Conversationware

Perhaps this is old news already

A sale has been on the cards since they went completely indirect and the manufacture was outsourced (if memory serves).

I remember when the big UK PBX’s in the old days consisted of

• Siemens ISDX
• Mitel SX2000
• Nortel Meridian Option 11
• Alcatel 4400
• Lucent Definity
• Ericsson MD110

A bit crowded when certain other companies joined the fray I suppose.

Obviously there are no announcements from Aastra about futures yet, as this won’t be concluded until April 2008.

The MD110 had a superb installed base in the UK. Back in the day they had a very innovative and reliable distributed solution. It was kind of the Ford Granada of the comms world.  

I’m sure this won’t happen soon, and I feel a bit like an ambulance chaser - but if MD110 customers were to consider change, they should keep hold of their Unified Messaging Onebox system, as it is an AVST CallXpress system in disguise - and that fits onto any IPT PBX. (drop me a note).

I’m telling myself that it’s just being helpful really

Could society could be stupid enough to label completely different disciplines with the same moniker?

I used to wonder.

Communications meant both “telephone technology” and a “job title within some PR function”

Back in the day though, telephones seemed completely different to the ‘other sort’ of communications, which seemed to be about getting your message published in a newspaper.

Well, doesn’t this single word make more sense this year? (Happy 2008)

Today, you can draw a theoretical line between real time voice communications, through other one to one technologies, to messaging, and on to other asynchronous group based communications like blogs, wikis and social software.

So my theme is that;

• Marketing is talking - originally to a very wide audience, but now steadily being segmented (segmented, segmented) into smaller and smaller targeted audiences.
• Real time communications is talking - originally one to one, but now steadily being increased from one to one conversation into larger and larger targeted audiences.
• Communications has finally lived up to it’s original promise.
• Cisco bought a Web Conference company last year. That tells you the same thing - communications is communications, and wherever the technology falls between the two endpoints, it is all interelated.

So: communications were unified enough already. Therefore, doesn’t the phrase ’Unified Communications’ lack definition, ambition and a sense of purpose?

Get a telephone, and surround it with lots of other technology like IM, everyone seems to say. Perhaps the better approach is to define a business process, and then telephone enable if needs be.

Voice is used to persuade, to seal the deal. But the fact is, written communications are just as useful as voice communications and sometimes a great deal more.

I suppose I could have just rung you all to tell you, but this seemed like a better way.

PBX based companies had better think this through.

More and more it has seemed to me that VOIP doesn’t matter. I don’t see this discussed on mainstream communications news sites, presumably it’s a question of who pays their bills through advertising.

I was contemplating on ways to express this properly, when I read this seasonal post by Ken Camp, looking back at the technological year . He did the job already, - see the extract below.

Voice over IP - VoIP as Plumbing
If there was a shaking revelation in 2007, I don’t think it shook enough people. Having written books and papers about VoIP from a number of different perspectives, my view is focused in a different way that the enterprise customer view. My history in VoIP goes back ten years or more. But the stark reality is in 2007 VoIP became plumbing.

For many years, VoIP was viewed as a major disruptive technology. People expected it would completely change the face of telecommunications. I know I believed that. But I don’t believe that today. I’ve often, in the past, referred to circuit switching, for either voice or data, as nothing more than plumbing. It’s base infrastructure. It’s a foundation.

VoIP has proven that it’s really just another foundation element. The hot technology area is voice as a service. It’s how and where we can use voice services. How we deliver them is irrelevant to customers and users. VoIP truly is just another delivery mechanism. It’s a great delivery mechanism. It lets us maximize the value of IP networks. Cost savings and operational efficiencies can be huge, but at the root of things, VoIP is simply a service delivery mechanism for a service.

There is another element, in as much as voice calls are going to be less frequent, and therefore doesn’t matter as much as it used to. A trend I think will continue over 2008.

Incidentally, I should be careful with plumbing analogies, I am still very high up on uk google search for k.i.t.c.h.e.n.s after a rather overworked analogy back in April on how if you wanted to buy one (unified communications was the k.i.t.c.h.e.n), you shouldn’t be held to ransom by your plumbing provider (voip).

Anyhow, thanks Ken, I enjoyed the rest of your post.

We’ve had communications Vendors telling us for months that;

• Voip is Unified Communications
• Unified Messaging is Unified Communications
• Sending an SMS from a database event is Unified Communications

All very irritating for everyone (ok, that would be me), but probably even more so from an analyst point of view.

The good news that someone sensible from the analyst community got involved, and Melanie Turek, tells it like it is. Bravo

The CURRENT guestimated market size is very interesting indeed, less than $10M.

I’m sure that’s about right given the (correct) definition

However, Vendors have all promised their investors that there is gold at the end of this rainbow. The land of Unified Communications will deliver prosperous and wonderous times.

So, how long will it take to get there?

VOIP (red) vs ‘Unified Communications’ Search trends (blue)

Having figuratively left Reading Town a few months ago, my guess is that we’re only up the road in Newbury, the natives look pretty similar, and the emperors new clothes are still only just getting worn in.

There is a broader point

Until we define things properly and without fluff and nonsense, then the interest in unified communications won’t hit the heights that vendors want to see.

(More diagrams after the jump for RSS readers)

(more…)

High Availability and Disaster Recovery are different you know.

And I found out recently that there is also a third term - Continuous Availability.

Or at least, I now understand better what it means.

The ability to fail over an application server to a backup, so seamlessly that users don’t notice, between servers on different sites is pretty amazing. And, if you have over 99.3% uptime, you can claim Continuous Availability (Gartner’s term), as well as the other two.

It’s important I know this, because Avanquest now have distribution of Neverfail (such a brave name) - which provides Continuous Availability for the following

• Exchange
• Lotus Notes
• SQL
• File Server
• IIS
• Blackberry BES
• Rightfax

It can also run on VM Ware, leading to some very nice supplementary capabilities.

An excellent independent endorsement is here at it-director.com, a review

This is a Massive subject, even worthy of a capital ‘M’, and extremely topical with all my VOIP friends.

A few even go as far to say that failover is the only reason that their voip systems are selling so well.

With more and more communications capability becoming software applications, delivering Continuous Availability without those massive SAN and clustering costs will give a Competitive Advantage.

Backup servers are useless without knowing what the application is doing.

We are now availing our channel partners with these capabilities, with all the normal value added services wrap around of course.

Here’s a Neverfail customer video illustrating the point

Sometimes, the internet throws things up that make you laugh, for all the wrong reasons.

Proudly displayed on this website - Microsoft and Avaya’s great big advertising links alongside a very thin (to be kind) article about the vulnerabilities of Unified Communications.

You couldn’t make it up could you?

In case it gets taken down soon (UPDATE, the Avaya advert got removed) - the text includes things like

“One cannot ignore the seriousness of attacks against unified communications systems. At best, such an attack might disable your company’s phones. At worst though, a unified communications-based attack could allow an attacker to steal or modify data, or eavesdrop on voice or video calls”

and

“Unfortunately, I would have to write a good-sized book in order to cover all of the known exploits and countermeasures related to unified communications systems”

and worst of all

“Conclusion

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to secure your unified messaging systems. Some vulnerabilities effect virtually all unified messaging systems, regardless of make or model, while other vulnerabilities are specific to certain brands. Until traditional firewalls and IDS systems evolve to the point that they can detect unified messaging based-attacks, your best defence is to monitor the various web sites that I have mentioned in this article, in order to arm yourself with the latest security information.”

This last one is the richest of them all. I have never come across a Unified Messaging vulnerability in my 13 years of supplying them. That’s either from AVST or the competition. It’s just ridiculous.

It’s nice to be safe, however, you don’t need VOIP to get Unified Communications. But, if you do go that route, it can all sit nicely behind your firewall without opening any extra ports whatsoever.

When I see CRM, a sometimes debateable technology, aligned with VoIP for the greater good, it has me snorting into my morning coffee. A good job I’m on my own this morning.

“A perfect fit” indeed.

Most industry people know that VoIP itself isn’t needed to integrate telephony into a CRM system, and this has been possible for many years.

There has to be another reason for this sort of technology bundling (and marketing)

Whatever, the lure of simplicity is just too great sometimes. When it gets difficult to decide, just go for the easy option (technology or marketing)

Getting dressed for example, it sometimes can take ages to work out what goes with what.

Deep down of course you know that you’ll pay in the end.

With technology, the cost can be time and money taken up, and the work you have to put in justifying the original decision. Still, as the article quotes, the cool factor can be worth it, just look at the cool dude above. (it’s not me) 

Personally, I didn’t go the shellsuit route. But, I’ve just resigned myself to going back to a proper mobile phone.

I’ve tried the qtek Windows mobile device, and I have to say the experience was dire. If the phone isn’t any good, it matters little that I can access my gmail whilst on the move.

One size fits all didn’t work. I realised I wasn’t using the damn phone as often as I should, because the experience was painful - how useless is that?

I like technology from people who specialise. The motorola Z8 enables me to hear people properly when I call them.

Luckily, with telephone systems these days, we can now enjoy open systems and choose the best of breed and still choose the best handsets, the best voice messaging system, the best call recording platform, the best fax solution, the best stats package, the best call centre software, the best CRM system, and not have it cost a fortune.

Any other decision might be construed as a symptom of not trusting your communications suppliers to dress themselves properly.

   It feels like the calm before the carnage.

This week, Microsoft aimed at the Enterprise market with OCS, and Microsoft Admins over the world pricked up their ears.

To be able to apply their hard earned Active Directory and networking skills to telephony, and not to mention finding a new use for all that spare rack space, it must have felt like heaven.

At the other end, the SMB’s also got something. For those who have never heard of Active Directory in other words, 3 Com announced it’s support for the open source Asterisk PBX. This aimed squarely at those interested in a good deal for their telephone plumbing. 

Open source lacks credibility? Well, here’s some  - and an excellent article from Dan York indicates some traction. Comparing Asterisk to the rise of Linux is probably spot on from what I’ve seen recently.

Trixbox had a stand at IP07 - (I thought it was VOIP for business show, my mistake), and it looked like theirs was one of the busiest stands. A cool colour scheme must be the reason.

Anyone who says Asterisk won’t be a player, well, that’s like saying no corporate would ever install linux based applications.

Back in May we saw $6.5B of linux server sales in a quarter. That’s only 7 or 8 years worth of activity, without credibility.

Genesys supporting Asterisk is somewhat of a suprise given who they’re owned by,  but hedging bets was never a bad thing. 

So - two potentially massively impactful solutions gain traction on a crowded staid technology market. The neighbourhood just isn’t the same any more - that banging sound must be the ‘for sale’ signs going up.

Gartner are still talking about VOIP and Unified Communications as if they were joined at the hip.

Still, UC is second in their list of technologies to make a significant impact in the next two years.

I’m sure this is being widely publicised, but as it mentions UC quite prominently I thought I’d point it out.

Suprisingly, the list also includes web, social networking and hosted services alongside mashups. I might well have missed all that. Or maybe not. 

The demise of any technology is probably inevitable, apart from the PC, which seems to be responsible for most of the carnage. The PBX is being lined up as the next ‘mainframe’ to disappear.

My own thoughts are that A single interface for whatever it is you may want to do is just too powerful to resist, starting with the typewriter, and who knows where it will end

Alasdair Ford writes an excellent piece plotting the rise, and predicting the ‘possible’ eventual fall of the PBX.

It started me thinking about whether there are good reasons the traditional PBX will survive OCS and Asterisk.

I know my telephony friends will probably look at me with scorn for putting it like that But when speaking to a technical chap yesterday, and he told me he was considering downloading and running Asterisk telephony on his ADSL router for a home PBX, it kind of stopped me in my tracks.If the only reason for PBX is survival were to be “you wouldn’t run a business on that, would you?” then I don’t think there’d be a decade left in it:

But surely that’s not the case?

1. Call Centre - this is a nailed on survival strategy as the ‘niche’ is completely arcane. It is also the one reason most companies will keep some sort of PBX imho. It may split buying decisions between callcentre and back office, but that’s always been ‘common’.

2. Call handling - related to the first point, routing calls through reception consoles, and all the little foibles that users in ad-hoc groups need. After 5 rings, can we ring the bell in the delivery bay, for example, and how about Manager Secretary working.

3. New Technology projects are not always about all the new facilities, it’s about the little stuff you took away. Replacement solutions have to be very extensive in functionality.

4. Unless it is a greenfield site, it will always be less expensive to just carry on with what you have and add a few bells. The business case for UC hasn’t been proven for example, but then, is there a business case for email….who has to make that these days? And it amazes me how much kit out there has gone well beyond the 7 year cycle. The long tail indeed.

Fax is still a growing technology for us, lets not forget the proven stuff will find a market for time to come, although suppliers will probably consolidate. Do you fancy buying a telephony from someone who will be merging with one of the dominant players?

Ok, I’m stuck for ideas now, 4 reasons isn’t that great is it - what else is there?