seamless integration that provides the most functionality for the lowest cost. Ease of use, especially in accessing VoIP for less expensive services, will be a market driver that the solution providers will finally understand. We'll see some companies really leverage that.

Video
In 2007 we saw Skype move up to high resolution video for a limited set of users. That will expand rapidly in 2008. We also saw SightSpeed evolve beyond the consumer to embrace business use. Even Gizmo began to embrace video in a new way. I expect to see video services couple more tightly with voice services in 2008. Whether the industry settles on VVoIP or V2oIP as the acronym of choice still remains to be seen, but we'll see video rise a couple of levels in importance. I don't think we'll see any exponential innovations in video, but several incremental improvements. I think we'll see some of those start to be announced at CES in a couple of weeks.

Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) & Software as a Service (SaaS)
I struggle with these terms, but not with what they embody. They've been used, and misused, by a number of companies grappling with how to describe unified communications.  I expect the industry will slowly leave both terms behind, but there are a couple of solution providers who will hang onto them for years. I think Forrester's terminology of Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) will become the most widely adpoted view. Here's how Forrester defines CEPBs -

...business processes and applications tightly integrated with unified communications technologies to enable concurrent or consecutive communications among customers, suppliers, and employees within the context of business transactions.

That's a mouthful really. It's something I'll be writing more about soon. I'm already working on a series of papers on the topic. CEPB will be the convergence point that really integrates communications tools with business processes, and Forrester touched on several vital business processes -

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management(CRM)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Sales Force Automation (SFA)
• Human Resources Management (HRM)

I expect to see huge advances in this evolution of convergence in the year ahead.

I also expect to see some disappointments. I'm not overly optimistic today about the innovation we'll see from major players like Cisco and Microsoft in the unified communications area next year. I'm confident they'll make noise. They're likely to bombard us with new words that mean old things. What I don't see coming from them today is real innovation. Real innovation comes from aggressive, small, entrepreneurial companies.

Social Media & Social Networking
In 2007 social tools (Facebook, LinkedIN, Plaxo, Jaiku, Twitter, etc.) leaped into high visibility, yet none are really new technologies this year. They've been with us for a while. This year they achieved some critical mass, but it's really just a start. I don't even see it as an explosive start.

Marketing and PR organizations still see these tools through a distorted lens. They're still looking for a way to deliver a message, but their universe is changing. Rather than broadcasting a message (spoon feeding marketing to a demographic audience), they're struggling with the concept of participating in a larger conversation in a new way. I think in 2008 we'll see more of these groups start to make a fundamental change in how they operate and converse with the world at large.

I think the social media and social networking are going to be explosive in 2008. So much so that my life and business partner Sheryl and I launched Stardust Global Ventures recently, with a focus on mobility and social tools. We think those are the two most exciting areas within the industry.

2008 is shaping up to be an exciting year with lots of real innovation from many companies. The small innovators are still going to be the ones to watch. They'll be where the really hot action is. They always are.



Technorati Tags: unified communications, mobility, VoIP, video, business integration, convergence

Posted by Ken Camp | Permalink | Comments (1) |

I make no bones about being a Siemens fan. One reason I like them is that they take great pains in providing solid information prior to their major announcements. To that end, I had the opportunity to chat on the phone last week with Ross Sedgewick.

The visuals here are stored in my Siemens OVCC set on Flickr. You can see them in larger detail by clicking the visuals themselves. I didn't upload the PDF document that was shared with me, but you can certainly find more information on the Siemens web site.

Today Siemens is announcing a new Open Virtualized Contact Center solution. I think it's big news. One reason I think it's big is that it's a major effort in supporting contact centers in a new way. It's based on Siemens' very successful HiPath 8000 platform. It's available immediately, and globally in 70 countries and 6 languages.

This OVCC conforms to SIP and OpenSOA standards and provides an open path to enterprise evolution in call center technologies. And coming from Siemens, it's a carrier grade solution based on the IT data center model. That's right, a telephony call center solution based on the model we use for IT data centers.

You really need to click the next visual to get a feeling for the evolutionary nature of the OVCC solution. It provides a path from the traditional site-based call center, geographically tied within the four walls of a building, through the distributed call center based on the converged IP network, to an open virtualized SIP softswitch approach that complements Siemens fixed mobile convenience philosophy for the revolution in unified communications.



Siemens demonstrates a three-fold approach with their OpenPath offerings:

• Optimize to maintain and maximize performance
• Enhance to add incremental improvement while proving viability in the real world
• Transform from legacy, proprietary systems to open communications
  

The arrow along the bottom of this visual shows the continuum from traditional telecommunications to new open communications.


Siemens' whole idea behind virtualization is ro break down the four-walled barrier that's been the contact center world for many years - to move from site-based contact centers to globally distributed ones. This approach to extending the enterprise is somewhat analogous to turning the HiPath 8000 into a "mainframe for voice," allowing the solution to be deployed for up to 5,000 users in this release,anywhere on the network.

Here's a large visual to give a sense of what the OVCC might look like in a real world deployment.



For anyone who's ever worked in the call center environment, one of the key indicators of success is first contact resolution of every problem. The OVCC approach to contact center virtualization is a step down a path that I believe lays the framework for a new paradigm in call centers. In the past, the four-walled call center was in place to perform a very specific function, like reservations or collections. I believe the next generation enterprise, using converged unified communications services, will also become the next generation virtual contact center. I believe enterprise employees will belong to multiple "agent groups" based on their role in the organization, their expertise, and their geographic location. This is the sort of technology that presents the forward-thinking enterprise with the tools to build a first contact resolution culture, not just in the call center, but across the enterprise.

Why Siemens? For me, one of the bigger factors I look at is thought leadership. Another is a company's commitment to open standards. (Note: Open source and open standards are very different things). This visual is larger, and laps underneath the right sidebar, but I'm showing it this size to show you Siemens commitment to open standards. not just in this announcement, but across their whole solution set. Search the blog for other Siemens posts and you'll find a thread of commitment to openness that's vital to our industry.,



The full press release is below the line for convenience.

---

Siemens Announces SIP-Based Open Virtualized Contact Center Solution for the Enterprise
Groundbreaking solution offers on-demand enterprise service for virtually any existing corporate infrastructure

BOCA RATON, Fla. — April 17, 2007 — Siemens Communications, Inc. [NYSE: SI] today introduced its Open Virtualized Contact Center, addressing the traditional limitations of the hardware intensive site-based contact center. Siemens’ groundbreaking overlay software approach makes it easier and faster for organizations to distribute expanded functionality to agents in any location equipped with no more than headsets and minimally configured desktops. The new solution integrates two of its most popular and award-winning products: Siemens® HiPath® ProCenter® Enterprise contact center solution and Siemens HiPath 8000 SIP-based enterprise softswitch. The new blended solution supports environments from as few as two attendants to up to 5,000 concurrent agents and provides a platform to enhance customer interactions across every segment of an enterprise, on virtually any existing communication or network infrastructure.

Well-suited to hosting in a data center, this solution provides centralized administration while delivering global enterprise-based or outsourced contact center functionality as an on-demand service anywhere that secure IP network access is available, unconstrained by legacy PBX or Centrex infrastructure. It delivers scalable, strategic communications coordination and intelligent load sharing by linking multiple Siemens HiPath ProCenter systems on a single HiPath 8000. Furthermore, HiPath ProCenter CRM-Ready IT integration and Software Development Kit tools facilitate incorporation of contact center capabilities directly into communications-enabled business processes and applications.

“Siemens’ large-scale virtualization of the enterprise contact center represents the next step in business extending its capability beyond traditional office-bound agents and effectively leveraging the knowledge of expert resources throughout the organization,” said Joe Outlaw, Principal Analyst of Contact Center Solutions with Current Analysis. “It can be a much more effective way to deploy agents when and where they’re needed, with the potential to lower costs.”

The Open Virtualized Contact Center leverages the open SIP capabilities native to the HiPath 8000 and the presence-enabled multimedia application services in ProCenter. Going beyond Siemens’ industry-first presence and collaboration agent desktop capabilities, new presence services empower contact center agents to confirm the presence and availability of the best support resources among all HiPath 8000 users in the enterprise. With one mouse click, agents can then initiate collaboration that enhances resolution of customer issues during the first contact. In addition, Siemens extends this presence and connectivity to mobile users with Voice over Wireless LAN solutions.

“The Open Virtualized Contact Center extends the Siemens Open Communications strategy to the large enterprise customer,” said Eve Aretakis, CEO, Siemens Communications, Inc. “It offers tremendous flexibility across almost any network, client, device or IT environment, along with business process integration and highly effective agent tools. It can help agents resolve many more customer issues the first time around, boosting overall contact center performance and providing companies the opportunity to lower costs and enhance customer service.”

Siemens’ Open Virtualized Contact Center solution is now available globally through direct sales channels and value-added resellers.

About Siemens
Siemens AG (NYSE:SI) is one of the largest global electronics and engineering companies with reported worldwide sales of $96 billion in fiscal 2005. Founded nearly 160 years ago, the company is a leader in the numerous fields, including medical technology; power systems; automation and control systems; transportation; information and communications; lighting; building technologies; water technologies; and services and home appliances. Based in Munich, Siemens AG and its subsidiaries employ 460,000 in 190 countries. Eleven of Siemens' worldwide businesses are based in the United States and are supervised from Siemens’ U.S. corporate headquarters in New York City. Siemens’ American operations produce annual sales of $18.8 billion and employ approximately 70,000 people in all 50 states and Puerto Rico. For more information on Siemens in the United States, visit www.usa.siemens.com.

About Siemens Communications, Inc.
Siemens Communications, Inc. is one of the world’s leading vendors of Open Communications solutions for enterprises of all sizes, enabling business processes to be more productive, faster and more secure – with any device, network or information technology infrastructure. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens AG with about 15,000 employees globally and headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla. For more info, visit www.usa.siemens.com/communications

Note: Siemens, HiPath and ProCenter are registered trademarks of Siemens AG or its subsidiaries and affiliates. All other company, brand, product and service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

This release contains forward-looking statements based on beliefs of Siemens management. The words "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "forecast," "expect," "intend," "plan," "should," and "project" are used to identify forward-looking statements. Such statements reflect the company's current views with respect to future events and are subject to risks and uncertainties. Many factors could cause the actual results to be materially different, including, among others, changes in general economic and business conditions, changes in currency exchange rates and interest rates, introduction of competing products, lack of acceptance of new products or services and changes in business strategy. Actual results may vary materially from those projected here. Siemens does not intend or assume any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.
###

Technorati Tags: Siemens, Open Virtualized Contact Center, call centers, VoIP, unified communications, HiPath 8000

Posted by Ken Camp | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Some of you may know that I'm in the process of writing an e-book, The Definitive Guide to Converged Network Management. If you visit the web site, you may have noticed it mentioned in the sidebar, but if you only read here via an RSS feed, you don't see that.




This e-book is being published chapter-by-chapter. There will be ten chapters when the work is all completed. Yesterday Chapter 4 went online. If it's something that interests you, you can click the link and download each chapter as it becomes available.

Technorati Tags: Definitive Guide to Converged Network Management, Ken Camp, unified communcations, VoIP, network management

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This post from Christopher Carfi's blog caught my eye today as I was catching up on reading. Cristopher's one of the Principals at Cerado, a company that helps companies with competitive intelligence and other tools to use the network more effectively.

Maybe it's because I've been offline for several days, but there's a whole deja vu theme playing in my head as I catch up on reading.

For Your Radar: The "Economics Of Abundance"

In a nutshell: Economics, economies and economic theory have all been based on economics of scarcity. That is, scarcity drives the "laws" of economics. A number of things have hit the radar over the last few months that are of note:

Chris Anderson (author of "The Long Tail"): The Economics of Abundance -- The speech that Anderson made at Pop!Tech this year.

Mike Masnick: The Scarcity Myth

Nick Carr: Knockoffs roil Second Life - A great example of what happens when one tries to force-fit an economic model based on scarcity into an environment where information is free.

David Hornik: Tough Choices

This idea is going to hit the mainstream press and boardrooms in a big way in 2007.

The whole idea of a network economy of abundance isn't new. And while Chris Anderson's Pop!Tech presentation made and big splash, David Hornick has been talking about this for a long time.

Let's think about it. When was it exactly that we ran computers on slow dial-up connections, equipped with 20 meg hard drives and 640K or RAM? Not that long ago. What changed fundamentally was that Microsoft, and as a follow-on, the entire tech sector, quit treating computing resources as scarce commodities. We treated memory, CPU, storage and network connections as limitless resources. We ignored the illusion of scarcity and assumed abundance.

Operating systems and software applications bloated to enormous size, and nobody cared. long gone are the days of tight assembly code optimized for size and memory utilization. Now we develop programs and simply tell users they have to upgrade to the latest OS, add memory, and get a bigger hard drive. Abundance ignores pre-existing barriers.

The economy of abundance ignores preconceived notions. And it's been around in networking, but downplayed by the carriers, for years.

One example - optical networking. Dense Wave Division Multiplexing technology in networks isn't new. I was teaching DWDM classes in 2000. If we can multiplex light spectrum, by color, to carry multiple OC-192 (That's transmission speeds of up to 9953.28 Mbit/s (payload: 9621.504 Mbit/s; overhead: 331.776 Mbit/s)) (It's probably the fastest commonly available connection to the Internet), why are we still talking about DSL and broadband in terms that make T1 speeds seem revolutionary?

Simple, the carriers haven't found a way to monetize the higher speeds at a high enough profit ratio. Sure, Verizon talks FIOS, and it absolutely requires investment, but the bottom line is the technologies in widespread use today provide a glut of capacity in the backbone. We have an abundance that we don't fully utilize.

We don't use it because we wait for carriers to provide it at a cost we'll pay. The economy of abundance tells us that is fundamentally the wrong approach. We've seen it historically time and again with CPU speeds, memory and storage.

The way to drive costs down is to burn bandwidth like there's no tomorrow and load up every potential stream with more and more information.

Assuming abundance and using resources as if they're abundant, creates abundance. Check the history.

I agree with Christopher, but I also feel like this isn't new. I think said these same things in talks five or six years ago, Time to quit talking and start consuming. Voice, video and unified communications will be most successful of we get off the dime and use them.

In the Kevin Costner movie Field of Dreams, the premise was "if you build it they will come." In the abundance economy of the Internet, the corollary is reversed, If we use it, they will build.

Posted by Ken Camp | Permalink | Comments (0) |

The snip you read below is a pretty extensive copy-and-paste from Jan in Malaysia. While Jan and I send IMson Skype every now and then and recently started following each other's updates on Twttr (a web service I really like a lot), we've never spoken in voice mode. I follow Jan's posting closely because he runs much closer to the cutting edge of what's going on with Skype than I do.

Corporate Skype keeps crashing on me. «Hello Niklas, Hello Meg, I have a problem with my corporate Skype, can you send a technician to fix it ?» Answer : «No we can’t because you got it for free. Press 1 to call marketing now...».

It’s the 5th time this morning… Looks here. In the middle of a conversation with a business-person. What the heck is going on :

Also noticed that the desktop icon of the corporate skype is not showing the right skype icon. Ah but problem solved. I will call support being a business-guy and all that… Ow wrong, I forgot, beta’s are not supported.

What is the number of the calldesk and helpdesk for corporate skype users anyways ? Maybe that should be mentioned on the interface of Skype callto:skype.corporate. «Hello Niklas, Hello Meg, I have a problem with my corporate Skype, can you send a technician to fix it ?» Answer : «No we can’t because you got it for free, we don’t do support. Go complain on the forum and write another funny story on your weblog». (a fiction of my imagination of course what is written here, but the error and frustration are real, and it is not only me).

If you provide corporate solution, please provide corporate business procedures to deal with support, based on service-levels.

I've taken heat on more than one occasion for my pretty adamant position opposing Skype in the enterprise, but that's a position I don't see changing any time soon. That position's based on security concerns that Skype has never even begun to acknowledge. They dance around with fluffy words about SKype for business, but they've never shown they were serious about the enterprise.  On the other hand, enterprise security managers are pretty serious about keeping Skype out.

Now Jan shows how the average small to medium business (not the enterprise) can put their business at risk by relying on Skype for telephony, traditionally one of the most mission critical services any business uses.

Skype for business? A small home business or as a backup to more secure and reliable tools, but never as a primary communications resource. At least not in my business.

Technorati Tags: Skype. Skype for business. Skype reliability

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