Yesterday Cisco announced a nice round of additions to the Cisco TelePresence portfolio, and earlier this week I got to sit in on a TelePresence webinar introducing the new products. This time it was a little personal for me because Cisco representatives also said that these announcements marked the five year birthday of TelePresence. TelePresence was the first blog I wrote on this site in 2007, and I can’t believe it has been that long since it came out. I’ve always been a big fan, of not just Cisco’s telepresence products, but the entire industry, as since its inception, video has become one of the cornerstones of UC, and has truly changed the way that companies can do business.

As for some Cisco statistics, the company claims that they have the broadest video endpoint and infrastructure in the industry, and that currently 50 million users of Cisco collaboration products are now capable of using TelePresence. That is pretty impressive.

The Telepresence announcements had three parts. The first is the extension of TelePresence into the SMB market with the introduction of the Cisco TelePresence Callway, a hosted service that is part of the Cisco Collaboration Cloud. SMB customers can purchase or lease personal endpoints to connect to the service, which Cisco is offering at affordable price points in an “all you can eat model” as Cisco put it, ($99 a month for standard, unlimited calling, data sharing, and $149 for premium that adds on support for higher res and meet-me bridging service). It is pretty plug n’ play, with set up of about five minutes. The service is being offered through 14 service providers, and is initially available only in the US.

The second part is an expansion of Cisco’s video endpoint portfolio. This includes:

•Cisco Jabber™Video for TelePresence, which is a standards-based, HD video-calling software application that allows participants to join TelePresence calls from their desktop PCs or laptops. Globally accessible through a website, the person holding the meeting can invite participants to join a TelePresence call for free. A global beta program for this is charted for Q1’12.

•Cisco TelePresence MX300 is Cisco’s newest  multi-purpose, room-based TelePresence system, supporting nine people in a room. The new system offers 1080p, 30 frames per second, high-quality video, on a 55” screen, is affordable, and can be set up in as little as 15 minutes quickly. Target GA is Q1’12 worldwide.

The third part of the announcement was a follow on to Cisco’s recent announcements around extending TelePresence to more than just meetings, by enabling customers to capture video from any TelePresence endpoint across their network, and then share that content with any user on any device. In yesterday’s announcement, they introduced a vertical market specific example of this — Cisco TelePresence VX- Clinical Assistant which is a purpose-built, mobile telemedicine cart designed for use in healthcare settings.  The VX-Clinical Assistant is a high-definition video collaboration system that will allow healthcare providers to better provide telemedicine, such as remote consultations, medical education, or virtual healthcare teams.  GA for this product is also slated for Q1’12.

In the TelePresence announcement meeting Cisco had demonstrations, as well as some customers, including P&G and Singlewire Software. Of course they would only have stellar customers on the call, but they were really interesting. For example, Laurie Heltsley, director, Global Business Services, P&G said that they started off with TelePresence from the beginning five years ago, with 43 rooms and the only thing they could have done better was to have added more. They can’t keep up with demand, even though they are now up to 80. But the most interesting part was that she said that they have saved four dollars in travel costs for every dollar they spent on TelePresence. She also spoke of new ways of using the products. P&G has had challenges growing in Africa, but using TelePresence in kiosks in malls has enabled them to have consultations on beauty products with potential customers.

From the beginnings five years ago when TelePresence was new, but very expensive with a lot of overhead in terms of setting up the rooms, to now, I really believe that Cisco has taken a lot of care in expanding the company’s portfolio so that there are solutions available to any size business, in any form of consumption whether immersive or on a small mobile device at any price point. Happy Birthday TelePresence.

This year at the Cisco Collaboration Summit for analysts and partners, held in Phoenix, AZ, Cisco announced a number of significant product additions, but unlike last year when they introduced 63 all at once, Cisco kindly spread the announcements out. Three of the most important ones, SocialMiner, Finesse, and their network-based, rich media capture (name is imminent) they announced two weeks ago, giving us a chance to digest the announcement and write about them in advance of this conference. My write up on those three you can see here on the UCStrategies site.

We also got to hear about some key partner integrations as well, including those from NICE, and Nexidia. For example, NICE did all the integration work to make the company’s SmartCenter solutions interoperate with SocialMiner, Finesses and Cisco’s media capture platform, so by summit time the combined products were ready to ship, giving contact center customers a solid end-to-end recording, monitoring, analytics and workforce optimization solution. I liked the fact that the work was done in advance of the summit so we weren’t just hearing about partners that will be working on integrating with Cisco’s new products.

Similarly, if a picture is worth a thousand words, myriad video demonstrations have to be worth a lot more, and this summit once again was all about video as part of collaboration. For example, we saw a demonstration of the integration of Nexidia, speech capture and analytics in a contact center environment. In the demonstration Cisco used Nexidia Capture for mining calls for potential proactive account management. For example, when a call comes in, with a customer that says ”I think I’m going to have to cancel my account”, that customer voice segment is captured, and can be proactively popped to the account manager’s phone (Nexidia Scan), who after listening to it, can click to call the customer.  The offer to keep the customer can also be popped to the screen of the agent so that they know what to do to save the customer and are in sync with the account manager.

Of particular interest to me was also hearing about the companies that are starting to use SocialMiner. One of the customers at the Cisco Collaboration event was Zone Labs; the company that created the Zone diet that many people have heard about and used over the years. Zone was the perfect customer to demonstrate the power of using SocialMiner because Zone is an average sized customer with an average size IT budget, rather than a big customer, yet they achieved huge success with SocialMiner in a short period of time. In fact, Zone moved from interest in using social media, to powerfully using it to achieve significant business results in 30 days.

Zone employed SocialMiner to listen to Twitter, Facebook and some forums, for chatter on everything from their own company keywords, to competitor’s keywords as well as general ones for their industry. Not only did SocialMiner help the company make sense of what was being said, it helped them be proactive in reaching out to potential customers in a non pushy way, helping with health information that they might need, and in turn, giving them a chance to make them customers. Equally as important was that Zone Labs, who employs 70 people, initially had three full time staff members monitoring social networking sites, and with SocialMiner that went down to one person half time.

I think the important take away from the conference is that Cisco has its collaborative hat on straight. Every product that Cisco announced just added to the last set of announcements, in a cohesive way. For example, with video Cisco has gone from the introduction of TelePresence four years ago, to smaller versions, to the umi home-based version, and has incorporated video into products such as the Cius tablet, and has integrated video from their video acquisitions as well. So when they demonstrate video, they can show a multi-faceted video experience that includes businesses and consumers, and can flow from device to device. This supports one of the key themes of the conference, which was that they are striving to have all collaboration endpoints video-enabled.  It is hard to describe without seeing the demonstrations, and it made me wish I had used my Cisco Flip video recorder to record a demo to embed in this blog. Oh well. Seeing is believing. On a lighter note, in one of my tweets from the event I said that every summit we see more and more capabilities and that next year I fully expect to see Teleportation demonstrated.

I attended Mitel’s Industry Analyst event that was held in conjunction with Mitel’s Partner Conference this last week in Las Vegas. The event was really well attended; selling out the Red Rock Resort and Spa, and spilling over into another neighboring hotel. This wasn’t an event tied to a major release announcement, but just business as usual. However, it wasn’t without some pretty nice product announcements, and other business discussions. For example, posting on Monday, on the UC-Strategies site is an overview I wrote on Mitel’s Wesley Clover affiliate program that is well worth looking at. This wasn’t a product announcement, but a business presentation that highlighted something of significance for Mitel.

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I think Cisco is onto something. Although it was launched in January, the Five to Thrive Initiative that John Chambers has been expounding on and Cisco is engaging their customers with couldn’t continue to be timelier in its message. If you haven’t heard the pitch or been to their web site, ‘Five to Thrive’ refers to five business strategies to help companies thrive in dynamic times (which I suppose is fresher than saying that we are living in interesting times). You can see a copy from Cisco’s web site below, but the main point that I heartily agree with is that during economic downturns it is human nature to hold back, want to retrench, and find ways to cut costs, but doing so isn’t the basis for thriving in a down economy, and sometimes isn’t even the strategy for surviving. We need to thrive, not just potentially survive.

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One of the big selling points for video, besides it being a green technology, has been the reduction in travel costs for companies that employ it for meetings. Cisco throws around huge numbers when they talk about video, such as the company holding over 200K TelePresence meetings per quarter, for example. In addition, if an enterprise has video in place, they don’t just benefit from saving on travel, they benefit from being able to hold more meetings and ad hoc meetings, building team rapport and gaining more from the meetings that they have.

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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!

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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:

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I just got a notice that two of my ‘Twelve Days of UC’ wishes – the value of video and going green - are being addressed in a first of its kind town meeting that is being shown to a live audience during Cisco’s keynote session at VoiceCon in Florida on March 19th. Former Vice President, Al Gore, Cisco’s Chairman and CEO, John Chambers, and Cisco’s EVP, Chief Marketing Officer, Sue Bostrom, physically separated from each other by thousands of miles, will meet together in a virtual unified communications environment, to talk about how technology innovation can play a part in mitigating climate change. Using Cisco TelePresence, of course, these three will virtually meet on stage in front of live audiences in London, England, Orlando and several other places. Those attending the keynote will get to watch the live discussion via a TelePresence system that will be placed on stage, while others will get to see it in several other TelePresence rooms around the world. Those unable to attend can view it live as a streamed webcast session.

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On the Eleventh day of UC the industry gave to me, the value of video, not hyping,
no more pagers beeping,
interface enhancing
CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing
five phone rings
the voicemail market girds
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.
Its not that we don’t have video out there; we sure do and it’s a mind boggling amount. At Cisco’s C-Scape I believe the figure that was mentioned was something like 250 billion videos were produced in 2007. That is mind boggling. That includes videos incorporated into Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube, and social networking sites etc. Some estimates have Internet video increasing four fold by 2011. However, my day eleven wish is certainly not for that number to increase, although it will undoubtedly hit some mind numbing figure by the end of 2008. No, I’m wishing for businesses to “get” the value of video too, not just consumers, and for vendors to help them “get it” without the hype.

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On the seventh day of UC the industry gave to me overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
and a clear definition of UC.
This is all about going green. How could anyone that reads a paper or goes onto the Internet not see the issue of green initiatives as a hot topic? My day seven wish is the second, along with assistive technology, that is about companies doing more to promote what they have or are doing. Day seven is that companies talk more about their green initiatives because we don’t hear enough about them. If we don’t hear about it, then customers don’t hear about it, and in order to go green customers need to be able to make intelligent choices when choosing vendors. In fact, Siemens recently held a webinar, entitled “The Green Contact Center – Making “Green” Work for you”. In it they held a poll with the question “Do you believe that a significant number of customers would be positively inclined to buy from vendors who publicly demonstrate a commitment to the Green initiatives?” Approximately 95% responded yes. Therefore, day seven is a wish to hear about green.

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