UCStrategies at Enterprise Connect

Transcript for UCStrategies at Enterprise Connect

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStratratgies’ Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I am joined as usual by the UCStrategies team of experts. And today we are going to talk about Enterprise Connect, which is going to be held February 28^th through March 3^rd at the Gaylord Palms Hotel in Orlando. We have quite an agenda, many of the UCStrategies UC experts will be participating and each one of them will take their turn to talk about their sessions and what they hope to provide to the attendees.

I will get started since I am on one of the general sessions which is, Summit UC in 2011 – Myths, Realities and What Comes Next. For those of you who have attended what used to be VoiceCon, now Enterprise Connect, you will probably recall several years ago I posed a very challenging question to some vendors about interoperability and that started the vendors talking among themselves and got both Microsoft and IBM to agree to work on some interoperability for Federation. They followed through and actually came to VoiceCon the following year having succeeded in providing that.

My goal is to try to push again for interoperability and also to get some clarification about where our industry really is at; how far have the vendors really come and where are they headed in the next year or two so that enterprise customers can make intelligent decisions, based on reality as opposed to what unfortunately happens from time to time, a lot of sound bites as to where they would like to be. How far along have they come with CEBP? Are they ready to deliver communications integrated to optimize business processes or are they just adding a name to something and they are really not ready for that. So that is my objective, is to really let people know what to expect over the next year, as opposed to what the vendors are selling and spinning to make themselves look competitive.  So with that I will turn it over to my colleague Marty Parker who is going to have quite a number of sessions.

Marty Parker: Thanks very much. I am looking forward to hearing yours, because it is always exciting. My contributions at Enterprise Connect are more focused on what the attendees, who are the technical managers of most enterprises, are trying to understand and/or answer for their enterprise about unified communications. So there are three of them: one is on Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. called Implementation Options – Unified Communications. In this deep dive, we will look at the different choices that enterprises have for deploying UC, whether they do it by adding to their PBX environment, their voice communications environment; they do it by adding to their desktop environment; or they do it by adding to the applications environment. And then we are going to look in detail at what is required to implement each of the four different major components of UC that most enterprises are installing: IM and presence, conferencing, mobility and CEBP-communications enabled business processes. And I will have panelists there from Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya. So I am going to have a number of panelists there to help comment on this. Actually there is one other panelist just so I do not leave anybody out Jim, I will add that I will also have Siemens on that panel. So it will be a pretty interesting panel.

The next one is kind of the big piece of work and that is the one that shows up on Tuesday afternoon, from 2:30 to 5:30. There is a break in the middle so it is not three hours solid. But this is the one called, Comparing UC Options – Who is Offering What? Each of twelve vendors in the industry will have responded to me already, with their solution for a typical 2,000-user enterprise, the solutions for unified communications specifically, not for enterprise telephony, we held that aside. There are other sessions about that. So this is going to be very interesting, because it shows the trends year after year. This will be the third consecutive year in Orlando that we have done this. You can see trends in pricing; you can see trends in packaging; you can see trends in what is possible to be done with these solutions, how the features are evolving. Very interesting to come to see. And I think we will get a lot of interest. We are going to do that with some opening comments and then some analysis at the end, but in between, three panels of four vendors each. So all of the leading vendors will be on one of those panels and it is really worth coming to see that.

We will be talking about pricing on that as well. In fact Eric Krapf, of Enterprise Connect and NoJitter has pulled about five slides out of this presentation and put them up on the site as teasers and one of them is the pricing slide. It has gotten people very interested. I have had several messages already saying, “How does that vendor do those prices? Where did you get those prices?” So if you want to know where the prices are coming from, come on down on Tuesday afternoon at 2:30.

And then the last one is on Wednesday morning, David Yedwab and I are co-hosting, co-moderating a session on Unified Communications Interoperability. And just as you said, Jim, having things work together is really important. We have the top dozen categories of interoperability identified and then we have a panel of companies to help us discuss this. And actually this panel has kind of grown to be one of the more interesting ones. But we do hope that you will come and see this one, because it is an interesting dialogue that will occur, after we do a few opening conversations including NEC, and Research in Motion, Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya – all will be on this panel. NET will be on this panel. So it should be very interesting. So those are the things I am working on, Jim who else would you like to have comment?

Jim Burton: Dave Michels has a number of sessions and he has a pretty exciting one talking about some of the new startups and what they are doing as a little bit of an experiment at this year’s conference. So Dave, why don’t you take it away.

Dave Michels: The Innovation Showcase is something new we’re trying this year, and it is pretty exciting. Unfortunately it is not getting a lot of coverage in the programming material, because we were not sure if we were going to be able to pull it off or not. But hopefully, we will get the word out at the show. We invited young companies that are doing innovative things in enterprise communications to enter, a panel of five judges are reviewing these applicants. The judges are largely enterprise-focused CIO-types. And we are looking for basically three things: that they are innovative, doing something new; that they are addressing communications specifically which is a pretty wide birth anywhere from collaboration to messaging  to voice; and enterprise focused is the third thing. We have a number of very, very interesting companies and the deadline was just recently and we are right now trying to go through these applications, trying to figure out the four most innovative companies. These companies will be presented on the 9 o’clock panels on Monday and Tuesday. At the very beginning of the panels, they will do a quick pitch. They also have a shared booth in the Innovation Showcase on the show floor. Just really interesting companies—I am not going to go into them right now, but some great ideas that are coming out, targeted toward enterprise space.

Other sessions—I am co-moderating a session on choreographing the cloud, finding the right mix of cloud versus on-premise functions and I really like this notion. So much of the conversation has been in the past about hosted or premise and certainly when you have those types of conversations, the answer usually end up with a yes. So, we will be getting into some of the things that make sense to push off-site and things that make sense to keep on-site and what factors to look at.

Another session I was hearing a lot of pre-conference preparation conversations is around Open Source, I will be moderating that panel and we have some interesting people on that, talking about where Open Source fits in an IT enterprise communications strategy. Then thirdly, the panel on Consumerization of IT, Is Resistance Futile? and I will be participating as a panel member on that one and I have some real strong opinions around consumerization—it’s is the first time the tail is wagging the dog and it is really changing the way things are being viewed in the enterprise and the way business is getting done.

And lastly the lock note on the last day of the conference, I think it is the last session, in fact, I will also be participating on that panel as well.

Marty Parker: Oh my gosh that means I will have to listen to what you have to say Dave, as well as providing my own opinions, because I will be on the lock note too so, we can have dueling opinions.

Dave Michels: We rarely do but it will be fun.

Marty Parker: It will be fun—I agree.

Jim Burton: Well certainly mobility is a very hot topic and the person from the UCStrategies team who is leading that for most of Enterprise Connect is our own Michael Finneran.  Michael what do you have in store?

Michael Finneran: Well Jim, we are going to have a busy time. We have sessions on mobile devices, tablets and a lot of interesting questions I am looking for, part which deals with the consumerization of IT, particularly in our field, the “bring your own device” movement. Also we have a bunch of the vendors including: Avaya, Cisco, Polycom, NEC and RIM talking about their tablet products. I’m interested to hear what they have to say about what is going to be required, where they are going to fit in, applications being supported...

But my biggest session is always the mobile UC RFP, it is modeled on Marty’s and runs at the same time on Wednesday, rather than Tuesday. We are going to have 10 different vendors and this about the third or fourth time that I have done this and I have been through the answers already—much more creative this time than we’ve seen in the past. I used the same 2,000-person company that Marty uses, only I crank up the mobility requirements. And this time challenged them more, rather than just having Blackberry devices, we have requirements for Blackberrys, iPhones, Androids, basic cellular handsets, to see what in their product lines they can actually come up with to really develop a mobility solution.

I am excited about that one. It is going to be a tough session. I only have 10 vendors, rather than the 12, but lots of creative ideas showing up there, and very cost effective. So Jim, that is what I am looking for on the mobile side.

Jim Burton: Well great. So of course, Blair will be doing her usual presentation, kind of setting the stage of where our industry is at and who the players are. So Blair let me turn it over to you.

Blair Pleasant: Thanks, Jim. Yes, I will be giving my usual UC market overview session. And it’s nice to know that we’ve moved from talking about “what IS unified communications,” to “how do I implement unified communications and what are some things I should be thinking about and doing?” I will be covering what’s new in the UC market, and also will be providing some updated numbers and projections and market forecasts. And I will also spend a little more time talking about the UC players, who are some of the leading vendors and what are some of their strengths and weaknesses, and the different ways that they are approaching unified communications.

I will talk a little bit about what’s in store for the near future, and then I will also provide some ideas to help enterprises that are moving toward UC—talk about some things that they should be thinking about, and ways that they should be approaching unified communications and steps they should be taking. And hopefully there will be time for Q&A with the audience at the end. Also, if you go to the home page for NoJitter.com, where it says “keeping up with Enterprise Connect,” you can see some of the slides that I’ll be presenting, so I hope to see you all there.

John Bartlett: Hi, this is John Bartlett. I’m also at Enterprise Connect this year, and working on a number of different sessions. I’ve been working closely with Andrew Davis and Ira Weinstein from Wainhouse Research on a Videoconferencing track, and there we have six sessions which will address all things videoconferencing. I’ll be speaking on one which is “Videoconferencing 101,” I call it, but it’s “I’m in charge now, what do I do?” So this is for folks who are just stepping into the video space and want to try to figure out what the space looks like.

I’m doing a second, and this should be an interesting one, on “Interoperability.” My view is that interoperability has really decayed in the videoconferencing space over the last few years as many new options have appeared that aren’t necessarily compatible. We have five vendors on that panel and we are going to challenge them to address this interoperability issue in the videoconferencing space.

A third one on “Extending Beyond the Enterprise;” this is the whole idea of being able to not just do videoconferencing within your company but being able to reach out to customers, to vendors, to partners, across the internet or across dedicated QoS-supported interconnect and be able to run really high quality video conferencing. So we will talk to some of the service providers and vendors about where they are with that, and challenge them to explain why we can’t have more than we have now, and when we are going to get there. So that should be interesting.

There’s a fourth session which I am going to co-moderate with Andrew Davis on “Managing real-world Experience.” We are going to turn the podium over to some real users—enterprise users of video—and have them help us understand why it’s important in their enterprises, what the challenges were for them, getting in place, getting folks to use it, and so on. So that’s always interesting to find out what’s reality and what’s not.

Then there’s a couple other sessions that Ira and Andrew are going to do—one on “Driving Adoption,” which is how you get users to take advantage of the technology, and Andrew Davis is going to do one on “Telepresence in the Home.” Telepresence in the home is big, and we want to see what its effect is on the enterprise.

Lastly I’m doing two sessions on the network side; one on test tools and why we need a different set of test tools for real-time traffic. And the last one is a kind of network tutorial, so this is a full three-hour session Wednesday afternoon where we’re going to deep dive on the technical side. I have invited some technical heavyweights, another consultant, Terry Slattery, as well as some folks from the vendors: Hewlett Packard, Cisco, Parent Networks, PolyCom for the wireless, and so on, to help us address what it is all about in terms of how you support this traffic properly on the network side. So if you want to roll up your sleeves and get technical with us, join us Wednesday afternoon. That will keep me busy for the week; I will also participate in the lock note at the end. I hope to see you at one of those sessions. Thanks very much. 

Jim Burton: Thank you, everybody. I look forward to seeing you all at Enterprise Connect in a couple of weeks and look forward to our podcast next week which is going to be on security.