Conversationware

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)

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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.

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. 

One of the big benefits to installing a VOIP telephone system is that you can build in resilience. The ability to provide service in case of failure or disaster is behind most decisions.

However, might you want to transmit a fax between sites?

Or, to put it a different way, might you may want to transmit an analogue modem signal, either 9.kbps - 14.4kbps, or 33.6kbps ,over an 8.0kbps channel?

Uh oh.

You ought to know compression and encryption are just no good when it comes to an analogue modem signal, and inbound fax across the IP network just doesn’t work consistently in any manner.

SO, what to do?

Well, what normally happens at this point is that ‘fax’ is handled locally per site. With logic, and funds, dictating the use of a ‘fax server’ instead of manual and paper based faxing, this can often ‘logically’ lead to the installation of multiple fax servers, with incumbent multiple bits of tin, multiple software licences, mutliple fax interconnect kit with distributed user databases and pockets of important documents on each of your sites.

Immediately going back to the reason for implementing VOIP - you care a great deal about resilience and redundancy - this now becomes an issue for your very important documents (PO’s, orders, contracts etc) which reside on multiple servers.

Do you fancy supplying redundancy for 6 fax servers across all of yours sites - isn’t that 12 servers alltogether? Not forgetting that six fax servers are utilising client software that is looking at 6 different server IP addresses. Good grief.

Let’s separate this out. Outbound fax is simple to deploy, because you can generate documents to be sent out from a central location. The modem signal only comes after the documents arrive at the fax server.

So, inbound fax is the only real question here.

A lot of VOIP gateways are now available that support the local termination of an inbound fax, ie. pretend to be the fax machine.

They will do one of two things

1. - SMTP into email accounts.

Easy, but if you want to ever find documents again in the future, then this is not ideal

2. - transmit the document to a central fax server resource using T.38 protocol

Why T.38? This is to preserve the real time nature of faxing, so to eliminate the analogue signal, but still provide all of the acknowledgements that sending fax machines expect.

This is far better than any store and forward approach.

T.38 Gateways can be the VOIP manufacturer’s, or you can deploy separate gateways if you care to.

The bottom line is that with one server you can now take advantage of all that SAN hardware you swore would come in useful one day. Install your single faxing database on that and you have resilient nirvana.

First, frame the problem.

Whatever your definition of Unified Communications, (this link is my own ‘What is unified Communications’ approach), there is an inescapable conclusion that in order to make software based communications work good, you have to find, and then telephone enable (all) your contacts.

Only one problem, and that is, the possible inbound and outbound contact details you might need are literally all over the shop.

• Customer Relationship Management systems
• Accounts software
• Outlook or Notes personal address book
• Global address book
• Your mobile phone
• Paperwork
• Web
• A colleagues’ version of the above

Of course, these contacts increase exponentially with the number of social software platforms that you’re using such as linkedin and facebook.

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I have often teased telephony types and asked them ‘what’s the point of VOIP, or IP Telephony systems? Well, I found a plausible answer.

My semi serious point was originally because companies spend money on infrastructure and skills to change to IPT, and to me, it wasn’t immediately evident what the benefits are, and, well frankly, how do you measure ROI?

Well, I found a reasonable answer regarding old telephone system replacement which I thought I’d share. Bear with me….what I’m getting at here, is that completely open Third Party CTI interfaces cost different amounts on different switches, and it is extremely important for Unified Communications (Unified Messaging is fine either way)

If you buy the wrong telephony platform, you may not not realise that the CTI interface costs a fortune (£40K), and that no clever developers are likely going to bother trying to sell to customers with that overhead (when they can sell to customers who don’t have those costs instead)

NB: FOR THOSE THINKING SIP - ITS NOT A THIRD PARTY CTI, SO YOU’RE NOT COVERED

The wrong switch then, will likely restrict you to telephone system manufacturer’s software, or possibly their selected partners’, which often won’t integrate to the things you want it to. 

Worse, when you try and justify UC in particular, the ROI is still in early stages, and adding a wodge of cash to the bill just ain’t going to help you deploy very useful tools for your information workers.

As I understand it, IPT companies Mitel and Cisco are delivering the the right subset of CTI connectivity out of the box. UC developers and customers are not far behind. My Mitel partner friends knew that I wasn’t anti, and now I proved it

Now I don’t know if Mitel have proof that Shoretel ’stole’ their ideas, but from the comment in this post, it would seem that the recent patent claims are so broad as to be laughable. I await the details with interest.
More than that, to file a complaint such as this on the morning of the Shoretel IPO, no less, even if it turned out the infringements were justified, is going to inflict maximum cost and negative publicity. In the wrong light, it could be viewed as a form sabotage, and it has to make you wonder just how desperate Mitel are starting to look, in an industry in turmoil (once more)
The patent system itself would seem to have just managed to achieve precisely the opposite of what it was designed to do. The little guy was supposed to be protected, and instead you can see innovators becoming dead meat. Incidentally, some people don’t deserve to own an idea - particularly those who are terrible at executing them.
Because of the timing, I’m sure Mitel have shot themselves in the foot. I for one am not sure their motives will escape the inevitable scrutiny.