Forums - Recent Threads

Re: UC-B applications

annagol251 — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 04:57:46 GMT

Debet

And now the forecast for Contact Centres: cloudy with outbreaks of cost savings!

paulm.scott — Sat, 30 Nov 2013 09:53:16 GMT

The drawback of using ‘cloud’ to describe a technology is the endless puns, cringing analogies and interminable references to weather. On the plus side, it does make it easy to understand the principles: it’s everywhere, up in the air, and always there. It might also explain the surprisingly rapid adoption of Cloud technology in contact centres which is expected to quadruple in the next 5 years.

Contact centre management have never been early adopters of technology. Indeed, if The Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report is to be believed, contact centres are normally at the back of the queue when it comes to technology innovation: 73% don’t have full integration of their channels and 40% sit outside the enterprise technology architecture, according to the Report. However, adoption of applications from Cloud platforms paints a very different picture.

Sixty five per cent of the Report participants already using hosted or cloud based technology, say its made it easier for them to get access to new functionality and for 64.8% its improved flexibility.

Commercially Cloud seems to make sense for contact centres too: 77.6% agreed that it’s helped reduce cost-to-serve, which is a principle success measure for many contact centres today.

One myth quickly dispelled about Cloud solutions is the belief it takes over completely from traditional on-premise solutions. This is very rarely the case. Indeed in the dozen or so implementations one large SI has completed for its clients none are operating a fully cloud-based solution, either for compliance and security reasons, or simply to ensure they don’t lose valued components of their technology infrastructure which is working.

All the indicators are for a bright future for contact centres, with sustained periods of high performance, albeit under a cloud!

UC for Chinese market

andyrmit — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 12:25:07 GMT

With China building up the IP infrastructure so rapidly, Enterprises and SPs are looking to adopt UC.

I have currently a few UC opportunities on hand and looking for UC vendors willing to invest in Chinese market.

Please email me to further discuss.

U.C and the Manufacturing Industry

tiffanyfp — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 16:26:59 GMT

A lot of people have cast doubt of the EU's (or Western) manufacturing feature. The numbers are looking bleak, whilst competitors are speeding ahead, getting products in the market faster and cheaper. Bizarrely, although there are employment (or lack of) issues, IT spending remains at an all time high.

Do we think there's still room in these industries for UC? What do you think?

https://www.ggr.net/ggr-blog/entry/87-business-3-reasons-unified-communications-could-benefit-the-manufacturing-industry.html?utm_source=forum&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=forumblog

Re: I’ve read Russell’s article and was hoping he could explain the advantages the E-SBC bring to an enterprise with regards to Security?

rbennett — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:21:01 GMT

I think that the paper already makes a good case for deploying a network edge element to facilitate secure traversal of UC signaling and media. So I guess this question is related to the differentiation of a UC vendor-provided element (such as those provided by Siemens, Microsoft and Cisco) vs. a 3rd party provided element (e.g. NET, Acme Packet, Ingate, Edgewater Networks, AudioCodes, etc.)

(If I have misinterpreted this question, please let me know).

The UC vendor elements are typically focused on the specific needs of those applications. So while they will do a great job of providing DMZ traversal of their own UC traffic at scale, they won't handle generic traffic, such as arbitrary data streams from application servers. On the upside, they are a lot cheaper (i.e. tending towards $0 excluding hardware) than a 3rd party element. Some of these elements (specifically those from Microsoft and Cisco) support inter-enterprise federation between same-vendor solutions, significantly reducing collaboration costs and increasing the utility of UC deployments and this is not (yet) a feature of the 3rd party E-SBCs.

The 3rd party E-SBC elements are designed to handle all kinds of IP traffic, including UC traffic from multiple vendors as well as web/app server transactions and data streams. The multiple UC vendor scenario will soon become an issue just as enterprises found themselves owning 2 or more brands of PBX. So, viewed across the range of requirements, you may need to deploy an E-SBC in any case, thus invalidating the element-cost argument of the vendor specific solution.

There is a case to be made that the 3rd party products are more secure than the UC vendor elements because they are provided by vendors who 'do security for a living'. This argument has some merit, but I am not sure that I completely buy it: the UC vendors greatly reduce their attack surface by focusing purely on their own traffic. I have yet to hear of a UC vendor solution that has been compromised or shut down by malicious attack (I may live to regret that statement); however we read almost daily of data theft from and compromises of more general commercial and government systems.

The bottom line is the need for some form of robust network edge security. Each enterprise has a range of requirements and all factors must be weighed by the UC/network administrators in defining their solution.

I’ve read Russell’s article and was hoping he could explain the advantages the E-SBC bring to an enterprise with regards to Security?

alan.patterson — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:34:00 GMT

This forum is about this article by Russell Bennett: SIP Trunking: How the NET UX2000 Helps Balance Risk and Reward, https://ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-expert-views/sip-trunking-how-the-net-ux2000-helps-balance-risk-and-reward.aspx

Re: Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces very proprietary architecture in UC?

paul.mcmillan — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 16:16:57 GMT

Put very simply the title of this thread is what is really important. Ultimately this all comes down to the underlying architecture and what the architecture facilitates. This is not just about adhering to a specific standard. This goes to the service orientation of your platform. Integrating on multiple planes and not just at the SIP interface.

The idea that its necessary for proprietary approaches to be used to stimulate innovation is a false choice and one that typically has an alternate motive than just driving innovation. Everyday we see examples of innovation around open APIs and mashups that have been created with this approach. In my view, its never necessary to go with a proprietary architecture solely facilitate innovation. Is it true that a more open approach could hasten the day when a given innovation becomes a commodity? I suspect there is some truth to that but if you embrace the open approach then the innovation possibilities never really cease. There is always the next innovation to work towards.

But lets look at the idea of proprietary architectures and innovation. I may get a specific benefit with a proprietary approach but that benefit is always short lived. The amount of competition in this space is staggering. If I embrace a proprietary architecture I have locked myself out of the larger innovation opportunity. I have few choices but to embrace what a given vendor is providing or start all over.

The hit on existing voice vendors has been their proprietary architectures and approaches. This is what the new players in the market have pushed in their marketing messages ever since Voice Over IP entered the enterprise in the late 90s and its been repeated again with Unified Communications. What has really transpired since that time is that the traditional voice vendors have become far more open in their approach while some of the new players are recreating proprietary architectures/approaches while at the same time calling them open. There is an absolute desperate need to have an honest debate on the competing architectures for Unified Communications and collaboration.

UCIF: I think the intent around UCIF is a noble one but it clearly lacks buy in from all of the vendors and as such this creates a fair amount of doubt among end users. Hopefully this will change and the opportunity to create real innovation and more importantly value for customers can and will be realized.

Paul McMillan

Strategy & Technology Office

Siemens Enterprise Communications

Re: Another Article About UC Being Dead

marty — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:48:23 GMT

Hooray, the buzz is over! Let's party. You know a market has gone mainstream when it has "crossed the chasm" and moved though "early adoption" onto "mainstreet" as defined by Geoffrey Moore.

Just to make the point, the buzz is also over for e-mail (20 B messages per day in N. Am.), instant messaging (18 B messages per day in N. Am.) and cell phone calls (4 B per day in N. Am.) which are the three most voluminous forms of business communications.

The leading vendors of Unified Communications user software for businesses have shipped 100s of millions of clients both as packaged software (Lync, Sametime, CUPC, one-X, et al.) or modularized software (Lync, Websphere, Genesys Labs, Sphericall, OpenScape, et al.). Sure, not all of those are deployed to users, but I would estimate that IM-type clients with 'click-to-communicate' via voice, web-sharing and/or video are approaching 100 million in active use by business enterprises. Thus, UC is no longer the new buzz, rather it’s just becoming pervasive.

Those who doubt should read more case studies at:

ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-case-study-library.aspx

Now over a thousand of them tell the story of UC with more diversity and creativity and real, hard-dollar savings than any marketing spinner could imagine.

Sure, there are pockets of frustration, as Rad points out. If you think about UC as a consumer product, there will be frustrations (enterprises use IM on mobile devices, not SMS or MMS, since IM can be logged for compliance). Video conferencing may be the new buzz, but it's expensive as Rad notes; but don't blame that on UC. UC includes video, as noted, but isn't limited to video. And, I agree that renaming communiations as collaboration is just confusing when collaboration is more often document-centric, as Rad says, and uses the tools he names, including SharePoint, Quickr, Google Docs and others, most of which are available in the cloud now.

Lastly, just for fun, it's clear that when Nick Jones of Gartner called UC a scam, he was running his own scam. Known for his contrarian views, Nick draws audiences through outrageous lead-in lines. Read more case studies, Nick!

So, party on, folks. The buzz is over and UC is a real market now.

Marty Parker

Re: What Kind of Organization Will Benefit From Using A Centralized Mediation Server Rather Than Just VoIP Gateways in Implementing UC?

rbennett — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:33:54 GMT

There are a few questions here:

Why do I need a mediation server?
Is a VoIP GW a substitue for a mediation server?
What are the benefits of centralized Mediation Servers vs. distributed ones?
Can I carry SIP/RTP all the way to the service provider network edge without a gateway?

Why do I need a Mediation Server?

When the Mediation Server was first conceived (2005), there was a significant gap between the abilities of most PBXs/VoIP Gateways and OCS: e.g. few vendors supported TCP as a SIP transport, much less TLS, which is the preferred OCS SIP transport. A fuller explanation can be found here. Many gateway vendors have closed these gaps and Lync now provides 'media bypass' for calls being placed from inside the corporate network that are now carried on G.7xx codecs: this obviates the need to transcode to RT Audio (however, note that roaming calls still need RT Audio). Therefore with Lync, Mediation Server is only required for PBX interoperability and for some gateway signaling intermediation and to provide a 'trust boundary' to which the Lync client can securely connect.

Is a VoIP Gateway a substitute for a Mediation Server?

Some VoIP Gateways have gone a long way towards replacing the Mediation Server (see above). Survivable Branch Appliance gateways actually have a Mediation Server on board. Note that the Mediation Server image is included with the Lync FE server, so you save deploying a box but get the capabilities of the software when you need it. Also note that for PBX systems that have been verified in the Open Interoperability Program, there is no need for a Gateway, but a Mediation Server is required.

What are the benefits of centralized Mediation Servers vs. distributed ones?

The same benefits of any centralized resource vs. a local one. Note that if transcoding is required (i.e. a telephony to Lync call where the Lync call leg is 'roaming' [e.g. working at home]) then the Mediation Server must be co-located with the Gateway. If the Gateway is a central resource, then Mediation Server can also be centralized. However, if the Gateway is a distributed resource (e.g. branch office based in a 'least cost routing' scheme) then Mediation Server must be local: this can be achieved with a Survivable Branch Appliance in most cases.

Can I carry SIP/RTP all the way to the service provider network edge without a gateway?

Any Service Provider SIP Trunk that is certified in the Open Interoperability Program does not need a gateway. Otherwise, the Gateway will be required due to the interoperablity challenges that are encountered with many SIP Trunk services.

Another Article About UC Being Dead

UCStrategies — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:54:53 GMT

Interesting article

https://blog.tmcnet.com/on-rads-radar/2010/11/the-buzz-on-uc-is-over.html

Re: What Kind of Organization Will Benefit From Using A Centralized Mediation Server Rather Than Just VoIP Gateways in Implementing UC?

arosenberg — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:00:31 GMT

This from Alec Spyrou 11/18/2010 5:58:57 PM

As with many others this has been a challenge for us for some time. How do we ensure that we have some control over the bandwidth used from multiple endpoints that are now mobile capable?

I would appreciate hearing from the folk on here.

Some background. We are well progressed in what we have called our Collaboration strategy. This started back in 2007 and we saw UC as just one of te latter parts of that collaboration strategy which encompassed Web, real-time, message based and UC leading into CEBP.

We are well progressed on that journey and are in the latter phases of message based (90% complete), realtime (75% complete) and UC (70% complete). These are the platform building phases that lead us to CEBP. We have voicemail and video conferencing left to complete in the platform building phase before we move into CEBP. CEBP will need a lot of prep work before we are ready to deploy in this phase.

Re: Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces very proprietary architecture in UC?

rbennett — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 23:54:39 GMT

Speaking as someone who put a lot of effort into the creation of the UCIF, but also someone who has worked hard to push the UC technology envelope, I have a foot very firmly planted in each camp. In fact, my belief is that open interfaces and proprietary interfaces are two sides of the same coin.

The main advantage of open interfaces is the ability to integrate systems from disparate vendors (aka legacy systems). This requirement is part of the practical reality of the overwhelming majority of UC customers, especially those who are the product of one or more mergers/acquisitions. The downside of open interfaces is:

Strict adherence to standards means commoditization (see later).
Standards never keep pace with innovation and the standards creation process is, by definition, almost always reacting to innovation (aka proprietary development). Regarding 'The Internet Standards Process', IETF RFC 2026 states: "In outline, the process of creating an Internet Standard is straightforward: a specification undergoes a period of development and several iterations of review by the Internet community and revision based upon experience, is adopted as a Standard by the appropriate body (see below), and is published. In practice, the process is more complicated, due to: (1) the difficulty of creating specifications of high technical quality; (2) the need to consider the interests of all of the affected parties; (3) the importance of establishing widespread community consensus; and (4) the difficulty of evaluating the utility of a particular specification for the Internet community."
'Standards' are made up of an array of options for implementation which are subject to varying interpretation by vendors. So even products that are 'standards compliant' are not necessarily (i.e rarely) interoperable by default. Note that every IETF RFC contains the following text: "In this document, the key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "NOT RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, RFC 2119 [2] and indicate requirement levels for compliant SIP implementations."
Because of the above, standards compliant vendors are unable to achieve interoperability out of the box (which is what the customer really wants). Since bilateral interoperability exercises are very expensive (i.e. repetivive) we must move to multi-lateral interoperability initiatives, such as the UCIF.

The downside of proprietary interfaces is self-evident. The upside of proprietary interfaces is simple: innovation. Living, as we do, in a capitalist society means that:

Every customer wants an array of choices for their purchases. Having meaningful choices means that products must be differentiated. Differentiation is born out of innovation.
Vendors (and their shareholders) have a right to expect a reasonable economic return on their R&D investments. Innovation is what the technology industry does. Proprietary innovation brought us the telegraph just as it brought us UC.
Customer choice is the Darwinian process which determines which innovations will thrive and which will die.

A successful innovation is rarely offered to the market as an open standard by the innovator (human nature at work). However, once an innovation has been proven in the market place, then other vendors will attempt to emulate it. Then customers will then demand interoperability and standards will emerge.

Sometimes innovation stagnates, as it did with telephony in the closing decades of the 20th century. Then, like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs (carefully chosen metaphor...), the internet disrupted the communications business and the innovation process started all over again.

Put very simply, are there advantages for the customer to open interfaces over proprietary architecture in UC?

pavila — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 20:56:20 GMT

I was involved in the beginning of the convergence/UC movement when it was "CTI" - when the "big deal" was that in communication we were moving from the very proprietary environment that was characteristic of the telecom world to more open architecture, which was characteristic of the data world. It seemed to me, at the time, that this could be a huge benefit for the end-user customer. No longer would they be at the mercy of a single switch vendor. As convergence and then unified communications moved forward, the customer would have the option of choosing business solutions that were developed from best of breed products rather than "you take what we have to offer". Yet, what we're seeing today is a tendency for some VoIP and UC vendors to revert back to proprietary architecture as a means of forcing customers to "buy what we have to offer or forget it". There are "reasons" put forth of course for why proprietary is better... tighter integration, quality control, etc.... but so far, I'm not convinced that proprietary is better for the customer - only for the vendor.

Re: What Kind of Organization Will Benefit From Using A Centralized Mediation Server Rather Than Just VoIP Gateways in Implementing UC?

artr — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 23:43:53 GMT

Migrating Enterprise Telephony Networks for Microsoft’s Lync UC

By Art Rosenberg

Microsoft’s launch of its Lync Server 2010 on November 17, 2010 will trigger great enterprise IT activity in UC implementation planning. In addition to the basic enterprise Lync Server, Microsoft has also developed a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) for Lync, which will enable a branch location to continue using Lync capabilities if disconnected from the enterprise network.

While operational business benefits of multimodal unified communications (UC) can be identified through specific operational “use cases” of an enterprise, the migration from existing TDM and PSTN network infrastructures to IP Telephony and SIP trunking infrastructure must also be carefully planned from an implementation and maintenance cost perspective. Accordingly, UCStrategies.com will be hosting a new forum to discuss real-world issues that enterprise organizations should consider in implementing IP Telephony networking in a centralized and virtual UC network environment.

While IP Telephony will still be location-based in terms of desktop equipment and network connectivity, management and control will move to network and software-based solutions. This will include not only traditional person-to-person communication applications (phone calls, messaging, IM, conferencing, etc.), but also integration of third-party business process applications communicating with individual end users at desktops and mobile endpoint devices (smartphones, tablets, iPads, etc.) under the label of Communications Enabled Business processing (CEBP).

Integrating Tomorrow’s Telephony For “Multimodal” UC

The telecom industry has had a hard time explaining the concept and benefits of “UC,” primarily because telephony is no longer the only or even primary mode of communication contact with people. This is especially true for wireless mobility, where individual end users will dynamically require the flexibility of multimodal communications to efficiently communicate under a variety of personal circumstances. Even for employees dedicated to handling customer contacts (call centers), the need for UC flexibility will still be generated by mobile customers and business partners.

As the big enterprise application players move into UC, i.e., Microsoft, IBM, etc., they are driving the need for new telephony integrations and media mediation that legacy phone systems didn’t deal with. Accordingly, enterprise network infrastructures will be faced with the need to accommodate such functionality with technology that is both cost-efficient and easily operational manageable. The traditional approach of “gateways” to handle diverse network interconnectivity has been expanded to incorporate more intelligent functionality and simplified, software-based, remote “virtual” management.

The Application “Eggs” Or The Network “Chickens?”

There has always been a question of anticipating network capacity requirements to support communication traffic. In a UC environment, where modalities can be dynamically changed or escalated from asynchronous messaging to real-time connections for voice or video (“click-to-call”) the problem becomes greater and requires the flexibility that IP communications supports. So, getting the enterprise networks ready for multimodal UC and CEBP will demand that IT be well prepared with a cost-effective network solution to support such flexibility.

Inasmuch as UC technologies are still evolving and not all the standards have been defined, there is little experience available within most enterprise IT departments to provide practical guidelines for UC migration implementations. That is why the industry technology providers are trying to reach out to IT management to help them understand the implementation and support needs of UC vs. traditional telephony systems. They are absolutely not the same!

So, while business management has to define their operational UC “use cases” and ROI priorities, in terms of identifying what communication modalities and applications are required by which end users and end point devices, IT’s responsibility is to take care of associated network connectivity needs between branch locations, the PSTN (which is not going away overnight), and the Internet.

Stay Tuned For Our Forum on UC Networking Migration Issues

The latter need will be the focus of the UCStrategies Forum, sponsored by NET, who has announced a new platform for simplifying the networking and mediation needs of existing telephony switches and new UC platforms like Microsoft’s Lync Server 2010 and Survivable Branch Appliance, that can interoperate or even replace legacy or IP PBX systems. The UC migration dilemma is complex and every enterprise organization has investments to protect or maximize in implementation planning.

To be notified by email when a new issue has been raised and/or answered, please sign up for our UC Alerts, which will give you a direct link to that item.

What Kind of Organization Will Benefit From Using A Centralized Mediation Server Rather Than Just VoIP Gateways in Implementing UC?

artr — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 19:23:58 GMT

Everyone recognizes that flexible multimodal communications supported by UC will still require efficient consolidation and management of network access. Given that the market is still migrating from legacy TDM telephony networks and the PSTN, what solutions are available for bridging the network gaps at the enterprise or service provider levels?

Re: Unified Communications Trends - 2010 and Beyond

gary — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:58:48 GMT

I agree with Mr. Rosenberg and Mr. Yedwab's comments. Would also add that IMO person-to-person video is going to sneak up and explode very soon. As everyone knows, combinations of bandwidth and CODECs have prevented any real mass adoption of P2P Video, but that has changed. Also, another component or impediment is the hardware / software clients. It's very difficult to certify and support software clients and PC cameras on each standard computer (Desk Top, Notebook, etc...), from a business enterprise perspective. That might lead one to think a dedicated hardware / software client is needed, but now the cost and end user exp will suffer as yet another peripheral (like the desk phone) is in the mix.

Also, consider the state of smartphones, IP Telephony Clients (Hard and Soft Phones) and the new market of Netbooks and Tablets. Smartphones and Tablets (thanks to Apple) are starting to evolve together. Netbooks are now sooo 2008, but if we define the difference between Netbooks and Tablets on whether or not a physical keyboard is present, then at some point these should merge. Dedicated hardware for a desktop phone "may" eventually go away, BUT just as the PC cannot replace a game console... People (desk-jockeys for sure) still prefer to have a hard phone desk use. AVAYA and Cisco have tried many times to make desk phones more useful by adding touch screens, USB ports and many other enhanced features, however a phone is a phone…until it isn’t.

That said, what if you took a Tablet (with WebOS or Android) and a companion docking station, and the device also included:

· LAN while on the docking station

· 3G/4G/WIFI while off the docking station

· Front-face video

· Voice and Video Clients (SIP based of course)

Cisco has already announced such a device based on Android. AVAYA is rumored to be working on one as well, and they just announced a partnership with HP (who also just bought Palm and WebOS) to co-develop UC products and services.

Bottom line: If you take the one hard client application the PC has not eliminated (the desk phone) and change the platform to a Tablet, then add video and basic office apps (e-mail, IM, web, etc…), you have a real chance of reducing the procurement and support cost for voice, video and real application mobility. Will a Tablet replace a PC (notebook or desktop)? For certain folk’s maybe, but most will still need their PC. That’s ok however, as you aren’t adding yet another peripheral to support. You’re actually eliminating or combining three different areas down to one, multi-function device.

Re: Avaya Aura

gary — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:11:59 GMT

AURA architectural information is difficult to come by for sure, however as a customer that has just recently deployed AURA, I can tell you what I have found out so far.

AURA Session Manager / ASM (SIP Server) allows both SIP Applications and SIP End-Point connections. You can connect SIP phones directly to ASM, however Communication Manager (CM) is still required for phone features. I have been told CM is not required for just basic features like call routing internal / external, but I have not yet actually connected a SIP phone to ASM to confirm this (I will do next week). So, to directly answer, AURA does support SIP end-point connections and they can be either AVAYA or others SIP phones.

Re: Can End-users Make or Break the Success of a UC Implementation?

bill.seybolt — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 21:42:51 GMT

You have to identify people in your organization who can serve as advocates to help lead the change. You also have to identify those who are resistors who may derail the project. The human element must be taken into consideration just as much as what technology you are using.

We're preparing for deployment in August-September? Any chance I could get a copy or link to the paper?

Can End-users Make or Break the Success of a UC Implementation?

pavila — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 18:00:44 GMT

I just finished working with Plantronics on a white paper about the importance of end-user acceptance. Of course, it included a discussion on end-points overall - particularly relating to ease of use. And it set me to wondering about the challenge this presents to IT departments that are now generally responsible for UC decisions and implementations. Not to mention those traditional VARs who have evolved to UC "solutions integrators"....

New technology is great as long as it is used by those it is supposed to help. But people are generally resistive to change - even in the workplace. So how important are end-points in the world of UC? Do too many vendors give lip service to "ease of use" but deliver "I can't figure this out and I've read the manual 4 times"?

Re: Does Location Matter?

pavila — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:47:04 GMT

In the world of sales to small and medium business, many of us have believed that people buy from people. The internet has changed that dynamic.... people buy from people if they want a business relationship, people buy from the internet if they want it cheap. It's the same issue again - am I buying a product or am I investing in a solution that will help my business? The former can be done with a dealer located anywhere that has access to a shipper and a 24-hour remote support system. The latter requires contact, discussions, and on-going conversations - all of which are more difficult to do remotely (although not impossible....).

Of course a single dealer can support a nationwide network of branch offices, but the initial sale to "headquarters" will almost always require a local presence. We're definitely working with a new set of guidelines for selling and supporting.....

Re: Does Location Matter?

Neal Gilbert — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:31:45 GMT

When you are talking about a Hosted VoIP solution, location is irrelevant since the only IP equipment at the customers location are the VoIP Phone sets and router. Most phone sets cannot be fixed by a technician and most routers can be fixed remotely. With that being the case, the choice of a Telecom Provider should be based on criteria that matter most to the customer like quality of the products offered, verifiable customer support track record, and existing customer base.

Choosing a Telecom Provider just because they are geographically desirable should no longer be a key criteria IMHO.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

william.durr — Wed, 05 May 2010 14:44:14 GMT

Nancy – Yes, getting the word out is important, especially given that I am often dismayed by the disconnect between the interest groups around Unified Communications and the emerging UC Analytics practice. They don’t seem to be aware of each other and even, at times, seem dismissive of each other.

It all reminds me of an old cartoon where a medieval warlord is standing outside and in front of a tent. Behind the tent is a salesperson selling machine guns (It is a cartoon, after all!). The caption has the warlord saying, “I don’t have time to see any salesperson, I have a war to fight.”

And, so it seems with UC and Analytics. Each camp is fighting a war of sorts; call it what you will – acceptance or awareness. But the battle can’t be won without considering using the superior tools of the other camp.

Given the issues that continue to beleaguer many organizations as they strive to increase stakeholder value, UC Analytics should be a component of any UC strategy. This is particularly true for process- and back-office intensive organizations where UC can create a baseline for improving business processes, but the analysis of information and uncovering key business issues and trends is necessary to realize process optimization.

Overall, UC Analytics furthers the process improvements that UC inherently delivers by delivering actionable intelligence from the converged communication flows into and out of the enterprise. Using two “lenses” – one internal and one external – UC Analytics illuminates how employees are performing and reveals what customers feel and tell you during their interactions with the enterprise. Organizations are better informed and strategically armed to maximize results.

Re: Virtualization - I don't get it

paul.leatherman — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:57:24 GMT

Tom, your post doesn't make sense. "meet the objectives of virtualization products with appliances that can't be virtualized!"

You have tangible benefits like server reduction, rack space, power, and cooling as well as the benefits Dave pointed out with flexible deloyment, backups, snapshots, labs, upgrades, etc...

Re: Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

suresh_tatavarthy — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 20:01:22 GMT

Hi Dave - With wave 14, the mediation server role changes. Microsoft has done a fantastic job of integrating the HQ and branch office to provide branch offices with survivability features. The 1:1 mapping of mediation server to a gateway is now something of the past. A mediation server can communicate with multiple gateways.

The mediation server is now collocated with Front end server. There are additional features added. For example, the mediation server can support "Media bypass". Under some circumstances, the mediation server removes itself from the media path to reduce need for transcoding and for reducing hairpinning situations.

Because of the many to many mapping of the mediation server and the gateway, load balancing features are built into the system that offers organizations reduced TCO.

So, Dave the mediation server does not go away but the architecture is changed.

Re: How important a role do you see mobility playing in the overall move to UC?

billyoung — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:13:44 GMT

Tom you make a good argument for the demise of traditional desk phones but the enterprise will still require capabilities to facilitate services such as conferencing, accounting, recording, presence, directory, voice mail etc that the distributed architecture of UC supports, be it enterprise based or hosted. So a “pure cellular” solution will still need to integrate with the enterprise communications environment and allow for the management of these mobilized services. That is really the role of mobile UC; extend the enterprises services to the mobile and allow the enterprise to manage them.

Re: How important a role do you see mobility playing in the overall move to UC?

billyoung — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 18:12:01 GMT

The historically low take rate on mobile UC has been due to the complexity of deployment and a less than friendly user interface of mobile UC’s predecessor FMC. FMC required a dual mode smartphone, a client, and voice grade WLAN. This is a relatively complex undertaking for enterprise IT groups which puts them in the position of running a miniature cellular network, and of course the user experience was more complicated than just making a simple call. Another big factor in the sluggish uptake was the fact that the mobile operator was really not involved, thus their was no leverage of the intelligence of the modern mobile network. The latest generation of mobile UC aka FMC which Sprint ,Tango and NET have launched, transparently extends the mobile UC capabilities to the cellular phone. The result is that any existing or future Sprint mobile can be used as an extension of the UC/PBX system. No dual mode smartphone or specialized client is required and no impact on the WLAN. It is simple to deploy and works exactly as the existing phone; no learning curve.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

njamison — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:19:31 GMT

Another thing, and this is probably an obvious question, is that for organizations presently in the midst of a unified communications initiative or planning for one, should they be considering UC analytics as part of this? I would say yes, but we need to get the word out as to what it is and how powerful it can be.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

njamison — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 17:17:02 GMT

Bill,

I think you hit the nail on the head. A year ago I wrote a UC Views (January) on expert agents and UC. One of the points I didn't clearly make was that there has to be accountability and control as to how these experts are being used or else you have what you call chaos.

At the time I had discussions with various vendors as to how they would get buy in from different departments if all the sudden their employees were getting tapped by contact center agents as experts. How do you account for their time? How do you show that their contribution is impacting business processes and improvements so that their time isn't just being used, but accounted for. If not, then one department would end up easing the burden of the contact center, but not getting compensated budget-wise, for example.

What I think is very cool, is that by using UC analytics, meaning all of the tools we have, we can take a holistic approach to the entire organization and see the effects of one department helping another, for example.

Nancy

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

william.durr — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 02:25:20 GMT

Hi Nancy. I’ve been following the thread and I think your question about UC Analytics and presence is an interesting one. Presence, of course, is the technology that enables the virtual enterprise. And virtual enterprises have some clear operational advantages, as well as some disadvantages. Not the least of which is that in a truly virtual enterprise there is a significant risk of chaos.

We’ve already had some experience in the contact center, as you know, with work-at-home employees. Generally, work-at-home employees are happier and more productive than traditional office employees. But staying connected to the ethos of the enterprise and feeling a sense of team , shared effort and success is really difficult. By some estimates, fully 20% of agents who opt to work from home, return to the physical contact center within 6 months. Nevertheless, work-at-home employees are more valuable in part because they are flexible. But the flexibility must be controlled or there will be chaos. They have schedules to adhere to in order for the operation to meet its service delivery goals.

Part of UC Analytics provides rigor. Rigor, a word describing a concept, implies that there are rules that apply to everyone. And that, I think, is the connection to presence.

In some presentations and future projections of virtual enterprises where presence stitches subject matter experts together with customer service representatives as they interact with customers, I am struck by the fact that the availability of subject matter experts cannot be simply a matter of whim, when they are “free” from their day jobs. A clear high-level value of UC Analytics is that it confers a grand view of the entire enterprise in terms of interactions with customers, partners and prospects. The entire enterprise can be modeled and simulations engines provide projections of service delivery measures as well as employee “presence” requirements and schedules based on each employee’s preferences.

By bringing the rigor of Workforce Management to employees bound to the enterprise by presence, UC Analytics helps enterprises avoid flexibility chaos.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

ryan.hollenbeck — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:21:42 GMT

Good question Nancy, and certainly applicable given the importance of "presence" in the overall scheme of unified communications. I'm actually going to ask a colleague of mine, Bill Durr, to respond to this. Bill is a fairly well-know figure in the contact center space and can offer some unique perspective into how UC Analytics can contribute to the improvement of presence across the enterprise. I will ask him to post a reply as soon as he can.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

njamison — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:09:16 GMT

Ryan,

How about taking a different approach to UC analytics? One of the things that we talked about when we said that UC really came out of the contact center was that there are a lot of features that the contact center has that UC has, such as presence. So, most organizations who have taken the plunge into UC do it not only to make processes more efficient and effective, but to improve “presence.” How does UC Analytics contribute, if at all, to the achievement of this objective?

Re: How important a role do you see mobility playing in the overall move to UC?

tom.levy — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 04:04:19 GMT

The question is posed wrong. The question should be does UC have any role other than mobility and isn't the answer just a to get everyone a cell phone? CFOs are already paying for most cell phones and with the money they save by throwing out the PBX, phones, and landlines - they can pay for everyone's cell phone and still come out ahead.

Evolution: PBX --> UC --> Pure Cellular (4G)

There is absolutely no need for an organization to have a phone system any more - what 4 digit dialing? Yeah right.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

ryan.hollenbeck — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 01:39:02 GMT

Nancy, I think you are right on the mark. With organizations turning to analytics to help them operate and act more strategically, the unearthing of broken processes and other issues hampering performance will not only become more commonplace, but more of a proactive business process with more formal measures and metrics. In fact, most companies I talk with today are already thinking about how tools such as speech analytics, desktop analytics, and customer feedback can help them improve the customer relationship across all areas of the business, and they want to proactively use these tools versus just merely reacting to problems. The outcome of these tools is becoming a big component of ROI for both vendors and end users in terms of how they can take out costs and increase sales and profitability.

Re: The Channel is Doomed

pavila — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 20:29:09 GMT

While I certainly see the picture that you paint, I think you missed a couple of words in your topic... The Channel As We Knew It Is Doomed. It's been a few years since a dealer made a reasonable profit by selling a phone system - of any type. There is a market for Asterisk and there's certainly a market for hosted IP in today's economy. But there's an even larger market that's being served by dealers who are seeing amazing growth even when "no one is buying anything"! The channel is shifting from selling hardware to focusing on the business needs of their customers - and providing tools that will meet those business needs. Integrating communication with business processes, for companies large and small, requires the skill and expertise of the "new and improved" telecom dealer. Identifying UC and other tools that will help a company be more competitive with fewer resources, shorten time to market, reduce expenses, meet the needs of their mobile and remote workforce..... this takes a different type of sale and technical expertise than providing a "phone system and telephones". And there's strong revenue here!

The channel definitely is NOT doomed. But what is doomed are the members of the channel who continue to pursue a strategy based upon selling hardware (i.e. phone systems). I see it as "survival of the fittest". For dealers today, there are so many opportunities available that didn't even exist a few years ago . The challenge is for a dealer to decide which opportunities to pursue. I delivered a keynote on this topic at a vendor's partner event just last Friday and as you would expect, many of the dealers understood the need to change from selling hardware to providing business solutions, but there were still a number of them who just did not want to change from what they had known and what used to work for them (the operative phrase here is "used to"). This last group is - yes! - doomed!

Unlike the extinct dinosauer - the channel is evolving as the industry evolves. Doomed? I don't think so!

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

njamison — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 19:38:58 GMT

Ryan, that is definitely true. Its funny that in presentations at trade shows or conferences companies will often give examples of how they uncovered some back office problem that was driving calls into the contact center and costing a ton of money. Usually these presentation examples are couched in terms of "we uncovered this problem and saved a lot of money". But I think we are getting to the point, especially as we start combining tools, that these kinds of relevations won't be one off events. So not only will we uncover more of them, but we will go looking for them.

That is why I'm kind of excited about bringing out the term UC analytics, because I think it will start getting people to think about using tools to go on witch hunts to see what they can find and how it can improve all areas of the business.

The Channel is Doomed

shel.brooks — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:26:47 GMT

We use Asterisk - I downloaded it. I buy brand new various SIP phones from multiple DOTCOM types on the net. I have not called a dealer in years. We used to call a dealer every time we needed to take a tele-sh*t. Not anymore.

A friend at another company just threw out their phone system for a hosted plan. I'm not crazy about hosting, but it made sense for them - they have about 12 locations with less than 4 people. One of their Internet service providers offered them hosting and just stole the account from multiple telecom dealers.

I don't see how a telecom dealer willl stay in business. Their model is hardware and the industry is moving to software and service. I guess there are plenty of antiques out there that need service and plenty of newer systems that are destined to become antiques, but I don't see how the telecom dealer will survive this change in the business.

Re: What Infrastructure

shel.brooks — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:21:36 GMT

I am excited about the prospect of the open cloud and telephony. I currently run Asterisk on multiple instances at Amazon for R&D testing. With low CPU usage and networking usage (testing only) it costs me a couple bucks a day. I've modeled moving production systems to the cloud, but the costs and networking options are not quite there yet. I figure it won't be much longer though. If I could set up point to point circuits to EC2 and get a slightly lower price from Amazon, it would make sense. Can't be much longer. Hopefully MS Azure will force Amazon to lower prices. I think EC2 will generate more revenue for Amazon than its webstore does in just a few years.

Presence

shel.brooks — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:16:56 GMT

Every discussion of UC involves presence. Presence is free. I have multiple presence accounts - Skype, AIM, Yahoo, Google, and our own ICQ server internally. What's the big deal - companies like Avaya, Cisco, Mitel all think they invented presence. Is there any benefit I am missing to a totally proprietary implementation of presence when it is available both as a free service or free server/client software?

Re: Virtualization - I don't get it

tom.levy — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:12:13 GMT

One of the key benefits of virtualization is to reduce hard servers. But the goal should be to reduce overall servers (hard and soft) - since OCS requires so many servers it doesn't fit well into a virtualization conversation. Anyone looking to reduce servers should be looking at simple appliances like the ShoreTel products. Yes, appliances can't be virtualized, but they are a lot less work and meet the objectives of virtualization projects with a lot less effort and money.

Re: Cloud-based Communications

tom.levy — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:08:35 GMT

Most of the current crop of hosting providers do not let the customer have any control over upgrades. But I think this will change as hosting companies provide virtual self contained systems for each customer. For now, virtualization seems to only be a private option. I have been looking for a hosted partner that can do this, but have not found one yet.

Avaya Aura

tom.levy — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:05:36 GMT

I understand how Avaya Aura manages existing phones systems as a sort of super phone system for SIP - but what I don't understand is if you can use just Aura alone as a phone system. Does aura directly support SIP endpoints or Avaya proprietary phones? I asked a few people and can't get a knowledgeable answer?

Subscription Based Licensing

dean.higgins — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 05:07:48 GMT

What companies are offering subscription based licensing regarding their IP solutions? If I understand it correctly, I can purchase an IP PBX core system and instead of buying user/phone/extension licenses - I can "rent" them through subscription based licensing. It sounds interesting - though a bit confusing. Would it not make more sense to rent the entire system via hosted voice solutions?

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

ryan.hollenbeck — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 19:50:59 GMT

Workforce optimization (WFO) and, more recently, analytics-driven WFO have been driving performance gains in the contact center, helping organizations improve everything from the customer experience to sales, for many years. Now, with UC Analytics, we are starting to see the adaptation and deployment of these same technologies and concepts to other areas of business, most notably back-office and branch operations.

This is mostly being driven by the fact that numerous functions beyond the contact center can, whether directly or indirectly, impact service delivery and, thus, the customer experience, customer loyalty, and even profitability. How many times do people call customer service frustrated by a processing delay, billing mistake, or, perhaps, confusion over a product offer? In these instances, the underlying motive for the interaction has little to do with the performance of the contact center, but rather processes that lie in back-office or branch processing areas that can be a cause of customer dissatisfaction and defections and can significantly boost operating costs.

By leveraging UC Analytics in back-office and branch operations in addition to the contact center, organizations can further focus its analysis and optimization efforts on areas prone to potential bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and underutilization given their process reliance. Effectively armed with the root cause of issues across the customer service value chain, organizations gain a more holistic view of operations and can improve the efficiency of claims processing, order fulfillment, customer administration, transaction processing, billing, and other back-office functions to transform the back office into a strategic business asset. Furthermore, UC Analytics can help strengthen the forecasting and scheduling of staff to meet customer demand, which is vital to effective branch operations, as well as determine whether or not the business applications critical to achieving process optimization are efficiently deployed and utilized.

In today’s business climate, companies that devalue or underestimate the inter-departmental impact back-office and branch operations have on service, satisfaction, and sales will remain challenged to achieve customer centricity and process optimization no matter the UC strategy deployed.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:23:16 GMT

Although I understand how UC Analytics can help optimize processes inside and outside the contact center, is it actually being adopted and deployed by other areas of the business? I know that individual business units will use different analytics packages, and solve problems that are specific to their own areas, but do they see the bigger picture of combining data from different areas to improve their department as well as others?

NancyJ

How important a role do you see mobility playing in the overall move to UC?

mfinneran — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:07:57 GMT

While every speech and article on UC makes reference to the importance of mobility, the take rate of the current UC mobility capabilities appears to be minimal. What's missing in those offerings that could put mobility in the center of users' UC planning?

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

ryan.hollenbeck — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:12:12 GMT

These solutions contribute in a very similar manner to speech analytics. Most importantly, they provide a more holistic view into operations and performance across the customer service value chain. Increasing transparency amongst stakeholders, data analytics, customer feedback, and desktop analytics can unearth issues and trends that can be leveraged to drive more collaborative process improvement more broadly across the organization, which is particularly important given the fact that numerous departments and the processes they employ generally impact service delivery in one way or another.

Data Analytics employs data mining technology to scour the attributes associated with calls—and possibly even the business issues identified by speech analytics—to uncover contact scenarios that can positively or negatively impact an organization’s ability to meet its key performance objectives. With data analytics, organizations can better leverage the volumes of data generated by customer interactions to uncover hidden issues and opportunities. Measuring everything from call metrics, such as average talk time, to productivity metrics, like interactions handled by agent per day, to customer experience metrics, such as first call resolution and satisfaction scores, data analytics can help optimize processes that directly or indirectly influence these metrics inside and outside the contact center.

Customer Feedback enables organizations to collect customer data through IVR, Web, and email surveys to determine the drivers of satisfaction, identify improvement areas, and measure customer loyalty. Using short, context-sensitive, dynamic customer surveys, organizations can capture data not only on loyalty, satisfaction, and how well staff handled an inquiry, but on the very products and processes that shape the customer experience and contribute to organizational performance. Moreover, based on survey results, alerts and workflow items can be delivered right to the desktop, with links to actual call recordings for further analysis, to improve enterprise information flow.

Desktop Analytics captures desktop productivity and application usage, delivering graphical reports that illustrate which applications your staff uses—including how they use them, when, and for how long. Providing an analytical view of desktop workflow, organizations can surface and assess employee workflow patterns and the root cause of inefficient internal processes, isolate processes or applications that may require re-engineering, and reinforce usage policies. This is particularly powerful for contact centers as well as process-intensive operational areas, such as back-office administrative functions and branch/remote operations, where there is generally a heavy reliance on business applications to perform routine tasks that can directly impact objectives such as sales, service, and expense management.

Ryan Hollenbeck

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 17:52:40 GMT

You mention the value of speech analytics extending beyond the contact center to the enterprise. How do data analytics, customer feedback, and desktop analytics contribute to enterprise process optimization? I think its the combination of all the tools that we can use that will provide the most benefit to companies.

Also, and this is for Jim, I think companies are using combinations of these already, and many just don't understand how powerful integrating more tools in can be.

Nancy J

Re: Virtualization - I don't get it

dave — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:38:24 GMT

VIrtualization offers huge benefits around resource management - don't think of it as server savings. By virtualizing your UC server, you can add/subtract resources (processor, memory, and storage) easily without downtime. You can also backup (replicate) environments with additional virtual (or real) servers at the same or a remote site. Don't think of it as server savings - it is part of voice/data convergence - the operational level.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:51:09 GMT

UC analytics is more than just speech analytics. Speech analytics is just a great tool to enhance the combination of analytical tools that we have across the entire enterprise. I think in order to quantify or clarify what un analytics is we need to list the tools that are included. So what else besides speech analytics, and contact center reporting should we include in this category and why?

Nancy

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

william.durr — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 15:35:26 GMT

To provide some more color via customer examples, I have included a few links below to case studies where speech analytics played an important role in improving enterprise processes and performance.

verint.com/.../file.cfm

Re: Cloud-based Communications

linda.spurlock — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 05:20:54 GMT

I think there is a distinction between cloud and hosted and hosted does not make sense for custom UC. The issue is upgrade control. I can't have some hosting company upgrade systems that could impact my custom integrations. That is why I run a virtual environment - actual virtual environments; production and test. We throughly test all upgrades before implementing them - and I know for a fact that seemingly harmless upgrades can break an entire custom UC application.

Re: Virtualization - I don't get it

dana.bradshaw — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 21:14:28 GMT

Matt - Microsoft OCS doesn't support virtualized implementations (as a solution - only some non real time server roles can be virtualized).

VIrtualization makes a lot sense from redundancy environment because two virtual environments can provide redundancy on the same or different virtual clusters.

Virtualization - I don't get it

dean.higgins — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:53:04 GMT

There seems to so much hype about virtualization. I can buy a basic server for about $3000 - complete installed - one time cost. My VMware servers are technically less expensive but require more ongoing care and feeding. Assuming both are equal in support of real time applications, which is a real leap as well - why bother putting UC servers on a virtual machine. Makes no sense to me.

Avaya Aura

alan.patterson — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 20:41:17 GMT

Did Avaya announce anything new regarding Aura at VoiceCon?

Re: Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

dave — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:49:14 GMT

With Wave 14, the mediation server formerly goes away.

Does Location Matter?

dave — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 18:33:59 GMT

Historically, the telecom dealer was local to the customer. Does it matter any more? Are we seeing dealers increasingly supporting more and more non local customers?

The world is flat and VoIP reduces distance issues and now with centralization of telecom systems it seems a single dealer can support a national network of locations (branch offices).

Thoughts?

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:48:58 GMT

Good point. When speech analytics was first introduced we really focused on agent training, such as doing a proper close or upselling, or using it to glean information on what customers were talking about, such as mentioning competitors names, for example. But its becoming a critical part of uncovering issues and opportunities throughout an organization as well. I hope someone jumps in with a customer example or two. If I think of one I'll post.

I wanted to add though, that speech analytics is one part of UC analytics. Blair and I both wrote UC Views on this, using what your company is doing by combining speech analytics with other analytics. Blair did an In the Spotlight article on Actionable Intelligence in UC, and I did one that had a different slant to it. This is going to be a big area that is just getting defined.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

william.durr — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 02:26:42 GMT

First off, investments in speech analytics attest to the growing adoption of business analytics in facilitating more efficient and effective business processes. Specifically in the contact center, with a greater emphasis on truly understanding the “voice of the customer,” speech analytics is becoming even more integral to understanding what is happening with customers and why. As such, those in the industry, like myself, see the deployment of speech analytics continuing to gain traction in 2010 and beyond.

Generally speaking, speech analytics works by employing technologies such as word spotting, indexing, and emotion detection to systematically analyze call content—from hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of calls—and suggest root causes so you can quickly identify issues related to specific calls. In addition, speech analytics can often search unstructured audio data, such as CTI-tagged data, agent name, and customer segmentation, to facilitate deeper analysis of interactions, data mining, and drilldown to specific calls or sets of calls.

Given this, with the abundance of customer interactions that take place in the contact center, the value of speech analytics to this functional area is rather apparent. However, it’s important to remember that the contact center is only a component of the customer service value chain, and that processes in the back office and other functional areas often can impact customer service and the customer experience as much, if not more, than the contact center itself. In turn, this can affect the performance of an enterprise as a whole and its achievement of top and bottom line goals, particularly if issues go undetected or remain compartmentalized within an operational area (silo).

Therefore, in terms of overall business benefits, process optimization, and even ROI, the enterprise can stand to be the greatest benefactor from speech analytics. This is due to the fact that using speech analytics to analyze the content of customer interactions in the contact center can provide valuable customer intelligence relevant to many areas of a business. In the context of UC, this enables key departmental as well as broader enterprise issues and trends to be identified, shared cross functionally, and viewed more holistically for quicker, more informative, and more collaborative decision making that improves business processes and drives customer centricity.

These business processes may very well be directly related to customer service, such as how a customer’s technical issues are resolved, but they more often cross disciplines and functions and indirectly impact service, such as the development and launch of a new product offer that encompasses product management, marketing, finance, sales, and other areas across the enterprise. Thus, with speech analytics, an organization can more effectively identify and address communication bottlenecks and broken processes that span business functions and can impact everything from customer service to revenue generation to profitability.

Re: Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:15:18 GMT

1. . My first question is around the tremendous potential for analytics to help organizations better understand where there may be communication bottlenecks or broken processes that are impacting customer service, and in turn customer relationships. As an analyst, one of my favorite of these tools is speech analytics, as it provides great value in “mining for what is missing” from other analytics tools. In fact, more and more I’m hearing of companies evaluating speech analytics for the contact center, where the majority of customer interactions take place. Given this, how can the deployment of speech analytics, as one UC analytics tool help optimize more than customer service and processes resident in the contact center?

Actionable Intelligence through UC Analytics

nsj — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 18:10:44 GMT

On the UCStrategies.com site a few of us have posted articles or opinions on how UC came from the contact center because so many UC functions, such as reporting, presence, etc. have been used for decades in contact centers. This concept is getting even more interesting as vendors are beginning to combine more of the tools of the contact center in with UC tools. Analytics-driven workforce optimization (WFO) has been optimizing people, processes, and communication in the contact center for years. So now we are starting to see an emerging category within UC called “UC analytics” that tie together tried-and-true contact center WFO tools such as quality monitoring and workforce management with advanced speech, data, and desktop analytics, to help organizations uncover trends and issues that may hamper business performance. This holds true not only in the contact center, but across the enterprise. Using UC analytics, organizations are better equipped to capture, analyze, and act on information about workforce performance, customer interactions, and overall business processes in the contact center, back-office operations, and even branch and remote offices.

UC-B applications

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:25:40 GMT

Ross Talbot --I don’t understand what business process automation is. Do I already have this in my company?

Tim Passios--You may. You’ll want to understand your own internal processes for getting work done to understand Business Process Automation. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in or what company you work for, we all have processes that we must go through for the work that needs to get done. The key is to find those processes that can be automated with technology. Would you like an example of a common process?

Ross Talbot--Yes!

Tim Passios--Ok! Let’s say a fax gets sent into a hospital with relevant patient information on it, it requires a human to review it and manually route it to the right location (pharmacy, doctor, emergency, etc.). There are several ways this process could be automated. Let’s look at one way it could be automated with technology. We could receive that fax and have it scanned automatically for relevant information (patient ID, doctor name, prescription information, etc.) that would then be routed to the right email inbox as an attachment. This eliminates human error and latency, automates the process, and improves efficiency and effectiveness. Get the idea?

Ross Talbot--No. What do you mean by "scanned automatically?"

Tim Passios--The old way of receiving a fax meant a piece of paper came out of a fax machine. However, it’s just as easy to receive a fax electronically and then deliver it somewhere for viewing or processing. One of those places could be a place where the fax is examined using optical character recognition and/or forms recognition software. These tools can “read” a form and extract names, addresses, patient ID, prescription name, and other information and pass that information along in the process.

Samantha Kane--I'm not really clear on the relation between business process automation and unified communications. Can someone describe the relationship?

Pam Avila--I think a lot of people wonder about that. Let’s take a look at the definition of UC and see if that helps - unified communications is defined as communications integrated to optimize business processes. By this definition, business process automation becomes the nirvana of unified communications - it's where companies can really realize a hard ROI.

Art Rosenberg--Samantha,I would keep things simple by describing the role of UC as being able to make timely contact with a person (or persons) in a variety of ways, depending upon the circumstances of the contact initiator as well as that of the recipient/respondent.

Unlike the tradtional telephone call, it's not just for "person-to-person" contacts, but also "process-to-person" outbound contacts. The latter is where an automated business process requires the participation of a person (specific individual or anyone who is available). In such cases, the business process application will act as the contact initiator and have the flexibility to initiate the contact independently of the recipient's circumstances, devices, or preferences. All the process has to do is initiate the delivery of the information or Web links and make sure that the recipient is notified and can access that information in a timely manner. I call this a new type of "I/O" that can addresss individual people device independently through UC.

Samantha Kane--Why would my business be interested in Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA)?

Art Rosenberg--Business processes can't be fully automated like some manufacturing processes. They have to be monitored, managed, and coordinated with people who are part of every business process. Rather than depend on people to have the time and remember to check on the status of a task or situation, it is more efficient to have an automated process detect exceptions of concern and notify appropriate people in a timely manner to get things fixed or changed when necessary. That not only minimizes the high cost of labor involved in a group task activity, but also avoids or minimizes any losses resulting from the failure to resolve issues as soon as possible or to meet deadlines.

Rick Chin--Ah, this is where you start going beyond simple business process automation and into the world of Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA). What’s the difference? Business process automation simply automates a process, leaving communications out of the picture. CBPA, on the other hand, leverages communications to further extend the effectiveness and efficiency. The ultimate end result is to unify all forms of communications for seamless interactions across all devices, applications and locations in order to improve business processes.

Ross Talbot--How does CBPA really do that and how does it go further than simple process automation?

Tim Passios--Good question! Let’s take another look at our previous fax example. So far, simple process automation got the fax into an email inbox and delivered to the right person or department. However, nothing is being done with it and unless someone is monitoring that inbox, nothing is going to happen to it.

With CBPA, that fax would never have made it into an email inbox. Instead, it would have been scanned for relevant information, identified for the right person or department needed to handle that information, and then routed into an electronic queue to wait for the next available person to read it. At the same time, it would have made an outbound communication (SMS, Email, phone call with a recorded message, etc.) to the person who sent it so that they knew it was being processed.

Ross Talbot--Is that it? Doesn't seem like much.

Tim Passios--No, there’s a lot more. CBPA continues the process to ensure that this is handled completely. Let’s say that our fax was delivered to the Doctor’s office on the 3rd floor of the hospital. The nurse sees a form presented to her on her desktop client and opens it. This form contains the patient information received from the scanned fax, a prescription request, and the attached fax (in the form of a PDF) for verification. The nurse clicks a button on the form to pass it along to the doctor for prescription approval. At this click, the form is routed back into the queue to the doctor for approval. However, using presence, the form gets rerouted to the doctor on-call because the primary doctor is currently out of the country. The on-call doctor receives the form along with a screen pop of the relevant patient information so that he can review all necessary records to be sure that this can be approved. Once approved, the form then gets routed directly to the pharmacy for fulfillment. The last step might be to automatically send a message (SMS, email, phone call with recorded message) to the person who originally sent in the fax indicating that their prescription has been filled.

Ross Talbot--What industries are best positioned to take advantage of CBPA?

Rick Chin--Lots of industries, including insurance and financial institutions, healthcare companies, higher education, entertainment and hospitality, and more!

Tom Parrot--What are a couple of examples of how my company can benefit from communications-based process automation?

Rick Chin--To be honest, it’s really easy to find these examples. Take a look around your organization and identify manual processes that could involve human error and human latency. Simple ones typically come to mind like vacation requests, approval processes, order processing, new hire HR and IT processes and many others.

Tim Seabrook--Your company can benefit from Process Automation in a number of ways across many of the processes that your company uses in every day of business. From basic communication with your customers to more complex process automation involved with Workflow Management across departments within the business.

Basic customer communication can be automated with automated outdialing applications to contact your customers for issue resolution notification, appointment reminders, or product release notification.

Workflow Management can be automated with various activities being queued / delivered to each department when the activity requires each department's skill. An example could be an insurance company handling claims. The claim is lodged and delivered to a Data Entry Operator who enters the details. The claim is then delivered to a Claims Assessor for investigation and approval. When approved / declined the claim is then passed to the Customer Service department to notify the claimant.

Through all these stages the Claim can be queued for the appropriate departments so that the activities can be automatically delivered to the properly skilled staff.

Apart from the automated delivery of the activity one of the main benefits here is that all these actions can now be reported on and monitored from a management level. You can monitor how long it is taking to process each stage of the claim and also see how many claims are being handled by various staff - in the same way that you can monitor the phone calls to your CSRs in the Contact Center.

Each process within your business can be automated in one way or another depending on the actual process and how it is implemented within the business.

Scott Todd--I’ve heard about other kinds of business process automation. How is IPA -using CBPA - different?

Rick Chin--Other companies offer products to try to automate parts of your business. Companies like IBM, Documentum, FileNet, and Lombardi all have products that attempt to do this. However, these companies are trying to take products that manage portions of tasks and extend them across the enterprise. Because their foundation was not built around communication, it’s not surprising to find that they are “walled gardens” with little ability to encompass all kinds of activity. Even other communications companies like Avaya and Genesys have taken a stab at automation. However, because their products are actually an amalgam of separate products brought together through acquisitions, they too lack the ability to present one unified view.

IPA is different. It’s the only product to use the new CBPA methodology that brings the proven contact technologies of ACD Queuing, Skills-Based Routing, Presence, Recording, and Real-time Supervision to any business process or work flow.

IPA knows how to route work, who is qualified and available to do the work, delivers the work, records what was done, and allows management and supervisors to see the status of that work in real-time.

Scott Todd--Customers are very important to my company. How would CBPA make my customers’ experience better?

Rick Chin--CBPA is built on the technologies that have existed for years within the walls of the contact center – a place founded and focused on customer service. Technologies like queuing, recording, reporting, alerting, monitoring and more are leveraged within CBPA. Simple screen-pops of your favorite CRM application with prefilled information about the customer can easily be routed to anyone within the organization during any steps of the process to ensure customer information is always at the fingertips of whoever services that process.

Jerry Brown--How high does CBPA seem to be on the priority list for CIOs?

Tim Passios--CIOs look for products that can support the business goals of their company. And CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs have all been interested in automation for quite some time.

CBPA should be high on the any CxOs priority list because it is easier to implement and maintain, does not require expensive custom programmers, brings the power of process automation to most businesses, facilitates market responsiveness, and establishes visibility into the progress and status of processes.

Existing solutions are expensive to buy, setup, maintain, and update. Expensive consulting and custom programming are constant additional costs due to complexity. Lead-time for implementation or change is very long, affecting a company’s responsiveness to the changing market. Lastly, these systems become “yet another” application with separate data to manage and they often create more “silos” of information because they only handle a small portion of the entire process.

Blair Pleasant --- Don't other vendors offer solutions similar to IPA? I've heard other vendors talk about routing, queuing, and automating back office tasks and workflows. What's different about IPA?

Michael Finneran Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:26 PM

We've run into some new ROI elements for CBPA recently that can really have an impact. A vendor of voice picking systems (that's where you have workers in a warehouse get their picking instructions via voice commands over a wireless headset) described his solution and along with the obvious benefits like improved accuracy, faster training, increased productivity, but then popped some real surprises. The headsets allowed the workers to be more aware of their surroundings, and that reduced accidents (a worker is killed in the US every three days from a forklift accident). One key one was that they boosted their fulfillment accuracy from under 90% to over 99.8%. That 99.8% was a magic number because it made them a "preferred supplier" with some of their biggest customers (e.g. WalMart), which meant their trucks got to go to the head of the line for deliveries.

Now no one is worrying about getting hit with a forklift in a hospital or an insurance company, but what it does tell you is that if you look deeper into the business processes (and talk to the managers who are directly involved), you can also find much more subtle but vitally important benefits that can be used to justify CBPA.

Blair Pleasant Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:27 PM

This all sounds great, but it also sounds like a lot of work. How can the process of CBPA be made simpler for enterprises.

Rick Chin Posted: Wednesday, July 8, 7:03 AM

Typically, other offerings only address portions of the process, leaving the company with pockets of automation in between areas of manual tasks. In between the automated parts, the company loses visibility and work can get lost. IPA seeks to automate the entire process regardless of whether it involves two people & ten minutes or fifty people & ten weeks while providing up-to-date visibility regarding work status and progress.

IPA also associates phone and email communications with work. That might mean it uses communications to reach out to the customer or places a call or email when necessary. IPA could also start a new action or continue and existing one based on an email from a customer.

One other difference in IPA is the use of presence and skills to know who is available and send work to the most qualified person.

Rick Chin Posted: Wednesday, July 8, 7:24 AM

The CBPA methodology doesn’t have to be complex. Bringing process automation and management within the reach of “normal” businesses was a key goal with IPA, the first automation system to embrace CBPA. People find that the visual design environment of IPA makes creating process flows very interactive and intuitive.

However, I would say that analyzing a process and automating it takes some practice. The first few times you do it, your eyes begin to see process and activities with much more detail and decision points. This is why engaging a consulting firm that specializes in process automation is recommended for initial implementations. Once you become familiar with the way processes are automated, you can do them without assistance. Learning how to do it right the first time is well worth the minimal investment.

Of course, you can jump right in and do it yourself if you feel comfortable with those skills.

Once you get comfortable doing automation, you will start to see automation opportunities everywhere and the CBPA methodology allows you to automate things other solutions couldn’t handle.

Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

admin — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 14:00:11 GMT

Brenda Perea

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 10:54 AM

Joined: 12/11/2007
Posts: 6

Posted March 9, 2009

Brenda Perea--Why are gateways required in a Microsoft UC Solution?

NET--Gateways are needed to integrate with legacy networks and telephony equipment. Microsoft UC passes VoIP traffic between desktops without requiring any other modification to the corporate IP network. It does not, however, provide any connectivity to PBXs and/or external service provider networks. Its connectivity to IP PBXs and IP-based service providers is also limited to a small number of vendors and requires specific recent releases of those vendors’ products. Few if any companies, however, want to completely rip and replace their entire telecom infrastructure at one time. A Microsoft UC deployment is typically first implemented in a particular targeted area of the business where it will deliver the greatest ROI – and then rolled out to other areas in successive stages. Moreover, as providers compete with each other and offer different pricing incentives, the rules about which voice traffic goes where will likely change over time. Companies therefore find it prudent, if not and necessary, to implement a third-party VoIP solution that integrates Microsoft UC into existing non-Microsoft telecom infrastructure as a way to flexibly switch voice traffic originating from Microsoft UC users to multiple networks as required at any given time.

David Yedwab--What’s NET’s value proposition in the Microsoft OCS UC equation?

NET--Microsoft UC is a powerful platform for increasing staff productivity, improving responsiveness to business problems and opportunities, and reducing operating costs. But, the right gateway architecture is needed in order to fully realize those gains.

NET’s VX Series and Quintum Series switches and Gateways are significantly differentiated from commodity VoIP gateways in ways that make them particularly suitable for the challenges associated with Microsoft UC implementation. Key attributes of the VX Series solution include: Suitability for diverse telecom environments, remote office survivability, VoIP security and Active Directory integration. NET VX and Quintum Series switches provide many other capabilities that make them especially suitable for Microsoft UC deployments – including link quality management, support for consolidation of UM voice mailboxes, and music/message-on-hold functionality. In summary, NET’s VoIP switches and gateways minimize implementation challenges and enable companies to fully leverage Microsoft UC’s rich functionality for maximum business benefit.

Brenda Perea--Can you go into depth on the value prop differentiators?

NET--The VX Series’ Any-to-Any MultiPath architecture (along with its built-in SIP to SIP mediation) provides full connectivity between Microsoft UC users on an IP network and any other telecom infrastructure – including PBXs and IP PBXs – without requiring additional hardware or reconfiguration of existing devices. NET VX Series switches include built-in SIP survivability functionality that ensures continuity of basic calling functions on SIP phones in remote offices even in the event of an OCS failure – or in the event that IP network connectivity to a UC server in a central location fails. VX Series switches also implement a broad range of encryption protocols, including TLS for signaling security and SRTP for media security – as well as IPSec, SCIP, and MD5 Authorization. And unlike other hardware solutions that compromise performance when using encryption, VX Series switches encrypt at wire speed. VX Series switches allow programmable call control to be driven by telephony data from Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP servers. AD integration opens up a universe of possibilities for rules-based call routing – including the programming of failover scenarios that direct calls to users’ cell phones in the event that LAN/WAN connections to UC desktops are down. It also allows the VX switch to determine whether a call should be routed directly to a user’s phone or via an OCS Server to a UC desktop.

David Yedwab--What lessons did Avanade learn from its own OCS R2 deployment?

NET--Avanade learned that the projections for hard and soft cost savings appear to be pretty accurate. That network savings, travel displacement and other hard cost avoidance can be substantial. A roadmap to get to the end-state needs to be developed and organizational buy-in is essential.

Brenda Perea--What is your definition of UC?

NET--UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes. UC integrates real-time and non-real time communications with business processes and requirements based on presence capabilities, presenting a consistent unified user interface and experience across multiple devices and media types. In other words UC is communications integrated to optimize business processes. UC breaks down today’s silos of communications. Done right it’s really one application with a supporting rules engine that unites such diverse communications components as presence, messaging (i.e., IM, email, voice, video) and collaboration modes (i.e., voice, data, video telephony, A/V/Web conferencing and information sharing apps) with business processes, business applications and directories in a way that provides a common user experience regardless media type or device used be it hard phone, softphone or mobile.

David Yedwab--Including Avanade’s experiences, what’s the quickest most effective path to ROI in a UC deployment?

NET--In this economy the quickest route to ROI hinges on hard the cash savings associated with protecting, extending and leveraging your existing telecom investment while driving down telecom costs. SIP trunking (supported by OCS R2) provides businesses with a painless first step and a seamless migration path to VoIP. It enables businesses to leverage their bandwidth investments by sharing voice and data traffic. Businesses gain the cost savings and flexibility associated with VoIP without having to purchase a new telecom system. SIP trunking is a scalable and affordable alternative to traditional dial tone - offering local, long distance, toll free and international calling at very low rates. Putting Office Communicator (OC) clients on PCs will leverage VoIP to drive down local, long distance and cellular costs. Additionally, OCS LiveMeeting and A/V/Web conferencing capabilities drive away outsourced conferencing charges.

This doesn’t mean that companies should write off productivity gains. Far from it, staying nimble is especially important in this environment as companies are forced to compete with fewer resources. And where will companies get the best productivity ROI today? It’s in UC-BB – UC for business. That’s where you’re making UC an integral part of your collaboration strategy. It’s the concept of having context, presence and click to communicate embedded within your business processes. Now, communications-enabling a business processes is difficult because established practices, generally, are deeply entrenched, and changing them requires changing behavior. In some cases, it also requires changing the business process itself. If done well, however, it will lead to soft cost reductions, increased employee productivity and job satisfaction, tighter connections with customers, suppliers and partners, faster decision making and time to market, increased supply chain intimacy and competitive advantages.

Posted March 11, 2009

David Yedwab--I understand the need for gateways for connectivity to the PSTN and legacy gear. If I were trying to budget for a UC implementation, for about 1000 users across 5 locations with 5 legacy PBXes. What percentage of my OCS deployment budget needs to be set aside for NET or Quintum gateways?

Posted March 13, 2009

Art Rosenberg--It's not just Microsoft's UC solution that needs gateways. Any UC platform or communication application that starts to exploit IP Telephony, VoIP, and SIP connectivity will need gateways for the same reason. That is, person-to-person voice connectivity through the PSTN.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, June 23, 3:11 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

I'm still trying to understand some of the technologies needed for a total UC solution. How do you know when you need a gateway, and what should enterprises be looking for when selecting a gateway vendor and/or product?

Suresh Tatavarthy

Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 4:59 PM

Joined: 6/30/2009
Posts: 2

Good question on how to select a good gateway vendor and the product. A typical UC solution includes a client component, server components, and voice network that includes integration with PSTN and PBX systems. In the case of Microsoft OCS 2007 R2, the client is the Microsoft Office Communicator. There are several servers defined as server roles.

Microsoft OCS allows users to make and receive calls from the public switched telephony network (PSTN) through the use of gateways. Most enterprises have multi vendor, multi-generational PBX systems in their networks. Therefore, it is important that the gateway should be able to convert any protocol to any other protocol to protect the investments made in the voice networks instead of requiring to do a rip and replace. Besides, a good gateway should provide staged approach to migrating legacy PBX users to Microsoft UC.

With the divergent networks, dial plans can become very cumbersome. A good gateway should provide a centralized dial plan for the entire organization taking into account the different dialing restrictions that are inherent to global number formats, and specific vendor implementation requirements.

Security threats can cripple voice networks and other IP network nodes. A good gateway should offer high reliability and resiliency with features like high availability, load balancing, and security through encryption and firewall capabilities to thwart Denial of Service attacks. Microsoft requires TLS and SRTP for protecting signaling and media traffic. A gateway should be able to support these encryption technologies.

It should be expected that the IP networks may go down once in a while. When an IP network goes down, the branch office networks may get isolated. A good gateway should offer protection against IP failures by providing survivability features such as providing alternate routing/failover connectivity to PSTN and local phone services with registered SIP/Wifi phones.

Many enterprises often require to switch calls from one service provider to another in order to keep their long distance charges low. A good gateway can flexibly switch calls between service providers to provide least cost routing.

Enterprise users still conduct business using fax machines, and analog devices like postage meters, HVAC equipment, security systems, and other modem based devices. A right gateway provides a smooth transition to unified communications for these legacy devices.

Finally, only a vendor that has the range of equipment that meets every enterprise use from small business to large enterprise can offer one stop solution and reduces UC deployment project risks.

Suresh Tatavarthy

Posted: Tuesday, June 30, 5:40 PM

Joined: 6/30/2009
Posts: 2

Marty and David, here is an approximation. The answer should be very similar to the PSTN case Marty gave. Looking at your scenario, multiply the number of users by $400 for the OCS costs (same as given by Marty). Then add the VX costs (2 GW’s). The GWs for 1000 users assuming 1:10 ratio, cost of each GW is roughly $18K per node. Assuming High Availability, 2 GWs will cost about $36K. The cost of GWs will be roughly 9 – 10%.

Performance Metrics For "Experts" vs. "Agents"

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:38:55 GMT

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Saturday, August 15, 1:05 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

In a UC environment, particularly when mobile, customers may dynamically switch communication modalities for faster interactions or to exchange data. This will make "agent" UC performance metrics complex to compare. For "experts," who have other business priorities and more complex response options, how should such performance metrics be used in the first place?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, September 22, 10:44 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Although quite a number of people are interested in the posted topic, I notice that no one has yet commented on how to go about defining the metrics for "experts" vs. all the old metrics we have accumulated for "agents." This, of course, is a management rather than a technology issue and probably has not (yet) been tested in the real world of contact center "experts."

From a "customer experience" perspective, management does have to track the effectiveness (not just the performance efficiency) of "experts," directly or indirectly through "agents." However, mobility and UC will be key to involving "experts" no matter how the contact is initiated, person-to-person, person-to-process-to person, or directly by process-to-person CEBP) notifications.

In the latter instance, non-voice customer contacts can be based on any available experts choosing to respond when they can and, when there are several such "experts," work flow actions can be based on whoever gets there first. (Just like "dispatch!")

From the "customer experience" perspective, what is key is that the request is acknowledged immediately in a "personalized" way and followed up as soon as possible. With the increased use of mobile devices, the game is changing from "real-time" First Call Resolution to First Contact resolution and "As Soon As Possible" (ASAP) response, especially when information (not just voice conversation) needs to be exchanged.

Obviously, the choices can be affected by the contextual nature of the customer's request, but not every phone call is really "urgent" and with UC and presence, tradtional voice calls can now be effectively responded to in other practical ways.

Expert Agents and the Contact Center

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:36:58 GMT

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Monday, August 3, 2:33 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

The use of Expert Agents (knowledge agents or subject matter experts outside of the contact center) to provide information to contact center agents or directly to customers has been growing rapidly. But, there are many things enterprises should consider in order to best utilize the experts and to ensure that agents, experts, and customers are happy.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Monday, August 3, 2:34 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

The concept of using Expert Agents is great, but many companies are concerned about bombarding their experts with questions at all hours of the day. What are some best practices around scheduling/leveraging those experts?

Michael Kropidlowski

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 9:39 AM

Joined: 8/4/2009
Posts: 2

What makes the contact center so uniquely positioned to leverage expert agents is the concentration of performance optimization technologies already in use. They can complement a unified communication strategy and help the contact center effectively schedule knowledge workers across the enterprise, determine availability to support customer interactions, or monitor these interactions to drive improvements in customer care.

Workforce management for example, provides direct, real-time awareness of whether agents and expert agents are where managers have planned them to be. It allows for recalibrating the tasks allotted to agents based on how their presence and availability relates to the presence-state of the customers. Additionally, it provides a framework to direct specific types of customers towards specific agent.

And workforce management software creates a template for extending that practice to the rest of the enterprise and to other kinds of expert agents who perform similar kinds of allocated tasks that depend on real-time awareness of external contexts. And, workforce management plays a key role in scheduling these experts in short timeslots, based on expected call volumes, which helps reduce the overuse of knowledge workers who are still trying to do their “day job” - a big concern of any UC strategy leveraging expert agent.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 11:18 AM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

How do you handle the situation when agents utilize certain experts because they're knowledgeable or helpful, but then it overburdens the expert when the agent keeps relying on them?

Candace Berman

Posted: Thursday, August 6, 3:44 PM

Joined: 8/6/2009
Posts: 1

Companies can handle this issue in a variety of ways based on what makes the most sense for their business. Of course, without rules or processes in place, agents will escalate to experts they are familiar with or most comfortable with. This is what creates the situation of overburdening that you asked about. However, with the right workforce optimization tools and processes, organizations can determine which experts can address which specific types of situations and how often/for how many hours per day or week they should be made available to do so. Then, agents can see, using presence, who is available to handle certain escalations at a given time. This technology, and the associated processes, eliminates the risk of overburdening only those experts that agents prefer to reach out to over and over again and will give agents access to others who can help them in the same ways while keeping everyone's schedules and involvement in check.

Michael Kropidlowski

Posted: Friday, August 7, 11:12 AM

Joined: 8/4/2009
Posts: 2

When experts are configured, they are assigned a skill or set of skill(s) which is used to define their profile as an expert. When agents decide they need assistance from an expert from outside the contact center, they can search for experts with specific skill(s) that match the requirements for the customer interaction they are handling. The agents will then receive a list of “available” experts with the skill set(s) criteria they selected. Presence determines the expert’s availability. If the expert’s presence indicates that they are not available, they will not show up as a choice in the available expert list presented to the agent.

Additionally, agents are not able to directly contact experts. They are only able to select the experts who are available at the time of the request. This way, agents cannot overburden experts or rely on the same expert.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Sunday, August 9, 1:40 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Like many other things that are changing because of the Internet, the Web, and wireless mobility, access to "experts" may become simply a UC extension (via CEBP) to searching for information on a web site. That is really what people usually want first before they need to talk to someone about a business problem.

I like to call this kind of contact "contextual" because it is not simply a name or phone number that a user/customer may happen to know, nor is it necessarily anyone who happens to be "accessible" and "available" for a real-time voice connection. All that stuff belongs to the past of telephony when customers relied primarily on the telephone for fast information access and customer care issues. In today's world of Web search, online access, and mobile contacts, more practical options for both agents and experts are needed to support the potential flexibilities of "Customer UC."

Step one, as already mentioned, would be to identify the qualifications for the type of expert to be contacted. That kind of thing used to be done for years in legacy call center networks with Skills-Based Routing, except now it doesn't have to be just for a live call connection from a caller. The "context" for such a contact can be derived from a direct question, extracted from a messaging exchange (email, IM, etc.), or from reference information that is associated with an author, list of experts, authorized decision-maker, etc..

Step Two - If no "expert" is accessible and available within a minute or two, the expert contact with an agent can be extended as a real-time, "as soon as possible" connection set up (again, voice or text). With callers becoming more mobile, accessible, and multimodal, First Call Resolution, as with wired telephones, is no longer such a critical requirement for customer satisfaction. That need should be the contact initiator's (agent) decision based on customer need.

Step Three - The original agent doesn't necessarily have to be involved when an expert becomes available, and the response to the calling customer doesn't necessarily have to be a live voice callback. It can be a message contact to the customer. Customers just want an answer and, if necessary, they can "click-to-assistance" if they need further help.

The bottom line is that everyone involved in customer support activities should be exploiting the flexibilities and efficiencies of UC, including the customer, the agent, and the "expert."

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, August 10, 10:46 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

I love the whole concept of Expert Agents and have heard some great stories about their use. We have the technology, what we need to be sure to add is education from vendors to customers as to how to change the mind set away from silos of expertise to expertise for everyone. That is, it takes a while to get managers to understand and accept that the system will work, and that their experts won't be over used. We have the statistical tracking to be able to show this to them, but it is a bit of a leap of faith up front. We also need to be able to use those statistics to show if some kind of compensation from one part of the organization to the other needs to happen, if in fact, experts start to get used enough that their time is really impacted.

The point is that we have the tools and the benefits are potentially great, but we need to change mindset as well.

Laura DiSciullo

Posted: Tuesday, August 11, 8:43 AM

Joined: 5/11/2009
Posts: 2

The technology exists to manage resources effectively and fairly. And, operational reporting exists to validate the usage (or over usage) of expert resources (inside or outside of the contact center). However, Nancy has hit the nail on the head with the argument for breaking down silos between the contact center and the departments housing the "experts".

Why would the call center supervisor be adverse to a program intended to drive first contact resolution? One major concern is a loss of control over performance and outcomes of the experts and the impact on contact center performance metrics. Who will be held accountable for customer satisfaction? Without a clear process and aligned goals, it is unclear how responsibilities will be appropriately assigned and measured. A second fear is the quality of infomation provided and tenor of the delivery. While one can argue whether they are always effective, most contact centers have "scripts" for how conversations with customers are structured, what is said and what isn't, and so forth. How are the experts trained to deal with customers? And, is a method in place to ensure quality and consistency? And, how are those metrics measured across organizations?

Why would the departments owning the experts balk at the proposition of increasing customer satisfaction? One reason that has been discussed frequently is the time burden placed on individuals who already have full time jobs. I proffer that this issue is actually less important than determining the value created by using these experts with customers versus the value created by these individuals in their normal routines. Therefore, a company needs to be able to define and measure value creation. These metrics will most likely be very different from those in the call center. And, they may require the combination of information from various resources to create relevant data in ways not currently envisioned in the company's IT systems.

The old adage of the CRM world (It's people, process and technology) hold true. Relative to expert agents, the technology exists. Issues surrounding people and process need further definition.

Aleassa Schambers

Posted: Tuesday, August 11, 2:00 PM

Joined: 8/11/2009
Posts: 2

A couple of great points were raised in the last posts. Silos in technology and communication have long been a challenge for probably just about every organization. Unified communications tools and processes have come to fruition largely to address these obstacles and make it easier for improved communication and processes across the enterprise. And, in the contact center some of the tools already exist for breaking down silos between agents and expert/knowledge workers in the form of presence technology and collaboration tools. But as has been mentioned, even if you build it, will they come? The good news is the technology to allay many of the fears that experts have in being used as resources for the contact center already exists, such as workforce management for scheduling these experts to keep them from being overburdened.

The interesting thing though was one of the previous posts mentioned the use of metrics to define and measure value creation, which could provide the incentive/motivation to get experts more excited/more motivated about being an additional resource for customer interactions.

Performance management applications address this issue by allowing managers to continuously monitor, measure, and improve contact center business processes, as well as those that may extend into the enterprise. By providing scorecards and analysis that keep employees focused on the organization’s key performance indicators (KPIs) – in this case it may be first call resolution - performance management drives improvements across sales, collections, and customer service processes to help companies realize cross-functional alignment with strategic goals.

Performance management applications also enable a structured process through which a company can take steps to improve overall performance against key metrics. These applications can initiate and track actions automatically in response to an indication of a performance problem, thereby reducing reliance on supervisor and manager diligence. At the same time, executives can immediately see performance issues in their organization and track their resolution.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Thursday, August 13, 12:36 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Here is a practical way to look at UC for contact center applications. How will UC implementation be different for a contact center "agent" than for an "expert" working for the same company? What if the "expert" works for another organization?

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, August 25, 2:44 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Art:

Have you seen cases where this is applicable? It seems pretty dangerous in a customer service type of scenario. How can a company manage outside experts, and what happens if the information provided isn't accurate or useful? Is this theoretical, or are people actually doing this?

Aleassa Schambers

Posted: Thursday, August 27, 11:23 AM

Joined: 8/11/2009
Posts: 2

There could be some opportunities where this could be a viable option. If a company regularly works with a certain set of partners, they could federate with those partners and then be able to have the same visibility/UC functionality that the organization has internally.

One example of how this could be applied: an auto insurance company that works with the same windshield replacement company. They could federate and the contact center agent could easily access an expert at their autoglass company to have customer questions addressed perhaps about billing or scheduling, etc.

Laura DiSciullo

Posted: Thursday, August 27, 4:23 PM

Joined: 5/11/2009
Posts: 2

The ability for a company to manage the customer experience across brick and mortar, contact center, expert advisor or partner is the next wave of customer service. The "how" (even if not totally seamless) is available today. The question is the "what" is important to measure. And, based on these "whats", how should the experience be changed. Technologists have figured out how to measure and to aggregate. The winner in the next round will be the one who can determine what in the plethora of data can be used to create relevant information.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, September 1, 1:39 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

I totally agree, Laura. i think the big issue will also be control - as Don mentioned in the UCStrategies podcast about expert agents, the contact center manager doesn't want to lose or give up control, and if they're measured on speed of handling and responding to calls, they'll be even more reluctant to let calls go outside the contact center where they lose control. The change has to come from the top - beyond the contact center. This will require organization shifts, including new job roles, like Director of Customer Satisfaction.

Michael Barbagallo

Posted: Thursday, September 3, 6:25 PM

Joined: 9/3/2009
Posts: 1

The use of non-resident experts has been a common practice in the contact center outsourcing industry for years. In many cases the outsourcer will provide a frontline agent, fielding between 80% and 90% of the calls and then escalate the rest to experts. In the Pre-UC days, escalation normally took the form of a code in the ticket. Today it may be a request for help through a UC system.

Let’s take an insurance company as an example. The front line agent is more likely not located in the same country as the experts. While the agents maybe in India, the Philippines, or the South Africa, the experts may be in Harford, Charlottesville, or London. In the old days, the expert would pick a ticket from the queue and call the customer back. No one was on the line and there was not the sense of urgency that UC offers. Today, UC brings more rapid escalation and the experts loose a measure of control. Not only do experts have to manage SLA of processed insurance claims, but they keep being interrupted by the agents. Tension soon builds between the experts and agents.

So how do you keep the customer and the processor happy? The insurance company needs to make assisting the outsourcer part of the job description of the processor. And at the same time, the expert must be treated in the same way as the agent. That is, he or she cannot be given the choice of answering a call and the experts results must be measured. Of the flip-side, the expert’s time must be protected. They must be given uninterrupted time to compete their job. A company will run in to big issues if it employs UC to increase collaboration between agents and experts and does not employ some sort of workforce management tool to manage and protect the experts’ time.

The technology will help bring agents and experts closer together. But like all tools, without proper management, a company runs risks of it causing more headaches than it solves.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, September 4, 4:06 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Great insights, Michael. It sounds like in the pre-UC days, when the non-resident experts who called the customer back, the contact center would lose important information - it wouldn't be able to report on the interaction, record it, monitor it, etc. With the UC tools available today, the contact center manager would still be able to have a view into the experts' interactions with customers, which is very important. Reporting metrics, workforce management, recording - all of those things are needed for the expert agent.

When you say that the insurance company needs to make assisting the outsourcer part of the job description of the processor, it sounds like you're agreeing that companies will need to change their corporate culture. I think this will be easy with new hires and new companies, but for more established workers and companies, it will be challenging. Workforce management and optimization tools will be essential - especially for the experts who still need to focus on their regular jobs.

Don Van Doren

Posted: Tuesday, September 15, 7:27 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 1

There has been a lot of good discussion about this topic in this thread. To summarize, I feel there are three issues that have to be addressed: 1) Identify and keep current the skill sets of expertise throughout the enterprise. 2) Harness technology to fairly distribute contacts to appropriately skilled experts. 3) Establish a business culture in which experts to be tapped are willingly responsive and the contact center managers are willing to let them handle the calls.

The first, identifying the appropriate skills, is similar to the issue with contact center’s skills-based routing capabilities as Art pointed out, but it’s much more complex. In many cases, the expertise is more fluid and changing, and the challenging requirement is to keep that skills database current, especially to do so without extensive manual intervention by potential participants. Therefore, techniques to mine corporate information, publications, email exchanges, etc. will be important.

The second, technology challenges, is largely solvable with today’s systems, as Aleassa points out. But it requires enterprises to go beyond the straightforward map-and-measure-what-happens-only-in-the-center approach that most enterprises are currently doing. There are challenges in correctly establishing “available” times for outside experts, and in measuring their contributions. And more work is needed to automatically keep and use updated skills inventories. But implementing appropriate systems will enable both successfully using experts’ capabilities appropriately, and having them feeling good about it.

The third, the cultural issue, can be the biggest challenge, and Laura and Blair made some excellent points. Success requires that the enterprise value “customer intimacy”, and, appropriately, not all companies should embrace that value. (See Discipline of Market Leaders by Treacy and Wiersema.) Companies that have or acquire the appropriate culture should make sure that the way the contact center manager’s “success” is measured doesn’t penalize for “losing control of the call”.

In our consulting work at Vanguard Communications, we find that the first step is to get the culture correct. That has to start at the top of the enterprise. When that is in place, get the measurements and metrics correctly aligned with the new culture. Then, identifying the skills, setting up the schedules, and implementing processes can work well.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, September 29, 12:27 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Does anyone have any good examples of companies that have found ways to overcome the cultural and personnel issues related to expert agents?

steven michaels

Posted: Thursday, October 22, 1:06 PM

Joined: 10/22/2009
Posts: 1

Rich presence engine is not enough to give you a robust method of using expert knowledge.When coupled with attribute based routing tool ,and one that will load balance the use of any one expert, will allow you to the best use of resources. Users may be listed by name or by skill depending on the needs and wants of the enterprise.Adaptive Engineering offers this product as well as including a collaberation tool all in a secure,enterprise grade product

Who in the Enterprise Supports Different End Users UC Needs?

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:29:31 GMT

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, July 21, 12:46 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

While UC network infrastructures, application integrations, and implementation and support costs are very important to IT management planning, they also need to know what technologies different end users involved in high-value business processes require to perform their jobs most efficiently and effectively. Who in the organization will represent the selective UC technology needs of specific end users inside an organization?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Thursday, July 23, 9:22 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I should qualify the "WHO" in the enterprise as being one (or more) of the following:

- Business Managers

- Communication Application IT Management

- Business Application IT Management

- Individual End Users

- All of the above

- Other

What do you think? Which of the above will be most available or knowledgable to be involved?

Dave Michels

Posted: Friday, July 31, 11:17 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

I don't think it will be a centralized group any more. Telecom has always been centralized because of the PBX. IT was always centralized because of the glass room. When I was an IT Director at GE, we policed things pretty good. We had to worry about data base integrity, off site backups, disaster recovery, etc. We slowed things down. I imagine groups today will just go find a cloud service and be done with it. I see the same thing with voice. Hosted solutions, APIs, companies like Twilio, wireless solutions, etc. I think organizations will have a real tough time trying to keep UC and voice projects centralized moving forward.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Sunday, August 2, 10:02 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Dave,

I think you are right on about technology decentralization, i.e., wired and wireless networks, business process applications software, mobile endpoint devices, etc. Mobility will also drive hosted application services for both business users and consumers. But I think that the bottom line for control of who will use what UC technologies will come from two sources - business management, that will require operational flexible connectivity and interoperability away from a wired desktop for their business processes, and the individual end users, who will decide what devices and software applications they will use when away from an office desktop.

IT management's role will be to match these two sources of requirements and provide cost-effective technology options to support such needs. As I have pointed out many times, UC flexibility is not merely required to support internal business users, but must also support key external end users who are involved in a high-value business process. That means business partners and customers (consumers) who contribute to the "human latency" in the performance of a business process. Customers and customer-facing staff, in particular, need UC support because they are the key to revenue generation and achieving business objectives, as opposed to simply reducing costs.

So, how do we represent those two user constituencies, business process management and individual end users, in defining operational UC needs for IT to implement and support one way or another?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, August 7, 10:19 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

What can and should still be centralized is for business process call and message routing to a non-specific recipient ("person-to-process-to-person"), as opposed to a direct "person-to-person" contacts. That applies to both customer contacts as well as internal suppport activities, e.g., IT "Help Desk" functions. With UC presence, these can all be more efficiently handled by whoever is qualified and available (Skills-based routing) and not limited to just conversational voice connections. Any form of contact that satisfies both parties can be used. With increasing "smart-phone"mobile accessibility and various flavors of messaging, what I have labeled as "as soon as possible" (ASAP) communications will be very acceptable in most business process situations.

David Zimmer

Posted: Thursday, August 13, 9:39 AM

Joined: 12/17/2008
Posts: 1

The question on the table is "Who will represent the user's requirements." I believe the obvious answer is "the users." I believe the users are speaking, but in many cases, no one is listening. Over the years of seeing technology deployed and used, I have seen some interesting applications of the features. Some users use the software and hardware in ways never imaginged by the creators. That fact speaks more to the ingenuity of the users than the creativeness of the developers. Therefore, the users will determine how they will use UC technology. In order for that to happen, UC facilities need to be available.

I believe the bigger problems lies in the lack of process developing requirements for the system. In my recent article, I defined a requirements gathering concept called IT Cube - Six Perspectives to Project Requirements. I published an artilce similar to it focused more toward the UC industry and called it Will the REAL DefinitionS of UC Stand Up: 6 Perspectives For A Single Definition.

In both articles, I discussed the six perspectives of any particular product or service.

To answer the question of who will reperesent the end users of UC, the answer is two-fold: the users must represent themselves and the business analysts must collect, analyze and collate the requirements into solution sets to let the users create their final solutions

The users must represent themselves. The beauty of UC is its ugliness: flexibility. Because of the many features involved in UC, users will adapt it for their use. For the mobile person, he will make more use of the mobility features. For the more stationary person, she will make more use of the stationary features. For the support staff, though, the variety of resulting solutions becomes a nightmare (different topic for a different time).

For example, email still is an important communication medium. For a mobile person, the use of a smartphone with a decent keyboard is a life-saver. But as a stationary person, the dinky QWERTY keyboard on the smartphone won't cut it, therefore, they will use the more robust and feature-rich email components.

The users will create the solution they need for their particular requirements. They need the building blocks and mortar to tie together. Fortunately, it is easier these days than the days of yore from the user's perspective to complete the process.

Of course, that makes it more difficult for the technology staff to create and support. They need to know what to supply and then learn how users will create the solution. The tech staff may be proactive and put together solutions that meet specific user groups, which points back to the requirements of the systems and the lack of requirements gathering processes.

For many companies, I find gathering requirements is a race to implementation, not a process with methodical steps involved. Fortunately, with the adoption of industry standards such as

Project Management Institute 's 42 processes (PMBOK v4),
International Institute of Business Analysis (BABOK v2), and
IT Infrastructure Libraries and IT Service Management,

we can put structure into the requirements gathering process with resulting benefits such as measureability, clarity, and requirements/functionaly grouping.

With the proper processes, business analysts can gather the requirements for the system. The end users represent their needs and requirements, which the analyst must document. From the gathered requirements, groupings of end users will emerge so packaged, supportable solutions can be delivered.

With that said, analysts must consider the other perspectives mentioned in the UC Cube article so their requirements can be met such as ROI, business justification, alignment with business initiatives and strategies, etc. No perspective exists in a vacuum, therefore, the final result must be a balancing act distilling all the viewpoints into something tangible and beneficial to the organization.

So, to answer the question "who will represent the users' needs," the answer is clear: the users themselves first and foremost and the business analyst is responsible for putting them in a form that can be implemented.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Monday, September 28, 9:43 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

To confirm your view about UC implementation planning responsibilities, I have started to see pundits, analysts and consultants increasingly warn IT management NOT to second-guess end user needs and requirements for telephony and UC technologies, especially when planning to replace legacy business telephone systems. One of the biggest mistakes IT/Telecom can make is to try to select new technology without doing any "homework." (And not just comparing pricing costs!) That "homework" is to ask business management what their current communications-based business problems are and what their new operational business process requirements will be in light of UC capabilities. If they don't have any answers yet, its time to find out more before making infrastructure implementation decisions, including the use of hosted services vs. traditional technology ownership, and the growing role of wireless mobile devices in business contacts.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, October 30, 9:48 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I want to call your attention to the interesting white paper by Blair Pleasant, highlighting the end user's perspective of benefits from unified messaging (UM) features. It does a good job of summarizing and confirming much of what we expect users, who have access to UM capabilities, to say (after the fact). They will then be able to reportfrom experience more efficient and flexible messaging capabilities, including UC-based "click-to-call" benefits such as responding to a message with a "call back."

https://ucstrategies.com/white-papers/end-user-insights-the-real-value-of-unified-messaging.aspx

The study specifically noted that UM benefits will apply to customers as well as customer-facing internal staff, reinforcing the need to view UM and UC as important to direct customer interaction activities (contact center), or what I call "Customer UC." This view expands traditional emphasis on inbound customer person-to-person telephone contacts to include inbound messaging and outbound process-to-person messaging contacts and time-sensitive notifications. The latter is based on integration with business process self-service applications and what is now being lebeled as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP).

CEBP, coupled with the rapid consumer adoption of multi-modal mobile "smart-phones," will explode the use of UM capabilities as an integral part of both enterprise UC for internal use, as well as for "Customer UC" interactions. However, this all begs the original question posed in this Forum, who in the enterprise will be representing the different end user needs (internal staff, customers, business partners) and priorities for UC (and UM) for implementation planning? Will it be line-of-business management, IT management, individual end users, or all of the above?

If all of the above, how should you orchestrate their involvement and who should be in charge?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, December 1, 11:46 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

End users can’t always speak for themselves. They may know what their problems are, but may not know how best to remedy them.

It is at this point they will need the help of “experts” who know what solutions are available and how best to utilize them.

Read this piece about how IT can help end users move forward in defining their UC solution needs, while also helping to justify their implementation

Industry Changes Impact UC

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:25:31 GMT

Brenda Perea

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:33 AM

Joined: 12/11/2007
Posts: 6

VoiceCon UC eWeekly is A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UCStrategies.com

"Is it possible that UC will become widely used, but not the profit-making machine some envisioned at the start?"

Allan Sulkin

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:39 AM

Joined: 7/24/2009
Posts: 1

Marty, Just read your Voicecon eWeekly UC piece , and I agree totally that the Nortel UC MCS 5100 solution is definitely stronger than what Avaya kluges together. I think that Avaya, however, may decide to keep its own platform in place if only due to internal organization politics. It would be difficult for Avaya to port its UC capabilities to Nortel product, because too much of the software is embedded in Aura Communications Manager code, but it could be done over time. Sometimes companies make the wrong decision, and Avaya has shown to be an expert at this. It took a long time to develop and market Modular Messaging to replace the Audix and Octel platforms, and it may take as long to integrate the Avaya and Nortel UC offerings.

I am also wondering how Avaya plans to generate significant revenues from its UC platform, if many of the feature-specific station user license fees are given away free as part of its Enterprise edition for Aura CM or for only $50 per user with Standard edition. I don't think that UC, by itself, will be a major revenue generator for Avaya or others when the license fees are bundled with the generic software package. It appears that many UC capabilities will become standard at no additional cost to the customer. The application servers, third party equipment, won't generate much in way of profit. Blackberry would profit more from mobile applications. Is it possible that UC will become widely used, but not the profit-making machine some envisioned at the start? And what happens if Google Wave takes off?

Marty Parker

Posted: Friday, July 24, 11:59 AM

Joined: 7/24/2009
Posts: 1

Hi Allan,Thanks for your message. I think the eWeekly article will be posted on NoJitter tomorrow, so we can share this dialog with others.

You are exactly right on the three issue you raise below. The eWeekly is suggesting how New Avaya “could” act, and avoided comments on past acquistions. It is a new executive team, so want to give them the benefit of the doubt; however, the killer behavior exists in Avaya Labs, who can choose whether to play nice, getting the best of the two portfolios, or to play badly, making up all the reasons this can’t be done.

Yes, you’re right that Avaya will be tempted just to keep their own conferencing portfolio, Meeting Exchange (even the name shows little innovation), but the Nortel MCS/Diamondware/Web.alive suite, with Microsoft and IBM integrations, is much further along. If there are actually open, standards based products at Avaya, there is no reason not to do this. All of Avaya’s Meeting Exchange products were acquired, so there is almost no dependency on Communication Manager or on the management suite.

ACE is another question. Again, it is better in my opinion, but the Avaya engineers and product managers will likely say that Avaya Application Enablement Server, which is now buried in Aura, already has all the needed integrations to Communications Manager. Of course, they will be missing the point; for UC, the important integration is to the rest of the technology stack, especially applications on desktops and mobile devices, and ACE is way ahead on that.

Lastly, as to whether UC can make a difference, given Avaya’s packaging and approach, well, that’s the entire point. If they choose just to keep selling PBXs, their supposed 25% share will fall back to 10%, just like ATT/Lucent’s 35% share dwindled when those parent companies thought they had better technology and customers would not embrace upstarts with IP Telephony architectures.

The new spending is on the UC elements. If Avaya chooses to bundle those with Communication Manager so as to pump up the “PBX” share, rather than focusing on share of the new spending, they will be sorely disappointed in 3 – 5 years’ time. We’ll see.

Thanks for sharing your always valuable perspective.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, July 24, 2:43 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Allan: I think the revenue from UC will come not so much from the UC products and licenses themselves, but from value added capabilities like application integration, vertical applications, professional services, etc. Professional services will be key - especially when we start getting more into CEBP or business process integration with UC. The call control vendors (eg switch vendors) will need to offer vertical applications that they can charge a premium for, since call control will be a commodity. Things like voice mail and UM are being priced so low there's not much money to be made from that, so the vendors will need to get creative and find the value add. This is also where they can differentiate themselves from each other and the likes of Microsoft.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Friday, July 24, 6:55 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Blair, I agree with you on where the real revenue-generating action will take place.

One way to look at that is going to be a shift from traditional "person-to-person" contacts to either "process-to-person" contacts (personalized,application-initiated notifications or CEBP) or "person-to-process-to-person" contacts (skills-based/availability routing). These contact activities can be heavily exploited by consumer customers and tied directly to revenue-generating, multi-modal experience benefits rather than simply personal time productivity. What will be needed, howver, is for the enterprise to be able to selectively support all aspects of UC flexibility for all end users, including those who are not within the organization, such as business partners and customers.

Dan Aronson

Posted: Monday, August 3, 6:48 AM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

This would be a more interesting conversation if you segmented out the different layers of the supply chain you are referring to when discussing whether or not UC is going to massively or only mildly profitable. However, for those of us working in the UC industry's trenches, the "profitability trail" is actually quite easy to follow on any level.

As long as technology trends in an upward spiral (as it has forever) it will always be in need of refreshing. Therefore, those manufactures of UC that either hold technological industry leadership positions or come to market with new, disruptive technologies (game-changers) will always do well. In other words, I wouldn't worry about Cisco, Polycom, or Sagem-Interstar going away anytime soon. Those, however, that fail to see new technologies on the horizon and/or fail to begin developing products and services to meet those new technologies will certain fail (see Nortel, Captaris).

However, the best barometer for measuring the UC industry’s wellbeing is really seen at the VAR level. The numbers of healthy and/or growing UC VAR's is tremendous, and their profitability can linked to three major practices. First, the health and wellbeing of their Level I vendors. These typically consist of their IPT vendor(s) plus one or two other complimentary technological leaders such as Microsoft, EMC, HP, etc. Next, all UC manufacturers have developed ecosystems wherein their Technology Partners are encouraged to develop UC add-on applications to fill the gaps in functionality that they themselves do not have the expertise and/or bandwith to create. And seeing the major source of profitability these applications represent, most have even put together programs that incent resellers to bundle applications with their basic UC offerings. This keeps their channel partners in the black and happy. And yes Blair, Fax-over-IP is one of those UC applications frequently included in these bundles. As for Professional Services being a source of profit, well, is that really a revelation? Ask any UC VAR what the single most profitable thing they sell is and they will all, without exception, tell you that it is professional services hours.

So the answer to your question is a resounding yes. Like anything else done right, UC is and will continue to be wildly profitable.

Criteria for Selecting a Vendor

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:20:49 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Tuesday, October 20, 5:20 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

There are many factors to be weighed when selecting a primary vendor for any UC implementation.

Anonymous

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 9:48 AM

I’m evaluating a new UC solution for my organization and have a few questions regarding how heavily vendor performance should be weighed against product performance. For instance, with the persistent bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions in Telecommunications marketplace, how much should I worry about the financial track record a vendor? After all, it seems the troubled ones will just be acquired by a larger competitor or “rescued” by some Venture firm.

RN Birge

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 10:24 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Even if a struggling company is acquired by an (arguably) stronger one, there are still major business disruptions created for the 1-3 years that it can take to assimilate the acquired company. And with the enormous debt some companies are taking on, it will be a long time – if ever – before they can “sell their way out”.

Robyn Thompson

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 10:26 AM

Joined: 10/5/2009
Posts: 4

To play devil’s advocate, some companies have a good track record of successfully assimilating technology & personnel. Aastra has made several acquisitions in the last 4 years and has a provided investment protection for customers by creating applications with open standards that can enhance existing solutions rather than forcing an immediate conversion.

Pam Avila

Posted: Friday, October 23, 9:41 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Given that some of the long-recognized “names” in the industry are in trouble, it seems there are no sure bets. I wonder if it is really riskier to go with a lesser known vendor if they have a solution that meets the customer's needs?

RN Birge

Posted: Friday, October 23, 11:42 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Brand recognition can be as a result of large market share, but it could also be the result of a huge marketing budget. Look for vendors that invest in R&D and customer satisfaction rather than simply marketing. One great measure is of a vendor’s track record is to talk to their customers.

Tod Rehner

Posted: Friday, October 23, 1:04 PM

Joined: 10/23/2009
Posts: 1

My CIO won’t consider a vendor unless they are highly rated by industry analyst firms. How much weight do other companies place on these independent evaluations?

Anonymous

Posted: Tuesday, October 27, 2:42 PM

If you’re going to include industry analyst reports as part of your evaluation, ensure that you have the research in context (not simply a single quote). Also, look at research from more than one firm as they each have different core competencies. Look at their comments in relation to your specific needs rather than in general; concentrate on trends rather than absolutes.

RN Birge

Posted: Thursday, October 29, 10:27 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

I totally agree with Anonymous about taking the research in context. This has been such a problem that even a Gartner analyst recently blogged about it. It’s just a tool, Gartner may (and often does) recommend vendors that are not in the Leader column and as the aforementioned Gartner analyst points out “an MQ reflects only a tiny percentage of what an analyst actually knows about the vendor.” One final point to think about it…last year Gartner had Nortel in the Leaders quadrant – enterprise customers need to do their own due diligence on criteria that is important to them!

RN Birge

Posted: Tuesday, December 8, 11:42 AM

Joined: 10/21/2009
Posts: 4

Excellent post by Dave Michels "Unified Communications: Through the Magic (Quadrant) Glass" on Gartner's Magic Quadrants.

The Changing Business Model

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:17:42 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:03 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

The transition to professional services and solutions is a major undertaking!

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:08 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

One of the most positive aspects of unified communications, from my point of view, is that it is forcing the reseller community – VARs, Integrators, Telecom Dealers, etc. – to stop selling features and benefits and begin focusing on customers’ specific business needs and problems. The shift in sales strategy seems to be a tough one for many reseller organizations (yes, change is always hard), but I keep hearing from individual resellers that the shift is bringing rewards beyond their expectations. So I’m curious… how hard is it to get a sales staff to change? How long is it taking before a company sees positive results? What has been the success level with the consultative selling strategy?

Bill Vollerthum

Posted: Monday, July 13, 4:16 PM

Joined: 1/18/2007
Posts: 1

Making the transition from product driven sales to a practice that focuses on professional services and solutions is a major undertaking. The brutal economy coupled with shrinking product margins from vendors is making the change a “MUST” for any company who wants to survive beyond 2009. Too many companies today, are still depending on meeting their revenue goals by pushing products. The problem is that formula no longer works!

With every capital investment coming under intense scrutiny these days, demonstrating how your solution is going to bolster worker productivity, drive down costs, and improve business outcomes is essential for making the sale. Sales professionals who cannot present a justifiable ROI and deliver a strong technical presence,will fail miserably. Unfortunately, most sales people are inept and incapable of selling in this manner.As such, the worst recession since the Great Depression is going to send many sales professionals to the unemployment line.

Be advised, making the transition to a company focused on delivering pro services and solutions will require a complete overhaul of your sales team. Your employee morale will suffer, financial performance will suffer temporarily, and you’ll experience resignations from your sales team. This fallout should be expected. Most sales professionals who’ve thrived in the past as product peddlers, will not be able to make the change. However, it is absolutely necessary to ensure any chance of survivability in today’s economy. Those companies who fail to act or equivocate with their decision to change will face certain extinction. Don’t expect immediate gratification when making the transition. Patience, conviction to your vision, intense training, mentoring, and periodic performance assessments will be necessary. If you have the intestinal fortitude to make this radical change, prepare for at least a 24 month overhaul process. The corollary will be having a sales team that can effectively compete for larger and more profitable business opportunities. If you have the intestinal fortitude to make this radical change, prepare for at least a 24 month overhaul process. If you can remain financially afloat during this restructure, you’ll be rewarded with larger and more profitable sales. Moreover, you’ll become a sustaining resource and trusted advisor for your customer.

Channel Members - You Need a Name

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:15:01 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 3:20 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

As voice, data, video, and mobility converged, the "reseller" channel began experiencing its own "convergence". Data VARs, telecom dealers and systems integrators began selling converged solutions - creating a new group within the "reseller" channel. But what do we call them?

Pam Avila

Posted: Wednesday, August 5, 3:39 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

For a number of years, I've been writing and speaking about the data VARS, telecom dealers and systems integrators who have been changing their traditional business models and moving forward into a new space, offering their customers solutions that were the result of the convergence of voice, data, video and mobility. Some in this group have even moved beyond basic "convergence" (IP-PBX, for example) to offer unified communications solutions.

Long story short, I'm looking for a name for this group of data VARS, telecom dealers and systems integrators because I'm tired of saying or typing "data VARS, telecom dealers and systems integrators" over and over. I think the name should reflect how a convergence/UC data VAR, telecom dealer, or systems integrator wants to be viewed by their customers, not by the industry itself. I can't call them "resellers" because in no way, shape or form does that term reflect what members of this group actually do or the value that they bring to their customers.

Several of us talked and thought "Solutions Integrator" seemed to reflect what these special "resellers" do. It might be a good name, but "SI" already has a different meaning in our industry. Then I thought of "Business Solutions Provider" ("BSP") because I believe that therein lies the value that this group of "resellers" brings to their customers. But the correct terminology or name is not up to me - I'm no longer a systems integrator. So what's the name for this special group of data VARS, telecom dealers and systems integrators? Help!!!!!!!

Dave Michels

Posted: Thursday, August 6, 11:03 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

I never know what the real difference is between VAR, Reseller, Systems Integrator, whatever. They all have different meanings to different people and thus are effectively meaningless terms.

We don't need another acronym.

I suggest UC Provider or (UCP if you must). The provider, whether it be a dealer, service, or even manufacturer is responsible for delivering UC. Today, terms need to be very broad as nothing adheres to models anymore. Retailers are wholesalers, resellers are manufactuers, customers and vendors and sometimes competitors. I have no idea what Amazon is anymore.

UC Providers provide UC solutions - it doesn't matter if their business card says consultant, manufactuer, or dealer. Some manufacturers have professional services divisions, some don't. It gets even worse with badges on the products... Mitel sells IBM servers, IBM sells Aastra Services.

Pam Avila

Posted: Friday, August 7, 11:46 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Dave - I think you're missing the point here. There is a channel out there that vendors depend on to get their products into the hands of the end-user (i.e. generate revenue for the vendors and the companies in the channel). Unfortunately, now that the telecom, data, video, and mobility industries have converged in one fashion or another, we are left with the problem of describing in a few words, those companies in the "channel". Why do we need to have a name for them? Because we/I need to talk about them.

To call them "the channel" is not good enough because in our industries there are actually a number of distribution channels - resellers, retail, service providers, etc. - in the food chain.

And it is demeaning to categorize as simply "resellers" the VARs, telecom dealers and systems integrators who are now providing their customers with "converged" solutions (their term, not mine) by addressing business problems. It's similar to calling an IT manager a technician, when clearly his knowledge, experience and duties have moved him far beyond being simply a "technician".

Do the voice and data industries - and now this converged industry - have too many acronyms? Heck yes! Nevertheless, we need a respectful term for the channel that is ultimately going to grow this industry - you know, those VARs, telecom dealers and systems integrators who have moved off of their traditional business models and are changing the way they sell. And to term them UC Providers is selling them short and not understanding the channel at all. As one of them explained to me the other day, they do not just sell "UC". Sometimes they provide network management, or VoIP, or security because that is what the customer needs. UC may be a part of the solutions that they provide to their customers, but sometimes it may not be. As this former "telecom dealer" explained, they've been providing elements of UC for years - but not as "UC"..... as solutions to businss needs. So forget "UC" in the name.

Bottom line - I'm tired of typing "VARs, telecom dealers and systems integrators" every time I need to mention this special channel. We're looking for a name!

Dave Michels

Posted: Friday, August 7, 1:14 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

I think we are basically saying the same thing. You can't find your word, because it doesn't and won't exist. Descriptors like you seek require a reasonable mature model that people can relate to.

When I was young, I used to buy shoes at the shoe store. Everyone knew what was meant by a shoe store. The model was understood. They had those funny looking chairs with mirrors on them. They were not too big, and often didn't have the right size in stock but could get it.

But today, the shoe store has lots of competition. I can buy shoes a big box store (DSW), a warehouse store (Costco), a specialty store (REI), or online in any of those permutations (zappos, overstock, REI). Each of these locations has their own definition of value.That's just the tip of the iceberg, I could go to department stores or factory outlets and everything in between. Is a factory outlet part of the channel?

You want a word or label for all of these. It doesn't exist, the days of the "shoe store" are gone. Telecom and High tech are even worse because of the rebranding. My monitor says Dell, but are they the manufacturer or reseller? Depends who you ask (I don't think they make monitors). Mitel resells Mitel Network Services (MPLS, SIP, etc.), but they resell them through the channel and directly - are they a manufactuer or reseller or distributor?

Even the term "channel" is becoming confused. Is the Amazon Kindle or better yet, the Kindle books sold through the channel? I don't know any more.Amazon creates the Kindle book, but they don't write the content. Does value ad include modification of the product into a new product or is that more systems integration?

I think your attempts to find or create a label are in vain. UC is far too young and too slippery for a model to form and take hold, the dynamics of the industry are ... well dynamic. Instead we have to be speak very clearly about roles rather than titles. The shoe provider or reseller that I worked with specilizes in selection (their value). The good news is confusion increases the need for experts.

What Infrastructure

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:11:11 GMT

Dave Michels

Posted: Tuesday, October 27, 9:56 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

Today Amazon lowered their price for their EC2 services.

Is everything going to go to the cloud? Mitel, Avaya are certifying their products for virtualized servers. Trunks are going SIP. Does it make sense to put a phone system onsite any more?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Wednesday, October 28, 8:36 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

Good question!

Quick answer.

Given the increasing role of both user mobility and teleworking, the fact that IP Telephony has become software-based, network-independent (wired,wireless), and endpoint-device independent, there is little reason to keep enterprise telephone systems hardware-oriented and premise-based. Throw in the fact that IP telephony is becoming a part of an "open" UC solution that must encompass the needs of individual end users both within and outside of an organization (business partners, customers), the different communication application servers should eventually all be part of the same interoperable "virtual" infrastructure.

So, what's the benefit of keeping things the same as in the past?

How do I ease into UC?

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:09:34 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 9:46 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

My company has several business issues that, it would appear, could be resolved with some of the UC solutions that I’ve been exploring. We’re concerned about the overall cost to implement some of these solutions and we already have a lot of infrastructure and legacy equipment in place. Would we have to change out everything that we have now or is there a way for us to ease into unified communications solutions?

Robyn Thompson

Posted: Wednesday, October 21, 10:28 AM

Joined: 10/5/2009
Posts: 4

Many companies have made a significant investment in infrastructure and endpoints and it’s not practical to “rip and replace” everything at once. That’s why the concept of Self-Paced Migration is attractive to many companies. This involves creating a UC overlay on top of your existing PBX and over time and moving gradually to a totally IP solution as budgets allow.

Pam Avila

Posted: Friday, October 23, 9:37 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

OK, I get the benefits of a migration strategy for a company. Then what are we talking about from a timing perspective and is there somewhere that is a good place to start? How should a businss prioritize the steps that they’re going to take?

Robyn Thompson

Posted: Friday, October 23, 11:33 AM

Joined: 10/5/2009
Posts: 4

Look at where UC can have the most impact in the company and/or where there is the biggest need. Here’s a sample rollout that we've used at Aastra:

In the first stage the UC solution is implemented as an overlay to existing systems and provides services to teleworkers, small branches and road warriors. It also provides a unified dial plan and UC features such as desktop integration and fixed mobile convergence for high priority users, regardless of their current PBX system.
The second phase handles VoIP migration of sites with obsolete systems as these will yield significant productivity improvements as well as important cost reductions and business continuity improvements.
The third phase continues the migration with the next set of highest priority sites as defined by the customers overall migration plan.
The final phase consists of migration of the largest and/or lower priority sites to complete the migration.

Robyn Thompson

Posted: Tuesday, December 1, 12:49 PM

Joined: 10/5/2009
Posts: 4

There's a nice article by Art Rosenberg on this site outlining steps for a CIO to help his organization migrate to UC

Business Value of UC

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:03:58 GMT

Brenda Perea

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 12:18 PM

Joined: 12/11/2007
Posts: 6

Samantha

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 12:34 PM

Do you agree with some of these stats? Are we using BVI in our discussions?
Thanks Samantha

According to a T3i Group primary research study of nearly 300 business decision-makers, the percentage of enterprises (businesses with 500 or more employees) reporting bottom-line gains from UC is expected to jump significantly this year.

The study, entitled: InfoTrack for Unified Communications: The Business Value of UC, used survey results to develop a “Business Value Index” (BVI) to determine quantitatively which market segments were farther ahead in achieving business value from UC apps. Among enterprises, the percent beginning to achieve measurable business value is projected to jump from 14% in 2008 to 43% in 2009. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are expecting a smaller increase, from 9% to 22%.

This research also compares the BVI of companies based on their preferred vendor of UC applications. The vendors whose users had the highest BVI were Microsoft, IBM and Cisco.

Marty Parker

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 12:38 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

Hi, Samantha,

Impossible to know whether to agree or not, since there is no definition of BVI in the message.

I did some digging and find that my long-time analyst friend, Terry White, is the creator of the BVI metric. It seems to be a growing technique among analyst firms to define leaders and laggards then assign probabilities to their future actions. In the attached TOC of the study, it seems that companies with a higher BVI are more likely to increase their UC spending (or, restating the axiom: high ROI drives more investment…).

I have not talked with Terry about this yet, but Russell said that this was an assessment of the value obtained from UC investments. Perhaps Terry will share the methodology or algorithm and then it will be possible to say whether there’s agreement or not. If there is, then it may be worth supporting the concept to help customers that don’t like “ROI” to have another way to justify UC investments.

Anyway, there’s a response, for now.

Thanks, Samantha, for asking.

All the best

Michael Finneran

Posted: Thursday, July 9, 11:56 AM

Joined: 3/21/2008
Posts: 3

So can we get CXOs to invest in UC on this basis? IT seems the things that are selling this year are ones that can show a clear ROI like reductions in conferencing service costs, reduction in long distance fees and the like.

Should we be pitching productivity gains as the front line justification or the "icing on the cake"?

Jim Barker

Posted: Thursday, July 23, 2:30 AM

Joined: 5/25/2009
Posts: 1

We have seen more success in positioning UC and gaining acceptance from our business clients using the ROI model than anything else. We do, however, service a smaller business - usually one with 25 to 500 employees. You can see more about what worked for us at www.unified360.com/blogs.

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, August 3, 9:43 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

OK - pretend that I'm a customer. Really, how can I get the financial benefits of UC that I was trying to achieve when we deployed it?

Rick Chin

Posted: Monday, August 3, 9:48 AM

Joined: 4/20/2009
Posts: 5

Everyone wants to receive some financial benefit from deploying UC since you’re taking multiple activities and centralizing them into your communications system. Perhaps you gain a little more value by enabling smartphones to listen and forward voice mail, slightly increasing the time savings and lowering response times. However, after that, where are the financial benefits?

Could you justify an upgrade or migration based on those productivity gains? The benefits of UC are real, but quantifying the impact is a tough job. It means measuring aspects of work that we consider insignificant or somewhat intangible.

With today’s focus on quick results and impact on the bottom line, features that contribute more directly to the work process are more valuable, which brings us to what should become UC’s killer app: business process automation.

Think about this: every business could streamline work better. Most businesses can’t afford to implement the current crop of business process automation and management suites. They’re very expensive, hard to program, and difficult to change as business changes. They also require a bunch of extra systems and layers in your infrastructure and they only offer partial visibility into the business process. Lastly, they don’t integrate communications at all, so your UC investment is no better off.

Imagine instead if business process automation was part of your UC applications. It would be ubiquitous, integrated, easy to setup and personalize, connected to your voice and data infrastructure, and reasonable in price.

Let’s say you process documents (accounts payable, sales orders, insurance claims, medical records). We’ll divide those documents into two groups, easy and hard. Easy documents go through the processes without challenge (representing the fastest a document can be processed) and hard documents go through the processes needing additional clarification and supervisor review or approval. Naturally, these processes for hard documents require more time and resources to complete.

(These are example numbers that are based off similar workflows for actual companies)

What the process looks like before automation: 100 documents, 19 steps, 100 reviewed by hand, 40% (40) documents are escalated for review and sign-off by a supervisor. Time for the easy file: 5 minutes. Time for a difficult file: 13 minutes. Total work hours: 13. Average cost per document handled: $3.16

The same process after automation: 100 documents, 16 steps, 80 auto-approved, 20 require further review, 40% (5) documents are escalated for review and sign-off by a supervisor. Time for the easy file: 2.3 minutes. Time for a difficult file: 5.2 minutes. Total work hours: 5. Average cost per document handled: $1.18

Assuming we’re paying people a flat $40,000/year, here are the projected savings from automation:
Daily: $198
Weekly: $989
Yearly: $51,405

Over $50,000 in savings from lightly automating just one process. What if we automated ten, twenty, or a hundred? Maybe we could take the time and money we save and reallocate resources to new opportunities or reduce overhead. If we systematized our employee knowledge and best practices, we’d reduce our risk of losing a key employee.

So, to answer you question, by combining UC and business process automation, you gain these highly measurable financial benefits of UC that you were hoping to see.

Accelerating ROI

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:01:42 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, August 3, 9:59 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

To achieve a larger or faster ROI UC needs to move into daily processes that impact the bottom line.

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, August 3, 10:02 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

How can a customer leverage their UC investment to generate a higher return than we typically see from user productivity (UC-U) applications?

Rick Chin

Posted: Monday, August 3, 10:04 AM

Joined: 4/20/2009
Posts: 5

The benefits of UC have always been that it increases productivity for a wide population of employees and that together, this increased productivity adds up to more than the cost of unified communications. Given enough time, most deployments do payback the investment but it would be desirable see a faster return.

To achieve a larger and/or faster ROI, the benefits of UC must do more than shave a few seconds off incidental activities. UC needs to move into daily processes that impact the bottom line, giving it the significant ROI that makes it a “must have” instead of a “nice to have.”

The best UC candidate for more return is business process automation and management. Traditional business process management suites and tools have been expensive, required lots of consulting, lacked the ability to automate the entire process, and require expensive custom programmers to implement. They are not well integrated into enough enterprise apps, and time it takes to test and deploy a change or an update is lengthy.

Some UC business process automation applications address those limitations. By leveraging UC infrastructures, the process automation can flow throughout the enterprise and integrate with more enterprise applications. Costs to implement and maintain are reasonable, which makes process automaton a viable solution for more businesses than previous more costly solutions. There are no complicated programming methods. Instead, visual design environments that resemble flowcharts are used. Process updates can be done quickly and applied to production.

Because mere mortals can create a process automation using the visual design application (and mere mortals cost less than custom programmers charge), companies are willing to apply it to automate small and medium processes that could not be touched in the more complex systems. Even modest automation of one common process can save anywhere from $1K-50K annually, making the opportunities for automation increasingly attractive. The savings increase as multiple processes are automated. And there are other benefits like faster completion, quicker response time, ability to focus resources on more markets, or the integration of communications into processes automatically.

Suddenly UC, the system with traditionally soft, intangible ROI, becomes the foundation for business process automation projects and UC gets measurable, substantial ROI out of the deal. Until know UC has been like Clark Kent, just a mild mannered reporter. But just as a phone booth transforms Clark Kent into Superman, when UC combines with business process automation, it becomes UC with a super-ROI.

Cloud-based Communications

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:00:30 GMT

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Friday, January 15, 9:05 AM

Joined: 1/13/2010
Posts: 3

Over the last decade we have seen a big increase in the amount of applications that are deployed in either a hosted or SaaS model for numerous reasons. In the past year in particular, economic conditions have spurred the increased adoption of hosting communications platforms in the cloud over spending CapEx money on a premises-based solution. Which is better for you and why?

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Friday, January 15, 9:14 AM

Joined: 1/13/2010
Posts: 3

There seems to be a great debate about the cloud vs. premise solutions. From everything from CRM and email, to storage and data mining. How does communications fit into this debate?

Tim Passios--When people think about communications, they often think just about voice. However, we use so many different types of communications today, it is best to think of it in forms of applications. Emails, Instant messages, SMS, contact center, these are all communication applications used by different organizations. In today’s world of tight budgets, having your communications run in the cloud – known as Communications-as-a-Service – makes a lot of sense with a ton of benefits:

- Little or no capital expenditure

- Predictable monthly costs instead of a large up-front payment

- Less IT overhead

At Interactive we call our hosted offering Communication-as-a-Service. There is a lot of info on our CaaS.com website.

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Friday, January 15, 9:30 AM

Joined: 1/13/2010
Posts: 3

Is it probable, or even possible, that we will see a major shift in the way companies buy and deploy business communications?

Brad Herrington--I think it is already happening and it all started with two events.

- The movement towards VoIP. With packet-based or soft switching, vendors started routing voice over the corporate data network in the late 1990’s. As VoIP picked up steam, along with the wide spread adoption of MPLS networks, it became increasing apparent that you could run your communications system across a wide area network (WAN) without losing audio quality or impacting security.

- The financial crisis. As organizations stepped back to evaluate their spending in light of the economy, they became determined to find better ways to complete their communications projects without spending a lot of money on hardware, software and maintenance contracts. This opened the door for the adoption of hosted-communications solutions or CaaS solutions.

Because of these two events, you will start seeing more and more companies adopting a CaaS model for their communications so that they too can reap the benefits it provides.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, January 15, 9:48 AM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Do you see mainly SMBs using cloud based services, or larger companies too? What about the loss of control issue that some larger companies complain about?

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, January 18, 4:15 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

Tim,

I do think its the ultimate try and buy, if they choose to start with hosting and then decide they want some or all of it in house. Even if companies start with only a piece or as back up or as a business continuity option. It also depends on what it is you want to host too. For example, with a contact center it is an easy business case choice to use hosting for seasonal overflow, as opposed to deciding to build a contact center for all customer support from the ground up. For UC, hosting certainly provides the option of going all in or just providing capabilities for certain UC functions to specific groups of employees.

John Wesselman

Posted: Wednesday, January 20, 8:41 AM

Joined: 1/6/2010
Posts: 3

I just came across a very powerful article, "Managed service providers: Outsourcing unified communications applications" written by Katharine Trost of Nemertes Research, that presents numbers that indicate that the Unified Communications (UC) boom has only just begun. What was even more interesting is that there is a dramatic increase in organizations considering a UC implementation through a managed service provider (MSP).

Here are some of the important facts that she presents:

Leaner IT departments - "67% of organizations are decreasing their IT staffs, by an average of 17%."
Increased adoption of UC - "In 2007, just 17% of organizations were deploying UC, meaning they were using at least one unified communications application. By 2008, that figure increased to 47%. This year, that number has grown to 60%."
Considering an MSP for UC deployment - "65% of organizations are using, or evaluating, some flavor of managed services at one or more of their locations. That's quite an increase from the 46% we saw in 2007, and 27% in 2006.
Switching to an MSP after challenges of self-deployed UC - "Generally telecom staffs use an MSP after finding IP telephony more difficult to manage than expected, especially on a 24 × 7 basis."

I have some more insight into the MSP effect on UC in my blog: https://blog.smoothstone.com/bid/29920/Ready-for-the-Managed-UC

But there is clearly an increaseing amount of consideration given to Managed Service Providers.

John Wesselman

Smoothstone IP Communications

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, January 25, 1:02 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

So, particularly in the area of UC, which is just starting to see more of in a hosted environment, what are some of the more compelling reasons to check into communications-as-a-service?

Tim Passios

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 8:05 AM

Joined: 2/14/2007
Posts: 3

Nancy Jamison wrote:

So, particularly in the area of UC, which is just starting to see more of in a hosted environment, what are some of the more compelling reasons to check into communications-as-a-service?

Sure thing, Nancy. Here are a few.

Cost, complexity, staff - In the past, the barrier to entry for UC for some companies has been the cost of switching out their current communications infrastructure. With CaaS, the monthly costs are predictable and easy to budget, with minimal (or no) capital expenditures and far less IT overhead than on-premise data centers require.
Trial time - Some companies are even going with a ‘toe-in-the-water’approach and carving off a certain department or group of people to try the features that CaaS offers. This allows for the measurement and evaluation of certain features to see where they can realize the greatest value without having to disrupt their current operations.

Tim Passios

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 8:19 AM

Joined: 2/14/2007
Posts: 3

Blair Pleasant wrote:

Do you see mainly SMBs using cloud based services, or larger companies too? What about the loss of control issue that some larger companies complain about?

Hi Blair,

These are great questions. Let me see if I can address them for you:

SMBs vs Large Companies - Over the past 2 years, the interest shown by these two groups have grown closer together. Initially for CaaS, the interest was mainly relegated to the SMB space as they were looking to cut costs and gain in features. Deploying a CaaS solution provided a way to do just that - get all of the features of an expensive communications solution without the capital expenses. This remains true today for the SMBs.

As for the larger companies, they initially showed little interest in CaaS offerings for several reasons, including the feeling that the feature set lacked what they could get with their premise-based solution as well as the whole issue surrounding security and the trust needed to host communications or data outside their network. For those larger organizations that did consider a CaaS solution, they mainly used it either as a way to trial a solution (kick the tires) or as a way to provide small departments or branch offices a solution when they needed something up and running quickly.

This has changed dramatically as larger organizations are now rolling out their entire enterprise communications on a CaaS solution. With goals to minimalize IT staff and associated training costs, along with the need to drive capital expenses down, larger organizations are actively seeking CaaS solutions as a way to achieve those goals.
As for the concern of larger customers losing control, I think this still remains an issue and may even be a sticking point for many companies considering moving to a CaaS solution. However, while there are many ways to overcome those issues, many organizations are finding the control issue to be far less important than cutting IT costs and capital expenditures and are willing to lose some of that control. And in many organizations, they are more then willing to give up that control for the same reasons as mentioned in the point above - they just don't want to maintain an IT staff and the costs associated with it.

Tim Passios

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 8:21 AM

Edit Delete

Joined: 2/14/2007
Posts: 3

John Wesselman wrote:

Here are some of the important facts that she presents:

Leaner IT departments - "67% of organizations are decreasing their IT staffs, by an average of 17%."
Increased adoption of UC - "In 2007, just 17% of organizations were deploying UC, meaning they were using at least one unified communications application. By 2008, that figure increased to 47%. This year, that number has grown to 60%."
Considering an MSP for UC deployment - "65% of organizations are using, or evaluating, some flavor of managed services at one or more of their locations. That's quite an increase from the 46% we saw in 2007, and 27% in 2006.
Switching to an MSP after challenges of self-deployed UC - "Generally telecom staffs use an MSP after finding IP telephony more difficult to manage than expected, especially on a 24 × 7 basis."

------------------------

John -- great post. These stats are right on target with what we continue to see in the market today!

Thanks for the stats.

Tim

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 8:32 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

Tim Passios wrote:

"As for the concern of larger customers losing control, I think this still remains an issue and may even be a sticking point for many companies considering moving to a CaaS solution. However, while there are many ways to overcome those issues, many organizations are finding the control issue to be far less important than cutting IT costs and capital expenditures and are willing to lose some of that control. And in many organizations, they are more then willing to give up that control for the same reasons as mentioned in the point above - they just don't want to maintain an IT staff and the costs associated with it."

Tim, normally I would say something like "it goes without saying", but in this case not. I think it needs to be said that part of the issue of control is that any company that is concerned about security and loss of control just needs to vet out the company that they are thinking of doing business with. Hosting providers should be able to prove their track record with security, as well as give a customer a really good sense of good the people are that will be running their communications/contact center etc.

Also, one of the pro and cons for hosting versus premises is that if you develop and maintain your own applications and systems you have to also attain and retain the talent to run them. A good hosting provider has that talent, and can also bring new capabilities to their clients often quicker than premises-based customers.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 10:12 AM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Tim: I think you left out another point about the value of a hosted service - customers don't have to constantly upgrade to the latest release of a product - the service will automatically ensure that the customer has the latest and greatest, with no upgrade costs or hassles.

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Tuesday, January 26, 12:05 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

So what about the con side of pro and con (and where did that come from anyway?). Kidding aside, besides the perception of loss of control or security issues, are there any cons to employing communications-as-a-service?

Brad.Herrington@inin.com

Posted: Wednesday, January 27, 1:58 PM

Joined: 8/3/2009
Posts: 3

Nancy

Any company looking to move functions of their contact center to the cloud needs to make sure they have the flexibility to address their future needs, and not just the next 12 months. Make sure the CaaS offering will scale to meet their growth plans, and even allow for the eventual transition of all the CaaS features to be brought in as a full on-premise solution, if their business model dictates the need.

And while size is a simple problem to address, control is also important. When looking at a CaaS solution, one set of features doesn’t work for everyone. Companies need to have options as to how much or little control they want over something as basic as the audio path for a call, having the flexibility to offload all audio to the remote site or the security of keep audio local, while maintaining the same set of features is a big advantage for companies looking for a CaaS solution. The most glaring pitfall is being locked into something that does not meet future needs.

Brad

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, February 1, 12:59 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

Brad,

That is an interesting point that maybe some hosting vendors would jump in on. Obviously Interactive provides this, but where will customers go to get CaaS services?

Nancy

Brad.Herrington@inin.com

Posted: Monday, February 1, 1:32 PM

Joined: 8/3/2009
Posts: 3

Nancy,

Companies are likely to begin looking at CaaS solutions by turning to their existing communications vendor if they are happy with them. However, the few vendors who do offer CaaS solutions today provide a wide variety of services and service levels, so most companies issue a RFP (Request for Proposal) to receive bids. When developing a list of RFP candidates, most companies will research competitors or rely on consultants to develop a list of CaaS candidates.

Some companies may consider turning to one of the major telecom providers. The problem is that the telecom providers offer a hosted telephone system. They bought some vendor’s phone system and are trying to resell and share that system while making it fit your business. But they are selling a service, not a product. Because it’s not really their product, they don’t know it as deeply and can’t offer the wide range of feature updates and latest releases, or provide the in depth support that can be offered by a orginal vendor. For example, at Interactive Intelligece, we make our software and offer it up as a CaaS solution. We know the product inside out, and our experience with 3500 companies in 93 countries gives us a great starting point to create a deployment that works and thinks they way you need it to, not like what is best for the majority.

Brad

You know how a home owner always makes sure everything works great and invests in things for the future good of the home while the renter just uses the property? We’re the home owner; the telecom companies are the renters. Who would you rather deal with?

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, February 2, 1:11 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

UC is More Than Person-to-Person Voice

There are several operational and strategic drivers ( besides simply cost savings) for planning UC as a hosted or managed service rather than a premise-based, in-house technology. These include, the growth of wireless mobility using multimodal "smartphones, " the complexity of developing proactive, multimodal, self-service business applications, and enabling customer/end user flexibility in accessing their choice of available live (real-time) assistance. However, we need to separate the sourcing of the networking facilities required from that of developing application software for servers and endpoint clients differently than in the past. This will be especially important in dealing with mobile customer/consumers who will be choosing their own devices and communication services for interacting with everyone.

This should really mean the end of the "walled garden" approach of the carriers who supply the public wired and wireless communication connections, as well as increasing the need for interface/device-independent application software, and flexible and end-user choice of mobile devices and "smart-phones." That's a future to plan for, while at the same time still supporting the voice applications or the past. We are, after all, in the middle of a transition from siloed to open and converged software-based communications, not only for person-to-person contacts, but also between people and automated self-service applications (inbound and outbound). Real-time contacts can be now include 2-way instant text messaging (IM) as well as as immediate notifications via SMS. (Don't forget social networking too!) With presence-based "click-to-contact," efficient real-time contacts can be made on-demand, rather than traditional "blind" telephone call attempts.

Clearly, the burden of making it all work will require the IP network capacity to support and manage flexible UC traffic demands. However, the bigger challenge will be to design, implement, and manage the various kinds of business applications that will make up that communication traffic. So, now, who will you trust to be able to do that for the many different business applications and for both voice and visual interfaces?

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Friday, February 5, 9:43 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

Brad and Art,

Both good points. I like Brad's comment about the homeowner versus the renter. There are some obvious benefits to owning the stack as not only can you provide seamless integration of the business apps, but also add new releases, or even new release versions as soon as they are available, rather than waiting for a third-party to develop something you then plop onto your service offering.

I think that having ownership of a CaaS offering from one vendor is also good for the vendor, and ultimately the customer because you get an endless feedback loop on the apps that you put out there. OK, so there is some risk in "trialing" an interim release of a product on a CaaS customer, but its light years ahead of the way we used to do it, which was to have 18 month product development cycles, ending in a big release of a product, in which we hoped for the best.

But Art makes a good point too. We still have the outside service providers to contend with because no one owns the entire thing.

Nancy

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Friday, February 5, 9:44 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

How about turning this in a different direction, since this is a UC site. Does CaaS help or hurt the UC movement?

Nancy

Brad.Herrington@inin.com

Posted: Friday, February 5, 11:45 AM

Joined: 8/3/2009
Posts: 3

CaaS helps the UC movement. Companies with constraints will find CaaS offers them new hope. If they need to deploy enhanced contact center applications, face limited technical staff resources, are facing a multi-site upgrade from a variety of legacy PBX systems, or need to deploy a consistent solution across their enterprise and contact center, using CaaS can bring those services to them.

Imagine a business with a mobile sales force and perhaps a few regional offices. They could use CaaS to deploy UC to everyone in their office and remote/mobile employees to facilitate conference calls, keep sales and inside sales in closer contact, deliver faxes to mobile devices for review or approval, send voicemails as emails, and everyone being able to see the availability of their co-works at all times. These features would change how quickly and efficiently a business can respond to customer demands.

Brad

Nancy Jamison

Posted: Monday, February 8, 11:32 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 9

Is the contact center unique when it comes to CaaS, or simply part of the bigger picture?

Nancy

Tim Passios

Posted: Tuesday, February 9, 12:13 PM

Joined: 5/7/2009
Posts: 2

Nancy,

Contact centers will often lead the move into CaaS because of the flexibility it offers and the ability to integrate or utilize a rich set of applications into a business’ processes quickly and comprehensively. Contact centers will realize a greater reward and return on investment based upon the number of applications they utilize.

However, many enterprises will also find significant value in CaaS offerings, especially as companies seek to unify their environments, outsource their communications infrastructure, and build a stronger workflow across their organization. Individual returns for companies will be determined by the nature of their business and their business approach to the market. However, for many companies, there are significant savings and operational gains to be recognized.

Tim

Improving Business Performance

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:53:35 GMT

Samantha

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 12:51 PM

By: Stephen G. Smith, President & CEO of Accellenx Partners
Wednesday April 15, 2009

Performance, whether on a stage of theatre or business, is all about “making it happen”. Whether a Shakespearean tragedy or strategic business initiative, the performance of the organizational unit is what produces results. The math is simple: One, someone writes the play (strategic plan). Two, everyone in the group rehearses their parts (departmental and individual performance plans). And three, the troupe orchestrates individual performances into a unified group performance (execution of tactical plans providing goods and services to customers). The result, when done well, is applause from the audience (satisfied customers who vote again for your goods and services with their dollars). Yet, if this concept is so basic, why is it that most companies fail to understand how to manage—much less improve—their performance?

As I’ve noted previously, most organizations are rather skilled at planning for better outcomes. Planning, and its forward-looking nature, is often just as much art as it is skill. So, planning in and of itself is not something that can be easily measured to determine how good it really is. But business performance, rooted in pure execution, is all about action—action that is designed to accomplish the goals defined in the existing plan. Such actions can and should be measured.

However, planning for, then executing, and finally measuring organizational performance does not guarantee delivery of planned performance. Nor does it lend itself to improving upon that performance. That’s because execution in any business exists at multiple levels in the company: namely, at the organizational level of performance, the workflow (process) level and the individual employee level. These three echelons comprise the backbone and infrastructure of performance delivery in every firm.

At first, this concept seems foreign to even the most seasoned operating executives. This is due partly, in fact, to the conventional wisdom offered for decades by many of the world’s most revered business schools. Traditional thinking would have us believe that the performance of the enterprise is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. Therefore, when everyone in the organization “does his or her part” as planned, then the company as a whole realizes its planned performance at the corporate level.

This concept was introduced by Peter Drucker in his 1954 book “The Practice of Management”, in which he launched the idea of Management by Objectives—or MBO. Popularized in the 1960s and 1970s, MBO still had a large base of practitioners throughout the 1980s. While conceptually sound, it falls short in practice as it tends to overemphasize the setting of goals versus focusing on the drivers of business outcomes. These drivers are rooted throughout all three performance levels in the organization, which is why it’s important to understand the three levels and how they are related.

The top level of performance is the most obvious: the organization level. This echelon represents the business outcomes for the enterprise as a whole. Performance at this level is broad and is typically comprised of revenues, profits and return on investment. It may also include market share, customer satisfaction and new market acquisition.

The base level of performance - the individual performer level - is the core performance delivered by each and every employee throughout the organization. This key driver of business results is grounded in the premise that results are not achieved without the contribution of each employee. Performance at this level is much more granular and varies widely from one employee to the next. It relates to the required, or planned, performance of each individual in order to effectively contribute to overall company goals. Examples of performance at this level are more task-focused and include items such as order pick rates, inbound calls time-to-answer, claims closure rates, etc.

Most organizations easily identify with the top and base levels of performance. After all, the popular MBO approach dictates that you first identify your top level performance goals, then design performance targets at the base level that support your desired top level results. However, it is the middle level of performance - the process level - that is arguably the most important, and most elusive, in today’s business environment.

Why? Because tried and true approaches “proven” by large businesses and business schools alike die hard. We were trained to think about the company and the individual levels of performance, and to tie the two together utilizing the most obvious channels available—the various departments that comprise the inner soul of our company. But the most obvious path isn’t always the most effective. The different functional areas of your company do not deliver your goods and services to your customers. Your business processes do. These critical flows of work—which move across and between your company’s departments - represent the middle and most overlooked level of performance in your organization. It’s this layer of performance that provides the key to alignment across all three levels of performance.

Understanding the three levels of performance in your company is the foundation to improving your organization’s performance. But the real key: alignment across the three levels. And paramount to this alignment is identifying your performance drivers and then linking them from the organization level, down through your business processes and ultimately to each individual performer in the company. The thread that sews your performance plan together in perfect alignment is an authenticated set of performance metrics.

So, what is the most effective way improve business performance? Start with a clear understanding of the three levels of performance in your organization, nail down the drivers of performance at each level, and wrap them in a real set of performance metrics. And remember: ignore the system of your business processes at your own peril, as they are the lynchpin to performance alignment and achievement of your business objectives.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Tuesday, June 16, 12:54 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

Samantha,

Thanks for sending that article on business process and "workflow" performance.

While I agree with the overall perspective of the three organizational "levels," I think the bottom and middle level needs to be updated to include external end users (business partners, consumer customers) as part of workflow performance consideration. This is because web information access and wireless mobility now enables persons outside the organization to also exploit their own UC services and contribute to task completion more efficiently and effectively. With automated business process applications available to all end users involved in an operational task, we no longer should focus only on organizational personnel , but should insure that everyone involved in the task can do their part as flexibly and efficiently as possible, regardless of location or responsibilities.

The enterprise still has its responsibilities for supporting its own employees in work flow performance tools and services, but must now consider that external end users can also contribute more efficiently with similar communication technologies for information delivery and two-way multi-modal contacts (UC, unified messaging, on-line self services, mobile smartphones). What good is it if only the internal staff can access information and communicate between themselves efficiently, when ultimately the major delays in task completion can stem from communicating with external users (both inbound and outbound), particularly with third-party "action takers" and individual consumers (customers)? They too are "performers" in a business process and should be able to increasingly exploit the benefits of Mobile UC for both "person-to-person" contacts as well as "process-to-person" notifications and self-services.

I wrote a piece shortly after the introduction of the iPhone by Apple that talked about "Customer UC" and what would happen if all consumers had an iPhone-like mobile device. What would change for traditional call centers? The writing is on the wall that voice conversations will be a "contextual" option to other forms of information access and person-to-person contacts. While not everyone uses mobile "smartphones" all the time, the business process performance framework should start including their use for improving workflow performance metrics. This is because user contact accessibility is a prerequisite for timely, on-demand automated applications (information delivery, transactions) and communication with available people.

With mobility, Enterprises are not be losing their traditional telephony "daughter," they will be gaining a "UC son-in-law!"

Best regards,

Art

The Truth is the new Trend

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:46:49 GMT

Dave Michels

Posted: Thursday, August 6, 10:56 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

Techcrunch recently did an interesting story on Press Releases - suggesting 10 words that should be banned from them. The point was that every vendor seems to think they are a "leader" or "Leading provider" and that their products or services are "innovative" and/or "revolutionary"; etc., etc.

I think that is what is making Social Media so important. Real people using real words.

When I look at book reviews at Amazon, I usually jump to what the real people are saying and skip over the "book reviews" section. I love that you can actually rate the ratings.

When I get a press release from a telecom firm - about their "next generation" product or service - It takes a while to get a good feel for exactly what they are talking about. Before I even read it, I know it is "next generation" and basically the cure to all evils. Because of all this puffery - it takes way too much time and patience to just get a grip on what the heck the product/service does.

More and more, I find myself relying on sites like this one to cut through the crap. Just tell me what it does, why it is different and let's move on. A great example is the Avaya Aura Suite. This product was announced at Voicecon MCO. Try this this release and separate out what it does from all of its benefits (also great for a short game of Telecom Bingo).

Anyyay, the point: Press releases won't change. That role is well understood and ingrained. But I beleive the role of the web, interactive online commentators, is very different than that of the prior printed media. I submit that paper vs. online is not just the medium, its the message. New media is real.

Tell me I am wrong.

Dan Aronson

Posted: Friday, August 7, 3:33 PM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

When it comes to social media, I believe the best way to describe its output is, "you get what you pay for".

Don’t get me wrong, like you, I am sick and tired of manufacturers making blatantly false claims, let alone spewing endless gobs of puffery. And worse yet are the self proclaimed analysts/experts whose only strategy seems to be go along to get along -- not that I blame them. After all, when you depend on the people you critique to earn a living, how harsh can you really afford to be? So it would seem, as you pointed out, that the only people you can turn to for the truth are actual end-users. The question then becomes, are you actually getting truthful opinions?

I personally question the motives and self-proclaimed expertise of many LinkedIns, Tweeters, and Facebook-ians. For example, someone on LinkedIn floated a survey asking if businesses really still use fax as a method of communication. The respondents overwhelmingly said no, which puzzled me greatly. After all, anyone that knows anything about the business processes of larger companies or who deals with companies in Latin America or on the Pacific Rim knows that the most mission critical processes continue to rely on faxing for the interchange of paper-based documents, in most cases because of its legal nature. So I began looking at the profiles of the respondents and found that most were small-time consultants that typically dealt solely with SMB’s -- that is if they actually had clients at all. So in this case, social media failed wildly to produce the truth.

The fact is that thanks to the plethora of social media outlets, any nut-job can render an opinion (look I'm doing it now). Since you only need a PC and an internet connection to start blogging or tweeting, this begs the question, how do you vet these people? Take the case of George Sodini, the guy in LA who for years blogged about going into his health club and blowing a bunch of women away. And the Columbine kids left a digital trail a mile long leading up to their killing spree. So if these nutters didn’t have a problem "socializing their psychoses", how can you trust anyone on these sites?

Also, keep in mind that most social media websites do not demand proof of identity, allowing you can assume any identity you wish. As such, when you read a harsh review of a product, how can you be sure that the author doesn’t have an ulterior motive? Maybe they work for a competitor? Maybe they were just fired from that company? Perhaps they had an incompetent reseller botch their install (I’ve heard plenty of those stories), yet they rail against the manufacturer anyway. Maybe they are malicious 12 year-old kids with nothing better to do then mess with "old dudes". The problem is that in most cases, you just don’t know. It is undeniable that within the general population there exist certain people who should not be let within 10 miles of a soapbox (to stand on). Unfortunately, thanks to social media, there is no way to stop them.

Now here is the punch line; despite all of my cynicism towards social media, like you, I will still lend more credibility to a reviewer that paid for a product than to a manufacturer’s marketing claims or an analyst that gets paid by the manufacturer to say nice things about them and their offerings. So I guess I am not, as you asked, telling you you’re wrong. I am just saying that you might have found the least of all evils.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Friday, August 7, 3:54 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Dave:

As a "leading" analyst focusing on "next generation" technologies, I would have to agree with you (please note the tongue in cheek comment).

While social media/networking sites are great for getting advice and opinions, as Dan pointed out, you don't always know who's behind the comments made on these sites. I tend to trust sites like TripAdvisor, but you never know when a competitor from a hotel across the street is submitting a negative comment, or if the owner's son is writing a glorious review.

This is why UCStrategies is initiating the idea of private forums - where everyone who participates would have to include their real name and company email address (not a personal address or a yahoo, gmail domain) - so they can't hide behind a phony name and hide their identity. Sounds like there's a real need for this sort of thing - so let's get working on it.

Dave Michels

Posted: Wednesday, August 12, 1:46 PM

Joined: 4/15/2009
Posts: 6

I just got this email - I have no idea what these guys do. I am so sick of this stuff... (I removed company name with COMPANYX to protect the guilty).

This was a cold email designed to get me interested in their company - what do you do?

David, COMPANYX is looking for resellers and solution providers who are looking for greater revenue and wish to differentiate themselves by enhancing their solution portfolio with a pervasive customer promise; to further increase their customer’s productivity and decrease their customer's operational costs.

Our program structure is designed to build strong partnerships through incentives and rewards for companies who invest time and effort in the sale and promotion of our products.

All of our North American partners can expect:

Dedication of a COMPANYX Channel Program Coordinator
Complete sales support from COMPANYX managers
Preferred pre and post sale technical support
Deal Registration and Protection Program
High impact cooperative marketing campaigns
Participation in channel exclusive webinars
24/7 access to COMPANYX Partner Web – COMPANYXs’ partner resource library

Am I really supposed to research this company just to figure out what they even do?

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Tuesday, August 25, 2:49 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

Do reputable companies actually look for partners this way? I would have concerns about both the company and the partners they attract. Have you ever signed up with a company through non-personal solicitation? Maybe that's why some channel partners are having problems these days.

Dan Aronson

Posted: Thursday, September 3, 9:14 AM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

Believe it or not Blaire, they do. I get the same types of e-mails almost daily. And is seems like no matter how many times you opt out, they just keep coming. The problem with e-mail marketing, just like any other social media campaign, is that it is free. As such, executives like Dave who get 100+ e-mails directly related to his company/position get just as many of these goofy e-mails as well. And although I have not data to back it up, I would bet that a 1 in 1,000 response rate to an e-mail campaign such as this is considered a great result! But again, remember the cost of doing such a blast. And don't think for one second that a corporate spam filter will rid you of these either.

What I would like to see is a survey of executives asking just how much time they waste foraging through junk e-mails just to get to those in need of attention. My own experience finds me wasting somewhere between 30 to 45 minutes a day on junk e-mail. And if other folks have the same experience, just think of the cumulative man-hours wasted each year and its effect of that on the overall economy. Unfortunately, it took congress forever to pass junk fax laws, and they proved to be relatively toothless. So my question is, how on earth are they going to pass effective junk e-mail, twitter, etc. laws that will actually be enforceable?

I hate to be a doomsayer, but I think we are all in for a long, painful experience when it comes to dealing with free, electronic communications.

Unified Communications Trends - 2010 and Beyond

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:43:22 GMT

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 1:15 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

Everyone in the industry now seems to be trying to identify the most important changes taking place with communications, emphasizing the technology pieces that they provide. Here is the latest from Avaya which could use more detailed clarification as to what it will mean to both enterprise IT and enterprise users.

https://www.xchangemag.com/articles/avaya-lists-10-communications-trends-for-2010.html

Marty Parker

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 1:36 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

Very interesting list. Many are contact center driven, no surprise.

Others are close to the mark, but are still overly focused on voice communications.

Jay Brandstadter

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 1:46 PM

Joined: 1/3/2010
Posts: 1

Thanks, Art. Interesting list. Another one to compare, by Zeus, is from one of our favorite Canadians:
https://nojitter.com/blog/archives/2009/12/whats_hot_and_w.html

Any comments on this nugget:

"CEBP and UC enabled applications will not be hot. This is another technology wave that will have a long adoption cycle. There will be a few verticals, such as healthcare and financial services, that will communications-enable some processes, but broader deployments will be limited until the ISV community gets more engaged in UC. This is one of the trends that the vendors are going to need to "prime the pump" and develop some processes and applications in concert with the ISV community to start the ball rolling. Once this happens, the momentum will create a "rising tide" that will initiate another wave of growth in this market."

Dave Michels

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 1:53 PM

Joined: 1/3/2010
Posts: 1

Ah, so Avaya and Zeus completely disagree on CEBP - I go with Zeus on CEBP but lumping "CEBP and UC enabled apps" together is a bit of stretch - particularly since UC apps includes everything.

I think my 3 are better than their 10. But I might be biased.
https://www.pindropsoup.com/2009/12/megatrends-in-voice.html

Marty Parker

Posted: Sunday, January 3, 2:01 PM

Joined: 6/16/2009
Posts: 3

I like your three, as well, but they are, as you say, Megatrends, reaching into music, airlines, etc. Avaya’s are “micro-trends” in enterprise communications.

And, each supplier would likely have their own list, such as “Video-based collaboration will be the new standard.” (Guess who.)

David_Yedwab

Posted: Tuesday, January 5, 7:47 AM

Joined: 7/18/2007
Posts: 1

As I mentioned in the podcast, video will become a growing component of UC deployments. It's hard to believe that telepony based video is now into its fifth decade since first introuced as Picturephone at the 1969 World's Fair (dating myself). But business video is finally beginning to emerge as mainstream with many flavors from desktop to Telepresence and certainly mobile video, too. The network and performance requirements for video being even more stringent than voice, will make the network infrastructure needs about full UC even more important and the user Quality of Experience (QoE) will be even more critical.

And we've seen major M&A interest with the pending acquisitions of Tandberg by Cisco and LifeSize by Logitech -- lots of dollars being invested in business video.

What is important to consider are not just the travel displacement opportunties from video but the improved functioning of business processes from well deployed video applications such as remote medical consults or executive/expert education and business meetings.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Monday, January 11, 12:24 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I have to also date myself to correct you about when Picturephone was demonstrated at the World’s Fair. Since I tried it there in New York, the year was 1964, not 1969. At that time I was involved in the first on line application developments that would highlight the role of the Internet and the World Wide Web. At that time it was called “time-sharing,” because it enabled interactive applications by sharing CPU time of a mainframe computer amongst different applications that had to be swapped in and out of main memory.

While there will always be a valid role for real-time video conferencing, face-to-face on-camera discussions are not always useful or convenient from a user “availability” perspective. Asynchronous exchange of information content will dominate UC because it is the easiest form of contact for both initiators and recipients. So, even if everyone has a mobile “smartphone” with a video camera in it, that doesn’t mean it will be used that much just for face-to-face conversation. However, it will be powerful for real-time exchanging of video information during a voice conversation, as you mentioned for medical consultations.

History as a guide to the UC Definition

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:40:11 GMT

Marty

Posted: Tuesday, December 15, 1:56 PM

Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 2

As a parallel historical example to the problem of the name for Unified Communications, the early automobiles had a wide variety of names: horseless carriage, autocar, roadster, tin lizzy, and more. The engines were electric, gas, and steam. And you couldn’t even constrain the definition by listing components. Some early automobiles could be steered with tillers, while others used steering wheels. Some had three wheels, some had four; wheels were wood, iron, solid rubber, or tubes. But the point was clear that the horse was no longer the premier form of motive power. It took almost three decades for that transition (the US Army still used mostly horse-drawn vehicles in WWI, 20 years after the first automobiles), but the change just kept coming. By the middle of the 20th century, the automobile had redefined most industrial societies, changing cities, services, and social structures. The results were more efficient business methods and more personal convenience, though with some generally unanticipated downside costs. Now, we’re faced with the same diversity of change in business communications. New methods for communications have arrived on the scene and we’re struggling to organize and maintain them into neat categories. For now, one of the broadest general terms is Unified Communications. Yet, there are also adjacent or subordinate or overlapping categories, such as Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP), or Collaboration, or Integrated Process Automation (IPA), names all currently in use in relationship to UC.

Clearing up the confusion around UC

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 22:38:57 GMT

Jim

Posted: Friday, December 11, 11:30 AM

Joined: 1/12/2007
Posts: 1

There’s been a lot of discussion about the definition of UC and what it means, and if UC is the right term to use or not. Is there consensus on what are the categories that go into making a UC solution? Also, what makes something a UC product or solution? For example, is voicemail a UC solution?

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, December 21, 1:54 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Jim - in the "big picture", I really don't think it matters exactly how we define UC or what goes into it. Voice Mail? IP/PBX? Collaboration? Who cares (except for the vendors who want to be offering "UC products/solutions"). Does the end-user care if they're investing in a UC solution or do they care if they're investing in a solution that has a positive impact on their business in some way? What good does it do if we end up paralyzing resellers and buyers as they try to figure out if it's UC or not UC? If the solution, whatever it is, improves a process in my business through better communication of one sort or another - I'm interested!

Some resellers talk about having a "UC story" to tell their customers. It's NOT about UC! It's about improving productivity so a company can do more with fewer people in today's economy. It's about reducing expenses, increasing profitability, providing better service to customers, meeting the needs of a mobile workforce, and much more. But it's NOT about UC.

So how do we define UC and what is and isn't a part of UC? UCStrategies has the definition that describes UC in terms of what it does. That's more than enough!

Unified Communications is a name for functionality

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:19:23 GMT

Marty

Posted: Tuesday, December 15, 1:52 PM

Joined: 1/13/2007
Posts: 2

It doesn't matter so much what we call it, but what UC does. Thus, our definition of UC as, "Communmications integrated to optimize business processes" is about how UC creates benefit (through integration) and about the result (optimized business processes). Any number of technology elements, from the dozen or more new communications functions that have emerged, can be combined to create a UC solution, depending on the problem that is being solved. But the point is that an improved business result is being created. So, look at our the industry case studies and the definition of UC will become prett clear. Visit the Case Study Library here: https://ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-case-study-library.aspx

Pam Avila

Posted: Monday, December 21, 1:57 PM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Yea, Marty! Thanks for not getting hung up on what UC is - but rather emphasizing what it does!

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Thursday, December 31, 12:00 PM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I agree with your view of UC as a means to optimize business processes, but that only describes the objective of the technology (the "Why of UC"). It provides the important business justification for supporting end users in their specific roles in a business process. The "How of UC" then becomes important in terms of functionality at the technology level and how it will actually be utiliized. That area is where I think further clarification is needed.

In my view the main "communication problems" that UC is aimed at are in initiating contact with a human being, who may or may not always be "accessible" in all modalities of communication or "available" from a time and priority perspective. Mobile users exemplify the first challenge of selectable accessibility, where a recipient may or may not be able to always talk, listen, read, or type to communicate. Further, it doesn't have to be a particular individual that must be contacted, but any person who is qualified, accessible, and available, as in tradtional customer contact centers.

It goes without saying, the contact initiator doesn't have to be a human being too, but can be any automated business process that needs to notify or deliver important information to a human being. It is also obvious that a business process will be exchanging informational messages, not trying to have a voice conversation with a person. However, message exchanges may be exploit speech if necessary.

The flexibility of UC for communicating with a person should not be limited to selecting one modality of contact for communicating, but must allow for easily and dynamically switching from one modality to another, e.g., asynchronous messaging (text, voice) to instant messaging to conversational voice to mutli-person conferencing. Too many people think UC is only about telephony capabilities via IP telephony or VoIP connectivity, but those are infrastructure and application server considerations that must support what the individual end users really need at the moment.

End user needs should actually be broken down into two functonal categories; their needs for initiating a contact and needs as a recipient of a contact. Obviously, that covers a lot of different functionality that must be kept simple and endpoint-device independent. With all the form-factors and capabilities of new mobile "smart-phones," that is not an easy challenge. However, the mobile user is the one who really needs the flexibility of UC the most!

UC-B: "The Pause That Refreshes"

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:17:09 GMT

Michael Finneran

Posted: Thursday, July 9, 11:44 AM

Joined: 3/21/2008
Posts: 3

I recently came across a rather amazing UC-B application in the most unlikely of applications: soda dispensers. Coca Cola is testing a new unit called the Freestyle that can dispense over 100 types of drinks versus the 6 or so you get from the ones you now find at the local McDonald’s. The real key is that the dispenser has an embedded cellular data connection and can provide a wealth of sales data,automatic reordering, and the ability to download new drink formulas.

From the soft drink standpoint, the key development is that the Freestyle has 30 cartridges containing highly-concentrated flavorings from which it can mix over 100 different drinks; only a few drops are needed to make a drink. Each cartridge is RFID tagged, and the dispenser contains an RFID reader that can monitor usage and determine when cartridges need to be reordered. Further, if they ever need to recall a particular batch of cartridges, those problem units can be disabled instantly from headquarters.

Fast food outlets have traditionally kept track of sales by counting the cups; since the customer fills their own cup, they really don’t have any idea what beverages are selling. With the Freestyle dispensers, they can not only determine exactly which choices are selling, they can determine different buying patterns at different times of the day. All of that information is uploaded over VerizonWireless’ mobile data network, so the machines can be plunked down in the store and don’t need to be connected to a wired network connection.

The other flexibility afforded by this design is that formulas for new drinks can be downloaded over the cellular data connection. Drinks are selected from a touch sensitive display, so a new drink can be added to the menu all by means of software. So, if they come up with another bomb like the “New Coke”, they can test market it,roll it out, or cancel it far more cheaply than with their traditional process.

Businesses are reluctant to invest in soft-dollar productivity enhancements, which is what makes UC-B so exciting. When we look to “optimize business processes”, we have to get beyond office-oriented tasks and get into the real “business”. What I loved about this application was that it took a process that hasn’t changed substantially in decades, provided a far more efficient means to deliver the product, collect detailed sales data, and includes a more flexible means of testing and introducing new products. It think that qualifies as “Communications integratedto optimize business processes”.

Art Rosenberg

Posted: Saturday, July 11, 11:08 AM

Joined: 1/16/2007
Posts: 16

I do have to agree with you that this is a business process that can benefit from wireless connectivity between a point-of-sale dispenser and a highly automated centralized control/management point. This connectivity cost-efficiently provides greater flexibility of product offerings, timely activity feedback, and options for distribution policy changes. Definitely helps optimize the distribution business process of soft drinks to consumers.

As long as the "flow" is fully automated and working smoothly, everything is fine. However, once the flow requires the need for a human skill or judgement, the process will require "UC-U" as well. That is, the flexibility of UC communication applications based on people accessibility/availability, will always be a necessary element of UC-U. Obviously, certain business processes always require people to be able to initiate or respond to communications from automated business processes (process-to-person) or other people (person-to-person). Maximizing the flexibility to communicate easily and quickly with people, not just equipment, is therefore critical to UC-U and therefore indirectly to UC-B.

Michael Finneran

Posted: Monday, July 13, 10:18 AM

Joined: 3/21/2008
Posts: 3

I agree, but I don't look at this initial implementation as the "be all and end all". Incorporating intelligence and communications capabilities in the machine opens the door to a world of other possibilities.

In this case, the question is: who is the machine talking to? The initial functionality is aimed at providing sales analysis, reordering, etc. to the back office. It will be a lot more challenging but a lot more strategic to establish a dialog with the actual customer. About as far as we have seen that go is to use the cell phone as an electronic payment device. Up until now, we have been hampered in those attempts based on the fact that we had so many different models of cell phones with different operating systems, communications interfaces, etc.

The iPhone and the library of applications that have been developed for it really has changed the game (i.e. "There's an app for that"). A vendor like Coke would be foolish to limit the functionality to iPhone owners, but we have app stores for virtually every mobile OS, and Bluetooth capability is standard in virtually all handsets and Wi-Fi is becoming a regular addition to smartphones.

Most mobile applications link the mobile device to a Web based back end, but maybe its time to turn that model around and establish a dialogue between the user's mobile device and devices that are nearby (like soda dispensers).

BPA - A Unique Approach

admin — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:34:41 GMT

Pam Avila

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 10:02 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

Business Process Automation is one of the high value/high ROI applications for UC, but there are different approaches to accomplishing the automation.

Pam Avila

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 10:13 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

While no one disputes the benefits of automating business processes within a company, the "process" of automating can make an IT manager tear out their hair! If I have already endured the pain of implementing a traditional BPM (business process management) solution, why would I need or want to look at something different?

Rick Chin

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 10:53 AM

Joined: 4/20/2009
Posts: 5

You might not need something else. Everyone should evaluate the benefits of a solution as they apply to their purposes. However, the key is to do the evaluation, not just dismiss it because you have something in place.

Many people find their BPM deployments have these downsides: expensive, slow to implement new processes and/or roll out changes in existing processes, requires highly specialized programmers, is typically applied to only some portions of the entire process, and is completely removed from the communications used to complete each step of the process.

In these instances, often CBPA can automate entire processes across the enterprise, including the use of existing BPM applications. CBPA solutions typically have more and stronger integration with enterprise business systems such as CRM and accounting systems and can extend automation (not just management or centralization) to the whole process.

In addition, because BPM solutions are typically communications unaware, they are unable to provide insight into all of the communications needed to complete the process. CBPA is the only methodology that correlates all these business transactions to related communications events like phone call history and email messages. This gives a company a complete view of interactions with customers and vendors.

Pam Avila

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 10:58 AM

Joined: 7/16/2008
Posts: 17

OK, now I’m confused! I’ve heard about CEBP (communications-enabled business processes) and now you're talking about CBPA (communications-based process automation). Does one bring my business more value than the other?

Rick Chin

Posted: Tuesday, July 28, 11:07 AM

Joined: 4/20/2009
Posts: 5

Yes to your question! Since CBPA (the term created by Interactive Intelligence) is essentially process automation built on top of a communications platform, its main focus is managing, automating, and streamlining communications and processes, not just one or the other. CBPA acts like an umbrella over all the related communications and work within a given process, directing work to the best place to ensure the entire process is completed efficiently and initiating or responding to communications as needed or desired.

CEBP’s main focus, on the other hand, is to embed communications abilities into an application that is otherwise communications unaware. This almost always requires some customization of an application to achieve. It also means that the scope of the benefits is very specific and related to the customized application.

Blair Pleasant

Posted: Thursday, July 30, 3:59 PM

Joined: 1/2/2007
Posts: 14

How do companies go about identifying the processes that should be automated, and isn't this a big undertaking? What are some steps companies should take when looking at doing CBPA?

Dan Aronson

Posted: Friday, July 31, 6:14 AM

Joined: 7/31/2009
Posts: 1

With all due respect, and I'm sure it would be fun to argue who exactly coined CEBP and what it exactly stands for, this is hardly a new concept.

In 1988, the company I was with wrote a program to take invoices generated on a UNIX-based midrange system and automatically fax them using a Canon fax machine equipped with an RS232C interface. Previous to this, a group of five employees spent the better part of their afternoon taking these same invoices off of a continuous forms-feed impact printer, breaking them up, and then feeding them into a bank of fax machines. E Voila! Real ROI generated through the implementation of a Communication Enabled Business Process. So the question is, CEBP has been around for so many years (and they have), why haven't pervaders of UC solutions been able to capitalize its benefits? The answer lies in the following question. "Who exactly cares about CEBP"

What is undeniably unique about CEBP is the approach you must take in order to effectively utilize it. The first and most important thing to recognize is that the key contacts you will need to establish are quite different from those you are used to working with. Most UC deals are done with IT or Telecom managers. However, in most organizations of size, they are simply not that familiar with the day-to-day operations of most departments, and therefore a CEBP pitch will typically fall on deaf ears here. Instead, you need to shift gears and get to the Line-of-Business managers. These managers will always have operational budgets at their control, and may even have P&L responsibility. If you can convince them that you can save their departments real budgeted dollars and/or increase their department's profitability, they will find a way to get the necessary funds to invest in your product or service. And in fact, this is much easier than trying to get a director to carve money out of a company's overall IT or Telecom budget.

Tim Passios

Posted: Friday, July 31, 10:32 AM

Joined: 5/7/2009
Posts: 2

I agree CEBP has its roots in many individual projects that have gone before it. However, CBPA (Communications Based Process Automation) is a completely different solution.

CEBP is primarily used to enable some kind of communications within an application. This usually involves much custom programming to achieve the end result, perhaps a button in an application that dials the phone number of the customer.

CBPA manages and oversees all kinds of business processes and integrates communications into them. There will be many processes automated by CBPA that don’t have the slightest thing to do with communications.

Using queuing, routing, presence, and recording, CBPA delivers work to the most qualified and available worker, wherever they are located within the enterprise infrastructure. When that worker finishes with that step, automated steps can be executed or the work can be routed to the next worker in the process. The combination of actions and activities is virtually unlimited. If anywhere in that process any kind of call, email, or web chat needs to occur, CBPA initiates them seamlessly as the process requests them because of its tight integration with the communication system.

Throughout the process, workers and managers have complete visibility into the real-time status, progress, time-in status, and work assignments.

I also agree with you that it’s better to present these kinds of benefits to executives, line of business managers, or a CIO with an understanding of the business side of the company. Since CBPA can have a significant effect on the financial needs of a company, these executives and managers are the most likely people to recognize the potential benefits.

Arun

Posted: Friday, July 31, 1:51 PM

Joined: 7/31/2009
Posts: 1

People appreciate CEBP concept as it involves the customization of business application to enable communication. However the reverse I think involves whole lot of work in terms of developing the communication capable business process is not it more work and will enterprises appreciate it?

Dan Aronson

Posted: Monday, August 3, 6:03 AM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

Thanks for the clarification Tim. It sounds like, in order to take full advantage of your concept (CBPA), organizations with manual processes will have to retool their entire enterprise, while the one I described (CEBP) calls for an enhancement of process only where communication is involved (i.e. automated faxing, rules based routing of calls coming into to a call center, etc). If I have this right, then I understand Arun's concern.

The adoption of CEBP is quite simple and painless. Your statement claiming that CEBP “. . . usually involves much custom programming to achieve the end result” is simply not true. For example, many companies in my industry (fax server) have long since written standard connectors for the most commonly used ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, industry specific systems such as McKesson and Cerner in the healthcare sector, and for the integration of multifunctional devices (all-in-one copier/scanner/printers) for handling paper-based documents. Other specific integrations might require 20 lines of XML programming, but no one is required to do months of custom programming.

Conversely, and please explain where Arun and I have it wrong, it sounds as if organizations are required to rework entire business processes in order to utilized CBPA toolsets. As you said, “The combination of actions and activities is virtually unlimited.” That would mean that the tools offered by a CBPA system would also have to be unlimited. Of course, it also sounds like CBPA might be nothing more than setting up workflows with rules based routing and triggered communication processes, all generating reports allowing the system to be managed properly. If this were the case, I would recant my statement about it being a long and arduous process to implement CBPA and encourage people to consider both. I look forward to your feedback.

Rick Chin

Posted: Monday, August 3, 9:37 AM

Joined: 4/20/2009
Posts: 5

To respond to Arun's question about the amount of work necessary to enable a communications-based business process as well as Dan's comment, ironically, the process of customizing an application to embed CEBP can be somewhat difficult. The required changes in the app and the amount of extra functionality will be indicators of how difficult the customization will be

I understand the concern about the work involved in connecting business process automation to the communications system. With traditional business process management suites, that would be a big concern. However, CBPA uses the communications system (and it’s integrations to other enterprise applications) as the foundation of the business process automation engine. The inherent queuing, routing, presence, and recording abilities of the communications system are leveraged to deliver work to the most qualified and available worker.

In an intuitive visual design environment, process flows could be drawn out in flowchart fashion. It doesn’t have to be hard or complicated. When the communications system is the foundation, most of the interfaces and integrations are already in place.

Rick Chin

Posted: Monday, August 3, 2:19 PM

Joined: 4/13/2009
Posts: 3

Using CBPA, someone can choose to automate one action or a whole process. There’s no need to “retool.” However, I do think companies who are looking for significant improvements in their productivity, time in process, or reduction in expenses and resources will want to spend some time analyzing and optimizing for automation. That is a process any company would do when using any process re-engineering. If you’re just enhancing one aspect of a process or one step, that analysis is probably not necessary.

I can see where integrating CEBP changes into some apps might take a few lines of XML, but it’s not going to be that simple to do inside a Saleforce.com, Microsoft Office, Siebel, or Oracle app unless they built-in prior support for it. As you point out, when industries have adopted a documented API to add in functionality, your workload is much lighter. We often find people trying to add in unique functionality specific to their business – functionality and flexibility not addressed by industry standards or APIs. This is especially true when companies have decided to create their own CRM, order processing system, or other key application.

CEBP is meant to add communications ability to an application that was previously not communications savvy, at least in some aspect. With CBPA, the original application still does the work it was designed to do and the communications system works with the application data and uses the UC and contact center advantages to manage and expedite that work delivery, status, and process flow. Integration to the data could be via database connection, built-in file format or application support, or a custom connector. If the process requires five applications, it doesn't matter that much to CBPA because CBPA is working at the process level and adding communications abilities at the necessary places.

In that sense, it is more like your “workflow” idea but with both queuing and routing, web service calls to additional services and resources, and the ability to take appropriate action based on changes in database records or other data changes.

Because CBPA inherently understands the communication abilities available, it can initiate a call, email, or chat to a customer, vendor, employee, or supervisor. It works the other way also; CBPA can take action based on new or additional calls, emails, or chats and thereby affect running processes with the new or updated information. CBPA immediately associates processes and interactions.

CBPA doesn’t have a huge number of commands or tools. It does have some key preset actions implemented in a very flexible way. For actions that can’t be handled within the primary set, there are tools that allow you to make web service calls and pass variables or execute subroutines to perform functions outside of the usual actions.

Additionally CBPA maintains proper data security based on roles and provides rich visibility by providing real-time monitoring and historical reporting.

I see no reason why you couldn’t use both CEBP and CBPA. In general, CBPA should help companies complete the same or improved processes faster and more efficiently while removing many areas of human latency (i.e., the file sat on my desk for two days) and errors, replacing slow tasks with automated actions, and systematizing company specific processes to provide a consistent experience.

Dan Aronson

Posted: Thursday, August 6, 10:57 AM

Joined: 8/7/2007
Posts: 5

Once again Rick, thanks for the excellent explanation. And please don't get me wrong; I can, as you envision, see a time and a place for both CBPA and CEBP. Left to choose, I think it boils down mostly to a companies individual direction and culture. There are some points in a process's life-cylce that call for a rip-and-replace mentality, clearly a perfect spot for CBPA.

In others, certain process improvements might have already been implemented which come up just short of the CBPA end-game and are just in need of a tweak or two. Still other organizations are simply not prepared to and or don't have the funds to implement larger projects, but are still always looking for ways to reduce operating budgets (hard dollar ROI). These latter two examples are often perfect for a CEBP solution.

In either case, let's just agree that the amount of work that goes into each will come out in the wash as it will be a primary factor in creating and evaluating the ROI of any such project.