Although its summer and not the high season for big announcements, there are still some gems that have crossed my inbox this week. Here are some highlights:

OrderCatcher, a provider of speech-enabled voice portals for the hospitality and restaurant markets has developed a really compelling voice application development tool that essentially takes the developer out of the equation. I’ve seen a lot of IVR application development tools over the years that I’ve tracked this market, but this one even looks simple in a presentation, and normally they don’t. iSAT (Instant Speech Application Technology) can take a script and turn it into an application with blinding speed. For example, iSAT uses a grammar engine that parses all menu items in a quick-service restaurant menu and generates slot-based grammars, for all possible ways that a customer might order. The engine then generates semantic scripts from the items, and options or modifiers of those items. The OrderCatcher applications are state-based, allowing flexible control of the call flow and a natural sounding application. The application takes into account all of the options a caller will use, and then only prompts for any information it hasn’t received yet.

That is a simplistic description of the tool, but it is simple. The compelling part of iSAT, however, is that it is part of a hosted solution from OrderCatcher that looks to be really attractive for the SMB market, in that a company can give a script to OrderCatcher and within hours, OrderCatcher will have a working application up and running with no development costs to the business. The only fees are for the minutes used by callers. That equates to instant ROI. Interested in hearing more?

Next up was Interactive Intelligence’s announcement of a partnership with Buzzient to incorporate social media into the contact center. Interactive Intelligence is going to use Buzzient’s social media analysis and integration capabilities to monitor social media “chatter” according to customer-defined keywords, and then route the pertinent content as email messages to the person or agent best suited to handle the content, based on business rules and agent skill set.

Buzzient will monitor myriad social media interactions from the normal suspects, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn, but also blogs, wikis and other sources too. The interactions can be tagged with quantitative sentiment scores for tone, such as negative or positive comments. The emails will be routed as part of Interactive’s multi-channel queuing and routing solution, based on the tone or other factors such as a vertical market focus, product name, competitors name, etc.

Finally, I just wanted to mention a developmental addendum to a product called ZoomSafer, which I blogged about on the UCStrategies site in March. A brief description, but you can see more here, is ZoomSafer is a patented solution that provides flexible policy management for the use of mobile devices while driving. It consists of a web application that allows a business or individual to customize their own set of safe driving policies, and track and administer them, a client application to download onto a users’ mobile device to enforce the policies, and a set of free voice services to allow users to text, call or email, hands-free while driving. It uses the customer’s GPS to automatically detect the customer’s speed and if they are driving or not.

After great customer feedback since the company launched the product, this next iteration provides further automation, and integration with Bluetooth technology to automatically determine when the customer is driving, but with zero incremental drain on the customer’s mobile phone battery. ZoomSafer claims that this is the world’s first safe driving software to integrate with in-vehicle Bluetooth technologies to automatically activate/deactivate “safe drive mode” on a user’s smartphone whenever they power on/off their in-vehicle Bluetooth device. In this release the Bluetooth Beta software works on Blackberry smartphones running 4.2.1 OS and higher. Later additions will include availability on Windows Mobile and Android phones as well.

When talking to vendors about competition in contact centers the two names that most often pop up for North America are Cisco and Avaya, followed by Genesys, Interactive Intelligence, and then myriad others. What do Cisco’s competitors say are magic bullets in competing with Cisco? They say that Cisco is too expensive, not fully-featured, complex, and solutions require too many servers. Those bullets are losing speed, since Cisco, in addition to continuing to develop and rollout some rather visionary contact center and collaboration goodies, is working on filling long overdue feature holes in the more traditional contact center products, and reducing the amount of servers required to run it all.

I was happy to participate this week in a contact center day that Cisco held in Boston. We hadn’t had a deep dive into contact center for awhile, in part because of the effort it has taken Cisco to bring to market and educate analysts on their unified communications and collaboration portfolio enhancements. Contact center is part of UC at Cisco, but in last year’s big fall announcement of new UC and collaboration products, traditional contact center products tended to take a back seat; but not now. No, this isn’t a renewed focus on contact center, as the focus has been there all along, we just havent’ heard much about it lately. But in the last year Cisco has added 80+ people to their contact center teams, and are shooting to be number one in contact center; hoping to boot out Avaya, a vision John Hernandez, VP and general manager of Cisco’s contact center business unit, made clear in his opening presentation.

However, getting back to my earlier comment on competitive silver bullets – in order to facilitate adding new capabilities and fixing feature holes in the product line, Cisco made some big changes to both process and organization. The company moved from a waterfall development process to an Agile one so that they can very quickly add new developments or fix issues within products, in weeks, not months or years. They have a board focused solely on customer interaction, and they make use of what other development teams are doing, taking developments within, for example, UC and applying them to the contact center, so they take advantage of existing resources. For example, Cisco is taking the competency collection capabilities of Cisco Pulse, and applying it to skills-based routing functionality in contact centers.

What this has allowed Cisco to do is to focus the bulk of their R&D on the core or legacy contact center portfolio. Cisco still has 70% of its R&D focused on the core platform and applications, and have been avidly working on improving some of the weaker areas of their product lines.

However, the day wasn’t all core product enhancements. Of course, during the event we also heard more on some of more intriguing product additions being made to the portfolio. For example, in November we were introduced to Cisco Pulse, which watches everything going across the network and tags pertinent content building a dynamic picture of knowledge competencies across an organization. Within a contact center, Cisco’s vision is to use Pulse to embellish or replace skills-based routing.

We also heard a lot about how Cisco intends to integrate social media into the contact center as well. For example, Cisco is building a solution to add social media to customer care agents. Cisco is already openly talking about this for launch later this year. Basically, it is an appliance that taps into the social web, captures consumer-generated content, analyzes it, prioritizes it, and then distributes it through workflow. More details to come as they get to announcement.

In all, the new things Cisco is working on seem very compelling, and much more clear than when we sat through the big launch in November. For example, seven months ago Pulse was a concept. Now it is available, and fairly soon we will get to hear about how contact centers are using it. I’m looking forward to it.

One of the most interesting panels at the recent Mobile Voice Conference was one on patent law and its effects on industry innovation. It wasn’t even so much the hampering of innovation as the scope of damage that can be done out of greed, and the need to stop it. The panel on patent law, was made up of Marie Meteer, of MM Consulting, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium – Building the Prior Art Library to Enable Better Patent Application Examinations”, Jason Peltz, an attorney with Bartlit, Beck Herman Palencher & Scott LLP, speaking on “Patent strategy: considerations in filing a patent infringement suit and in defending such a suit”, Mark Powell, the Director of the Technology Center 2600 of the US Patent and Trademark Office, speaking on “United States Patent & Trademark Office – How You Can Work With Us”, and Ria Farrell Schalnat, a patent attorney with Frost Brown Todd, speaking on “Speech Technology Consortium – Using Re-examinations Proactively to Clear the Threat of Patent Trolls”.

There is evil lurking out there in the form of patent trolls, which is threatening to stifle creativity and stall the speech technology industry, and others, one of which is unified communications. Ria Farrell Schalnat started her presentation on patent trolls with excerpts from Terry Pratchett’s 1992 work — Troll Bridge, which I found amusing enough to add here:

“It was a lonely bridge across a shallow, white, and treacherous river in a deep valley.A grey shape vaulted over the parapet and landed splay-footed in front of the horse. It waved a club. The troll blinked. It took this long to realize that the saddle was unoccupied. It blinked again, because it could suddenly feel a knife point resting on the back of its neck.

“Hello,” said a voice by its ear.

The troll swallowed. But very carefully.

“Look,” it said desperately, “it’s tradition, OK? A bridge like this, people ort to expect a troll . . . ‘Ere,” it added, as another thought crawled past, “‘ow come I never ‘eard you creepin’ up on me?”

“Because I’m good at it,” said the old man.

The troll risked a sideways glance.

“Bloody hell,” it whispered. “You think you’re Cohen the Barbarian, do you?”

“What do you think?” said Cohen the Barbarian. “

So just what is a patent troll? In a nutshell, it is a non-practicing individual or group/entity that buys up patents from willing sellers or struggling companies that then turns around uses to sue related companies for patent infringement. In other words, this is someone who has not practiced their patent, and is not contributing or innovating in the industry in any way. Instead, they accrue patents as an arsenal (with multiple claims in each patent), bundle them up, and then take companies to court. We saw this happen starting more than a decade ago, with Michael Katz taking on the voice processing industry (at the time, voice messaging and IVR), and now, extremely aggressively, with Phoenix Solutions, who have sued big companies such as Sony, PG&E, and Wells Fargo, for their use of speech technologies.

To set the stage, Jason Peltz explained that there are 200K patents that are issued annually, with 2700 patent suits filed annually. Currently, there are 4000 patent cases pending. The average case takes two years, with an average cost of between $4.5 to $5M to defend, with an average jury award of $6.5M. Something that was equally interesting is that 30-40% of patent cases are overturned on appeal, which is dramatically higher than any other form of litigation. Also, in the case of patent law, the higher courts at the federal level do not have to defer to the trial court’s interpretation of the claims in the subject patent, so if a company successfully defends their patent, and the “troll” decides to appeal, they may get a second bite at the apple, with all the associated costs escalating. Many small companies just fold, as it’s often less costly to pay license fees than legal fees. But it is not just small companies that fold. In a recent case filed in 2002 (US patent 5,799,273) Allvoice Computing, PLC vs. Nuance, Nuance won their first case, and then ended up settling rather than going through it again on a federal level. Why does this matter? Because even though Nuance won, when they settled in July of 2007 rather than pay, it gave the patent troll a big stick to use against smaller companies by being able to say that Nuance paid rather than fight — we can beat you too.

The panel discussed what could potentially be done about this, and Ria Farrell Schalnat talked about using re-examination as an alternative or supplement to litigation.

Depending on the type of re-exam conducted, costs may initially be anywhere between $5,000 – $50,000+. It all depends on the complexity of the patent as well as whether the initial decision is appealed.  Although these fees are a fraction of litigation, they may still be too cost prohibitive for one company to take on by themselves. The potential solution would be to band together to fight the trolls as a group – hence the birth of the idea of a Speech Technology Consortium (STC), which would pool money and intellectual property resources to defend and win against the trolls. There would be a membership fee for participating companies, but no charge for the cost of accepted re-exam requests. A key component of this effort would be to uncover, gather up, and create a database of prior art to be used as evidence in the re-exams.

Ria cited statistics showing a 73% patent “kill rate”, through August 2008, which is a complete elimination of all claims targeted by a requestor, which represents a rate much higher than litigation at 33%.

I just love the whole concept of a group effort to defeat something which only hurts the industry. Needlessly spending money to defend or settle “claims” only drains the coffers of companies trying to honestly innovate, and has the effect of inhibiting new companies from emerging because it jacks up the cost of entry to the market.  I believe that as the STC is developed, that companies in the unified communications space should definitely jump on board and help out as the technologies used in UC, and the features and functions in these claims are interwoven, leaving UC companies at risk of attack too.

UC analytics is an emerging category worth paying attention to because it truly combines all of the information available to a company about their customers, customer interactions, history etc., along with everything going on in the contact center and back office. Why? To improve customer relationships, the contact center and back office. Sure we have talked about this before, but this time we are bringing UC applications and tools into the picture as well.

Want to hear more. Pop over to UCStrategies.com and read the UCViews article that I wrote about it, as well as one that Blair Pleasant wrote on a different aspect of UC analytics. You can find my article here, and Blair’s article here.

In furthering Alcatel-Lucent’s theme of the dynamic engagement, the company announced the Alcatel-Lucent OmniTouch™ 8082 My IC Phone at VoiceCon in Orlando. In a pre-briefing on the product Alcatel-Lucent said “Alcatel-Lucent is making an announcement which will dramatically change the employee, developer and customer experiences and will redefine the notion of engagement”.

To start off, this is one nice looking desktop phone, with a 7” wide capacitive touch screen, that is LED backlit, and provides connectivity to Bluetooth and USB devices. Functionally, ALU paid attention to both the form (adjustable base) and audio components of the phone. It provides full duplex wide-band communications, and has a large loudspeaker built in. The phone provides for seamless transfer between the desk phone and mobile devices.

ALU put a lot of work into creating a new user interface to make the phone far more functional, and in line with providing users access to information, and unified communications capabilities. For example, the phone gives users screen access to instant messaging, presence, contextual applications, and email, and allows the user to play MP3 music for personal ring tones as well. ALU is keenly aware of the user experience, building business context across the user interaction, taking into account presence, location, social networks, and what the user’s business needs are.

Additionally, new applications for the phone will be available when the phone is generally available (year-end) that will be developed by ALU and their developer community. Companies are always talking about “rich user experience”, and Alcatel-Lucent is no different. We still have a few months until the phone ships, but the company spoke of a tailored set of applications for financial services, such as real-time video and twitter feeds from traders, as examples of what could be provided through the phone.

As for this added application development, ALU is using its Developer Application portal, which already has more than 10,000 active developers, to create applications for the new phone. The new phone serves as an application pod that has an open API developer platform, and will be integrated with ALU’s next generation of unified communications services (stay tuned for more announcements during the year). The Developer portal will be accessible to developers starting in Q2. All applications

Finally, besides the look of the phone, I was completely pleased when I asked ALU a question about power consumption, because green is a big point with me. Alcatel-Lucent has gone above and beyond on that score, as this is the first desk phone product to comply with the European Code of Conduct, which forces companies to be green, by requiring a limit of one watt of consumption when the screen is off and less than two watts when the screen is on – and this is a seven inch screen! Nice. In addition, ALU designed the product for long life, and went for minimal packaging, with no paper being delivered with the product – instead they provide an online manual.

Jim Burton and I, on behalf of UCStrategies.com are participating in a webinar on cloud-based communications, along with Tim Passios of Interactive Intelligence. Please join us. Click here to get to the registration page.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

2:00 p.m. Eastern

Executives are mandating that their IT/Telecom departments must switch away from their premise-based communications solutions to a hosted, Communications-as-a-Service (CaaS) solution. Why? To…

• …reduce or eliminate capital expenditures
• …reduce IT educational and support costs
• …reduce IT footprint
• …increase deployment flexibility
• …develop a disaster recovery plan

During this interactive webinar we will we explore these reasons, the value and importance of a CaaS solution for your business, as well as tackle the common questions associated with choosing a CaaS vendor.

• Are cloud-based communications right for you?
• How is cloud-based technology different than Centrex?
• What about security and voice quality?
• Can it scale to take on large enterprise? Contact center?
• What about Distributed environments?
• How quickly can the move to cloud-based communications be made?
• And many more…

Last week, Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN) announced the availability of the company’s latest release of OpenScape Voice – Version 4.0. For those not familiar with OpenScape Voice, it is Siemens communications platform that is the core of their PBX, UC, UM and Contact Center offerings. As part of OpenScape UC Server, it provides enterprise grade voice services, carrier grade scalability and reliability, IP least-cost routing, video conferencing, mobility, unified messaging and role-based UC applications. Based on a native IP-based software platform (SIP), OpenScape Voice utilizes SEN Group’s unified OpenSOA applications framework.

In this release, Siemens improved the platform including adding forty new features. For example, they introduced a new team working and executive assistant application, which helps to streamline the management of executive calls with support of one or more assistants, and provides multiple call handling options for voicemail and mobility. This V4 release also includes two new capabilities – OpenScape Branch and OpenScape Concierge.

OpenScape Branch is just what it sounds like; a voice solution for customers with multiple branch offices that want the functionality of larger enterprises across their branch offices. It is scalable in 50, 250, 1000, and 6000 user variants. It’s a single box solution with an integrated gateway and analog adapter for smaller remote branches. It also has integrated management with OpenScape Voice. OpenScape branch includes a SIP Proxy for survivability, and a Session Border Controller (SBC) for local SIP trunking connections. It also provides streamlined management through a common portal for simple installation and integration.

According to Siemens, OpenScape Concierge is the industry’s first true unified communications (UC) Attendant Console application. OpenScape Concierge provides telephone attendants (such as switchboard operators) with the same UC desktop functions that other UC users have, including real-time UC-based presence status information for contacts across both OpenScape Voice and HiPath 4000 systems. It provides the user with detailed data on incoming customer calls, and also supports call queue and corporate directory integration, so that telephone attendants can more easily direct incoming calls to anyone in the organization.

With OpenScape Voice Siemens has delivered on the trends that we have been seeing in the industry in the past 5 years. Besides being software based, making it simple to manage, install and upgrade, OpenScape was designed to be green. Siemens maintains that OpenScape provides the lowest carbon footprint and lowest power-cost per user in the industry. They also maintain that it provides the lowest TCO and best ROI as well. I’m not in the position to comment as to whether or not this is true – just reporting on intent. Siemens is also positioning OpenScape Voice along the lines of some recent trends – “cloud and social-media ready”. The later we saw demonstrated at VoiceCon in the fall with Twitter integration.

In all I like the consistency of what I am seeing with Siemens. Eighteen months ago we saw the emergence of the change from proprietary hardware and software to open, standards-based software and services, moving away from the TDM-based HiCom and VoIP-based HiPath platforms, and each announcement after that has built on those principals, along with delivering industry par or leading applications and functionality as well.

Voxeo continues to build out the company’s unified communications strategy and portfolio with the acquisition of ClackPoint, a real-time multi-media collaboration platform, that is both simple and easy to deploy, and inexpensive compared to traditional standalone conferencing/collaboration offerings. ClackPoint’s platform is currently being used by over 100,000 people each month to connect and collaborate in social networks, casual connections and business.

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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.

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Now that I have weighed in on what happened in 2009, what will happen in 2010? Here is what I think will be hot in 2010 in speech -
Hosted Applications
Hosting is going to stay hot. With companies such as Voxeo, Microsoft Tellme, Contact Solutions, Angel.com, and myriad others providing hosting as an adjunct or alternative to premises-based speech deployments, customers have a lot of safe choices for not having to do everything themselves. No longer an anomaly, I believe that we will see hosting brought up in conversation in the majority of deals in 2010, even if it’s only talked about.

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