Unified Communications

Report: Vertical apps to drive UC interest

Doug Mohney — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:25:23 -0400

Applications built for specific enterprise user needs will have a "significant impact" on the continued development of the unified communications (UC) sector, says a report out from Light Reading.

"The Key to UC Revenue Success: It's the Apps," says customers want whey have wanted from all their other voice, video and data offerings - saved time, saved money and increased productivity. Vendors need to emphasize the practical aspects of UC adoption, but also showcase "innovative" applications such as click-to-call, presence, whiteboarding and other apps specifically designed for small to midsized enterprises. Larger enterprises are being targeted with specific vertical market apps.

Key findings of the report include pegging fixed mobile convergence and collaboration as the most popular UC applications today. Financial and health care are two of the largest verticals that vendors are focusing on for specialized UC apps, while the push to UC partnerships is sparking more interest in more open platforms for UC. Rich media with HD audio and video is expected to pick up speed over the next 12 to 18 months.

For more:
- Light Reading plugs its $900 UC analyst report

Related articles
IDC: VoIP Strong, UC Hype, Cisco Gains
Marketing mudding VoIP and UC; getting creative

Nortel Buys Pingtel

Doug Mohney — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:36:36 -0400

Nortel has bought Pingtel, a subsidiary of enterprise mobility firm Bluesocket. Nortel hopes the open source IP PBX software/appliance division will have better luck moving forward.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but Nortel will acquire the key assets of Pingtel from Bluesocket, Pingtel's existing OEM relationship with Nortel will be brought in house and Pingtel employees will be integrated into Nortel's Billerica, Mass. facility. Pingtel and Nortel have been working together for a while on SIP-based enterprise solutions.

For the self-described "software-centric" Nortel, the acquisition adds to the company's R&D and software development capabilities. The new software capabilities are expected to help Nortel deliver unified communications solutions to enterprise customers in all segments. In the near term, Pingtel software pieces will appear on Nortel's SMB unified communications solution.

Pingtel's sipX open source IP PBX software is highly regarded for its ability to scale to support up to 10,000 users; as an independent entity, Pingtel landed Amazon.com as its largest publicly announced customer. The Amazon.com installation reportedly supports over 5,000 users in a high-availability configuration.

However, Pingtel's business history has been irregular. The company started out as an IP phone manufacturer, before ditching hardware to focus on software and sipX development. In 2007, the company actively sought a buyer, with Bluesocket finally acquiring them in July 2007.

For more:
- Nortel buys Pingtel announcement

Related articles
Nortel's Return From Doom
Bluesocket plugs-in to Pingtel

CONTACT CENTER CORNER: Pro-active Customer Contact, Part 1: Why The Time Is Right

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 16:06:43 -0400

By Joe Outlaw

Given my focus on the leading edges of customer contact you might wonder why I would be writing a series of articles about pro-active customer contact. Haven't outbound calling, auto dialers, and tele-marketing been around for years? Yes, but despite the obvious value of outbound contact for some businesses and the maturity of the technologies, most companies still do not employ service-related pro-active customer contact. Instead, almost 80 percent rely entirely on their customers to contact them for questions, problems, and even, in the case of many Internet-based businesses, for sales.

So, calling customers, per se, is not new. What is new is that leading companies, are discovering the strategic business value of comprehensive approaches to pro-active customer contact. They are leveraging customer and product information from across the enterprise to reach out to their customers with personalized service messages and sales offers to cement and grow profitable relationships. For the real leading-edge companies their pro-active customer contact initiatives are an integral part of their unified communications strategies, i.e. their internal and external communications strategies are intertwined and synergistic.

Reactive-only Customer Contact Is Not Good Enough Anymore

Depending upon the industry your company competes in you may already be feeling the competitive pressures to be more pro-active with your customers. Historically, the more commoditized industries have relied disproportionately on services for differentiation to create/maintain competitive advantage. And, not surprisingly, these same industries are leading the pro-activity movement. Increasingly global competition and a weak North American economy are two of the macro business drivers for pro-active customer contact, but there are also micro drivers, including:

to improve the efficiency of the customer contact organization;
to increase customer retention and loyalty;
to increase revenues and expand business with current customers; and
to add new customers.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Improving Call Center Operations

Improving the efficiency of the customer contact organization for most companies, means the doing more with less in their customer service group and call centers. Due to the inherent peaks and valley in incoming customer call traffic, making pro-active customer calls during the lulls for incoming calls makes use of previously unused people's and systems' capacity. Other benefits include:

reductions in inbound calls -- e.g. shipping notifications eliminate the need shipment status calls from customers;
job diversity for call center agents -- often, but I appreciate not always, viewed as positive and job enriching by agents; and
reduction of customer complaints -- again, pro-active notification of problems can eliminate complaint calls, which I think I can safely say always has a positive impact on agents' job satisfaction and usually on turnover.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Customer Retention and Loyalty

Pro-actively contacting customers with service information useful to them or with personalized sales offers is generally viewed by customers as positive and brand reinforcing. These positive effects have been shown to contribute to customer loyalty and increased purchases from the pro-active company over time. Frederick Reicheld, author of The Loyalty Effect, in researching successful companies, discovered the longer they retained a customer the more profitable that customer become for them. Likewise, I am sure everyone is tired of hearing that it is significantly less costly to retain current customers than to acquire new ones. Although, based on how many companies treat their customers its clear not everyone believes those economics.

A related topic, much in the news these days, is first contact resolution, which is also promoted as a way call centers can improve its customers' positive attitudes toward the company and thereby their loyalty. By pro-actively contacting customers with valuable service information, you cannot just resolve their questions/problems/concerns more effectively you can eliminate the need for their calls in the first place. The fourth article in this series will be all about leading customer examples, but one that fits here is the flower delivery company, which eliminated 80 percent of its incoming calls by pro-actively contacting customers to let them know their flowers had been delivered.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Increasing Revenues

Pro-actively contacting customers should have as minimum goals to reduce your expenses and increase your customers' positive attitudes toward your company and its products/services. Increasingly, enterprises are adding revenue goals for their call centers and pro-active contact is becoming the leading way to achieve these. Call centers with these new revenue goals quickly discover that customers calling with problems and complaints are not as likely to respond positively to sales offers as pro-actively contacted customers are. In addition, when working with B2B customers the person calling with a problem is often not the appropriate person in the organization to respond to a sales offer.

Pro-Active Customer Contact: Adding New Customers

Adding new customers, usually the primary responsibility of the sales and marketing groups can be impacted by the call center through pro-active customer contact. And, I don't mean by calling prospects in the classic tele-marketing sense. It is of course a generalization, but happy customers tell their friends and pro-active customer contact can, as mentioned above, have a positive effect on customers and brand loyalty. There are many other strategies and technologies for supporting customer communities, such as forums, and social networking, which I will discuss in future articles, but the point here is that pro-active customer contact can play a part in generating positive customer recommendations.

Part 2 in this series will explore the components of pro-active customer contact programs, Part 3 will compare some of the leading pro-active customer contact solutions on the market, and Part 4 will highlight pro-active customer contact success stories.

Joe Outlaw is President and Chief Analyst of Outlaw Research, a firm that provides results-oriented analysis and consulting of the customer contact marketplace. The objective of Outlaw Research is building a community around the leading edges of customer contact -- the advanced strategies early-adopter companies are applying and the technologies and vendors they are working with. His work can be found at www.outlawresearch.com

UC Pundits Gnash Teeth Over Hype

Doug Mohney — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:31:07 -0400

Even UC pundits are annoyed over the hype that vendors are using in promoting unified communications.

Recent postings over at ucstrategies.com notes the proliferation of jargon out of many vendors, resulting in customer confusion. Why aren't customers buying? They're confused.

Returning to basics is urged with pitching customers on solutions, not on buzzwords, is necessary to get businesses on board. Businesses want to see the basics--costs reduction, more productive employees and/or improving customer service. Integrators and vendors need to get away from bells-and-whistles talk and simply demonstrate that UC solutions work and make a positive difference to a business.

In "Holy UC, Batman... What's happening here?!," Jay Brandstadter goes through a laundry list of recent UC complaints (low adoption, questionable value, defining what UC is, "human latency") and basically tell his peers to suck it up. UC, says Jay, is a work in progress and people need to demystify it rather than getting into hokey religions and ancient weapons.

For more:
- "Keeping singing, Batman!" blog at ucstrategies.com
- Brandstadtler's "Holy UC, Batman" piece

Related articles:
IDC: VoIP Strong, UC Hype, Cisco Gains
Marketing mudding VoIP and UC; getting creative

UC and Human Latency

Doug Mohney — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:03:13 -0400

Unified communications is now being positioned as a tool to cut down on "human latency"--the process delay between waiting for human intervention and action.

Over at UCstrategies, Art Rosenberg takes a close look at the many ways UC can trim the delays been two people trying to reach each other on the phone, especially by knowing who to call, the right number to call, and giving the recipient of a call the ability to be notified about expected or urgent calls, along with a method to answer that call.

IM and present management provide tools to enable a caller to initiate a call with another (authorized) party. IM allows a caller to make sure a person is around and is available for a call before dialing the phone number.

Bonus points spring from integrating IM and presence on a mobile phone, so a caller can make a call to another regardless of where they are. Visual voice mail and 3G phones, plus services to provide voice to text provide other efficiencies.

Future efficiencies may come from "ASAP" (As soon as possible call connections exploiting federated presence and availability management technology with smart-phone mobility, making a voice connection as soon as all parties are available and accessible.

For more:
- Art Rosenberg blogs on Presence, Human Latency, and Telephone Calls

Related article:
IDC: VoIP Strong, UC Hype, Cisco Gains

UC Data Leakage Dangers

Doug Mohney — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:40:51 -0400

It's not just Light Reading that's talking about UC security this week. Osterman Research has conducted a survey polling enterprises on their security thoughts and features about UC.

Companies are starting to understand that UC is a good thing, but it creates even more opportunities for data leaks. Nearly 50 percent of respondents are concerned about information leak prevention in their current or planned UC implementation with 23 percent viewing leak prevention as a top priority, said 109 mid- to large-IT organizations in North America.

IT shops are worried that attackers get a menu of choices by putting all communications traffic onto one common data network. An attacker can intercept VoIP, IM and other traffic or choose to inflict a denial-of-service attack by using VoIP to flood systems with session requests.

Outsider attacks, however, pale in comparison to insider threats from either unintentional or accidental leaks, with 48 percent of respondents worried about such a problem compared to 31 percent who worry about data loss from malicious software.

For more:
- SearchSecurity.com reports on the UC security survey by Osterman Research

Related articles:
UC Insecurity
UC security urgent priority

UC Insecurity

Doug Mohney — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:00:21 -0400

Is time to worry about UC security? In its latest report, entitled "Unified Communications: A Sense of Insecurity," Light Reading thinks so.

Because UC integrates so many established and emerging technologies, it is difficult to predict what future security problems might crop up in the future. Combine that with many existing security features in existing UC platforms that are not implemented correctly, and there is some cause to be worried.

UC providers are turning to third-parties such as Clarus Systems and Sipera to look over their systems and find vulnerabilities, as well as encouraging customers to seek third-party assistance to review internal security policies before installing a UC solution. Hosted solutions run by service providers may be less vulnerable, but end-user misuse could "trickle up" to affect larger UC installations.

Other tidbits include assigning enterprise users the "most glaring point of vulnerability" when it comes to UC security breaches and the potential damage from a major UC breach is leading Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft to work together to establish tighter UC security.

For more:
- Light Reading summary of its UC security report

Related articles:
UC security urgent priority
Sipera IPCS Security Products Get Nortel Blessing

Microsoft and Unisys Offer Free UC Test Drive

Doug Mohney — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:42:32 -0400

Unisys is offering enterprise customers a free test drive of Microsoft's UC services. Unisys is also working with Quintum Technologies to handle the VoIP to PSTN piece.

The trial service allows companies to "kick the tires"on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office LiveMeeting. It's an interesting tactic that echoes back to comments recently made by Nortel executives. Based upon Nortel and Microsoft's experiences in running a joint collaboration lab, enterprise customers want to try out UC services on a small scale. Once an enterprise is able to demonstrate the value of UC implementation, it typically goes from a smaller (50 to 500) seat deployment, to a much larger (factor of x10 or better) one.

Under the free trial service, implemented and managed by Unisys, organizations get the opportunity to evaluate the features available in the Microsoft unified communications suite, including email, calendaring and unified messaging, multi-party instant messaging, and voice and video conferencing. Up to 20 accounts can be established per customer, extending the trial experience to a larger group of individuals across the company. A trial lasts for 30 days and is set up through a Microsoft sales executive.

Unisys already offers email management and hosted messaging services to a number of corporations and handles more than two million Exchange mailboxes worldwide.

For more:
- Unisys free UC trial press release

Related articles:
NXTcomm08: Microsoft Announces Hosted UC solution; Nortel delivers first
Microsoft sets sights on UC call center market

IDC: VoIP Strong, UC Hype, Cisco Gains

Doug Mohney — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:30:16 -0400

IP telephony continues to grow despite--not because--of hype building around unified communications (UC) solutions. IDC's latest study says that 30.9 million IP telephony lines shipped in 2007.

Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens were the leading vendors in the IP PBX market, based upon results for end-user revenue in 2007. In the IP PBX market, Cisco has gained the most market share while Alcatel-Lucent lost the most as compared to 2006. Other vendors had "nominal" changes in market share year over year.

Cisco also maintained its dominance as the leading vendor of IP phones, both in terms of hardware desktop sets shipped and end-user revenue. Again, Alcatel-Lucent was the biggest loser.

IDC research says potential threats to the IP PBX market include desktop collaborative environments, open source IP PBX and hosted VoIP solutions with UC mobility solutions the primary threat to desktop IP phones. The firm recommends IP PBX vendors get tight with Microsoft and IBM as well as build a software developer ecosystem for apps development on their platforms. IP phone vendors are advised to watch how UC software clients affect the importance of the desktop phone and look at how they can incorporate/integrated with videoconferencing and telepresence capabilities.

For more:
- IDC's findings on IP Telephony and UC hype

Related articles:
Marketing mudding VoIP and UC; getting creative
UC Confuses SMBs

Aspect Software Snaps Up BlueNote

Doug Mohney — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 12:57:16 -0400

In a Boston-area merger, Aspect Software is acquiring "substantially all" of the assets of BlueNote Networks. Aspect adds SOA and more of an enterprise UC spin with the acquisition of BlueNote.

Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Aspect is spinning the acquisition as an extension of its "UC for the contact center" strategy with BlueNote bringing "IT ready" software products for enabling business process communications. Aspect Software says its customers will be able to extend SIP-based services to enterprise users as an integral part of a service oriented architecture (SOA) and will get such goodies as interactive multichannel communications, globally-reachable communications services and integrated workflow applications.

Aspect has invested considerable energy into building a unified communications contact center solution around Digium's Asterisk open source software. BlueNote, started in 2005 as a spin-off out of Fidelity Investment IP communications development efforts, has pounded the table from day one with SOA and being able to integrate into enterprise network architectures.

SIP is the point where the two companies touch, but it will be interesting to see if the BlueNote SOA philosophy is carried forward into enterprise and contact center applications. BlueNote only uses a small portion of Asterisk to support voicemail recording and delivery. Aspect and BlueNote have already demonstrated interoperability of their products through SIP, specifically putting BlueNote's "click to call" and presence engine into a proof of concept for Aspect customers.

An Aspect spokesperson said the company has a "particular focus" on BlueNote's firewall/NAT traversal and audio quality monitoring capabilities for SIP communication for remote agent support, as well looking at BlueNote's "excellent" web service enablement for tighter integration between CRN systems and the contact center.

For more:
- Aspect announces purchase of BlueNote

Related articles:
Aspect Software Gets High Marks
Microsoft sets its sights on the UC call center market