Collaboration and "Productivity without Borders"

We all know what collaboration is, and we all know that collaborative events should be easy and quick to set up, should be seamless from everyone's perspective and should occur in real time. Of course, vendors have different ideas how to achieve those enviable goals: IBM's server-centric approach, Microsoft's enableit- with-software approach, Cisco's network-as-a-collaboration platform approach, etc. However it's done, some collaborative technology has now evolved to the point where a host of legacy hardware and software can be tied together and used with the latest concepts in Web 2.0, all while still maintaining sufficient security, policy and compliance. Indeed, it's becoming more and more difficult to distinguish a "mashup" from an "integration".

Take for example, Avaya, which has integrated the power of its Meeting Exchange audio conferencing (designed for small and midsize companies) with IBM Lotus Sametime, IBM Lotus Notes, Microsoft OCS, Outlook, etc. You get simultaneous voice, instant messaging and web conferencing in one solution. You can click-to-call your Sametime IM contacts and then move easily to a conference call without leaving the context of the work at hand. With Sametime web conferencing capabilities, team members can instantly connect with each other, dial out to participants on the road, control who joins the call, see who is talking at a particular moment, lead the process in lecture mode, or mute/unmute participants.

Based on an analysis of more than four years of actual customer data in conjunction with industry-reported cost-per-minute service provider averages, Avaya concludes that companies spending $2,500 or more on monthly outsourced conferencing fees can realize return on investment within 10 months and can save an average of $1,400 per month by switching to Meeting Exchange Express.

For larger organizations, Avaya Meeting Exchange Enterprise can, depending on the number and type of ports (or concurrent user licenses) required, be implemented using various Avaya servers to scale the Avaya Meeting experience up to a pretty impressive system - the S6200 server can handle up to 2,000 SIP ports (up to 192 T1 ports or 240 E1 ports with an external gateway), and the S6800 can handle up to 14,000 SIP ports. You can also link up to three systems so that calls can be scheduled and executed across the distributed systems, reducing access and network charges for the business. As with Express, you get easy access to reservation-less conferencing so that authorized users can hold conferences any time, on demand, without the need to contact an operator or use a credit card, and you still have the ability to schedule conferences and automatically include conference access details in a meeting invitation, through integration with Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes.

Avaya early on became intrigued with web conferencing tools for virtual meetings, and they have combined their Meeting Exchange audio conferencing technology with Avaya Web Conferencing for virtual meetings. Avaya Web Conferencing itself is a single-window, browser-based application, that allows participants inside or outside the corporate firewall to join conferences, and avoids the need to download applications or client software. All you need is a conference URL and a security code. Interestingly, the solution automatically optimizes bandwidth for each user, so slower connections, like dial-up, will not hinder the performance of the overall meeting. Avaya Web Conferencing can be branded and customized to accommodate customer preferences. Its many features include PowerPoint "push," document annotation, white boarding, text chat, polling with instant tabulation, desktop and application sharing (for live product demonstrations or interactive document review and editing), host ability to promote participants in order to take control of the web conference, recording and playback of the audio and web portions of the conference, and integration with corporate directories and databases via LDAP.

By integrating Avaya Web Conferencing with Meeting Exchange audio conferencing the meeting experience enhances allowing hosts to monitor and control the activity of participants in the conference. An integrated participant roster appears in the Web Conference interface. The addition of Meeting Exchange provides a considerable range of additional capabilities, such as access to the audio and web portions of the conference with a single set of login credentials, the ability to identify speakers - or noisy lines - in the audio conference, the ability to mute individuals or the whole audience, disconnect participants and start and stop synchronized recording of the conference.

Bridging Islands

Christopher Thompson, Senior Director for Unified Communications at Cisco, says, "We recently made a set of announcements. Our Collaboration Portfolio is a new effort for us, and we've made three additions to it. One announcement concerns Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0 which now involves greater integration with IBM and Microsoft environments, as well as increased mobility extending collaboration features across workspaces. Our Cisco Mobile Communicator now also supports devices running on Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian operating systems. Another centers on a product called TelePresence Expert on Demand, and the third announcement relates to Cisco WebEx Connect, a Software as a Service [SaaS] a sort of 'UC from the cloud' collaboration application platform that integrates presence, instant messaging, web meetings and team spaces with various conventional and Web 2.0 business applications."

"Generally, our biggest surprise is that there's a productivity gap emerging in business," says Thompson. "It's getting bigger relatively quickly. Initially we saw it as being introduced by distance and time factors and globalization. For example, I'm speaking to you from Helsinki right now. With all the tools in the world, nothing can stop the fact that it's 11:30 p.m. here. Distance and time in a global workforce introduces all sorts of factors that slow down decision-making and innovation. But we've also seen two important factors. One relates to preferences that individuals have when they connect and communicate, and the other is related to different work styles of different teams. What see happening in businesses is that people are starting to bring to work the tools that they prefer to use. We're moving away from the standardized environment that companies tried to put into place in the late 1990s. Instead, we're ending up with islands of people that don't connect to each other and they can't communicate, so they can't collaborate."

"So we at Cisco have put together a strategy wherein we first focus on enabling people to connect," says Thompson. "We do that with the network platform, and then we enable them to communicate with our unified communications products, adding video to give context to UC, and then employ Web 2.0 methods so that these network services can be embedded inside of business applications. This is the core of the story that we're taking to market regarding collaboration. It's different because unlike competitive models, people don't have to get into the same work environment. We actually came up with the concept to describe it - The Workspace. It's a recognition that the tools that people use change as they go through the day. In fact, two people in similar jobs may have different workspaces. Our goal is to make the experience of collaboration portable across a range of workspaces and to enable collaboration between different workspace types."

Thompson elaborates: "Here's an example. I'm one of the 7,000 or so Cisco employees who have an Apple MacBook on my desk. If someone wants to use Microsoft Office SharePoint as a place to do document sharing, I unfortunately can't participate in that solution. But what was even more alarming is that, when we looked at our customers around the world, it wasn't just about the computer and the telephone anymore. In fact, the mobile phone was becoming a more important tool for people to use. We saw that most collaborative solutions in the market didn't really recognize the importance of mobile devices. Secondly, most collaborative solutions don't recognize non-desktop workspaces, so there's no place in the system for the guy on the factory floor or on the loading dock, or the person managing inventory in the stock room. So we end up with all of these islands of people that connect, can't communicate and can't collaborate."

Thompson continues: "Therefore, we at Cisco wanted to build a strategy wherein we could look at the different devices that people had in use: IP phones, mobile phones, purpose-built devices like inventory scanners, and of course all of the operating systems in those devices - this is not just a Mac and Windows discussion, it also involves Symbian, Nokia, VxWorks and embedded Linux. And then there's all of the different network types, be they wired, wireless, public wireless or private wireless - and how does RFID play into all of this? And most importantly, there's the matter of the business applications that people use to get the job done. We saw that what we needed to do was to unify these devices, bringing them together so that an experience could be portable as the underlying devices changed and to ensure that people could communicate between two very different workspaces."

"We looked at the last 30 years of productivity shifts," says Thompson, "and what we found in almost all cases was that when a large innovation appeared, such as the introduction of the PC, we didn't receive the full business benefit of that productivity shift until we could enable people to work together. Recall that, early on in the PC days, we had many different kinds of network topologies and protocols. And if you were on an AppleTalk network, you couldn't interoperate with somebody on a Novell network, or somebody on a Token Ring. It wasn't until the IP network came along that people could really connect one system to another."

"And now, we've created an architecture that enables us to do several things that are different," says Thompson. "One is to start to move away from 'thick clients' and push those services onto the network, at the same time recognizing that those services may not all come from Cisco. Some services may come from a third-party provider such as SAP, or there may be presence information from a mobile service provider. And of course there are public Internet applications. We thought that the kind of models that Google had put together and that Apple had put together with the iPhone, were indicative of the direction that customers wanted to go. Customers want speed and the ability to deploy applications, but at the same time they want certainty and security in terms of how those applications are deployed."

"So we wanted to push these services down onto the network and we wanted the network to be capable of handling both on-premises as well as SaaS or on-demand," says Thompson, "so that customers could make business decisions about how they want to deploy technology and not be bound by technology. We wanted to place a nice policy wrapper around the network services so we could guarantee different service levels and govern how people could use those network services, based on the corporate policy that was in place, as well as the policy that would exist between user interactions. Furthermore, we wanted to expose those services and applications through a set of Web 2.0 APIs. Primarily, we have four of these: Cisco Unified Application Environment, the Application eXchange Platform [AXP] on the Cisco ISR [Integrated Services Router], the Cisco Voice Portal for self-service applications, and then a set of applications we've just announced with the release of WebEx Connect. We wanted to use these standard Web 2.0 APIs to expose these network services up through applications - applications that we could develop and deploy, applications that our customers could develop, applications our partners could develop, even applications that third parties might provide, and that you would want to integrate with your own applications or do a mash-up. You then expose the apps to up through another policy layer to the workspace, again to ensure the consistency of experience across a range of devices."

"As a result of all this, right now I'm talking to you over an alpha system using elements of an on-premises solution and an on-demand solution," says Thompson. "In fact, we're using several components. Our technology is designed to co-exist with investments that our service provider partners, end customers and distribution partners had already put in place. It's not really designed to actually 'replace' anything; instead, it's designed to make existing systems work better. For example, this could be deployed alongside a legacy TDM PBX and provide a set of very specialized applications to a specific workgroup of users, perhaps a mobile salesforce. But it still integrates with that PBX so the customer can still enjoy a coordinated dialing plan, least cost routing, and whatever other inner PBX features they had previously."

"As for service providers," says Thompson, "we find that many of them are trying to determine whether they want to opt for a hosted model or an SaaS model in terms of how they offer applications. You'll soon be seeing some service providers make announcements with us as to how they will be rolling out our on-demand products. But it's definitely a premises-based model and a hosted model, it's not really competitive to IMS [IP Multimedia Subsystem] as a service provider offer, but it can be offered by service providers as a hosted solution."

The Symbiotic Relationship of UC and Collaboration

UC and collaboration go hand-in-hand, since to do collaboration effectively you need to coordinate a range of media - which is UC's specialty - when setting up "virtual" meetings for those times when it isn't possible or practical for a team to meet in person.

The latest round of UC and collaborative technologies are taking us to a world where collaborative network environments will transform the way we all work and do business, whether we like it or not.

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC's IP Communications Group.