At the annual IBM Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Florida, NEC Corporation of America (NEC), announced UNIVERGE® Sphericall® for IBM Lotus Foundations. This is a UC solution that is fully integrated with IBM Lotus Foundations; an appliance that extends IBM Lotus Sametime UC and collaboration (UC2) tools with the ability to connect to telephony functions.
A week or so ago I had the pleasure of doing a podcast with Rick Moran, Vice President of Small Business Solutions Marketing at Cisco. I’ve wanted to talk to him in depth about the results of some of the research Cisco has done since they formed the SMB unit in July 2007. Every time I talk to him he has numerable interesting tidbits about the SMB market. For example, yesterday he said that his group had surveyed SMBs in 21 countries as to what their core concerns were and overwhelmingly they all said, they just want it to work, with all the reasoning behind that such as they don’t want to hassle with integration or have issues that they won’t be able to address with limited staffing. That sounded pretty normal and boring, until he got to the tidbit that there was one country exception and that was India. In those surveys having solutions that are “bright shiny and new” as Rick put it was more important. I guess they are the early adopters. I always like hearing about the exceptions.
It’s the end of the year for unified communications. It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since I started this summation of the Twelve Days of UC. I can assure you that matching an industry to a holiday song is a feat I won’t repeat, nor try to pick a new song to parody. As with previous quarters, here is a brief summary of some of the Q4 events related to my Twelve Days categories. For the last time, here is my parodied version of the Twelve Days of Christmas.
Things really picked up in unified communications in the third quarter as it was back to school for everyone. This is despite the fact that we didn’t have any big shows during the summer except for SpeechTek. Q4 should be even more interesting, however, as VoiceCon is coming up. Here is the made up song again, with a smattering of things that happened in some of the categories. Next time I blog a song, it will be a short one!
I’m way overdue for the Q2 update on what happened in the world of UC, per my Twelve Days of UC December blog (below). I took advantage of the slow months in the industry this summer, and took some vacation time. It figures that the morning I took off for my second trip was when the Siemens announcement hit, so I missed it, but I’m back and ready to blog. Next week’s SpeechTek conference should initiate busier times in contact centers, UC and speech and I’m looking forward to it.
Siemens Enterprise held their global analyst event last week in beautiful Vienna, Austria, and in addition to wanting to get an update on the business, possibly every analyst in attendance was eager to find out if Siemens was going to announce which company would take over the enterprise business. However, as Brian Riggs of Current Analysis pointed out in his ‘Siemens Enterprise: June Wedding Postponed’ (loved that title) blog on NoJitter, there was no long awaited news on who the lucky partner would be for Siemens – yet. However, that didn’t stop many analysts at the event from trying to squeeze shreds of info out of Siemens execs as to who it might be, yet they remained strong and didn’t and couldn’t say.
It’s been a quarter since I blogged my industry wish list for unified communications, so I figured I would revisit the list to see how we are doing. I don’t want to make this a beauty contest as there have been so many announcements, big and small, particularly as we had a number of voice shows last quarter, but here are some highlights. One caveat; just because we have had a lot of announcements this quarter doesn’t mean we have marked anything off of the list. It just means we have made progress in several categories. Here is a recap of my December “wish list” song, and the category each line represents:
We have speech-enabled solutions for the SMB market out there already. In fact, I will be writing about some of them in a Q1 update of my 12 days of UC blog, probably next week. But Active Voice, who have been in the voice/unified messaging market for more than a decade, has finally cracked the code on providing an affordable, single-digit IQ (SDIQ ) installation, speech-enabled auto-attendant for the SMB market. That would be the many people are starting to pay attention to, but still much underserved SMB market.
On the second day of UC the industry gave to me what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.
My second day of UC wish is a particular interest of mine. What SMB loves is to be the center of attention. Don’t we all enjoy that? But its my opinion that when it comes to unified communications the industry hasn’t done enough to educate small and mid-sized businesses on the impact that UC applications can have on their networks, nor have we done a good job of educating SMBs as to the possible pitfalls of blindly adding on applications without proper network assessment and planning. Then there is the issue of security. SMBs may not want vendors to muck with their data, but its not uncommon for someone selling into those businesses to have to educate them on the value of backing that data up, let alone what the impact would be on the security of that data if new applications are added that might create security holes. Therefore, wish number two is a stronger focus on the SMB market.
In a separate announcement, but in conjunction with its 7.5 release, ShoreTel continued to amp up its product portfolio by announcing a strategic distribution agreement with Syntellect, to sell Syntellect’s Customer Interaction Management contact center solutions. This is a superb fit for ShoreTel, who has been storming the IP telephony scene with its scalable, software-based, systems, and unified communication solutions. Until now, ShoreTel has had three contact center solutions – Workgroup and Contact Center, which are for the SMB market, and Enterprise Contact Center, which effectively goes up to 300 agents, but didn’t scale past that and wasn’t as feature-rich as many larger customers have demanded. Syntellect’s contact center offerings will give ShoreTel an extremely competitive offering in the higher end market, and fill out their portfolio.
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