UCStrategies Experts Discuss Lotusphere and ITEXPO

Transcript for UCStrategies Experts Discuss Lotusphere and ITEXPO

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz, this is Jim Burton and I am here as usual with the UCStrategies expert team. Last week was a busy week for a lot of us. There were two very, very important conferences – Lotusphere in Orlando, and ITEXPO in Miami. A couple of brave souls actually attended both; some people like me just could not handle two and attended one. So we are going to jump into that and I am going to turn it over to my colleagues who attended the Lotusphere event in Orlando and we will start with Michael Finneran. Michael take it away.

Michael Finneran: As usual, IBM does an excellent job painting the big picture and certainly fitting in the context—the social networking. The central theme was “Get Social, Do Business,” and it started with Alistair Rennie and stayed right through the rest of the program. Of course, the highlight was having Kevin Spacey there talking among his other movie efforts, he was the executive producer for The Social Network. But IBM really did a great job, I thought, in pointing out the smarter planet theme and also the importance of social business. There were a lot of interesting statistics about how companies who engage in social business are outperforming their competitors. Of course from IBM’s standpoint they point to a decade of research they have had in working on social networking and even going so far as publishing one of the first sets of guidelines on social computing, recently updated, they tell us. But key also, in the IBM message is still their idea of openness. One of the speakers pointed out that the idea of building a social network on a proprietary stack is a fool’s errand. Social networking is about reaching out and certainly, IBM does seem to have taken that to heart in their own, internally. I know Dave Michels was there as well, what were your feelings?

Dave Michels: The first thing is, I was just amazed at the size of the show. I do not know how big it was...someone had told me 10,000 people – that’s possible. It was significantly larger than I had anticipated, being my first Lotusphere. I made the mistake of trying to meet somebody at the first evening reception, but that was like trying to find somebody at Disneyland or something, which is insane. I was also a bit surprised, initially, with their strong messaging around social. As you mentioned, Kevin Spacey being the guest speaker – I didn’t really consider IBM as a social company or social really fitting into the space that Lotus and Sametime addresses. But they did a very good job of connecting those dots for me and being back from the show, I’m looking at the Super Bowl and seeing the Chatter ads during halftime; I’m looking at the news around Yammer, of course the whole Egypt thing, Facebook and Twitter seeing a lot of attention. Clearly social networking is changing the way we are communicating as a society and very few business-focused solutions are really being presented other than Chatter and Yammer and it was nice to see IBM really pushing that and listening to some of the customers talk about the effects of that. I was very surprised by IBM’s tight relationship with RIM. RIM seemed like it was almost an IBM subsidiary the way it was presented in so many panels and sides of the booth and one of the co-CEOs attending some of the events at Lotusphere. I guess RIM is the logical partner for IBM in a lot of things as Apple and Microsoft and Google are more or less competitors of different types.

Going back to the voice side of things, I was a little surprised about how loose their voice strategy really is. They put up a number of voice manufacturers that are key partners for them with SameTime, but there is no kind of degrees or certifications or levels of partnership and some of these vendors are very tightly integrated with SameTime and some of them are very loosely integrated with SameTime. And just kind of -- I thought kind of confusing for the consumer or the enterprise buyer to understand the relationships and integration options and the capabilities between partners. For example, they talked about the new Plantronics headset that has the proximity detection in there so it reports presence. And they said a number of times that Plantronics is actually changing your status in Sametime to available when you put the headset on. But is the headset really talking to Sametime or is it talking to the phone solution? I couldn’t really understand where the pieces were coming together. I think there is a lot of opportunity for IBM to build up its voice story.

Jim Burton: Thanks Dave; I would say that one of my observations is that it is almost as if IBM is changing the discussion in the enterprise community from UC to social business. We will see how that goes, if they are successful at that. I think they can do very well because I think they are ahead of most of the people in the marketplace. But when you have competitors like Cisco, Microsoft, and Avaya, who have their own agendas, it is a tough marketing crew to go beat against when you are up against those folks.

Don Van Doren: Interesting observation, Jim, about the fact that the social message was really louder than what was formerly, UC2, their Unified Communications and Collaboration message. As you suggest, perhaps it’s a way for IBM to give itself sort of a home-field advantage, because this social area is clearly an area of strength for them. So in that light, I think the Lotusphere emphasis on social was bold, but not exactly surprising. While IBM I think certainly has the capabilities to connect to the public social media and social networking sites, my observation is that its real interest and focus has always been on developing its enterprise class internal social capabilities. As Michael mentioned, the capabilities in Lotus Connections have been under development for many, many years, and IBM’s Center for Social Research has been really churning out demonstration capabilities, many of which have materialized as features and functions within Lotus Connections.

What’s interesting, I thought, was that each of the three morning keynotes were all about the social aspects of business, and what IBM is doing with this, how they used it internally, and some of their customers and where they’re going with it as well. So IBM clearly has a commitment to all of this. Monday, of course, it was mentioned that Alistair Rennie started out; Tuesday, Mike Rhodin, senior vice president now back at Lotus, talked about how they used it internally and where it was going; on Wednesday, Charlie Hill, who is the CTO, was talking all about the future developments. And it was pretty broad brush strokes that they were taking with this to really show a lot of capabilities.

But it wasn’t all social—there was a lot of talk about the “next” generation—I use “next” in quotes—the “next” generation of Lotus product lines, including SameTime. Interestingly, they didn’t refer to SameTime (the next generation) as 8.5.2, which would sort of be the words that we’ve heard periodically in the past, but rather just “SameTime Next,” and maybe that suggests that there are some major things coming. I know one of the things that they emphasized at Lotusphere in the “next” version is that there is going to be much stronger video connectivity. So I think we should be looking for a lot more announcements about this coming forward. They clearly are moving in that direction.

All in all I thought it was a great Lotusphere; many interesting things came out of it.

Jim Burton: So we had another conference last week, ITEXPO down in Miami, and I know that David Yedwab was there for the whole week as was Jon Arnold. So let me turn it over to those two gentlemen and then of course Michael Finneran and Dave Michels would join later in the week. So let me turn it over to you, David Yedwab.

David Yedwab: Thanks Jim, and thanks team, for filling us in on what was going on in Disneyland South while some of us were sweating away on South Beach. The ITEXPO has really evolved to a collection of events around IT for businesses. From the core ITEXPO, it has now added breakaway sessions, like Jon Arnold’s Smart Grid, like a Cloud Summit, like a Regulatory Summit. Even Digium did an Asterisk World session. So it is really becoming, if you will, a big tent for a lot of events around the IT space, around the internet telephony space, around the unified communications and collaborations space, to come together. As a matter of fact, it is so busy that I felt very frustrated most of the week because other than the five or six sessions that I was involved in as a speaker or as a moderator, I had very little time available to catch many of the other events and I know many of the events were offered on the web and video on TMC’s website for several of the keynotes. If anything, I would say I felt a bit overloaded by information, by content and by alternatives for consideration, if I was going to this event to help plan the direction for my business. Let me turn it over to Jon Arnold who might have a different perspective, and actually Jon and I were together in Miami for four days and we only saw each other once when we did the cloud contact center session for Interactive Intelligence. Jon.

Jon Arnold: Thanks Dave, well said. I agree with everything you are saying and the big tent is what I have been calling Expo as well, for quite a while. It’s all there and there is plenty of content for anybody following what we are doing here. You know when UCStrategies had some sessions running of their own and there was contact center stuff and open source stuff and all kinds of tracks and you are right, it is not humanly possible unless you can send a team of four or five people to multitask and cover everything. I do not want to be cynical because I like to live in the moment, but honestly the only way you can really do it is to use the very tools we are talking about. You’ve got to sit down in a coffee shop with a computer and get like seven split-screens going at once to follow every session. That is the only way you can do it. You cannot be in more than one place at a time, unless you are doing it virtually, which is too bad because you know you miss that human contact element.

So the content is there, but like you are saying Dave, you are running around trying to cover five sessions and at the same time so is everyone else, which means the audience turnout, gets to be on the small side because it gets diluted. Now the interactive session, though, was well attended and I think that is maybe worth talking about because their focus was to talk about the value proposition for hosted contact center and the whole CaaS concept that they have – communications as a service. And they had I would have to say at least 60 to 70 people in the room and I thought it was pretty good. We had a very nice conversation with everybody on the panel talking about the pros and some of the cons of hosted. I think it was a good educational forum for a lot of people. So I thought there was pretty good value there, but I think at the Expo itself, including my own Smart Grid Summit events, the dilution of the crowds makes for smaller turnout for individual sessions. So I agree with you, there was some frustration to all of that. But that is the reality when you try to cover so much ground.

But I think it also speaks to just how diverse and complex the whole communications business is becoming now. There were just so many things to keep track of and I think that is one of the realities that this show really brings forward to me in a big way.

David Yedwab: Absolutely. I certainly agree with that. We certainly do not have uninteresting times to be living in, especially if you feel that you are a generalist about our industry.

Michael Finneran: I thought it was a great event. I was dividing my team, of course between the UC Track, where a few of us were speaking: Blair, myself, and Dave. The 4G wireless evolution and also Super Wifi, which I discovered is the new term they are using for TV white space transmission. Again, they do cover a wide swath and quite an interesting group of speakers including my old pal Jeff Ward from Apriva, Todd Rowley, Vice President of 4G for Sprint. So yeah, it is a little full bludgeoned, because the session teams that go off each one or each track on their timeframe, so seeing everything you want to see is difficult, but certainly a worthwhile adventure, ITEXPO. What do you think?

Dave Michels: This is Dave Michels. I think ITEXPOs are really confusing so for me is as David and Jon were talking about. The other thing I find confusing about it is the vendors that exhibit there – they do not really fall into any kind of category, they are so widespread and so many different – there were vendors from fax companies to telephone equipment to SIP providers. It is a much more diverse collection of exhibitors than you find at most shows. Other than that, it was actually probably one of the best ITEXPOs I have been to. I think I participated in somewhere around five or six different panels, between the Cloud Summit and the UCStrategies Summit, and somehow Jon Arnold roped me in on something on the Smart Grid Summit. But I think of all the panels, one of the more interesting ones was this one we did on the channel and how the channel is changing, particularly with folks in the cloud. And what is kind of nice about it was, it is great that some of these companies like Skype are beginning to participate in these industry events, and you know they are going to be keynoting at Enterprise Connect. They had at least two people at ITEXPO. And it is nice because at Skype is having a fairly significant influence in our space and this particular channel panel had Skype, it had Cbeyond, who of course has just gotten into the hosted space. It had Thinking Networks, which was on the leadership quadrant of Gartner’s UC as a Service. Digium was in there and they are changing their channel strategy. So a lot of really interesting people came together on that panel.

I think the conversations on the panels were generally really nice, because you get a little more audience participation at ITEXPO than you do at other venues. All in all, I think it was one of the better ITEXPOs that I have been to, and a real good event. I think TMC should be quite pleased with the event and the job.

Jon Arnold: Hey Dave, what was your impression of the audiences’ interest in the whole cloud topic because it has been a very well attended track?

Dave Michels: It is a surprisingly well-attended track and I say surprising because with so much of the conflicting scheduling going on at ITEXPO I am always surprised when one event seems to really get some traction. Thomas Howe has been putting that on for the three or four years now and he does an excellent job, and I was pleased to be able to co-host it with him this time around. It is a more technical track than we normally deal with. A lot of developers; you know Thomas’ focus on APIs so you get a lot of really interesting conversations going in there because they are not just looking at implementing cloud, they are actually creating the cloud; creating new services around it, so some real interesting conversations about the mix at that track.

David Yedwab: This is David again, let me just pop back in again for two closing remarks about ITEXPO. Cloud definitely was the term of the week across all of the tracks and all of the sessions. It has definitely caught people’s minds and imagination. I had some rather interesting discussions with several vendors around cloud and immediately some of the values of cloud seemed to be getting lost, because everybody wants to talk about the financial benefits of going to cloud as opposed to owning. And then finally, again, attendance appeared to be way up; enthusiasm as opposed to last year was way up and I think it indicates a potentially great year for the industry as a whole.

Jon Arnold: David, I just want to add one other comment, looking at the two shows back-to-back, Lotusphere and ITEXPO, it was a little bit kind of different extremes. Lotusphere was very heavily focused about client server software. They have LotusLive, which is a web-based app, they are clearly building up LotusLive and it has a lot of functionality that you cannot do in the client server models, but it is the minority there. It was definitely more around the client server model and the direction of the client server products. And then when you get to ITEXPO, the conversation I would say was much more the cloud and service provider model was in the driver’s seat and I was on at least two panels where the conversation came up – why do we even have PBXs why do we still have phones? While that conversation never came up at Lotusphere. So it is not to say one’s right and one’s wrong, it is just to say these are very different audiences and it was very interesting to see shows back-to-back with such a different dichotomy.

Jim Burton: Thank you everybody for your time today. I will look forward to another podcast this time next week. Until then, have a good week.