John Del Pizzo on Social Business at IBM

Transcript for John Del Pizzo on Social Business at IBM

Don Van Doren: Hi this is Don Van Doren, welcome to this week’s podcast with the UCStrategies experts. Today we are delighted to welcome John Del Pizzo, who is Program Director in Social Communications; he is head of project management for IBM Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony. Welcome John, we are delighted to have you with us today.

John Del Pizzo: Thank you, Don, I am happy to be here.

Don Van Doren: We had recently, of course, IBM Connect 2013, and a lot of new announcements and really some new direction. John, maybe you can give us just a little background on where IBM is moving these days and where you see it headed?

John Del Pizzo: Sure, it would be my pleasure. When I start this discussion I always go back to the initiative that IBM launched probably two or three years ago, which was Smarter Planet. They talk about Smarter Planet as having three defining characteristics: the world is becoming increasingly instrumented, intelligent, and interconnected. The instrumented part is something we can all see in our daily lives. We have sensors in phones that know when to turn the screen off when you bring the phone up to your head. We have sensors in roads that are monitoring traffic. We have equipment on the manufacturing line that can tell you before they break down that they are about to break down. So sensors are just everywhere, and they are driving a tremendous amount of information, which is where the ‘instrumented” becomes this “intelligent.” We have all this data flowing around the world and through these various systems and then you need things like analytics in order to understand that data, and develop patterns and see synergies across the different information sets.

But the third one, which is the interconnected one, is really where we start to play. Interconnected is really about the people part of the equation, and yes, we are all increasingly interconnected through these computers and devices and social networks whether it’s Pinterest or Twitter or Facebook. We’re all increasingly interconnected to the systems we are using in the work environment as well, so social business, the initiative that IBM has been pushing under Smarter Planet for really the last two years or so, is really about this thought of how do we leverage all of these tools, these new social protocols that are evolving, these new communications tools that are evolving in the social sphere, within the enterprise, and apply them to specific business processes to really drive better business outcomes. And what was most interesting to me as an observer, just watching the opening general session at IBM Connect this year, was the transformation from, say five years ago, when I joined this division. Five years ago, each Vice President from a product pillar would have stood up and told you what they were doing in their areas, and done demos and their pieces, and then moved on and the next VP would have come up.  

This year there was none of that. There was only about 20 minutes worth of actual product discussion or demos; the rest of it was all focused on vertically oriented industry solutions that leverage again social tools and networking and analytics to revolutionize how that process is operating. There were examples like smarter commerce, and smarter workforce, and a workforce is a good example. We just acquired a company called Kenexa; I think we closed the acquisition for $1.3 billion recently. We bring all of the industry knowledge and process knowledge they have about human resources and combine it with the social platform and software tools that we have, and we think we can revolutionize how human resources organizations attract talent, how they integrate that talent into their culture. How they ultimately empower that talent to be successful and develop and build skills that the enterprise needs, and how they motivate that talent to stay in front of you and interesting challenges all the time. So we are attacking not from a product perspective but from an industry perspective and a vertical perspective.

Don Van Doren: Well that’s great, John, and thank you, that’s a great introduction. At least three of our UCStrategies Experts were at IBM Connect and let me hear some of their perspectives. Jim Burton, what did you see and some of your observations please?

Jim Burton: I have a couple of observations, and I have a couple of questions for John, too, but some observations. I think John was actually nailing this when he was talking about the difference between this conference and previous conferences. I’ve been going to what used be LotusSphere, now Connect, since they introduced unified communications when Sametime took on that name and profile, and clearly, it was different this year. It’s been speeds and feeds and past discussions and this time was all about solutions and I felt that absolutely very, very, worthwhile.

Another observation I had, I had a chance to spend some time with Mike Rhodin and Allister Rennie, and we were talking about their acquisition, the one they just made for $1.3 billion. And we got into a discussion comparing IBM acquisitions to other vendors’ acquisitions, some of their competitors, and how some of these acquisitions you’d wonder how will you ever see a return if you take profit as a return and use that to pay for an acquisition.

You look at some of those and you say, boy that is going to be a long time in coming. I will not go into the names of the vendors, but it was really interesting when you started comparing the model that IBM follows – it has to be good business, it has to be a profitable business, and it is one that we will use profits to pay for over time and in a short period of time. So I thought that was a fascinating analysis.

The other comment is analytics, the focus on analytics. And some of this came out in last year’s conference when there were discussions of some of the recent acquisitions they had made in analytics and quite frankly, how far IBM is ahead of so many of their competitors in being able to take  analytics and put it into various applications. I think as most of you who follow conversations that I’ve had, (there are) three stages of unified communications; the third stage is analytics and I think IBM has beaten everyone else to the punch on that one.

So getting to a question I have for John, prior to the conference there was a Wall Street Journal article that kind of said how IBM has lost its way, their revenue volumes are down...and not a very friendly article. And I just wondered what kind of comments you might have on that and whether there are some things that were discussed at the conference that maybe made the point that the Wall street Journal article was not as accurate as it could have been?

John Del Pizzo: Well, I actually found the article entertaining and somewhat self-contradictory.  They laid out an argument that IBM, particularly the old Lotus division, is shrinking and dying away, yet we are still in excess of a billion dollar division. That’s not a bad situation to be in if you are a business of that size – you still have some pretty significant staying power. I can look at my products such as Sametime and I have seen a consistent and steady growth curve across my products that we have been adding about two, two and a half million new users to our platform each year for the last five, six years, and we are still growing quite nicely in the enterprise segment. I can say that again speaking specifically of Sametime, we’ve traditionally had about 30 percent of our new customers in each of the last five years be Microsoft shops. So these are folks that we have gone back and looked at the various licenses in our systems and couldn’t find any Notes or other real IBM licences with these customers, so they were Microsoft Outlook shops or other environments, and this year that number actually spiked up to 40 percent. So we are still publically saying 30 but we were really proud that we got that number up to 40, so if we are struggling publically or struggling in the market I don’t know what we are seeing that kind of success.

The other thing that I will point out is that we have undergone this transition from Lotus to IBM collaboration solutions and we have taken on the mantel of leadership for social business, but you will notice the solutions I spoke about were smarter commerce and smarter cities and smarter workforce. We own the mission to enable all of those other solutions that are coming from other aspects of IBM, smarter commerce is part of the Websphere group; it’s not part of our division. Smarter cities is not a part of the Lotus division either, but what we have done is aligned our mission of owning the people end of the equation in with the optimizations and the middleware solutions and the other capabilities the rest of IBM is bringing to market. And then so we are much less the kind of isolated collaboration people we might have been five years ago, and we are now a fully integrated and driving force behind where IBM as a company is going. And I think you saw that with a lot of the executives that were speaking at the event this year. It was not just the typical product Vice Presidents; you had Greg Haney coming from other parts of IBM, and Mike Rhodin and a laundry list of other IBM executives from across the company who were participating in the various sessions. So I don’t think anybody has to worry about IBM or our division going anyplace anytime soon.

Don Van Doren: Blair Pleasant, you were at the conference as well.

Blair Pleasant: Yes I was, thanks Don. I thought it was a great conference, especially for those interested in social business, but not as great for those interested in unified communications and collaboration. John and I had talked about this, but I was disappointed at the lack of anything related to UCC and frankly, Sametime was barely mentioned. Also, at a lunch for the analysts where there were different tables representing the different solution areas where we were able to sit with IBM people to discuss these areas, there weren’t any tables or any discussion about UCC, which I was disappointed in, and I thought that was telling about where the company sees Sametime and UCC.

So I do think that IBM needs to revisit the value of Sametime and its value to social business solutions and recognize that real time communications is a really important part of social business and they’ve got a great product to leverage. Really, IBM is one of the very few companies that has both an enterprise social software solution and a UCC or real time communications solution that can be integrated and work together, so I would like them to leverage that synergy a bit more. I did do a video with Amy Ewing (posted on UCStrategies) that demonstrates the IBM Connections Suite that integrates the two products. I also would have liked to hear more use cases about IBM Connections so that customers could get a better feel for what it can do for them and how it can benefit them.

All in all, I thought it was a great conference; I got lots of good insights, especially when it comes to IBM Social Business. I did another video also about the IBM social business cloud and I think there is a lot of good potential in that area. All in all it was good but I think that there is a lot of opportunity to leverage when it comes to IBM Connection Suite and I would like to see that more.

John Del Pizzo: I think there were both a lot of positive things in what you said, and quite frankly as critiques, I wish more people at IBM learned to give them in the way you did because I came away feeling very good about that. Let me add a few quick comments. Relative to the analyst’s lunch, I know I have been at that in previous years, so I don’t know whether they had a scheduling conflict with my calendar or what the situation was. Typically, I have been there or someone from my team has been there in the past, but what I think you are highlighting, though, is part of the evolution that I was talking about earlier. The emphasis of what IBM is doing is much less on product today than it was five years ago. You didn’t see significant...in the opening general sessions...again there was about 20 minutes of product time where they laid out what was coming...Notes, which is still the 800-pound gorilla of the ICS portfolio, got maybe four or five minutes of that. Sametime got a couple of minutes of that. Connections got a little bit more but that is the new darling, the driver of a lot of what we are doing, so that makes some level of sense. Portal and the other pieces all got a few minutes, but instead you heard a lot more about again these industry-oriented solutions of which the social platform, the software that we build, is an enabling component. I know I have read on a few of the pieces and Blair it may have been yours, Marty it may have been on yours, this kind of thought that we didn’t talk enough about voice, or the basic UC capabilities. That should not be taken necessarily as a negative thing. Those are critical capabilities; there is only so much communication you can drive by posting comments on somebody’s file or on their blogs, or their wiki.  

At a certain point in time you need to get on the phone, you need to get in a conference, you need to actually drive an immediate decision, and so real time communications are critical. But they are one of a number of different critical capabilities that make up the overall solution that we are delivering through to the marketing organization or the human resources or to the emergency response folks in the public sector, and we try to pull all of them together into one coherent hole. Not necessarily talking about feed and speed about why our video is better than the other video. We have a mini main session devoted to each of the different product lines so I gave the presentation this year for Sametime and we announced a whole slew of new capabilities that are coming in the next version of the product set. So some fairly significant investments continue to be made in the Sametime portfolio, around integration with Connections, around the video capabilities that are coming, cloud capabilities, mobile capabilities. I think the whole session has actually been posted on YouTube so if anybody is interested in watching the session you can certainly go to YouTube and look my name up or the IBM mini mains up and you will be able to pull that down and watch some of the things we are talking about. So I will say to an extent that I feel your pain as the product guy responsible for driving a product segment. It somewhat pains me that IBM takes a non-product-oriented view to going to market, but when I step back or take off my product hat for a moment and I focus on where IBM is going as an organization or as a company, it is proving to be phenomenally effective, and when they sell these solutions they are taking my products along with them, so I am a happy camper about the way we are doing things.

Don Van Doren: Great, thanks very much John. Marty Parker, what are your observations?

Marty Parker: Well thanks, John, for being here with us, and Don for moderating. I find this to be a fascinating evolution. I certainly understand what John’s saying, that it’s the smarter planet initiative, IBM is taking this as a theme, and from everything you see from the stock price to the revenues to the individual numbers that John has talked about in communications, it seems to be working pretty well. Also, with our Unicomm Consulting clients, we are seeing some pretty aggressive adoption of IBM Connections. Interestingly, the adoption isn’t to do with unified communications right at first, it’s usually sponsored by HR or some other department who wants it there as a social environment but the two things have to collide at some point and our clients, we try to bring them together peacefully as opposed to in a train wreck. But I think that they will come together over time; I think that IBM’s bet is a good one. The thing I notice as I said in a couple of posts here on UCStrategies at IBM Connect 2013 was that it was as John said all about solutions, it was all about industry verticals or IBM’s viewpoints on how business processes would be modified, and of course again that resonated with us because we have been saying at UC, unified communications, for some time is “communications integrated to optimize business processes.” Well here we are, optimizing business processes, John, it seems to me.

I also think that IBM’s move is a smart one because it plays to IBM’s strengths, and if you go and start scouring through the Gartner Magic Quadrant reports, you find that the IBM Social Business and IBM Smart Planet moves are playing to areas where IBM is in the leadership quadrant, while the move in the past with unified communications never quite got IBM into the leaders quadrant in UC or enterprise corporate telephony. That didn’t happen. But it IS happening in the areas where social business is going to have a strong play and so John, my expectation, and I will toss this to you for comment, my expectation is that there is a lot you can do to build on some excellent work you have done through partnering with the telecom vendors through Sametime Unified Telephony (SUT). You really know how to integrate with every PBX in the market, unlike some others, but I think that it means that you are not trying to build a PBX and you are actually not trying to build a communication system, you are trying to build the communication components of a smart planet-oriented business, or the communication components of a social business, would you say that’s true?

JohnDel Pizzo: I think that’s an accurate description and I will go back to actually when Don made the introduction and he gave my fairly long-winded title – Head of Sametime Product Management and Program Director for Social Communications. My primary day job is running product management for Sametime and working with customers, and developers, and my team to make sure that we are bringing the right kind of capabilities to market. But at the same time I have this other role where I am trying to articulate, really to a communications audience, where does social come to play, how does it impact the communications infrastructure? How do these things come together, and we see some interesting parallels between what happened when we moved just from dial tone to unified communications. We had a new defining characteristic, we have presence, and presence let us see when someone was available and therefore we didn’t make as many errant phone calls. We didn’t leave as many voice mails and we had this other proliferation of tools: instant messaging, meetings, voicemail, and all these other tools we could use besides the traditional phone when we wanted to reach someone. And the voicemail and dial, those sorts of tools, the phone did not go away, but the way they were used changed as new capabilities came into play.

What we are doing now is we are seeing a very similar parallel take place on the communications front. I don’t want to say unified communications is not relevant, but we think we moved into a social communications era where the emphasis is less on just presence-based communications, but much more so on relevance. A really unrelated example... but I know when the power went out at the Superbowl in New Orleans a week or two ago, somebody set up a Twitter account and it had 20,000 followers within about four or five minutes of the blackout actually occurring. So imagine if you were able to harness your own organization, a threat or opportunity appears and you’re not worried about moving through who you know in your contact list to find somebody who knows something about that area to help you, but you are able to leverage the entire expertise of the organization, right? Not wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of the corporation.

Marty Parker: So John, I would say I think that is right, but the spin I would put on it, the spin you are putting on it, is about communications in social, but actually, at IBM Connect 2013 the spin was really about communications in business processes including social for business processes. So I think this is a harbinger of more play by people who are in the overall business process business, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, but more in the dynamics and SharePoint spaces than in the Microsoft Lync space. And I think to some extent it is going to leave the PBX community somewhat in the dust, because none of them has a footprint that lets this happen.

John Del Pizzo: I will let smarter people than I determine what happens to the traditional PBX vendors, but I think your statement that IBM is engaging with the business process owners and the business process owners are in turn engaging with the communications groups and saying “this is what we want to have happen,” is a very true statement. And again that plays towards IBM’s strength. And the message that I end up coming with is, I will not say the back end of that but that is, okay Mr. Communications Professional, this is what the rest of your line of business organization is seeing and really what they are asking for, so let me show you how these things work together. And you’re right, IBM is not going to build a PBX; we don’t want to be in the voice business; we have never wanted to be in the PBX and the telephony business. We view ourselves as operating above that, and not to say there is anything wrong with that, but a slightly different area of the stack. We want to be able to integrate with the infrastructure that our customers have and some of our customers have very divergent, very robust infrastructures with vendors and stuff all over the place. So therefore it’s incumbent upon us to leverage the investments they have made in the infrastructure, in their telephony, in their phones, in the PBXs, help them transition into the cloud, if that is where they want to go. And start leveraging hosted services and continually provide that consistent user experience that makes it easy for the end user to operate in the environment without having to worry about what’s under the covers. So I don’t think you will ever see us move into the leadership quadrant of Gartner’s MQ ever again, only because we are never going to offer telephony and again, Gartner considers that a base piece of the UC solution; we just think there is a better way to do it.

Marty Parker: Got it. Good. Thank you very much; back to you, Don.

Don Van Doren: Thanks, great discussion – all of you. We have some other comments from other UC experts. Kevin Kieller, what is on your mind here?

Kevin Kieller: Thanks, Don, and welcome, John. What I want to do, John, is bring you to some specifics, so first a comment and then maybe some specific questions. Everyone I talk to wants to leverage social tools, improve business efficiency, help organizations find, retain, and empower talent and those are some of the things that you said IBM is working with. But what happens for me is that lots of customers that I am talking to, they’ve really adopted, or are looking to adopt some of your major competitor’s tools, so specifically Microsoft, whether it is Active Directory Exchange, Lync, SharePoint... And I understand that you said you are putting less emphasis on products, but ultimately products are the tools the customers pick to help them meet their business requirements. So with your product management hat on, how specifically does IBM and do you position Sametime and Sametime Unified Telephony to compete with some of the Microsoft tools, and what organizations are good candidates and should be looking at the IBM tool suite as opposed to just moving towards the Microsoft direction?

John Del Pizzo: You asked essentially two different questions there. The first one is just about Sametime in particular and essentially what organizations would make sense for Sametime and for SUT. And the second one is then the IBM Suite. I am actually going to answer them differently because from an IBM perspective you do get different answers.

From a Sametime point of view, we quite frankly think that we fit well with most mid- to very large-sized organizations as far as providing a consistent user experience and a base set of UC-related capabilities. Obviously we provide instant messaging, meetings, we do video, we do voice, and we integrate with the telepresence rooms, the PBXs, the infrastructure you already have in place, and it can be on-prem solutions or they can be hybrid cloud solutions. We have some folks using some stuff from Broadsoft and their plug-in integrations work with our platforms as well. Where we see our shining strength is for that customer that doesn’t necessarily want to get locked into any one particular environment because they realize the situation is highly fluid.

The vendors that they are using today may or may not be in these businesses tomorrow and fundamentally, you need to integrate multiple capabilities from multiple sources to deliver an end-to-end solution. So in that regard I segment it this way. If you are using Sametime and have a single or predominantly single telephony infrastructure from one vendor, you are using all Cisco, you are using all Avaya, or mostly those, then Cisco, Avaya, ShoreTel, Alcatel-Lucent, all the others, they make very nice integrations through the open plug-in model and APIs that we have for Sametime. Cisco actually just updated theirs. I mentioned in my session that we have a love/hate relationship with Cisco; sometimes we love them and sometimes we hate them. This time we are loving them because they went out and upgraded their integrations into Sametime such that instead of doing a click-to-launch and opening Cisco clients on the desktop, all of the user experience, the voice, the video, the unified messaging, is all handled from within the Sametime experience.  One consistent client experience; that’s something we like to see. But if you have again, a single oriented environment, their plug-in may be exactly what you are looking for. If on the other hand you have a very diverse environment, you have a multinational organization, you have grown through acquisition, you have various pieces of equipment all over the place, and you want to bring that consistent user experience to the table for all of your users but you don’t want to rip and replace what may be very viable assets, then a product like Sametime Unified Telephony makes a lot of sense because it is a middleware layer that can integrate with and leverage everything that you have already in place, but again provide advanced functionality and that consistent user experience to the end user. And like any middleware, it means you can have the flexibility to make changes to the underlying infrastructure and the end user never has to know. So if you decide to switch from Cisco someplace to ShoreTel someplace else, well, the end user does not have to worry about changing environments and learning how to use new devices and things, they just continue to use it they way they already have.

Now you asked a different question in there, which is how does IBM, and I am going to say “broader IBM” see ourselves working in those environments? Well, Sametime, sure we work with Active Directory, we integrate to Office, we integrate to Outlook and we actually out-integrate Microsoft in some of their versions of their products especially as we move forward in waves and you don’t want to move to the latest and greatest wave and upend your entire infrastructure. Sametime fits very nicely into older environments and we could continue doing that for the foreseeable future. But lets say that quite frankly you were wedded to a Lync, that’s the environment that you want to use, so you are wedded to a Cisco Telephony and a Jabber presence and that is what you want to use, fantastic, IBM will be more than happy to sell you Connections and the Customer Experience Suite and the portal components that surround that to help flesh out your social business environment. It doesn’t have to be all IBM; we work with all of our competitors in order to be able to provide those kinds of solutions. So Cisco is going to integrate directly into Connections? Fantastic. We are going to have customers that want to do that. Cisco will integrate into Sametime and other environments because we have customers who want to do that, too. So again maybe it’s because of our tradition in middleware and services, but we look to put together solutions that help the customer achieve their goals and some of that is going to contain IBM software in various parts of the portfolios and other times it won’t. That is okay because we are helping the customer achieve their goal.

Kevin Kieller: Well great, that was a very detailed answer and I think you hit on a lot of key points from the product basis. I guess my final comment would be somehow you have to get more of the customers asking about and considering some of the IBM and Sametime products, but with that I will turn it back over to you, Don.

Don Van Doren:  Great. Phil Edholm, you had some comments.

Phil Edholm: Yes. Obviously I think it is an interesting world because if you look at a view of both Sametime and to a great extent the tools that come out of the Lync family, I think there are two characteristics that are very interesting that are changing today. One is, they tend to be knowledge-worker focused, which tend to be people who operate their own independent personal business process through those tools, through the productivity tools, through calendars and email and other things, and the extension of those with IM and voice and video and how they manage interaction and interaction and information is interesting. The majority of the workforce is actually information workers who don’t collaborate in the same way; they tend to work defined by a business process that is very specific: contact center agents, bank tellers. So the question I am curious about is from an IBM perspective, it strikes me that what’s happening in the industry today is that we are making this very fundamental change from the phone being the only communication device to the phone being a communication device for almost a specific modality. I am very curious about how IBM sees addressing that change. Obviously, you said you do not want to be a PBX vendor, but the reality is that a lot of voice communications in the future are not going to be driven from the PBX. They are going to be driven from businesses processes or personal or a formal business process and I am just curious how much you see IBM taking advantage of that and addressing that as you move forward?

John Del Pizzo: I think that’s a centerpiece of what we are doing; this is just a very simple example. Sam Palmisano, our former CEO, had Sametime intentionally integrated into all of his sales dashboards and the sellers, we actually renamed it from Sametime to SamTime because every time those numbers weren’t what they needed to be, they were getting a ping from him immediately. And we are seeing that happen over and over again; now we enable a lot of that so whether it is embedding presence into Connections, into Portal, into Cognos, in the rational tools, once you have presence you can click-to again, a particular voice, video telephony, pick your particular infrastructure. One of the things we do with Sametime is our goal is not to be the top of the stack. Our goal is to integrate the communication services but then put them where people need them, where they actually work, the environment that they are in. We view it as a failure if they have to pivot away from what they are doing in order to go get into a collaborative environment in order to talk.

So you mentioned the contact center. We actually had AVDS and Interactive Intelligence speaking at Connect about how they are using Connections and Sametime and integrating that into the Interactive Intelligence Contact Center Solution and how they are transforming how the customer service is handled through that. Again, we talked about human resources, smarter commerce; it’s all about the marketing organization. Identifying when things are happening on the websites; which offers the customers to getting excited about and being able to engage with them and sometime that is a direct voice to video interaction with them. Sometimes it’s an email; sometimes it is restructuring the website. We have the IBM support folks who have actually set up their own independent installation of Sametime because they wanted to run some of the more advanced capabilities versus what the CIO’s office here implements, in order to be able to do voice and video with their customers and do the whole queuing mechanism. So embedding Sametime through the APIs that we have and those sorts of things and extending our platforms to the plug-ins and the clients is a huge crux of what we are doing for our customers.

Phil Edholm: Then just one other question. One of the things that everyone here knows is I am a big proponent of WebRTC; I think WebRTC is a huge game changer. Do you have any specific plans in that space that you are ready to talk about?

John Del Pizzo: We have plans but nothing I am in a position to announce today.

Phil Edholm: Thanks much, I appreciate it.

Don Van Doren: Thanks very much Phil and John. Michael Finneran, I bet you have something to ask about mobile.

Michael Finneran: As usual, Don thank you, John I am sorry I missed Connect this year. I have been to the last couple of Lotuspheres and always found it an eye-opening event. But I did hear about Bharti Patel describing some new mobile clients and while I apologize for bringing up products, I was wondering if you could say something about where they fit in your overall plans?

John Del Pizzo: It’s funny, the executives lead with a saying, a slogan that it was Cloud first and mobile always and I forget what the third part of it was, something about business integration and kind of beat that one to death. I actually think from our perspective it is happening in the other direction; it is mobile first, and probably then Cloud always. We rolled out a significant number of just Sametime clients this year, across Android devices, iOS devices, Blackberry devices, and we are bringing out a whole range of new video capabilities and quite frankly audio capabilities in the next generation of the product. And a major driver behind that is the question I get from every customer when I sit down is, when am I going to get audio/video on my iPad in a Sametime meeting? So we are delivering that; we are going to make that happen for them and we are going to make it a good continuing presence video experience, we are going to make it a flexible experience so they can manipulate it and pick the video streams they want to see.

We are also really excited because a lot of people want to use audio conferencing or use Sametime for audio conferencing and we have done voice and video for a while. But that challenge has always been, somebody is in a car somewhere and therefore you have to give an audio conferencing bridge and everybody just dials into the audio conference bridge. So with the new mobile clients you will be able to use the voice and video capabilities directly from the mobile clients, so everybody inside your organization can leverage the Sametime voice and video. And we will include a dial out bridge for the first time, the ability to cause the Sametime meeting to dial out to a person or dial out to an audio conferencing bridge to connect to other people that might be outside the organization. And of course we are going to put in a full SUT soft phone on the mobile devices which is something I am very much looking forward to as I was wandering around Vancouver at another event last week and it would have been perfect to have that kind of mobile voice over IP features available to me. So we have a lot of mobile stuff and that is just in Sametime; then there is the whole Connections roadmap and other mobile clients that we are building, so mobile is a major area of investment for us.

Michael Finneran: Great, glad to hear it. I am looking forward to seeing it as well John, thank you.

Marty Parker: By the way John, it was Cloud first, mobile always and multiple choices.

John Del Pizzo: Multiple choices...okay, I will have to remember that one.

Marty Parker: But that’s what you have been saying all along, so that works.

Don Van Doren: Art Rosenberg, did you have some comments, too?

Art Rosenberg: I had just posted something about Mobile UC and Social Media on UCStrategies.com. The main point that I was trying to bring up is that with social networking and posting, it is not a person-to-person situation now, it is person to community, if you will. So somebody who is in your community posts something that may be of interest, how do you know about it? And so they use notifications, but now if you are mobile and you get notifications of everything that gets posted then you are going to be overwhelmed. So there is a need to have management of your notifications of the recipient, not the contact initiator end; I want to let them know something. The person who is going to be getting all of these notifications has to be able to manage their time and they have all kinds of things and social postings is just one of many and there has to be some way of managing that. So that is the gist of my article and I just wondered if you have any plans in that direction for what I call Notification Management across all modalities.

John Del Pizzo: To your initial statement, we call it “the shift from reach to relevance.” It’s not about the one-on-one interaction with the people you know that you can reach. It is about the relevant people who can help you regardless of where they are in the organization.

Art Rosenberg: It may not be just the relevant people with just the information; if people want information they do not really want people in the middle, if necessary.

John Del Pizzo: Oh absolutely, and I use an example like that in some of the presentations I give. How I posted one file and 84 people downloaded it and that meant that not only did I not have 84 requests for that file, the email or instant messaging or phone call, but all the other people who those people would have contacted to ask who the right person was that had that information didn’t have to be bothered. So there is a tremendous productivity just in that thought process. But you are right, the notification management, the attention management, is a critical part of this. Unfortunately, I have to defer to my Connections brethren because they are taking the lead on designing what that notification management system is going to be. I know that for example today I get a little pop-up on Sametime whenever people that I follow have posted something that it considers to be relevant for me. I can pretty much guess though, that the answer would be some mixture of analytics and other backend systems in order to help prioritize what the system thinks is important for you to see right now, and then when you get back to your desk and have leisurely time to read you can skim through all of it.

Art Rosenberg: Exactly. I think it would be very helpful if you or someone you want to refer it to read my post and then comment back on the idea of prospective.

John Del Pizzo: Sure, I would be happy to forward that over to my colleagues in product management for Connections, I am sure they can give you a good answer.

Art Rosenberg: Okay great, thank you.

Don Van Doren: Great. Dave Michels?

Dave Michels: Thanks Don, John thanks for joining us, this was really interesting. I have always found Sametime a little confusing from a UC perspective as Blair touched on in some of her comments. I personally think that UC is, if I were to use a pizza analogy, the basic cheese pizza is voice and then all these other things like presence and video are various toppings. You are one of the few vendors that are coming at it with the toppings. I have always had a little trouble understanding how that fits, and so I want to throw that out there and see if you want to comment on that, and then I wanted to ask you specifically about some of your voice partnerships. So did you have any comment about your approach to voice?

John Del Pizzo: Well, I think some of that just comes from the IBM heritage. First of all, we are very good at integrating into other systems. We also respect the work that our partners do, doing voice and doing it well is not an easy thing. There are a lot of man hours and time and effort that have gone into some of those products. And they are going into the next generations and the Cloud versions of all those products. We are going to let the experts who know how to do those things do those things, but we feel that there is value that we can bring to the table on top of that base capability. And it’s interesting because I actually had this conversation with some new IBM sellers today and I tried to explain to them the difference between unified communications, which I think a lot of people associate with the kind of definition you put on the table, which is predominantly voice and the transition to IP PBPX’s. Unified communications and collaboration, which is where we felt we played, and we added a lot of value to that base UC infrastructure, and now the seed change we see happening is we introduced social into the mix and we are moving more towards a social communications form of interaction. I don’t necessarily know how to describe it other than that’s where we think we can add value and our customers are telling us we are doing so, so we continue down that path.

Dave Michels: It sounds like we largely agree that voice is an important part of the puzzle. It is just a matter of who provides which pieces. I think you said earlier that you could only comment so far in social streams and blogs and what not where you might at some point need to have a conversation about it, was that correct?

John Del Pizzo: Yes, voice is critical, I by no means want to downplay the value of voice because fundamentally and we have all experienced it, you are doing an instant message with somebody and you just say, look – this would be faster if we get on the phone and have that call. There are times when you need that immediate kind of interaction, but that doesn’t mean that IBM necessarily has to provide that part of the stack.

Dave Michels: I get that and so help me understand how you assure your customers that their investments and way of solving that piece of the puzzle is not going to leave them stranded. You made the comment earlier about your love/hate relationship with Cisco and you like Cisco now, or you love Cisco now, because they have done better integrations with Sametime, but if they hadn’t then you would hate them and it seems to me that the customer gets kind of caught up in that. And then you also made the comment how IBM doesn’t want to be in the voice business and you actually said, I was surprised, you actually said never has been or never wanted to be. But obviously that is not true going way back to when you acquired Rolm, but there have been strategic relationships with 3Com and Nortel; just recently you had the Digium, IBM Cube, which was replaced by the Lotus Foundations Box that had ShoreTel built into it and NEC. It just seems that there is a high risk for a customer with the Sametime solution to get caught in this.

John Del Pizzo: Let me suggest that when I say never, I am probably referring to the modern era of the last maybe 10 or 15 years when we have been pushing and involved in Sametime as part of a unified communications stack. I do realize that 20 years ago or whatever it was we bought a phone company and sold a phone company, so we have been in that business and we exited that business. So my language may have been a tad imprecise in that regard.

Dave Michels: But even Lotus Foundations are the IBM Cube were the last three or four years.

John Del Pizzo: Yes, but think about those in the context of what I said. IBM is not providing the voice capability; we are collaborating with others who are providing the voice capabilities as part of an overall solution. We do that all the time. That is how we deliver a tremendous amount of value to our customers and in some regard yes, anytime you put a new solution in market there is always the threat that it is ultimately going to go away. And Cisco introduced, to pick a slightly relative example, they introduced the Cius Tablet and then they pulled that out of market. So that happens all the time, what we try and do though is maintain open sets of API’s,  open standards and endorse open standards wherever possible, so that as the technology changes and matures over time, we are in a position to leverage those capabilities that are there. Now if you are really concerned about future proofing, something like Sametime Unified Telephony is a fantastic solution because as the middleware layer, it extracts all that stuff that is happening underneath and you can make whatever changes you want to the infrastructure and it doesn’t impact the users whatsoever. You have a lot of flexibility to essentially roll with technology as it evolves. If you are doing a direct one-on-one integration, of course, if you’re talking Sametime to ShoreTel, Sametime to Cisco, a lot of it is going to depend on what the Cisco capabilities, the ShoreTel and the Avaya capabilities are and how well that they are implementing the standards in those sorts of things, it’s part of the world we live in.

Dave Michels: I like that. That’s a good point; there is always risk with any solution and it goes away. Can you summarize some of the key strategic partnerships you have with those voice partners? I have seen a list but not recently.

John Del Pizzo:  I can run through a couple off the top of my head. Obviously Cisco I mentioned, they just updated their voice plug-ins, which would include video, telephony and voicemail. I know they have a series of integrations that you can add plug-ins into the Sametime environment to launch WebEx meetings and those sorts of things. ShoreTel just updated and introduced a whole new set of plug-ins for the Sametime environment; they just did that at IBM Connect. I have not seen them in phenomenal detail but I am told by my team that they very much mirror the kind of user experience I mentioned, where you have access to their full set of capabilities inside a consistent Sametime container, so it makes it look seamless to the end user. I will pick somebody on the audio conferencing side for a moment. Arkadin which is very quickly making a name for itself in audio conferencing has made some major acquisitions in that space. Also announced new PCSDI adaptors for their audio conferencing system so you can plug that into your Sametime meeting experience and operate your audio conference from within Sametime. A company called Appealio had provided a new set of plug-ins for PGI audio conferencing, they have long been partnered with PGI, they have been building some of those plug-ins and now they are offering it directly to market. Avaya has a whole slew of Aura and ACE plug-ins; they have a couple of different integration options that are available. Alcatel-Lucent actually had some of the best and most advanced integration I have seen in Sametime, I have not looked at it in the last year but last year at Connect when they were rolling that out and introducing some of those. And again very robust capabilities, you would never know you had left or were not working in a fully IBM Sametime environment. So those are just a few off the top of my head.

Dave Michels: That’s fantastic, just one last follow-up on that. If you have a mixed environment, if you have different kinds of brands of voice solutions at different offices and what not and you use Sametime as a way of leveling that, do you have some sort of certification or levels of certification that assures that they all have the same type of functionality or do you run into disparities across the different sites or brands?

John Del Pizzo: We have a certification program, I am going to get into a little technical detail here, but for example, around something we call SUT Light, which is essentially just using a SIP trunk to connect to the Sametime components to your Avaya, Cisco, whatever telephony components or video components. And there we take that through the formal certification program on their end and on ours to make sure that that operates properly. That is fairly basic functionality, so again, type in a phone number, type in a SIP address and get connected through whatever your infrastructure is to some other endpoint. For full SUT I don’t know if we use the word certification but we do have a testing/interop program with most of the other vendors to make sure that we can deliver the right kinds of capabilities as they migrate and enhance their platform over time.

Dave Michels: Very good, thank you so much John for joining us, back to you Don.

Don Van Doren: Great, thanks very much. I think this has been a great session and I think this dialogue really helped to clarify IBM’s positioning and how it is extending its leadership into this emerging world of social business. Our thanks to John Del Pizzo for joining us for this valuable discussion, thanks John, it was really great having you. And I think frankly we ought to have you back and six months or a year just to get an update on how all of this is coming out, these really great visions that you guys are going forward on.

John Del Pizzo: I enjoyed it, just let me know, I would be happy to join anytime.

Don Van Doren: Great thanks, and please join us next week for another podcast on a relevant topic of today’s news, thanks.