unified communications

Mitel has announced desktop and mobile Unified Communications (UC) clients with some excellent features and their own flavour of telepresence which might compete with other HD solutions but wont compete with leading telepresence solutions.

The UC desktop client include some key features that immediately stand out; the ability to federate with public presence sources and integration with their mobile UC client. Better still the mobile UC client is available across Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry. These feature releases are essential to providing integrated UC solutions and from an industry perspective come hot on the heals of magic quadrant provider Cisco who has also only just released desktop to mobile integrated presence and the support for a Microsoft Mobile UC client.

In addition Mitel has announced the availability of their TeleCollaboration solution for Q1 2009. Mitel claims an improved result over telepresence due to desktop sharing and recording capabilities (see below image). The video component of the solution is actually provided by a company called Magor.



While the collaboration aspects may provide an improvement I can immediately see their is no comparision to a telepresence solution such as Polycoms RPX (see below image). Telepresence is not just high definition video conferencing (which is a better description for Mitels solution), telepresence allows users to interact as if they were in the same room. Imperative components of telepresence solutions include having completely controlled room environments that look identical at all locations, with immersive lighting, with immersive audio and screens that are large enough to allow users to stand up and move around without disappearing from view - the Mitel offering does not achieve this. Ultimately price will dictate if the Mitel solution compares to existing market high definition solutions, however given current information it wont compete with true telepresence rooms.

Avaya has announced a new feature to convert voicemails to text and deliver these as email. The text conversion is powered by a company called SpinVox who joined Avaya as a development partner in April this year.

I have actually been using the SpinVox service for over a year as a VIP customer. I can vouch for the reliability and accuracy of the service. More importantly the voice to text feature is a great time saver. I can read a message faster than calling my voicemail, stepping through the menus, and then listening. I can also read a message in circumstances when I can’t easily call my voicemail (perhaps while in a meeting for example). In short, I could never go back to listening to voicemails!

Best of all is anyone can use the SpinVox voice to text service irrespective of the Avaya announcement. If you signup with SpinVox you are provided with a voicemail number and simple instructions to program your mobile and/or landline to use this number as its voicemail number.

Try the SpinVox website (www.spinvox.com) for a free trial with consumer pricing starting from 20p in the UK with commercial options available by request... and no I am not on commission ;)

For those not familiar, Office Communications Server (OCS) is Microsoft’s Instant Messaging, voice and video communications product. In Microsoft’s own words OCS lets users find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications they use most.



Users can initiate communications with colleagues via a desktop client called Office Communicator or directly from Microsoft Office applications. For example using the desktop client users can Instant Message a colleague and then escalate into a voice or video call, or from Microsoft Outlook users can view an email together with the availability of the sender allowing them to choose to reply by email or reply via a voice call.

The following key points are built from our observations of clients who have deployed or who are considering Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). These may be of value if you are evaluating how OCS may benefit your organisation.

1 - Telephony integration

OCS2007 has many integration options which will be primarily influenced by your existing telephony plans. The exact approach will depend on your functionality objectives with the greatest considerations for organisations with their own PABX.

If OCS meets all your telephony needs and is planned to 100% replace your existing PABX then all that will be required is a voice gateway to the public telephone network.

If however OCS will complement your existing PABX environment then various levels of functionality will be available depending on the level of integration. Some examples include; an inbound call can potentially simultaneously ring your Office Communicator client and your PABX phone allowing users to accept the call on either endpoint, this includes if your Office Communicator client is running on a remote computer; when initiating a call from an OCS interface your PABX can act as the voice gateway providing public network connectivity; your PABX voicemail system can provide voicemail for OCS; and your PABX and OCS directories can be merged providing a common telephone numbering plan.

Telephony integration extends beyond the PABX to include mobile platforms including Microsoft Mobile, RIM and Symbian devices. For example organisations with a Blackberry Enterprise Server can extend OCS features including Presence, Instant Messaging and directories to Blackberry phones.

Irrespective of the options available successful telephony integrations focus on providing users a single integrated telephony platform rather than separate OCS, PABX and mobile solutions.

2 – Presence federation

For those not familiar, Presence provides a visual indication of a user’s availability and preference for contact. For example I may be on a teleconference but available for an Instant Message chat. Alternatively on listening to my voicemails I can prioritise return calls according to the availability of my colleagues rather than playing “phone tag” (especially relevant if OCS features are extended to mobile phones), or perhaps if I prefer not to be disturbed I can set my status to “not available”.

For Presence to be effective the various devices that impact on our availability to communicate need to share, or federate, information. For example, if my PC is in standby that means I am not available for Instant Messaging; my telephone off hook means I cannot accept a phone call; if I chose to manually set my status to “not available” then update my Presence accordingly.

Having separate Presence systems for OCS, your PABX and mobile environments will mean one system can show me as available while another shows unavailable. Clearly this is counter productive and will result in poor user adoption.

For an effective presence environment all key communications technologies will need to federate their information to each other, perhaps not immediately but this should be the objective for an efficient communications environment.

3 - User adoption

The business advantage of features such as Instant Messaging and Presence can be hard to justify unless they are integrated into business process. Many users in an organisation will never have used these technologies so their adoption can be poor without a clear use.

As an example an organisation where all employees keep their calendars up to date provide an efficient method for booking group meetings. If a significant number of users ignore updating their calendars efficiencies for the entire organisation are lost due to the time required to rebook and reconfirm meetings. This analogy can be extended to Presence. Unless users update their Presence and observe the Presence of others then the communications efficiencies will be lost. More voicemails will be left and retrieved, more people will be interrupted when occupied, and more critical emails will be sent when a phone call would be more effective.

4 - Business process

If OCS is successfully integrated into your environment and users have adopted the features then the true business value will be found through integration with business processes. For example if Presence categories are applied to job roles as well as people then IT support or customer inquiries can be efficiently directed by searching and identifying immediately available resources. This reduces the “human latency” in finding the right person and in these examples directly provides a reduction in IT downtime and increased customer service.

Every organisation will be different and targeted pilots will assist in identifying the value of potential opportunities.

Of course there are many other considerations in addition to those above. As with any new technology getting informed and learning from the observations of others will only assist in making your own projects a success.

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at UC provider sales pitches is their focus on ‘soft’ benefits, such as time saved for the average office worker and increased productivity. Of course, what most organisations need in order justify a UC purchase decision is reliable evidence of ‘hard’ benefits such as cost reduction and accelerated time to market. ShoreTel’s promotion of the energy efficiency of its solution provides an interesting example of a UC provider trying to address that need.

ShoreTel’s claims are based on a report it commissioned from the Tolly group to investigate the power consumption of its IP switches and IP phones relative to those from other suppliers. These tests were then used as the basis for projections of the typical energy consumption of ShoreTel’s UC solution in various deployment scenarios. These projections estimate that a ShoreTel UC system on a network made up of 350 users at a main site and 19 branch offices would use 45% less power than Cisco’s UC offering. At a single site with 65 users, the saving would be 44%, and that deployment at a main site with 1500 users plus one regional and one branch office site would produce savings of 37%.

On the one hand, it’s shame that the figures that ShoreTel is quoting here are only projections - many customers will only be convinced if they see numbers that originate from real world deployment. On the other, ShoreTel should be commended for having enough faith in its own technology to risk a severe loss of credibility if customers make a purchase on the strength of these energy saving projections, and then fail to achieve a comparable result in the field.

Cisco’s acquisition of PostPath, a collaboration server vendor, and Jabber, an IM and presence software developer, are important from a number of perspectives.

Firstly, they are small but significant steps in Cisco’s evolution from hardware vendor to software and services provider. They also augment Cisco’s UC offering with improved e-mail, calendaring, IM and presence functionality. This will enable it to compete more directly with Microsoft for ownership of the corporate desktop communications environment. However, these acquisitions also better enable Cisco to work with customers existing infrastructure. And this will make the transition to UC a lot less daunting for many IT decision-makers.

The fact is that despite all the hype about hosted UC, many companies aren’t ready to ditch their existing infrastructure and the familiarity of a CPE and Microsoft Exchange-based communications system - at least not now, and not on an organisation-wide basis. Deploying UC on a smaller scale to test its usefulness for specific sites or departments makes more sense to most companies at this stage in the development of the market. And that isn’t an ideal model for providers looking to supply a hosted UC solution. Cisco’s acquisitions help it to address this dilemma by enabling it to offer its customers CPEbased integration with Microsoft Exchange and extended UC functionality in the short term, and a feature-rich hosted alternative to Microsoft Office Communications Server in the longer term.

As a result, Cisco gains the flexibility to adapt its offering to customers’ state of readiness for UC adoption. And this increases its credibility with customers as it tries to gain similar levels of acceptance in the desktop communications space as it has in the network environment.

Of course, this is also good news for enterprises, who get more choice when it comes to deciding on a UC implementation strategy. It also helps them delay the PBX replacement discussion, a big barrier to UC adoption. Instead, they now have the option to implement a Cisco solution that can be used with existing CPE now, and migrate to a network-hosted solution when they are ready.

Greater service flexibility and increased customer choice should also contribute to the development of the wider UC market by stimulating overall demand and accelerating the real-world delivery of UC benefits both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’.