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The evolving Unified Communications industry is reshaping the communications marketplace. The changes create challenges for some vendors and opportunities for others. The legacy vendors are scrambling to revise their business models, and all of the major vendors, both legacy and emerging, are looking at how to flesh out their UC product portfolios.

One thing is clear: We’re going to see more acquisitions. None of the vendors can offer all of the piece-parts that are required in a UC future, and there’s neither the time nor the human resources for each of the vendors to “roll their own.”

At one level, there’s nothing new about this. If you think about Cisco or IBM, for example, their respective UC offerings run off platforms that came through acquisition: Cisco purchased Selsius Systems and IBM bought Lotus. When you add Microsoft into the mix, you see the critical role that M&A activity has played in getting them positioned for UC. Here’s a recap of some of their acquisitions:

• Microsoft: PlaceWare, Groove Networks, media-streams.com, Tellme Networks and Parlano.
• Cisco: Selsius Systems, GeoTel Communications, Vovida Networks, Active Voice’s UM product, Latitude Communications, dynamicsoft, Orative and WebEx.
• IBM: Lotus Development Corporation, Databeam, Ubique and WebDialogs.

From my conversations with CEOs of the UC vendors, it’s clear that they recognize the importance of M&A and strategic partnering. At VoiceCon Orlando 08, the UCStrategies.com team held an evening social function that included the top leadership of major UC vendors and start-ups. Both groups found that mix to be very useful and, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the companies that began their conversations that evening wind up formalizing close working relationships in the near future.

With two decades of experience with communications M&A, I can tell you that there’s been an incredibly high level of activity during the past two years. Traditionally, the biggest challenge involves potential partners finding each other—small companies and startups either can’t find the right people in the big companies to talk to or can’t get their attention; big companies have so many irons in the fire, they can’t work with as many companies as they would like.

I think this is about to change; we are entering a Unified Communications “land grab.” Now that vendors have validated the UC market, it is time to compete. Enterprise customers want to keep the number of vendors they work with down to a reasonable number, which requires a balance between engaging with more vendors and implementing some UC components that are not best of breed. The major vendors understand this, and some are building up their capability to go out into the market and grab the best available UC “land” to complement their UC strategy. This creates a challenge to enterprise customers—they need to be alert to how their vendors are proceeding with their partnering and acquisitions.

But it’s certainly a good time to be a small company/start up in UC, provided that they begin to take the necessary steps that will make them an attractive partner and/or acquisition target. The UC land grab will determine the ultimate success and failure of vendors—both the acquirers and acquirees.

What do you think? Are you seeing or hearing more about UC-related M&A? Drop me a note at jburton@ucstrategies.com

Jim Burton
CT-Link and UCStrategies.com

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In the early 1980’s the fast-food chain Wendy’s created a classic ad that took on its nemesis, McDonald’s. Three elderly ladies waddle up to a food counter and, after admiring the size and fluffiness of the bun, are dismayed to find that there is precious little too be found—or eaten—within the bun. The “Where’s the Beef?” line was born and it has been part of pop culture ever since (see the original ad).

A recent study by Forrester Research suggests that many potential buyers are asking the “Where’s the beef?” question when it comes to Unified Communications. As reported in Network World, Forrester found that “Fifty-five percent of the 2,187 North American and European companies queried said there is ’confusion about the value’ of unified communications for their company.”

Forrester analyst Ellen Daley, author of the survey’s report, told Network World, “There’s been a 21% increase in UC pilots since 2007 but no increase in firms buying UC. A lot of people are talking about UC, a lot more are tipping their toe in; but at the same time they’re all saying they’re not sure about the value.” (The article can be found at Network World: “Enterprises baffled by unified communications, survey finds”)

If Forrester’s findings are even remotely correct, it’s a serious indictment. To be sure, there have been studies that identify how UC is being used to improve end-user productivity as well as significant business processes. Just a couple of weeks ago, Blair Pleasant reported on the “hidden benefits” of UC, based on research she and Nancy Jamison conducted (see “The Hidden Benefits of UC”).

Still, vendors have been talking up UC for the better part of two years and Ms. Daley reports that “Forrester receives inquiries from clients regularly asking simply: What is UC?”

If, after all this time, two of the most common UC-related questions are: What is it and why does it matter, either UC is a hoax, or the folks who believe they’ve got answers to those questions need to rethink how they’re communicating.

I reject the UC-is-a-hoax argument, but I believe the industry needs to find better ways to discuss what UC’s really all about—and soon.

Each of UC’s primary elements—telephony, messaging, IM, video, etc.—aims to solve specific, clearly definable problems. By contrast, UC has those elements continuing with their solo missions, while, at the same time, becoming integrated into larger communications software and applications infrastructures that yield greater benefits than any of the components could on their own.

The dilemma is that UC isn’t a “thing” that I can just go out and buy. Wait, let me amend that: I can go out and buy it, but if that’s all I do, I’m going to almost immediately run smack into the “where’s the value” question.

My friends at UCStrategies.com and other UC advocates have spent a lot of time and effort pointing out that the value of UC—whether measured in hard dollars or in user perceptions—requires considerable upfront investment in planning and targeting, because the biggest bang for the buck comes when UC deployment brings about changes in how a particular business process or chain of processes is carried out or how an organization carries out its mission. In short, UC goes way beyond traditional “reach-out-and-touch-someone” communications and into the realm of how business or work actually gets done.

And therein lies the rub. When networked computing came into vogue in the 1990s, it was easy to justify the costs—shared resources, shared access, better document/data access and storage, etc. Then, after LANs and WANs were in place, business processes changed—indeed were revolutionized—because people figured out the various ways they could take advantage of the new infrastructure.

With UC, however, the situation is reversed. We’ve already got more tools for mobility than we know how to handle, we can message to one another via text, voice and even video, we IM like it’s going out of style and the use of presence is growing fast. To be sure, UC faces interoperability challenges—big ones—but if all those interoperability problems were to magically disappear tomorrow, would the two key questions—What Is UC and What’s Its Value?—also disappear? I don’t think so.

But what do you think? How would you answer the “Where’s the Beef?” question? Send your replies to fknight@techweb.com.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.com

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by AVST:

Click here to view the VoiceCon Webinar: Unifying Communications Through Interoperability of Your Telephony and Data Infrastructure.

This webinar presents a case study from Del Monte Foods, with insights from a leading analyst and technology producer. The session provides enterprise customers with a strategy that enables them to deliver productivity enhancing Unified Communications applications today with minimum impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, telephony and data infrastructure, resulting in a strong ROI on your investments.

The UC market continues to grow rapidly. Microsoft and IBM are reporting tens of millions of licenses shipped for Microsoft’s OCS and IBM’s Sametime, while Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, Shoretel and Siemens are all shipping impressive UC solutions.

That growth, however, doesn’t mean that everything’s rosy. Customers face considerable challenges as they move to deploy this new technology in way that is practical and affordable, and which produces beneficial results.

To help them through those challenges, enterprises are increasingly turning to Value-Added Resellers (VARs) and Systems Integrators (SIs). While the product vendors are obviously important, when an enterprise seeks to achieve the applications and results that UC promises, their progress often is largely dependent on the level of UC awareness and skill levels of the VAR or SI that is involved.

The best UC VARs/SIs have invested in the future on behalf of their enterprise customers and prospects and, of course, themselves. They’ve expanded their skills base and product lines; traditional telecom VARs/SIs are becoming partners of Microsoft or IBM, while IT-focused VARs/Sis are signing up to carry IP Telephony product lines. There is a growing cadre of experts who know how to deliver an effective communications assessment—what are the communications issues and opportunities—before they even begin to work on a network assessment or a bill of materials.

We saw about a dozen of these leading VARs/SIs at VoiceCon Orlando this past March, and I expect to see even more at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008 this November. Dimension Data announced its Unified Communications Development Model, which “helps organizations assess their competence and capabilities in the area of unified communications and develop a roadmap for UC implementation.” INX, Spanlink, Accenture, Touchbase, CRI, SPS, Enabling Technologies, CommuniTech, and others have also been developing their UC practices to focus on the applications and business improvement opportunities, far beyond the basics of VOIP.

The bottom line is that your choice of VARs and SIs will be among the most important decisions you make as you proceed with UC. My advice is to get them involved as early as possible so you can tap their expertise as you develop your requirements, plans or RFPs. Some of attributes to consider as you make your selection are:

• Track Record: Does the firm have an organized UC Practice, as evidenced by expertise and experience?
• UC Certification: From both telecom and desktop (e-mail/IM) vendors.
• In-House Talent: Be wary of an outfit that functions like a “talent broker.”
• References: Can you contact customers who have achieved tangible UC benefits?
• Skill Sets: System integration expertise in both interoperability and in use of APIs and toolkits to customize new UC solutions for your environment, perhaps from call center experiences.
• Fiscal Stability: Will they be around when you need them—now and in the future?

VARs and SIs usually sell specific brands of software and/or hardware, so there are still plenty of reasons to hire independent consultants to provide expertise, perspective, checks and balances, and negotiating leverage. Yet, I expect that my independent consulting peers will give you similar advice—the value you get from your UC investment will depend as much, if not more, on the quality of the VAR or SI that you hire as on the product brand being implemented.

What do you think? If you’ve had experiences—positive or not so much—with UC VARs and SIs, please drop me a note at MParker@UniCommConsulting.com.

Marty Parker
Principal, UniComm Consulting

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by IBM:

The Challenge of Unifying Communications and Collaboration
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration.

A decade or so from now, we’ll look back at these early days of Unified Communications and smile at the “quaint” ways businesses used these emerging capabilities. Today, most of the buzz and most of the usage of UC is around “user productivity” applications.

In the future, an even richer array of communications functionality will be embedded in business processes and applications. Increasingly, communications will be initiated by software in a workflow application rather than by a person picking up a handset to make a phone call. Some of this will be fueled by system integrators and applications developers building on the APIs and standards in this emerging, horizontally layered communications environment. But it also will be the result of a shift in how people work—communications bottlenecks will no longer impede information flow.

A hot topic of discussion, of course, is finding the ROI in UC. In the future, I believe that this will be much less of an issue as UC functionality becomes woven into the infrastructure and becomes integrated into how we do our jobs. But for now, it’s an important consideration, both for those seeking to implement UC and those seeking to sell it.

Last week’s issue of this newsletter was written by my colleague Blair Pleasant, who, along with Nancy Jamison, recently completed a study of how end users are using UC and the types of benefits it’s producing (the article can be found at nojitter.com). Blair and Nancy interviewed enterprise end users to document the extent to which UC is helping them be more productive and effective at their jobs.

Blair and Nancy found that user productivity dominates much of the discussion and the examples of UC’s benefits. They heard the “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have it!” kinds of responses from the people they interviewed.

But that enthusiasm shouldn’t be confused with ROI benefits. The typical way that user productivity gets translated into ROI is by estimating the time saved through the use of the tool, multiplying that by a salary cost, and then extrapolating that to the entire population. This approach is usually skewered by the bean-counters.

Blair and Nancy also found evidence that UC already is being used to change the way people work. There are examples in technical support, marketing, HR and many others. Blair refers to some of these outcomes as “hidden benefits”—crisis management/avoidance, improved rapport and camaraderie among geographically dispersed workgroups, and an increased talent pool of potential workers. My view is that these “work-changing” and “hidden” areas are where the most meaningful ROI opportunities are to be found.

The trick is figuring out how to quantify the ROI lurking there. One approach is to identify “what changes” and then to measure that. My experience is that a requirement for an ROI calculation is often not so much trying to estimate dollars, but rather understanding that the change really results in something positive happening. I find that senior management is really good at understanding the business impact of a change—for example, improving the close rate by 10%, responding to customer requests a day faster or accelerating time-to-market by two months.

In our work with enterprises, we therefore look at how UC functionality can eliminate communications bottlenecks and what changes as a result. If ROI estimates are needed, we build a case study that shows (a.) how things work today, (b.) how will things work with UC, and (c.) what changes. Documenting the changes and showing the logical way that these will occur usually helps line-of-business managers understand the magnitude of the impact on the business.

Of course it’s important to both measure and document the results, so you need to begin with a baseline—measuring the key variables that will be affected by the UC implementation. Tracking changes in these variables builds a powerful case study, and helps prove the value of the UC application.

Rich UC applications will become much more common in the future. The industry’s challenge today is to get through these early, awkward, growing years until the benefits become obvious.

What do you think? Please send your comments and experiences with UC ROI to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com

Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications
Co-founder, UCStrategies.co

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by AVST:

Click here to view the VoiceCon Webinar: Unifying Communications Through Interoperability of Your Telephony and Data Infrastructure.

This webinar presents a case study from Del Monte Foods, with insights from a leading analyst and technology producer. The session provides enterprise customers with a strategy that enables them to deliver productivity enhancing Unified Communications applications today with minimum impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, telephony and data infrastructure, resulting in a strong ROI on your investments.

By now we’ve all heard about—or possibly experienced—the benefits of Unified Communications: Improved responsiveness, reduced costs, increased revenues, enhanced customer satisfaction, etc. Nancy Jamison and I recently interviewed end users to determine how and if UC is helping them be more productive and effective at their jobs, and while the interviews produced results we were expecting, it also uncovered hidden UC benefits, results that we weren’t expecting.

Among these hidden benefits are crisis management/avoidance, improved rapport and camaraderie among geographically dispersed workgroups, and an increased talent pool of potential workers.

The uses of UC in crisis situations included being able to be notified about and respond to situations while providing the ability to contact the right people at the right time to get information in a timely manner. Representative comments from the respondents included:

• When you’re the CEO you try to nullify issues from becoming crises. Crisis leads to stress. I can now be proactive and be responsive to clients and partners before things escalate to crisis mode where you could lose a valuable client because they think you’re ignoring them.”
• Problems tend to grow if you can’t deal with them right away. UC lets me deal with a problem when it happens and saves me from headaches. I can have a chat client open on my PDA when I’m away from the office and can do my work more easily.”

Another “hidden” benefit was the impact on the relationships between co-workers. UC helps to enhance camaraderie among dispersed groups of workers who can use, for example, IM or video or web conferencing to enhance their interaction. Several respondents discussed how UC helps maintain connectedness among colleagues and coworkers who are geographically dispersed. They appreciate the ability to go online at different hours of the day or night and find distant members of their teams who are online. They use IM to not only get work done, but to also build rapport—including sharing funny comments or stories about things going on at the office.

One survey respondent whose company has implemented UC throughout the organization and also provided PCs with video cameras for every employee stated, “As a company, our working relationships have improved. It’s easier to blow someone off if you don’t know them.” While this may not be typical of every company, it’s certainly indicative of the impact UC has on intra-company relationships.

Another hidden benefit is how UC opens up the talent pool, enabling people to work remotely and still be in constant communication with their peers and supervisors. One manager noted, “It’s tough to find talent and without UC I’d be limited to the local area which doesn’t have that much. With UC I can have workers located anywhere, which opens up my talent pool to the world so we can grow the business and still have management and oversight.”

There is a great deal of ROI from these benefits, hidden though they may be. The full study results will be available on May 30 at ucstrategies.com. Nancy and I will also be presenting some of our findings during the upcoming VoiceCon webinar—Demonstrating UC Productivity Benefits—which will be held next Wednesday, June 4, 2p.m. EDT/11 a.m. PDT, sponsored by Genesys Telecommunications Labs.

In the meantime, it you have examples of other UC benefits—hidden or in plain sight—please drop me a line at bpleasant@commfusion.com

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by AVST:

Click here to view the VoiceCon Webinar: Unifying Communications Through Interoperability of Your Telephony and Data Infrastructure.

This webinar presents a case study from Del Monte Foods, with insights from a leading analyst and technology producer. The session provides enterprise customers with a strategy that enables them to deliver productivity enhancing Unified Communications applications today with minimum impact on their employees, customers, suppliers, telephony and data infrastructure, resulting in a strong ROI on your investments.

Unified Communications (UC) introduces change at many levels of a public or private enterprise:

• Technology changes from monolithic or vertically-oriented products to a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which enables user interfaces and portals to utilize multiple services and/or applications; both the interfaces and the applications operate on a single converged network.
• UC-based changes in both User Productivity (UC-UP) and Business Processes (UC-BP) as described in a recent issue of this newsletter. UC technology and investments make sense only in the context of the business benefits they provide, and some enterprises have already used to UC to achieve breakthroughs in revenues, costs, services levels, and/or bottom line results.
• Organization changes to align telecom and IT around new technologies and business processes. UC introduces new clients, new services and mixed-mode mashups far beyond earlier models of just converging phone-for-voice and desktop/PC-for-data. Let’s look at this type of change.

There is a lot of concurrence that organization topics are part of the UC picture. Just last month, Steve Blood of Gartner warned that “…more than 80 per cent of appropriate organisational changes, including procedures, policies and compensation, will lag behind technological change through 2011.”

The most common UC-based organizational question is how to blend the telecom team, the e-mail/desktop applications team and the mobile devices team to deliver the blended UC applications.

For telecom teams, this means handing off the network layer as shared gateways replace dedicated ports and trunks, and as mobile and desktop interfaces supplement or even replace the telephone.

For the e-mail/desktop and mobile device teams, the technology and roles are distributed between the application servers (Exchange, Domino, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, etc.) and the desktop or mobile clients (Office Communicator, Sametime, Blackberry and user portals). The desktop or mobile clients, especially the portals, are increasingly expected to integrate multiple services (e.g. voice or video communications, enterprise transaction data, etc.) with their traditional functions of e-mail, IM or data viewing.

To assist enterprises in considering and acting on these issues, UniComm Consulting has posted a white paper. The recommendation is that organizational elements be established for:

• User Experiences: This team identifies, configures and manages the interfaces that the users see. The team would define a small number (about five) primary use cases to assist the employees in optimally performing their jobs.
• Applications and Services: This team manages the applications software that enables the functionality delivered through the user interfaces, including the enterprise data resources. Often a specialized team in this group will manage the servers and Operating Systems (OS).
• Network Operations: This team designs, deploys and manages the converged network in support of all user devices and applications. This includes the interfaces to the public networks (Internet, PSTN, Wireless).

This structure enhances your ability to integrate communications into business processes, since neither the applications nor the user interfaces are compartmentalized by brands or functions. Also, the networking team is able to have a clear view of the aggregate requirements, loads and service levels.

The crucial User Support organization is now better able to accomplish its mission, since they can organize their user-facing teams around the well-defined use cases. The support organization may also include provisioning and Tier 1 and 2 support for user devices and the application images provisioned on those devices.

These three organizational groups are supported by staff roles including CTO/Architect, Security Standards and Audit, and Project Management. Operational Level Agreements (OLAs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are negotiated and managed between each pair of organizations.

Of course, there are many variations to this theme, but this type of reference model can add value to the evolution of your organization as you move into the brave new world of UC.

What do you think about this? Drop me a note with your thoughts about organizational issues and challenges at mparker@UniCommConsulting.com or post comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Marty Parker
UniComm Consulting LLC

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by IBM:

The Challenge of Unifying Communications and Collaboration
Your challenge: provide simple, effective ways for your organization to communicate and collaborate. IBM understands. You have telephony systems from multiple vendors; you can’t afford to rip and replace; you need to extend your existing investments and shield your users from these complexities. IBM solutions work with the industry leaders; IBM partners are your partners. IBM Unified Communications and Collaboration.

We hear much about how Unified Communications will trigger massive changes in the enterprise communications markets and how it how it will be used to redesign and recreate business processes. But for that to happen, some changes have to be made in trenches of telecom/IT organizations—specifically the tools that are used when acquiring UC and related communications products and services.

For example, consider the venerable communication system RFP. Over the past seven years or so, as IP-PBXs began to replace TDM, many enterprises—and consultants—adjusted their RFPs to reflect that fact that the underlying technology for voice communications and networks was changing.

But in many respects, that meant little more than adding the initials “IP” in front of an otherwise standard list of phones, features and other devices. In many if not most situations, that sufficed. Going forward, it won’t.

Unified Communications certainly includes voice and traditional messaging; it also includes features and functions that are already included in most RFPs—capabilities like presence and IM, and encompassing both wired and wireless domains.

But UC goes beyond a list of technical features and capabilities—it is increasingly defined as providing the ability to: “…build new communications methods directly into the sequence of tasks in a business process to make that process function most effectively.”

In short, UC includes traditional communications but goes beyond it, to deploy communications systems and software to improve business processes. I submit that an RFP and a procurement process aimed at accomplishing that goal is vastly different from an RFP and procurement process that’s aimed at swapping out a TDM switch for an IP-PBX.

RFPs are one example where UC triggers the need for innovation (see—and contribute to—our attempt at Next-Gen system RFP Template at our RFP Wiki), another is the area of TCO and life-cycle metrics. The need for innovation here is driven by the fact that IP Telephony is increasingly, a software-driven architecture.

Doug Carolus, a consultant with N’Compass has done a lot of work in the area of UC budgeting and cost planning. When I asked him about the impact on the new software-intensive systems would have on capital vs. operating budgets and on depreciation, he noted that enterprises are familiar with depreciation schedules for software.

But he went on to identify some of the key challenges he thought enterprises would face in budgeting and TCO because of the change in communication system cost architectures. He recommends that enterprise managers ask themselves the following:

1. Do you know truly understand all of the software licensing costs for the systems and applications you’re buying? What they are, what they do, and what the restrictions are?
2. Do you understand the organization’s future growth well enough to plan for and purchase sufficient license capacity—there can be major cost savings realized during the initial procurement versus after-market purchases.
3. Do you understand the “break points” in licensing models—where does it make sense to invest in additional licenses?
4. Do you understand how software upgrades are priced and implemented (especially for multi-site infrastructures)? Vendors have different cost models for software upgrades depending on which release the customer is running R-1, R-2, etc.
5. What vendor service/support is available for software applications? What are the warranty and post-warranty support service costs, support options (and potential issues)?

The people who run today’s enterprise networks have vast experience with the entrails of vendor pricing, and service and support offerings. But many of those details are going to have to be relearned, as UC rearchitects the cost structure for enterprise communications.

What do you think? Have you rewritten your RFP/RFI for UC? Are the assumptions you use changing for TCO or life-cycle metrics as a result of UC? Send your comments to me at fknight@techweb.com or post comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Fred Knight
GM/Co-Chair, VoiceCon
Publisher, NoJitter.co

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:

UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail: www.ucstrategies.com

Individual user productivity is to Unified Communications as VisiCalc was to personal computing. VisiCalc, of course, was one the first software programs that enabled individuals to harness a PC to accomplish a task—to create and calculate spreadsheets. Everyone who needed to do these sorts of calculations immediately understood the benefit once they saw it in operation.

Similarly, the tools of UC—including presence, click-to-call, click-to-chat, single identity access to any device—provide an easy-to-understand way for individuals to improve their ability to communicate with others, to improve individual productivity.

We all know and have benefited from how PC use has exploded in ways that were difficult to envision in the days of VisiCalc. The reason for this explosion is that armies of software developers took advantage of standard operating systems and the “horizontal” layering of components, connected through published specifications and interfaces. They created an array of software applications each designed to fill a specific personal or business requirement.

We are in the midst of opening up the proprietary, vertically-integrated communications industry in a way similar to how the computer industry evolved over the last two or three decades. The future is a horizontally-layered industry with open standards, published interfaces and new armies of ecosystem developers. They will bring to market a vast array of specialized solutions, each tailored to the specific communication requirements of a particular job, industry, or business relationship.

As readers of this column know, the UCStrategies.com team sees the use cases for UC in two broad categories: One category focuses on communications to enhance user productivity; the other concentrates on communications integrated into business processes. Many of the user productivity cases leverage the initial UC tools, just as VisiCalc leveraged the Apple II and then the early PCs. And just as early VisiCalc functionality presaged unimaginably varied PC applications, today’s UC tools will evolve to provide a vast, rich set of applications for both individuals and for enterprise business processes.

All this came up at Interop last week, when I was discussing possible UC sessions and topics for VoiceCon San Francisco (Nov 10-13) with Fred Knight, VoiceCon’s GM/Co-Chair. One of the sessions will be a discussion of what’s available in the marketplace from various suppliers. Marty Parker, my partner at UniComm Consulting who designed the session, envisioned presentations describing specific UC tools that can enable specific business process applications—e.g., collaboration acceleration, or connecting quickly to the right resource to resolve a problem.

Fred wants the vendors to show what is in their UC portfolio, without being tied to specific applications—let the VoiceCon attendees see what’s available and decide on how best to use them. Both approaches have merit in this rapidly developing environment.

My view is that the “user productivity” approach to UC can be successful and an important step, but the industry is already beginning to integrate communications into business processes and business applications. Developers aligned with suppliers are using plug-ins, SDKs and toolkits to fundamentally change the nature of communications. Software residing within a business application, workflow process or web portal is automatically initiating communication to the right person, using the best available method. It’s software—not an individual—launching the communications.

VisiCalc was the harbinger of a revolution that moved far beyond spreadsheets. Using today’s UC tools to improve user productivity presages a similar, vast revolution in which software-controlled or enhanced communications will be embedded in most business processes. Buckle up!

What do you think? Write to me at dvandoren@unicommconsulting.com or post comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Don Van Doren
Principal, UniComm Consulting
President, Vanguard Communications

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by VoiceCon Webinars:
Free VoiceCon Webinar:

“Controlling OPEX in Enterprise Communications”
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET

IP telephony provide organizations with the opportunity to use new technology to reduce the cost of running their communications systems. But actually realizing the savings requires careful planning and ongoing monitoring, management and troubleshooting. Robin Gareiss of Nemertes Research will describe the structure of operational costs in hybrid and all-IP deployments and the financial impact of using automated management systems. She will be joined by Dr. Fiona Lodge of webinar sponsor Prognosis.
Register Now!

The UCStrategies.com team has been differentiating between the two types of Unified Communications: UC User Productivity (UC-UP) and UC Business Process (UC BP).

UC-UP focuses on personal productivity and features like “click to call,” while UC-BP focused on integrating UC with the organization’s business processes and applications, impacting the business and the way in which certain processes get done. We’ve been preaching that while both elements are important and enterprises can focus on either or both, the more significant ROI will come from the UC BP side. Still, many enterprises have begun on the road to UC focusing on the User Productivity elements—how UC impacts individual users and teams or workgroups—and there are significant benefits to be gained by going down that road.

My colleague Nancy Jamison and I are in the process of conducting a UC End User Productivity study, which we expect to publish on UCstrategies.com in June. Rather than talking primarily with the IT managers who are responsible for implementing and running the UC systems, we’ve been talking with the people who actually use UC; we’re trying to find out whether and how it impacts their day-to-day jobs.

Of course, it’s always a challenge to find users willing to talk, but those that do seem to be really happy campers—they LOVE their UC systems. In fact, when asked “What would you do or how would you react if your UC system was taken away from you?” we got similar responses from all the respondents so far, ranging from “I’d scream” to “it would be painful” to “I can’t imagine working without it.”

Several respondents liken UC to email—it’s hard to identify the time savings, but it’s a tool that eases communications and helps you better do your job. Whether UC saves you 30 minutes a day or 3 hours isn’t the point—it helps improve productivity and effectiveness. As one user noted, “It’s still challenging to quantify these benefits…. It helps productivity in a subtle way from a numbers standpoint, but in the end it’s obvious that you’re getting things done more quickly.” Another told us, “I’m much more effective in being able to deal with business issues in a real time manner.”

So, do you really need to prove a hard ROI to justify purchasing and implementing a UC solution? Yes and no. The audiences I’ve polled during, for example, the VoiceCon UC Roadshow in 2007, swung from answering overwhelmingly yes to overwhelmingly no. My general impression from talking to IT managers who have recently taken the plunge into UC is that most have done so without having hard ROI data to back it up. Perhaps we’ve reached a point where enough people and companies understand the value of UC and how it helps improve productivity and effectiveness, and thus the bottom line.

I’m still looking for more enterprise end users to survey, so if you’d like to participate (anonymously—all information is being aggregated), please contact me at bpleasant@commfusion.com

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

This issue of Unified Communications eWeekly is sponsored by UCStrategies:

UC Strategies is an industry resource and web portal to help enterprises, vendors, and system integrators develop their UC strategies. A source of objective information and thought leadership on Unified Communications, we provide analysis, executive interviews, podcasts, white papers, and other information on the UC industry. Visit the UCStrategies.com website for more detail.

One of the best features at VoiceCon is the case studies presented by enterprise executives, and VoiceCon Orlando 2008 was no exception. All the keynotes featured customer success stories, and the keynote by Dennis Schmidt of Bank of America was a detailed description of how the Bank has migrated to over 100,000 IP Telephony ports.

On one afternoon at VoiceCon, a series of sessions was devoted exclusively to case studies in selected vertical markets—Higher Education, Finance, Government, Health Care and Manufacturing. All my client and customer contacts were buzzing about those sessions for the rest of the conference.

Earlier that same afternoon there was a breakout session focusing on Communications-Enabled Apps, which presented interesting Unified Communications success stories. Here are highlights from that session:

• Karen Dean, Director of Global Voice Communications at Black & Decker, gave two powerful examples of “communications integrated to optimize business processes”—our UCStrategies.com definition of UC. In one case, Black & Decker created and automated an out-dial notification and self-service status-checking application to notify its customers when tool repair was complete. This reduced the days outstanding by 72%—from 39 days to 11 days. In the other case, Black & Decker created a new device that is attached to valuable machinery and incorporates both GPS (Global Positioning System) and cellular technology to report unauthorized movement (usually theft) of the equipment. One Black & Decker customer was able to recover $237,000 in stolen equipment in less than two months.
  Ms. Dean went on to describe the philosophy B&D used when approaching these innovations: Focus on business value; work across organizational boundaries; don’t underestimate the need for change; and train and hire for the needed skills. The needed skills mentioned by Karen include the ability to understand business processes and how to apply communications technologies to accelerate the business, and how to appropriately leverage the assets of both vendors and integrators.
• Rif Kiamil, IT Manager from J J Food Service in the UK, presented another powerful UC example. The company focuses intensely on the speed, efficiency and quality of its customer services, and used call center agent desktop software technology to put a smart “portal” application on the mobile phones of all their route drivers. This gave the route driver immediate access to the resources of the office staff when needed, and the office staff could determine where the driver was at any point during the day and whether the driver was available for a call or interruption or was busy with a customer. The application also included location information, via the GPS features of the mobile device, to be even more accurate in their customer service management. The returns were significant in both improved customer service and in shaving minutes per day from the deliveries and services.
• Michael Fuqua, SVP Global Information Services at Global Crossing, described how Global Crossing has integrated UC into its network provisioning operations to achieve significant ROI. Michael showed the actual network engineer PC screens (i.e. the provisioning “portal”) into which Global Crossing has integrated Presence, IM and click-to-call. With those tools, network engineers no longer have to call around to find assistance on problems; instead, the application software uses presence to find an available engineer with the right skills and authorizations to work on the problem and opens up an IM chat session to work the issue. If voice communications is then needed, either party can click-to-call. Overall, the benefits have been significant—problems take less time to resolve, customer service has dramatically improved and network engineering staff cost per transaction has dropped significantly.
• Devante Vargas, IT Manager from Kuepers Inc, Architects and Builders, described how UC has enabled dramatic growth for this mid-market firm. Prior to UC, the firm depended on traditional, manual methods to communicate with field personnel, to coordinate projects and to manage problems or issues. With the UC tools for easy access to mobile personnel via find-me and follow-me features, the company has been able to grow beyond its local area, since they can keep in touch with remote locations and project teams. The new conferencing tools also allow Kuepers to assemble the project teams flexibly in either planned or ad-hoc mode, to keep the business flowing. Overall, Kuepers credits the UC initiative with contributing to its 400% growth in just four years.

The good news is that these customer success reports are not isolated instances; there are dozens more examples that provide guidance on how to proceed with Unified Communications.

VoiceCon proved again that it’s the place to meet and to hear about progress, experience and successes in our industry. Hope to see you at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008, November 10-13! In the meantime, let me know if you have any UC stories—successful or otherwise. Drop me a note at mparker@unicommconsulting.com or or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Marty Parker
Principal, UniComm Consulting