11 Apr 2008 10:38
Echoing the latest industry buzzwords, this week's VoIP for Business event was re-named Unified Communications Expo.
Communications vendors are now trying to offer more than just voice over a data connection by building in features such as presence and instant messaging, calling this bundle unified communications, or UC for short.
Including its former incarnation, the event is now in its third year, and this week attracted 99 exhibitors to London's Olympia exhibition hall.
Visitor numbers were healthy too. "It really shows that enterprises are serious about adopting unified communications solutions," said Adam Malik, the show's commercial director.
Delivering the opening keynote, Quocirca analyst Rob Bamforth warned delegates to cut through vendors' marketing hype around UC. He said IT departments should establish suppliers' heritage before buying and try to understand what each of them is offering beyond simply touting cost savings.
Bamforth outlined how many companies have come from a hardware background — either in IT or telecoms — and how some have come from a services background. Their background affects their motives as to how they tell businesses to deploy UC, he said.
For example, Cisco, which has a network heritage, encourages customers to focus on retaining the network as a platform, whereas Microsoft believes control should come from the desktop. Telecoms service providers often preach an entirely different approach by saying that as much equipment as possible should be hosted in their network.
The result is that the market is now in a state of "collision", Bamforth said, with a huge number of service and product offerings, which is becoming more and more complex to understand.
Businesses must take control of UC on their premises, he said, and should be wary of technologies being brought in by individual employees.
The analyst said there should be a clear focus on the business benefits, and not too much thought about the technical elements. "My concern is that people might look at it and say 'We did this, but what did we get for it?'"
He concluded that the decision to roll out UC has to be taken sooner or later. "If you want to move forward, you need to invest," he said. "It is going to cost money to move to a unified communications infrastructure."
Putting Microsoft and the largest telephony vendors next to each other and telling them to discuss how best to implement UC could have created tension, given their vastly different strategies.
But all the vendors acted amiably, and each in turn claimed they were keen to work with the others to produce a range of interoperable products.
Unfortunately, such interoperability continues to remain a pipedream in the majority of cases. While the smaller vendors on this table, such as Tandberg and ShoreTel, have a lot to gain from interoperability, the industry behemoths Cisco and Microsoft could have a lot to lose.
For the time being, they seem happy to talk up interoperability while doing little in reality to help businesses deploy products from more than one vendor.
Cisco was keen to use the event to promote its partnership with BT, its largest reseller in the UK by far. BT has historically had a close-knit relationship with one of Cisco's main rivals, Nortel, and Cisco is keen to muscle in. One of the fruits of that relationship is a service for small businesses that BT calls Communications Complete.
Demonstrated in a mock office on BT's stand, Communications Complete is based on Cisco's UC500 IP telephony system and switch (pictured on the shelf below the notebook). It's a basic UC setup for up to 48 users that includes telephony, desktop videoconferencing and instant messaging/presence. BT usually adds to that by providing DSL connectivity and phone services, both fixed and mobile, and even security services, such as IP-based door entry systems (see keypad in bottom right of the photo).
BT now has a growing partnership with smartphone maker HTC, which is providing the devices for the telco's small-business push-email services. As both the devices and the UC500 contain Wi-Fi radios, the telco is actively encouraging businesses to make their voice calls over Wi-Fi when they are in the office.
BT is rather cautious on its pricing, though. Avaya started a UC verbal price war last month by saying it can offer a system for just 15 US cents (7.6 pence) per user per day, trumping Cisco's earlier statement that its offering would cost just 32 cents (16 pence).
Nick Molyon, senior propositions manager for unified communications at BT, declined to reveal exact pricing, but said that the telco's offering was comparable in price to a cup of coffee.
Molyon did not reveal the number of customers who have signed up for Communications Complete, which was launched in January; but he did confirm that BlackBerry devices are on a shortlist for inclusion with the service in the coming months.
The major disadvantage with Communications Complete is that it's a pretty hefty technical refresh, something that may only be worthwhile on a greenfield site or when the existing PBX is nearing the end of its life.
These three Microsoft employees are making use of the software giant's foray into videoconferencing by holding an impromptu meeting on its stand.
The conferencing unit is called Microsoft Roundtable, and it stitches together an image from each of its five cameras to provide participants with a 360° view of the conferencing room.
The Roundtable unit was developed internally by Microsoft and has retailed for $3,000 (£1,500) since its release six months ago. Tayside Fire and Rescue Service in Scotland is one of the first customers, and is taking advantage of the units for training purposes.
Away from the stand, Microsoft was keen to talk up the prospects for its UC offerings, Office Communications Server and the corresponding client software Office Communicator.
"Our goal is for one-quarter of our 400 million Office users worldwide to be able to click to dial in the next two years," said Mark Deakin, UC manager for Microsoft UK.
Microsoft is also making some tentative steps to other vendors. One such initiative, with contact-centre specialist Aspect Software, is aimed at broadening the reach of the contact centre.
Currently, in most organisations, if a contact-centre agent cannot answer a customer's query, the case is either dealt with badly or not at all. What Microsoft and Aspect are trying to do is to enable contact-centre agents who are faced with a difficult enquiry to dial out to specialists within the wider business.
The hope is that the venture between Microsoft and Aspect will enable the agent to answer the customer's query without having to hang up and call them back. To enable this to happen, all contact centre staff and specialists would need to use Office Communicator to indicate their availability. Agents could then choose the best available specialist to answer the query. Microsoft and Aspect hope this will lead to much better first time resolution for customers' queries.
Separately, Microsoft is now working with two videoconferencing vendors, Polycom and Tandberg, so businesses can set up video calls between the users on conferencing units and users at their desk.
Though it is encouraging to see Microsoft develop offerings with other vendors, Deakin confessed at the event that the codecs involved are still proprietary to Microsoft. He defended the codecs, saying they were superior to the standards-based alternatives. "Standards-based codecs don't deal well with bad network conditions. Quality of service doesn't check the quality of the conversation," he said. "[Our codecs] measure the quality of the experience. Is it echoey? Was there a hiss?"
Avaya was keen to illustrate how confusing and disparate UC has become.
The networking specialist's emerging technologies director Bruce Everest told ZDNet.co.uk that the merging of handheld devices, software applications, networking and telephony had made things "very complicated" for businesses.
"People are looking for an explanation from vendors, and they are getting a different story from each vendor. What I'm seeing is that customers are saying they have too many devices, and not a lot of it talks. None of it is unified," he said. "Microsoft has a solution for presence, IBM has one, we have one. Then you have presence from GPS, with your mobile workers."
Avaya is trying to solve the problem of disparate information with its Integrated Presence Server (IPS). The IPS is intended to gather all the various presence information and, by applying pre-determined rules, give users a cohesive set of information on their colleages' availability.
Everest said it's early days for the product, which was announced in March, but added that it will become vital in the future as UC becomes more ubiquitous and complex to administer.
Everest also outlined an initiative similar to Microsoft's, to allow contact centre agents to reach experts in the rest of the business to help them resolve customers' queries first time.
But he had concerns over how this could be implemented. "If the contact centre gets visibility of the rest of the business, how are we going to handle that? I would hate calls to be transferred to the warehouse. The change needs to come from the top down," said Everest.
Avaya is also interested in digital signage, which is the ability to make an advertising screen interact with an individual. For example, someone could scan the barcode on an advertisment for a music album with their mobile phone and have the album delivered to them by 3G. Or an advertisement for a supermarket could change to an advert for dog food as soon as a person with a dog walked by.
Avaya is far from alone in its interest in digital signage, despite the fact that concept is still far from maturity. Cisco is known to be keeping a close eye on the technology as well.
In terms of present technologies, Avaya used its stand to show off its One-X portal, the browser-based software that provides users with control of their IP telephony phones and mobile devices. Everest demonstrated how calls could be handled across a variety of devices using the portal — from a notebook softphone to desktop IP phones to Wi-Fi phones to the Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch.
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