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MARKETS » NFV Pandemic Tech News
November 18, 2008
Year-End Review and Future Trends in UCBy Richard Grigonis, Executive Editor, IP Communications Group (This article appears in the November issue of Unified Communications magazine.)
Unified Communications has evolved rapidly from a simple 1990s-type unified messaging inbox for email, voice and faxes, to increased mobility (including FMC or Fixed-Mobile Convergence (News - Alert)), multi-modal mashups of various forms of communications including multi-participant conferencing and collaboration (all “glued together” with user presence status information), and now to widespread integrations involving the communications-enabling of legacy business CRM and back-office applications, leading us to the most bandied-about term of 2008: Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP).
Traditional telecom vendors are now taking UC quite seriously and are scrambling to gracefully bridge the world they controlled for decades to the new, more disruptive world of emerging UC technologies.
For example, Alcatel-Lucent is leveraging its real-time communications heritage into the IBM instant messaging and collaboration world via OmniTouch 8600 My Instant Communicator release 5.1, a software client solution that links Alcatel-Lucent telephony, messaging, conferencing, and presence with IBM Lotus Sametime v.8. My Instant Communicator services can be integrated with existing business applications and accessed seamlessly from a computer, an IP Touch phone or smartphones. It allows end users to benefit from real-time, unified communications, a consistent user experience and complete control over their communications with a tight integration to Sametime for presence and IM. Additionally, the OmniTouch My Teamwork solution adds click-to-conference and dial-in conferencing capabilities to Sametime Connect and Meeting Center 8.0 offering an immediate ROI.
Several of the key trends that UC analysts and professionals are talking about include whether it’s best to purchase a unified communications system in pieces as the need arises, or as a whole to get the benefits of system integration.
Peter Anderholm, Director of Product Line Management, Unified Communication and Collaboration, Alcatel-Lucent, says, “The prevailing thought is that companies should purchase what they need as they need it, but with an eye toward growth and expansion of their system leveraging open standards-based solutions to assure investment protection.”
“Organizations are also finding significant value in UC-enabling of business applications,” says Anderholm. “With Communications-Enabled Business Processes [CEBP], users can access unified communications features through enterprise portals and business applications. This solution enriches standard business applications with real-time presence, telephony, messaging, and conferencing.” Anderholm believes that Alcatel-Lucent has an advantage in this area because the company’s solution is standards-based and thus works with both applications and telephony servers or softswitches from all vendors and scales to meet the needs of enterprises and services providers alike.
As for mobile UC systems, with so many professionals being road warriors or home workers, there is a need for traditional desktop features to be accessible from mobile devices with a consistent user experience. Anderholm says, “Alcatel-Lucent will again be meeting this need with the launch of ACE [Advanced Cellular Extension] for Blackberry devices in addition to the existing flavors for Nokia and Windows Mobile Pocket PCs. With this application, calls to a user’s desk phone can be instantly routed to their Blackberry for complete call control. With ACE, the mobile professional’s user experience is very close to what they get at their desk; that is, complete control on telephony services is available right from the mobile device. In Q2 2009, Alcatel-Lucent will launch My Instant Communicator Mobile, expanding the user experience from telephony services up to rich presence, messaging and ultimately collaboration and conferencing.”
Over at ShoreTel, they recently released ShoreTel 8.0, which supports a UC Desktop, more open interfaces for integration and new voice switches for increased flexibility. It also now offers a new VPN-enabled phone to simplify remote end-user deployment, as well as a Gigabit-enabled mid-range IP phone.
ShoreTel’s Kevin Gavin, Vice President of Marketing at ShoreTel, says, “These are exciting times. When we look back in five or seven years, we’re all going to say, ‘Wow! There was never was a category this big that went through such incredible change in such a short time. It’s like the mainframe-to-PC revolution all over again, or the emergence of the Internet. It doesn’t get any more exciting than trying to look ahead and figure out what the world of UC is going to look like. We’ll all be surprised when it all plays out.”
“ShoreTel comes from a core IP PBX background,” says Gavin, “the whole distributed architecture concept. We have many satisfied customers in that regard. That’s our core, underlying strength. Like every PBX vendor, we’re moving more toward unified communications.”
Gavin continues: “I believe there are four underlying trends that I think are interesting: First, in the old world of telecom, ‘business communications’ as such was basically having a phone number, and you picked up a phone, got dial-tone, and you talked to somebody one-on-one. It was all Voice. As we move forward, however, things are changing considerably. In terms of empowering users and boosting productivity for end users — which is what UC is really all about — what’s key is that communications has exploded in two dimensions: multi-participant and multi-modal sessions. By that I mean that communications is no longer just one-to-one — it’s one-to-two, three or many people, and users need to be able to quickly and easily add and delete participants from any given session. The old way of dialing into a bridge is kind of clunky and old-school. The ability for my colleagues to call me and for us to conference you into our session easily and seamlessly, is part of the new age which we’re in. So it has to be multi-participant. But it also has to be multi-modal. We’re finding increasingly with current ShoreTel deployments that many of our users tell us that they start conversations using instant messaging, and many times the first IM reads, ‘Do you have time to talk?’. And the second IM is ‘Yes, call me’. And then they pick up a phone and dial. But even that is basically clumsy. The notion that you should be able to begin a session inside of a client and if it’s an IM session and you want to talk to the other person, you should be able to click on a button that says ‘Call’ and the service should know both your phone numbers and then open up a voice link between you. During that call, if you decide you want to escalate that to video, there should be another button on which you can click to instantly start up a video link between you. Similarly, if you want to do a desktop share, you should be able to click on button in that same client software and open up a desktop share/collaborative program.”
“In the old days, early adopters had three different clients with three different logons and passwords and directories,” says Gavin. “It was kludgy and complicated and it took forever. The new way is to have end users seamlessly and quickly be able to change their type of communication from voice one-on-one, to the new world of multi-modal and multi-participant systems.”
“It’s all about the client, ease-of-use and integration,” says Gavin. “Many people can claim that they offer this technology, but how many end users are really adopting it and how easy is it for them to adopt? Ultimately, it’s about serving end users. We have a slew of raving fan customers who can’t stop talking about this stuff. I can give you a whole list of them to talk to. It really is transformational when highly ‘usable’ features appear that normal people can use every day.”
“The second trend involves the notion of find-me/follow-me and ‘you can reach me anywhere, anytime’, which is kind of interesting but a lot of mainstream people resist that,” says Gavin. “They say, ‘Wait a minute, I already have too many interruptions. The last thing I need is for every call to reach me wherever I am and I need to get away from some of these calls’. So the second trend we see is moving from what was a ‘reach-you-at-anytime-anywhere’ scenario to now being able to take calls from who you want, when you want and where you want, and to avoid being distracted when you’re otherwise engaged, because we’ve all got a distraction syndrome going on these days. Increasingly, customers demand filtering tools so they don’t get swamped by communications.”
“We’ve filed a patent for a system where if the phone or device leaves your office, it will change your call handling mode and it will stop ringing your desk phone and will instead ring your mobile phone,” says Gavin. “I can program it so that when I get to my other office, it will start ringing me there. So find-me/follow-me isn’t just some dumb thing that rings every phone. You can appropriately filter calls. You can put yourself in Do Not Disturb mode if need be, so that when you’re in a meeting all of your calls go to voicemail but you can set it so that only certain people calling will be given the option to press the 1 key in order to reach you. We also offer the ability, based on caller ID, to give specific treatments to specific callers. Calls from creditors and ex-wives can be sent to voicemail, but calls from your boss, secretary and spouse can go through to your cell phone, or whatever. So the notion of filtering is increasingly important — consider that the first wave of find-me/follow-me didn’t do such a good job in that area, and many people reacted negatively to it, because there was too much information, too much access. The filtering tools are thus key to widespread adoption.”
“Early adopters are great, but ultimately widespread adoption really depends on end-user ease-of-use. That’s the missing piece in many of these ‘puzzles’. That’s what we can do — making it easy for mere mortals — and that’s no easy task. ShoreTel has some very friendly telephony applications and products, such as our phone, which is designed so you can easily access your voicemail and your corporate directory and you can conference and so forth. You don’t need an instruction manual. We also have a desktop client that lets you do IM, visual voicemail and programmable find-me/follow-me. We also have a mobile call manager client. What all of this means is that when people want to communicate, they enter into a communications-designed portal that really is a communications application. It’s all good.
“This leads me to the third major trend, which is that, as we move forward, we’re seeing the reverse happen,” says Gavin. “Instead of having people leave their current application to enter a communication application, we’re starting to build communications capabilities into other applications. ShoreTel offers something we call Web Dialer. Skype has something similar. If you’re a ShoreTel customer, and you have this application installed, as you surf the web, any phone number, anywhere in the web, is highlighted on your screen in orange — our corporate color — and if you right click on that number a little dialog box pops up that says ‘Call’. If you click on that, Web Dialer will call that number using your phone. We’re also integrated with CRM technology from Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite and RightNow Technologies and others. If you’re in your CRM app and you need to make 10 calls today, you don’t want a communications app in which you’re forced to input phone numbers. Instead, from Salesforce.com you can call up a client, click on it, and your phone goes off-hook. Similarly, if somebody calls you, our technology can reach into Salesforce.com and get a screen pop so that the screen you like to show for your interaction recording will appear. So, increasingly, the world is becoming more and more communications-enabled. It’s what Gartner (News - Alert) calls CEBP, Communications-Enabled Business Processes.”
“The fourth trend is that we’re seeing the move toward mobility,” says Gavin. “I remember when cell phones cost thousands of dollars and calls were 45 cents a minute. Today they’re relatively inexpensive and everybody has one. But now the challenge centers on multiple phone numbers and devices. Which number are you using to call me? When you do, what capabilities will I be able to access? When I call out, which number am I going to display to the callee? We need to make sense out of the fact that we’ve got multiple devices and use multiple numbers and we use them at different locations. We’ve got to unify all of it. Many people think about UC as being presented with a whole suite of applications behind your number. So part of the trend is, unify your numbers. If somebody calls your mobile number or your Direct Inward Dial number, either way you want the call to enter a single voicemail box. And you still want to be able to do my add-video add-desktop shares. You don’t want your mobile number be a ‘stranded’ number and all of your capabilities are hiding behind a particular number. If you go on vacation and you set your vacation call handling mode, do you change things on your mobile, home office and office desktop phone? Or do you have the ability to unify all of the various access points — phone numbers — behind a single application that you’re able to manage seamlessly. That’s trend that, frankly, very few people are aware of. We are aware of it and we’ve achieved some early traction in this area. It’s going to be a significant differentiator as we move forward.”
OSS and BSS for IMS
Underlying the increased mobility of unified communications is an expansion in fixed-mobile communications, in many cases following the Voice Call Continuity (VCC) concept compatible with IMS [IP-based Multimedia Subsystem]. As the infrastructure is transformed and continues to grow, many opportunities for OSS (Operations Support Systems) vendors will appear. Providers require such things as integrated systems to manage the process and information flows when activating subscribers and services in the network (provisioning) and storing the required business and technical information (inventory). With the introduction of all-IP networks, service providers will be offering convergent broadband services through both fixed and mobile channels, which will involve investment in a convergent OSS/BSS system, where fulfillment is a major component.
Take Comptel Corporation, which offers Comptel Dynamic OSS solutions that enable telecom service providers to deliver services as flexibly and inexpensively as possible. Comptel’s expertise in inventory, provisioning and activation, mediation and charging offloads much of the effort normally expended by providers, and frees them up to focus on delivering innovative services.
Comptel’s Marketing Director, Olivier Suard, says, “We’re a software company working in the OSS space. We tend to deal in service fulfillment automation, which encompasses the whole provisioning area on the one hand, and mediation and charging on the other. It’s the ‘lower end’ of the billing stack which involves the collection of usage data and working out the value of that usage. Within those two areas we offer quite a few solutions such as mediation, data retention, charging, inventory and provisioning solutions. One of our flagship customers is T-Mobile; they process something like 1.5 billion customer detail records using our software.”
Recently Comptel Corporation acquired Axiom Systems in the U.K., a next-generation broadband IP services fulfillment company. Axiom’s customizable product offering is an end-to-end fulfillment suite that includes Order Management, Service Inventory, Service Activation and Active Catalog.
“We acquired Axiom to reinforce our presence in broadband,” says Suard. “We’ve been extremely successful in GSM mobile across the world, but much less so in the broadband space, partly because we didn’t have an order management component, which is fundamental to a lot of broadband provisioning. So we decided to buy Axiom Systems, which we did in April 2008. They have a wonderful clientele that includes BT and Telecom New Zealand.”
“You’ll certainly be seeing more FMC and IMS deployments,” says Suard. “We recently did a deployment with FarEasTone, the leading convergent operator in Taiwan providing mobile and broadband services. They’re the first operator in Taiwan to deploy 3.5G HSDPA [High-Speed Downlink Packet Access] and IMS technologies. Far EasTone offers broadband over ADSL, cable and WLAN and is readying WiMAX too. They are using both our Comptel Convergent Mediation Solution, and Comptel Provisioning and Activation Solution to support delivery of innovative services on their new IMS platform, which they got from Ericsson. In terms of FMC, Far EasTone will be using IMS to deploy a new dual fixed and mobile service. This service allows users to make and receive calls using either a WiFi Internet connection or the 3G mobile network. Users will have just one phone number for both services, and can choose at anytime to use either their PC or a WiFi phone running VoIP, or a mobile handset when roaming about. Far EasTone has adopted the Comptel Provisioning and Activation Solution to register and deregister users on the network, and to allocate and de-allocate the services to them. FarEasTone is also using the Comptel Convergent Mediation Solution to collect usage information to charge for these services.”
Mobiles in Motion
FMC and FMC-like technologies are attracting a lot of attention, since the workforce is becoming increasingly mobile and seamless crossing-over from indoor WiFi to cellular networks is an attractive proposition in terms of sheer convenience for harried workers.
For example, the DiVitas Mobile Unified Communication Solution is a network-agnostic, VoIP-based system for wireless communication over WiFi, PBX, and cellular. DiVitas provides seamless access to business applications over any mobile network on any handset under enterprise control. The DiVitas Server installs between the enterprise’s IP PBX and Wireless LAN, and monitors and manages a mobile user’s device continuously, whether on the corporate or public network. DiVitas works with any carrier and supports most mobile devices. You can even use the dual-mode (WiFi/cellular) handset of your choice to let employees receive voice, data, and applications on a single device from any location including access to the IP-PBX functions of their desk phone. Key information is automatically and seamlessly made available via the most appropriate network — cell or WiFi — without wasting carrier minutes. Moreover, by taking management and control out of carrier hands, enterprises assume policy and security control over mobile communications.
In a similar vein, Varaha Systems provides FMC solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. Varaha’s uMobility solution offers Service Quality Aware (SQA), seamless network hand-offs, and enterprise-grade security along with a large set of mobile capabilities. uMobility works with most Windows Mobile and Symbian smartphones over any wireless carrier’s network. uMobility can do seamless hand-offs between WiFi and cellular networks.
Instead of a true dual-mode phone capable of handing off a call from a WiFi to a cellular environment in FMC fashion, another related major subset of UC has been simply extending the features of the corporate PBX out to cell phones and other mobile devices when you’re outside of the office. For example, Verizon’s PBX Mobile Extension service is an implementation of RIM’s Ascendent (News - Alert) Mobile Voice System. RIM’s solution doesn’t require software to be downloaded since it’s their client and is built in. RIM’s BlackBerry Mobile Voice System (BlackBerry MVS) allows enterprise users to easily use their BlackBerry smartphone as a secure, mobile extension of their desktop phone. With BlackBerry MVS, BlackBerry smartphone users can access enterprise desk phone functions directly from the menu interface of the BlackBerry phone application.
RIM picked up this technology through its acquisition of Ascendent Systems (News - Alert), which is now a RIM subsidiary. Ascendent Systems/RIM has announced that Sprint has certified the latest version of the Ascendant Voice Mobility Suite (VMS) to enable FMC in the enterprise. Ascendent VMS Version 4.5 can now integrate with BlackBerry MVS services on BlackBerry Enterprise Server, allowing BlackBerry smartphone users to have menu-driven deskphone features, thus enabling corporate IT and telecom departments to better control their mobile costs.
David Heit, Director of Product Management at RIM, says, “The original wave of BlackBerry sales demonstrated that people like to stay in contact with their email. Before unified communications was coined, the original BlackBerry was an example of its beginnings. Today in 2008, there are many offerings and choices out there and everybody is talking about UC, FMC and voice/data convergence. If I were a system architect or a CIO faced with all of these choices, I would get back to basics and ask myself, ‘What am I really trying to do with this technology? Where do I get the biggest bang for the buck?’ If you look at the telephony world, the migration from TDM to IP is still ongoing, many customer environments are fairly complex and they’ve evolved into many different vendor systems, and some of those vendors have merged or have been acquired. So you’re dealing with fairly complex environments. To contrast it with email, if you look at Microsoft, IBM and Novell, you’ve covered about 90 percent of the email market. There’s not much variability in terms of email offerings and such, which is totally unlike UC. If you look what happened with email, it’s now become part of a whole collaboration story. Everybody has an email offering and secure IM offerings. You have OCS from Microsoft and Sametime from IBM. Social networking offerings are also now appearing from the major vendors. On the plus side it’s great that this is blossoming, but on the other side, it’s confusing for a CIO. So people are taking a step back and asking what it is they exactly need to do, as opposed to simply letting the technology take them somewhere.”
“Another major trend is toward total mobility,” says Heit. “More and more people identify what used to be a personal cell phone as a primary business phone. There’s an increasing number of people identifying more with their mobile device than with their fixed desk phone as their primary business phone. Organizations must grapple with that. Your average cell phone is evolving into a smarter device. We’re now in the era of 16 gigabyte MicroSD cards where huge databases can potentially be placed on mobile devices. This brings up security concerns that will be with us for a while.”
OnRelay and Tango Networks have roughly similar products that work with various types of PBXs and cell phones. OnRelay’s MBX is offered in two deployment models, Hosted MBX and Managed MBX; the latter can be integrated with legacy IP or even TDM PBXs. Tango Networks’ PBX/UC solution, called Abrazo, replaces all of your phone numbers with a single phone number, as well as one voicemail box to check and enables use of powerful PBX/UC features from your mobile phone — call forwarding, abbreviated dialing, conference calling, etc. For corporate IT departments, the Abrazo allows you to manage mobile phones as any other corporate asset, eliminating excess calling costs, productivity inefficiencies, inadequate call security, unavailable content monitoring and unnecessary legal exposure.
Putting a New Face on UC
FaceTime Communications provides security solutions enabling businesses to secure and control “greynet applications” such as instant messaging (IM), Skype, web conferencing and P2P file sharing.
Frank Cabri, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management at Facetime Communications, says, “We’ve been in business for about nine years. We started as a click-to-chat company. This was an IM-type of application that you could embed in your service and other applications to do IM between people in different companies. In early 2001 one of the large investment banks asked us to help them manage all of the public IM use occurring on their networks by traders doing business. They were using things such as AOL (News - Alert), MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and so forth. There were federal regulations that required the firm to track and log those IM transactions. So that’s how we started in the real time communications space. And now we’re used in nine of the top ten U.S. banks.”
“Around 2005, Microsoft started delivering their Enterprise class stuff — Live Communications Server, which is now Office Communications Server — and IBM popularized Sametime,” says Cabri. “And speaking of trends, you’ve probably seen that Cisco has acquired a couple of large companies recently to deliver these same types of solutions, such as the Jabber IM client and PostPath email and collaboration server. So they are putting together the components and will be offering functionality more as a service-in-the-cloud type of thing on their existing Cisco networks.”
Cabri continues: “We morphed into more enterprise class solutions and now we’re seeing companies in retail and manufacturing, telecom — and it’s not really vertical-specific anymore. People are rolling out things like Microsoft OCS or IBM Sametime clients to anyone who has email and they’re allowing employees to use those clients for real-time communications. We’re seeing a lot of this in call centers, where agents need to quickly be able to escalate conversations or answer questions while they’re providing customer service for a caller. We’ve certainly seen this activity in regulated environments where, there may be a federal or healthcare or some regulation that requires to log all communications. So, it’s showing up in a lot of different areas. You see it in telecommuting and hospitality, so where organizations in the network are trying to reduce costs and are moving employees to either home offices, semi-permanent or temporary hotel-type offices in a sort of corporate location, they’re deploying UC to ensure that the individual is still connected and that people can see that the person is online. They have as many of the benefits as possible as they would if they were sitting a cubicle right next to their fellow employees.”
“We are very deep into understanding how real-time communications works. We started with IM because that was the first UC-like app that companies were adopting. And even when they rolled out enterprise-class solutions, they tended to deploy the presence capability of an application and the IM capability. And now they’re adding on what we call modalities or services such as web conferencing, VoIP services and video conferencing, to create a full UC platform for the employees.”
Reaching Feature Parity
Objectworld Communications Corp. provides UC software solutions that propel SMBs with Windows to greater heights of workforce productivity and improve organizational responsiveness. The Objectworld UC Server integrates business communications, business processes and corporate data to deliver an advanced communications-enabled business process solution, allowing for a smooth transition from simple telephony to a feature-rich UC environment while leveraging investments in legacy PBX and Microsoft-based business systems.
Objectworld President and CEO David Levy says, “The real question is, where is communications going? Where is voice going? Nobody sells traditional TDM PBXs anymore. When I used to work for Mitel, we were busy adding call sequence management and other fancy functionality to our PBXs. These days, it’s expected that a phone system will allow you to do all sorts of things. There’s now an acceptance that communication is becoming the integration of the many different attributes and ways of how we run our office environment. Everybody delivers unified communications now — very few companies deliver pure PBXs. So it’s natural that a feature battle would now take place in the UC world. The expected feature set has been greatly broadened. It includes the workings of the whole office environment. For example, when I arrive at a hotel or other distant location, I set up my laptop, connect via WiFi to the network, and if anybody calls my normal office number and extension, my phone will ring in the hotel or wherever I am. So there’s an acceptance and indeed an expectation now that we can be reached anywhere and we can control how we are reached effortlessly.
“I was recently in Northern Quebec, and there was no cell phone connectivity where I was located,” says Levy. “However, there was e-mail connectivity on my BlackBerry, and because I have unified messaging people could leave a voice message in my office system, and I could pick up these voice messages as files sent via e-mail and listen to them, then look for a landline if necessary. For all of us to be seamlessly connected to each other will be an expectation of our modern office environment. We’re beginning to realize that this can be done for relatively low cost, without any prior arrangements. I think that’s what UC is in a nutshell.”
“It’s interesting how things change,” says Levy. “I never use my telephone keypad anymore to retrieve messages. If I can’t retrieve a message from my Outlook inbox, then I can’t be bothered with it — it’s just too much trouble and in fact I’ve sort of forgotten how to do it.”
“The vendors such as Avaya and Cisco have moved to a ‘cents per user per day’ model,” says Levy. “We at Objectworld have announced UC for seven cents per user per day, partly because we see many prices falling. The switch to UC software is going to push the IP PBX to become another commodity peripheral, along with phones and other traditionally expensive hardware. The feature sets will increasingly become the same. I don’t think the PBX is dead. However, it will stick around in various forms for many years. Whether or not you will have software PBXs the way you have software modems now is another question. But the communications will become more integrated with the applications. There will be more personal call control for auto attendants, more integration with back office — for example putting your corporate data out over the phone and running various other phone-based applications. Systems will connect with CRM apps such as SAPs and ERPs and business intelligent-type applications. You’ll see the integration of call detail records with business intelligence analysis and corporate performance management. And certainly there will be continued growth in terms of adding SIP-based wireless devices and using them as you would use a smart phone today. The synergy will be provided by intelligence SIP-based applications. For example, one of our real estate customers has an over-the-phone application that allows potential buyers of a property to look at a For Sale sign, input a House ID number into their phone, and receive a full description of the house over the phone, a list of similar houses, and the option of talking to an agent.”
“Also, there’s no reason that a person’s wireless handset shouldn’t be able to get a streaming video on it,” says Levy. “The kinds of applications that appear exotic now will become commonplace in short order. You’ll see more user-centric applications, and individual productivity is where both Microsoft and IBM are focused today. Here at Objectworld we try to concentrate on what will be of immense value to people. In one of our recent announcements we said that UC will be delivered as a software application that will be able to call upon a wide variety of commodity hardware. The solution itself will be commoditized to the point where all hardware components, be they paging systems, phones, gateways, server platforms, or whatever, will be commoditized and non-proprietary. There’s absolutely no reason any longer for proprietary hardware or specialized components or for the delivery to be restricted because of your existing hardware or methodology. All of this has enabled Objectworld to already drive the price of UC down to less than half of that offered by the most aggressive vendor is this space, and yet we’re profitable.”
“I think our approach is typical of what everyone’s approach will become in the near future,” says Levy. “And the feature set that all providers deliver will start to become similar. The differentiation will come in areas where vendors don’t like to be differentiated, which is in price, because that means that the price will continue to be driven down. Also in terms of ease of installation, we simplify things by piggybacking on Microsoft’s platform, such as its Active Directory administration. We provide a VHD [Virtual Hard Disk] version of our product. [VHD is Microsoft technology that enables you to deliver a virtual hard disk as a completely packaged solution with a single button click install.] This allows our customers to trial our product without any organizational preparation or modification. They can literally get the app in VHD format and put it on any standard Microsoft-based computer and have a system up and running in an hour or so, without any required expertise on their part.”
See It Now
VBrick Systems develops live, online, networked video solutions for the enterprise. VBrick’s core product offering, a networked video appliance called the Video Brick, enables customers to capture and deliver live streaming video over any network. When combined with additional VBrick systems components and management software, this video appliance becomes the foundation of what’s called the EtherneTV system. This complete video delivery system can capture, record, manage and distribute video across the enterprise. VBrick also provides a complete InternetTV solution through their new service offering. This “Video Streaming as a Service” (VSaaS) includes the video appliance as part of a complete service package that enables customers to stream, manage and monetize video content over the Internet. It’s based on a managed model that allows customers to enter the InternetTV market quickly.
Stan Jaworski, VBrick’s Marketing Director, says, “People treat video as a new phenomenon or a future trend. I look at it differently. I come out of the data world and was involved in the development of point-of-activity mobile data acquisition. Looking at the history of all this, you had data, the network, wireless networks, and then you had VoIP. And now, video is really the closing chapter of something that started 20 years ago. I think that video as the third leg of these unified communications technologies — the other two being data and voice — will be purchased for the same reasons as data and voice: productivity gains, unification and compliance within an organization around strategies, policies, government compliance issues, for competitive advantage and to deal with competitive threats. What’s happening now with video is that it’s being purchased in a ‘collapsed’ time frame and we’re seeing the consolidation of the market, but video continues to expand as part of UC strategies that are now coming to the forefront.”
“So video isn’t the future — it’s happening now,” says Jaworski. “It’s also being driven by consumers, who are concerned about gas, oil and ‘green’. There’s a new generation of worker that has become accustomed to video as being part of the mix in communications. Having said that, what’s going on in corporations today around UC is not unlike the paradigm of 15 or 20 years ago that involved integrated marketing. There was a point when various disciplines were out there in the field of marketing and when we started looking at our target audiences as marketers, salespeople and corporate communicators, we realized that the way to impact and deliver a message was across multiple types of media with multiple types of tools, working with them in an integrated fashion. So I think with UC today, we’re beginning have the same level of sophistication and segmentation within a corporation that we had developed years before to speak to our external audiences.”
“When you look at this idea of the three main technologies of data, voice and video, and you examine your internal audiences, UC seems to be about creating a unified message delivered across multiple types of communications tools. Data has its own set of tools, as does voice and now video presents a whole new set of tools. It’s all about reaching the right audience with the right message with the right set of tools internally. In a way, it’s as if we’re applying a marketing concept to internal communications, which I think is a great thing because we all know that between email, voicemail WebEX, Powerpoint presentations, and so forth, people deal with information transfer in different ways and what UC is, is corporate America in particular recognizing the need to raise their strategy for communicating internally to the same level as for external communications.”
Companies mentioned in this article:
Alcatel-Lucent
Ascendent Systems / RIM
Comptel Corporation
DiVitas Networks
FaceTime Communications
Objectworld Communications
OnRelay
ShoreTel
Tango Networks
Varaha Systems
VBrick Systems
Verizon
Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group. To read more of Richard’s articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Greg Galitzine |
