Conversationware

Why spend time, sweat and tears writing your predictions for the coming year.

Relax in your armchair instead, with your google persistent search turned on for the first week in January, and peruse until you find some you agree with - then link to them.

My interest is in how communications can help with business, in all senses of the word and to my mind, the best on the subject is a great article by Shomik Banerjee summarising 2007 and looking at 2008 for enterprise communications. Really good job.

Of course, I have to comment, or it’s not worth linking

Shomik doesn’t say if the headlined views below are in order of importance, or likelihood;

• A) PBX is passé, ‘UC’ is the buzzterm
• B) The Focus Market for Enterprise Telephony is Shifting to SMB
• C) Enterprise Mobility is ‘Hot’
• D) Collaboration Gains Fresh Impetus
• E) SOA and Web Services Gain Traction
• F) Open Source and Open System Gain Mindshare

In terms of market impact, I would have them in roughly the reverse order.

(maybe not by the end of 2008 though)

Another good read is by Charlie Bess on the EDS fellows ‘next big thing blog’. I like the Green IT idea, and I guess this is just an acceleration of the virtualization movement, which has been manic paced in any event.

Feel free to link to others in the comments!

I’ve noticed that a number of people searching for “CallPilot Exchange 2007″ are coming to this blogsite.

Because I posted asking where Callpilot is going, about 10 months ago, I’m seemingly getting a few hits through lack of news elsewhere.

Going back to Google just now, I just searched on - “Callpilot news”

In terms of Search Results - I often figure that the more recent the information, the more relevant. (Age affects relevancy, but only in terms of search of course

The fourth entry looked somewhat relevant, but goes back to 2001 - 6 years!

So….not a lot of news then. Conspicuous by it’s absence.

Of course, if you’re searching for Exchange 2007, you should know that Callpilot never ‘unified’ with Exchange in the first place. So there should be no real effect of a later version (guessing).

Callpilot stores messages on the voicemail server and should therefore really be described as ‘Integrated’ with Outlook. It works because Email clients like Outlook can look in multiple places for messages….and that’s why Outlook Web Access won’t show you voicemail in this sort of set up.

In my book at least, that was another terminology balls up by the industry at large, but that’s not the focus here.

If you’re searching to compare Nortel UM with Microsoft UM - although there may be licencing reasons to consider change - spare a thought for the users having to retrain! 

Seriously though, the whole Callpilot issue is still very cloudy with the Micosoft Exchange 2007 UM release and no news of a Callpilot development path (that’s available to me).

Callpilot runs on Windows 2003, when the new Nortel comms servers run on Linux. Thinking on, perhaps that’s why MS see the Comms market as lucrative….it’s an OS thing.

- and moreover with the new Microsoft Office Communications Server being effectively a switch with a proprietary IP protocol meaning specific handsets, and so how is that sitting with the partners in the Innovative Communications Alliance?

I believe the original plan was for OCS to be a CSTA overlay to existing telephony, but that’s not what I’ve read now.

If its confusing for me, it must be for everyone else, especially existing customers - unless someone can steer me in the right direction?

Maybe my research skills are deserting me, or perhaps bad news isn’t any better than no news?

An excellent post, as usual, linked here from mike Gotta, on the his view of the likely progress of Microsoft OCS and the status of key components.

A balanced view which adds value to whatever else we’ve seen in the last week.

   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.

Surely the news should be that people are using Unified Communications at all.

However, Wainhouse Research release a survey around Rich Media Metrics (2007) for:

• Both large and small companies
• Companies using any element of UC, (so anything from IM to Phones then)

I sat for quite a while trying to understand something, anything, about the value of this report (without buying it). And then it struck - a marketing exercise, although I’m still a bit confused about who it could be for.

There are a great many things around this survey to poke fun at, or generally make cheap points about, but here is my attempt…

There were 160 companies in the survey. From a pool of 160 of anything, could there be meaningful global extrapolation I wonder?

I also liked this quote particularly, “One surprising statistic is the huge mindshare Microsoft has generated over all other unified communications solutions.”

I’m not sure it’s that surprising.

If you were going to buy something, might you consider buying from a company that you’d bought from before?…… I wonder how many of these customers had bought from Microsoft in the past.

If you thought you might use Unified Communications, you might consider your phone people, and your email people. So, lets be conservative and say that Microsoft had supplied email to 50% of the companies, it follows that perhaps 50% might be considering looking at Microsoft for UC. 

Which is exactly the number looking at OCS 2007 in the survey. The bleeding obvious, QED.

Prospects may probably also be considering one of the other 12 PBX suppliers they may have bought from, which is also what the survey seems to show.

And another thing, both large and small companies are included - now there’s a hole to drive your truck through. If you excluded small companies, how would the figures look, probably very Notes heavy?

I also wonder how many of the 160 companies asked could define Unified Communications?

You’ll need to pay $2.5K to find out if that’s in the survey. That’s just enough to get me to France for the next couple of weeks for that desperately needed holiday. Although it probably won’t be enough to cover the wine bill.

Microsoft has been talking about Unified Communications for a while, and I keep an eye out for the detail.

A good summation here from Mark Dea, from Microsoft, who’s post about piloting OCS I found on my persistent search (radar) for Unified Communications - isn’t search and RSS combined an extremely useful technology?

Anyhow, thanks for the detail Mark. The feature I liked the look of most was

“I have found myself answering more calls than usual,  the reason being is that when I email someone and they phone me back,  it includes the subject title along with the call.  Even if the call doesn’t have a subject,  I can easily see who is calling now as it picks them name out of my contacts like it would on my mobile phone.”

This adds to communications as it stands today, and is only the beginning of UC. Making instigation of conversations ‘topic based’ will enhance productivity no end.

For example, I can imagine that when I make contact with someone in the future, as well as being highlighted with the foremost subject, it will be accompanied by a list of all the sharepoint work areas that we inhabit in common.

I was also very impressed at the association of Microsoft Office Server 2007 with 28 Days Later, a film about a deadly virus that swept the UK and turned most people into slavering zombies….or was that just the Comms industry? 

It looks like classic subtle British humour, but I guess it could have been entirely coincidental.

The age of ‘Presence’ is on us, with the requisite promises of unlimited contact potential.

A couple of Microsoft attributed quotes lately on the subject

For example, many of the features implemented in a PBX are intended to ensure that calls are not missed and/or do not end up in voicemail: so-called “find-me, follow-me” features. Unified communications uses a fundamentally different paradigm to address the underlying customer need

And another one

Presence based communications: you only attempt to communicate with someone who is advertising their willingness and ability to communicate with you at any given moment

OK, so, I can see the point. Instant messaging is a great overlay, and will give us the very important ability to know if someone is available at their desk.

So, wouldn’t it be neat if Unified Communications could tell me if you’re on the phone? (more…)