Competitive advantage generally goes to the organization best able to apply the knowledge and expertise of its workers whenever and wherever it’s needed. Much has been said of how UC can accelerate and formalize internal business processes, ultimately achieving improved workflow and cost savings. Certainly the notions of presence, single number contact, video and web conferencing are no longer novel and are now increasingly taken for granted by workers. But the biggest impact in providing unified and flexible, voice, data, video, and web-based collaboration tools may occur in the wireless realm with the nearly two-thirds of all workers who comprise the ever-growing mobile workforce.

 

“I think there are really three major issues when it comes to unified communications in the enterprise being a true productivity tool,” says David Wippich, President and CEO of Ensim (www.ensim.com), a major provider of management software for unified communications and collaboration used by service providers and enterprises worldwide.

 

“The first one is that many companies don’t know actually know how to build UC into the way they do business: the way they act, the way their sales department interacts with customers or internal departments interact with each other,” says Wippich. “Integrating UC into your standard workflows and business is Number One. You’ve got to think about where you’re going to integrate it. The mistake people make in many companies in the IT area is that they start with the technology, not with how they’re going to use the technology. So this first issue is, ‘How am I going to use it in my company to improve my internal efficiency, my internal communications and my external communications?’. The answer to these questions differ for each business. Whether you’re a web retailer, a manufacturing company, or a services company, everybody is going to have a different way to see how it fits into their business.”

 

“Once they’ve done that,” says Wippich, “the second challenge is ensuring that the applications are integrated. From a certain application, can you click on a phone number and call that number? Without application integration it becomes difficult to really enjoy the cross-usage of UC services. It’s great to have voicemail and efax and email and IM and VoIP, but it’s even better if they can work from each other’s front-end or back-end, so that when you’re in email you can click on something to make a call, or you can change your presence information to indicate that you’re in a meeting and therefore it’s best to reach you on IM instead of via a phone call or email. Thus, application level integration is important.”

 

“Third and lastly,” says Wippich, “is the plumbing that makes it all work. That’s at the platform level of integration — being able to provision users across all of your UC applications, being able to provide secure access control for a single site on a shared server, being able to do password reset, or be able to do different back-end tasks, and push them out to the front-end. Many of the unified communications applications require enablement of certain features or functionality by the IT department. So it’s very difficult for them to try to do that for each user. Being able to selectively take different privileges and then push those out to the front end in a delegated administrative way is very important. So this third area is ‘the plumbing’. That’s where Ensim plays. We’re the ‘plumbing enabler’ if you will, of unified communications.”

 

“There are several primary areas where we help a customer with that plumbing,” says Wippich, “First is provisioning: doing all of the automated provisioning on a single platform, whether it’s the IM, the VoIP, the email, the voicemail, the efax, or whatever. All of those applications need the same things. They need a user to be created on the system for access. The user needs to be linked into the directory system, be it Active Directory, LDAP or something else. A certain set of privileges or parameters need to be assigned to that user. Does he have specific rights? Is he a senior or a junior user? How much mailbox storage does he get? What kind of mobile device does he get? These are all provisioning parameters that must be dealt with. Then you’ve got to provision the devices he’s going to use. Many people forget about the device. So it’s about being able to automatically provision, configure and manage the device, such as setting up the smartphone or Blackberry automatically, or setting up his IP phone to match back to the PBX system. Setting up his Outlook client on his desktop or laptop is another common matter. And then there’s all the rest of the client-side software to configure.”

 

“Many UC applications such as Siemens’ OpenScape, Microsoft OCS or Outlook, all have a client-side part of the app that needs to be configured back to the server side when you add a user,” says Wippich. “You’d rather do that automatically than manually.”

 

“So the first way we help customers is in terms of automatic provisioning, and the second way is with all the device management configurations,” says Wippich. “Third is all of the user identity, role management and delegated administration. That’s essentially a matter of allowing people to have a single sign-on, to be able to take these back-end tasks such as creating a distribution group and have admins do that themselves rather than having to bother the IT guys.”

 

“Fourth,” says Wippich, “is providing a framework and a user interface for all of these users to work in their particular roles, whether it’s Jane who wants to change her password, or Bob who wants to create a distribution group, or the junior IT guy who needs to do some standard task, but you’re really afraid to give them keys to the back-end system because they might screw it up, limiting what they can and can’t do. But then you can also automate a lot of redundant tasks. So having a simplified IT management infrastructure, where the different people can do different things, based on their privilege set and performing them through a web-based interface that’s very easy to use, are the four main functional areas where Ensim contributes.”

 

“With so many things communicating with each other,” says Wippich. “There are of course security concerns. Take mobile devices. It’s bad enough when people lose a laptop. Imagine how easy it is to lose a cell phone. People go on a business trip with their laptop, but people always have their cell phone, so they’re more likely to lose it. Your cell phone now has business-critical information in it. What happens when it gets lost? How do you track it, wipe it, or ‘kill’ it? Being able to do all of that becomes important. Another area of security concern is determining what users have access to what applications. Does everyone get the same level of access to the apps or can you do that based on different roles? Then there’s the matter of setting up a user. How do you control who gets to set up users? How about taking down a user when somebody quits or is let go? You’ve got to lock up their account: their email, IM, smartphone; and making sure the device is wiped, so if they leave with the smartphone or the Blackberry or laptop, all of the business info from the UC apps are wiped clean. That’s another major area to which Ensim contributes.”

 

Ensim is currently focusing on the certain markets through four variants of its Unify product line: Enterprises (managing UC applications on-premise), Shared Hosting Providers (delivering UC and other hosted applications to small and medium-size businesses via a carrier-grade shared infrastructure), Managed Service Providers (offering enterprise-class solutions in dedicated environments) and SaaS (News - Alert) Service Providers and ISVs (offering applications as hosted services). The Ensim Unify Enterprise Edition is now available with a free trial download from the Ensim web site at http://get.ensim.com.

 

As long ago as the CTI/computer telephony days of the 1990s, Yours Truly always joked that advanced telecom technology such as UC was simply transforming whole organizations into veritable (not to mention virtual) call/contact centers. One company that has focused on the development and distribution of customer interaction and workforce optimization software for IP-based contact centers has been the Calabrio Software division (www.calabrio.com) of Spanlink Communications (www.spanlink.com), which in 2006 was spun off to operate as an independent company. Calabrio came out of the gate with approximately 500,000 installed desktops; it also maintains its OEM relationship with Cisco. (For the record, Spanlink Communications itself will maintain its focus on selling, delivering and supporting unified communications solutions. They still focus a great deal on the call center space, but more from a full solutions deployment and integration standpoint.)

 

Designed for virtual VoIP-based customer interaction networks, the Calabrio Unified Interaction Suite combines agent desktop tools with workforce optimization software to unify the entire customer interaction process for agents and supervisors, thus aligning contact center business processes with a company’s business objectives by integrating workforce optimization within a team’s daily workflow. Calabrio’s Unified Agent Desktop, for example, unifies agent productivity tools, automates transaction workflows and enhances team collaboration. It also integrates team coaching and collaboration tools with Calabrio’s own Quality Management, Workforce Management, and performance reporting solutions.

 

Kristen Jacobsen, Calabrio’s Marketing and Communications Director, says, “Our niche is developing software solutions for VoIP, which happens to fit into the unified communications space. So in a sense we’ve been doing UC for years in terms of unified desktop applications, bringing in softphone-type of applications, integrating presence for contact centers, and in the last couple of years we’ve rolled out applications relating to quality management and workforce management so that agents in a contact center really have one unified ‘device’ if you will, which is the desktop, from which to orchestrate all of their call-handling activities.”

 

“With the advent of unified communications, the fact that the underlying technologies from manufacturers are coming together, positions us to do what we do more effectively,” says Jacobsen.

 

Calabrio CTO Jon Silverman says, “We started down the path of distributed systems back in the 1990s and we got to VoIP in the early 2000s,” says Silverman. “We discovered this thing called ‘voice’ that could be streamed out to the endpoint, and we could do things with it, such as capture it and send it somewhere else where another program could play it to someone. Later we did what are called ‘end-to-end’ arguments, which involves moving the intelligence out of the middle and as high up in the stack as we possibly can, and just let the endpoints do their thing. We had situations where we’d be capturing the stream and the supervisor would want it and we’d send it along, from a server initially, and then we realized we could just as easily have the endpoint on the agent’s desktop communicate with a supervisor, and we could forward a stream that way. In fact, if we want to provide traditional contact center operations, such as ‘barge-in’ and ‘intercept’, and so on, we really don’t need heavyweight legacy servers in the middle. We can simply have the endpoints do most of that.”

 

“We’ve formed a software architecture that moves as much of the process as we can to the endpoints so they become intelligent,” says Silverman. “We do lots of capture there, since we do recording and monitoring; we can capture voice, screens, and so on. We have the signaling and the media right there coming to the endpoint, so we can do whatever we want with it.”

 

Silverman continues: “We’ve examined other things such as presence and we’ve said, ‘This looks interesting, so a long time ago in about 2001 or 2002, we presence-enabled our contact center applications. We started by forming what you’d call an organizational structure where we’ve defined a contact center made up of a bunch of teams and the teams are made up of agents and supervisors, and so on, and we’ve formed relationships based on where they fit in the organization. Then we would allow them to see each other’s presence and chat. Now, there are two types of presence: First, there’s the traditional presence that all the contact center players support, which simply indicates the on-call status of the agent. We went beyond that. We realized that there are people in the queue and then there are those people who may actually want to use the chat function. So we’ve had the ability to indicate presence for hook-states and ACD states for a while now. We can also set up rules where agents can talk to supervisors within their team, and in the case of agents that have someone else involved in the contact, those people should be allowed to talk and chat too.”

 

“So, we’ve always had this notion of a multimedia conversation, where the same time that we had a voice conversation going on, we’ve said, ‘We should also be able to do chat’. The traditional approach was that the supervisor wants to listen in and perhaps whisper something into the agent’s ear. So the agent hears the caller in his left ear and the supervisor in his right ear. That may be an interesting paradigm, they it doesn’t make sense in our newer world. Since we had multimedia capability, we decided to enable chatting. And on the desktop we made sure we could do various things that you’d want to do in a multimedia distributed system. We pioneered that.”

 

“More recently we’ve noticed that there are all these standards such as SIP, with its SIMPLE extensions for presence management as well as for some instant messaging,” says Silverman. “We thought it would be great if we had this island called the contact center be able to talk to so-called ‘knowledge workers’ or ‘subject matter experts’ or whatever you want to call them. And now our same presence-enabled contact center agent has one tool by which it, in an upcoming release, be able to say, gee, there’s a subject matter expert concerning the things I care about, I should be able to see who they are and I should be able to escalate a call to them. There are many examples. A salesperson is in the field and customers call in and talk to the contact center, which needs the actual salesperson to confirm something. What better way to know where they are than using some kind of IM solution. It can go over IP and be distributed in nature. We don’t care if the agent and salesperson are in the same building, campus, or country.”

 

“Where will presence go in the future?” asks Silverman. “If it’s not just ‘What’s my hook state?’, it’s ‘What am I doing at this point in time?’, and ‘What are my special capabilities with regards to this particular contact and this particular agent and how do we match them up?’. We’ve done a fair amount of work in this area.”

 

“Another area of interest is the back office,” says Silverman. “Our agent desktop is what we would call a container app. In a smaller environment, it says ‘There are all of these applications that are sitting on the desktop. How do we organize them?’ We can do a couple of things here. For example, we take the ‘container’ that’s going to host all of these applications and make it so that it must host those applications but it also has to host the contact center agent applications. And those applications can be things such as how you manage your ACD [Automatic Call Distribution] state. Do you reveal ‘Ready’ or ‘Not Ready’? Do you have the ability to wrap work? How do you track that? Do you have real-time displays or dashboards that show you how many calls are in queue? Are there dashboards that show your performance? How do you integrate all of that into a container?”

 

“Obviously you’ve also got to integrate things such as Chat, and other capabilities,” says Silverman. “You might want to see information about the history of a certain contact, where it’s been and so on. So we have a container app, and that’s one good side of it. The other side is the ability to integrate with the back offices. We have a ‘work flow interpreter’ and a work flow specification environment that we make as simple as possible so that non-programmers can work with it. In particular, one of the things we strive to do is to integrate the enterprises’ applications, or the ‘back office’ as we refer to them. So, we support a variety of methods by which desktop apps can be integrated into the agent container; simple ones such as HTTP POST and GET. We have browsers embedded within our agents’ desktop, and somebody may want a particular page to pop when the call rings, and some other page to pop in a different browser when a call ends and when we enter a particular ACD state maybe you want to run some other application. Think about all of the things you do when handling a contact from the beginning to the end and the back office applications you have to interface with so as to get an order fulfilled, and so on. It’s can be quite involved.”

 

“We also support a whole bunch of other application integration methods,” says Silverman, “such as traditional database access using ODBC and JDBC-type connectors. We have SOAP-enablement in terms of a Web Service and you may want to do a SOAP application interface to it. We can go even further to what we call the lowest common denominator. You’ve got some desktop application that, say, is running on a terminal emulator and there’s a ton of applications out there, particularly in the contact center space, where you still see people using green screens. Well, we can play keystrokes to that app and take the CTI data, just as in the POST and GET case where we have the original calling number and we can paste that easily into a terminal emulation session. We don’t care if it’s an IBM (News - Alert) mainframe 3270/5250-like device, of if it’s some sort of Unix server with an X Windows interface, we’ll be able to interact with it regardless.”

 

“So we have a whole raft of capabilities for integrating various applications and pulling them back into the single agent desktop, which simplifies and streamlines workflow greatly.”

 

 

In order to provide UC anywhere at anytime, all functionality normally found on the desktop must be reformulated to run in the increasingly important and expanding world of mobile workers, a process which generally involves speech recognition and text-to-speech.

 

Excendia (www.excendia.com) develops speech-enabled virtual assistants and unified communications software for mobile business people, marketing its voice and data convergence products under the Excendia brand, through a global network of service providers and resellers. Recently Excendia announced it had integrated its speech-enabled Virtual Assistant with IBM WebSphere Voice Server, further enhancing their ability to provide hands-free, eyes-free mobility and unified communication solutions.

 

Using speech commands over any phone, Virtual Assistant users can access and manage their phone calls, emails, appointments and contacts while on the road, driving or visiting customers. They can listen and reply to their email messages, review and schedule appointments, call contacts by name or send them voice e-mails. Excendia uses the IBM WebSphere speech recognition and text-to-speech technologies (Excendia can also call upon other speech technologies if need be, such as from Nuance.)

 

Gabor Barta (News - Alert), Vice-President, Sales and Business Development at Excendia, says, “You can run our product as a hosted service, standalone solution or adjunct to an existing PBX. However it’s deployed, Excendia provides several mobility services: First, Outlook-by-Phone for real-time, interactive voice access to email servers by phone. This allows users to access and reply to email messages, review and schedule appointments, and access Contacts to call or send them a voice message. We work with Outlook but we’re compatible with other email systems too such as Google Mail, Yahoo, Goodmail and so on. We also offer a Smart Phone Number service, which entails intelligent call routing, a single number for voice and fax, call screening, unified messaging and detailed call logging.”

 

“We address the needs of mobile business people, such as real estate agents, salespeople and financial advisers, who are always on the road visiting clients,” say Barta. “During the time they’re in their cars, they take risks by playing with their Blackberry, by trying to read what’s on the screen, punching keys and so forth. We say that you don’t have to do that anymore. You just tell your assistant what you want done and it’s taken care of.”

 

Exendia CEO and long-time telecom entrepreneur, Bachir Halimi, says, “Our solution is Windows-based and it acts on information using standard protocols such as IMAP [Internet Message Access Protocol], POP3 and HTTP. It also acts on information using SOAP [Service Oriented Architecture Protocol] a protocol for exchanging XML-based messages over computer networks using HTTP/HTTPS. So anything that’s involved in Web Services can be accessed and rendered using speech.”

 

“We therefore provide a virtual personal assistant that sits there, either in the network or in the enterprise, taking your orders and executing them,” says Halimi. “On one side it’s connected to the Internet to go and get all of the information on the web. On the other side, it connects to the telephony environment, and there it controls calls, answers calls, creates conferences, controls the way people can reach you.”

 

“We started from the notion that every business person, when they’re in the office, relies on two technologies: the phone and the desktop computer,” says Halimi. “The phone is obviously used to place and answer calls, and the desktop is to get emails, access the Internet and the web to check calendar contacts, and so forth. We’ve put all of this together and realized that the reason we all drive and go to the office is because we want easy access to these tools. So we asked ourselves, can we make these tools available in your car through hands-free/eyes-free technology just using things like speech? Obviously, we knew we weren’t the first to think about this. What makes us believe that we’re going to succeed where others have failed? Well, we noted that many things had now advanced in the right direction. You can see that we’re more and more dependent on email, so now people are prepared to make an effort to access their emails from a car. Also, cell phones have proliferated and we realized that had to be taken into account too. Third, we’ve all become dependent on accessing information via the web. For example, think of Google.”

 

“So on one side, these dependencies are growing,” says Halimi. “On the other side, the delivery methods, such as text-to-speech, are better, but that’s because the algorithms and processing power have improved. IP telephony became available everywhere too. Many applications are hosted, because they must be accessed remotely. So we think all of these trends and advances create an ideal environment for a solution such as Excendia. I don’t believe in proprietary solutions. We use standards such as VoiceXML (News - Alert) and SIP. So when I saw that, yes, we can build a solution that is standards-based, that could be accessible at a very reasonable price and be reasonably easy to use, then we went ahead with it.”

 

Solutions such as those from Excendia may effortlessly cast every mobile human into the role of a highly productive worker. Let’s hope they bring the same level of sophistication to mobile entertainment, too. After all, as the saying goes, all work and no play. . .