discussUC

Authors: Barry O' Sullivan

Authors: Lync Team

Interoperability (sometimes also shortened to just “interop”) is a topic that the Lync team pays a lot of attention to. And interop isn’t just a focus for us—it has been a huge topic in the unified communications industry as well. At the Enterprise Connect conference in March and the Lync sessions at...

It’s great to see the high interest with which partners, customers, and even competitors are anticipating the launch of Communications Server “14.” Thousands of people in our early Technology Adopter Program, or TAP, already rely on “14” to provide their phone, conferencing, messaging, and other communications, many of them since February. This number will increase dramatically when we make the release candidate (RC) software available in a few days. Of course, thousands of customers already rely on the currently shipping version of Communications Server for mission critical operations: for example, I just read a recap of a customer case study that highlight how a national police force replaced Cisco IP telephony and cellular phones for 18,000 officers with OCS 2007 R2, because it, in their words, “..helps our IT department do its job better and faster, just as it does for our police officers.” Even Cisco is “interested” in “14” – they posted a web page last week critiquing it, despite the fact that it is not even generally available yet.

Communications Server “14” is the fifth major release of our product that combines presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and voice in a single system. One system for customers to purchase, manage, and secure, instead of separate systems for presence, IM, conferencing, and voice/telephony. As a result, the investments of Microsoft and our customers in scalability, security, and high availability apply to all the ways people communicate, not just voice. Communications Server “14” customers can take advantage of redundancy within a data center to survive server failures, failover scenarios across data centers to survive data center disasters, and appliances for branch offices that provide telephony and instant messaging in the case of WAN outages. Customers like Royal Dutch Shell and Intel take advantage of our highly available and scalable technology to serve tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of users every day.

Note: If you want to learn more about our architecture for high availability, survivable branch communications, our support for QoS and call admission control, our new planning and deployment tools, and a host of other “14” innovations, you can view all of our Tech Ed presentations online. Just search for “Communications Server.” You’ll be set for a fast start with the RC bits.

Having a single system, rather than multiple systems, simplifies deployment and operations. We see it over and over again with customers. Sprint is replacing 489 PBX systems spread across the United States with a centralized Communications Server deployment, and projects annual savings of more than $9 million. Already, nearly 20,000 Sprint employees use Communicator instead of a PBX phone. Another good example is A. T. Kearney. They considered adding additional Cisco UC technology to their existing Cisco VoIP system, but chose to add Communications Server instead. In the words of Kevin Rice, Global Network Architect at A.T. Kearney, “A big advantage for us was cost avoidance. With Office Communications Server, everything comes in one package, and we could set up conferencing and VoIP without incurring additional costs.” I’ll repeat it for emphasis: A.T. Kearney found that it is more cost effective to enhance an existing Cisco VoIP system with Microsoft Communications Server than to add Cisco UC technology. And, by doing so, they have the option to replace it altogether in the future when appropriate based on amortization schedules and other factors. (Read this post from my colleague, Jamie Stark, to learn more about replacing or enhancing your existing IP PBX.)

By choosing Communications Server as the single system to provide their unified communications, customers get an even bigger benefit: higher user productivity, inside and outside the office. Realizing return on Investment (ROI) requires that people adopt and use a system, which in turn depends heavily on ease of use. Communications Server delivers ease of use through a single client that provides all modes of communication, and by making communications available in the applications people use most, including Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint. This short video illustrating the difference between configuring mobile phone integration on Communications Server and Cisco’s Unified Communications Manager shows the difference a well-designed user interface can make – features only matter if people can figure out how to use them. Of course, our customers experience the difference our great user experience makes. As Joe Hamblin, Manager of Unified Communications at Sprint, said, "…People are excited. They’re enthusiastic... They go back and share their excitement with their peers, and this type of “viral acceptance” facilitates the implementation. Right now, I have more demand than I can keep up with”.

Sprint, A.T. Kearney, Royal Dutch Shell, and many other customers share something beyond a need for a great user experience delivered a single highly available and secure communications platform: enabling remote work outside the corporate network is a business necessity. Communications Server is designed to enable all end user functions to work identically inside or outside the organization, and to work seamlessly across office, home, client, and on-the-road scenarios without requiring additional network hardware, smart-cards, or other VPN access. The A.T. Kearney case study, for example, highlights the value of Communications Server to their bread-and-butter: consultants working at client sites. All Microsoft employees around the world use Communications Server as well, and more than 75,000 no longer need or have a PBX phone.

What comes next? Twelve companies announced compatible products and services at VoiceCon in March, and I expect more than twice that many to announce beta versions of their “14” compatible products in the coming weeks. These partners provide traditional solutions include IP telephones and contact centers, and an entirely new class of applications that integrate communications deeply within business applications and processes. The choice and value that Communications Server “14” and partner companies provide to customers is simply not available to buyers of proprietary, vertically integrated solutions, and is proof that real interoperability and openness has finally arrived in the communications market. The proof is in the numbers – just look at the chart from VoiceCon showing system level pricing information provided by Microsoft and other vendors here – the list price of a Microsoft-based system capable of full unified communications is less expensive than the discounted price of IP PBX systems from Cisco, Avaya, and others.

BJ Haberkorn

Communications Server Product Management

For further info visit: http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/cs14/en/us/default.aspx

Authors: andrewk2

We just wrapped up our annual Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC), held in Washington, D.C. where thousands of partners from over 100 countries came to participate in this years meme 'Cloud Computing'.  If you haven't seen any of the coverage or watched the keynotes, I highly recommend you take some time to visit the

Rob Preston, VP and Editor in Chief of InformationWeek offers an interesting assessment of Microsoft’s cloud capability and closes by saying

Microsoft won't dominate the cloud -- no company will ... it's just too big a place -- but it will be the preeminent, most profitable player there in no time.

Bold words. Rob took time to go to Redmond and see if the claims of Microsoft being “all in” were true and he seems to have left being convinced. As regular readers will know, I’ve been working on this cloud gig for over 2 years and back in 2007 Steve Ballmer said this of “cloud” at our Financial Analyst Meeting

Now, when I talk about it I talk about it quite broadly. I'm not talking just about consumer stuff, or just about advertising. I'm literally I literally believe that every piece of software, the basic core value, and the way software gets created will change over the next three, five, ten years. So every piece of software will have a client component, a server component, and service component from the cloud, that all gets managed and orchestrated out of that cloud infrastructure.

I thought that was a pretty bold statement back then – that everything we do would have a cloud component – yet we now have a version of Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Windows Server, CRM, Office and more in the cloud. I’m genuinely impressed by the execution, in particular with Azure and with hundreds of thousands of server in our datacenters already delivering cloud services to customers like Coca Cola, Domino’s, Aviva, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Royal Mail and many more. The cloud Microsoft isn’t coming. It’s here.

Thanks Rob for looking a little deeper and shining a light on this.

My memory is a sieve. I can’t remember anything, and, no, it’s not getting worse with age. I was born with this problem. As a result, I’m a habitual note-taker in meetings. But I type pretty fast and could just about keep up with almost any conversation word-for-word.

Unfortunately, “typing word-for-word” is not the same as “listening”. So I’ve developed my own method of just typing every word of every sentence that I think will be important … resulting in something like “predictive inattention to content”. (Yes, I realize that phrase makes no sense. It’s just about as incoherent as my typed meeting notes.)

There’s my dilemma. I can’t remember much of anything, yet it’s unreasonable to type everything.

This is why I was so interested in studies Avaya Research undertook of ‘collaborative tagging’. Through this technology a recording of a meeting could become a useful reference tool. A straightforward audio recording can be pretty useless. For any discussion over two minutes, there’s no easy way to reference the information. You’d have to manually scroll through the recording to find anything.

Of course, transcription is a solution. One can record a conversation and then send it to a manual transcription service. I’ve never done this but a quick web search seems to indicate that this could cost a couple hundred dollars per hour of recording. Another option is to use software that does transcription automatically. I’m going to resist including an overview of these technologies. Suffice it to say that there’s no ideal software solution today, and Gartner Group’s 2009 Hype Cycle conservatively forecasts it will be several years before we see general purpose live transcription as part of our day-to-day business tools. Sure, Google just started transcribing speech for YouTube, so we can guess that their initiative may advance that Gartner forecast up a bit.

But live tagging a recorded conversation feels like an easy solution and instantly makes a recording referenceable. Tagging a call on my own is helpful. Instead of typing everything word for word, all I need to do is type in a reminder – a quick word or phrase. The Research folks built a little app window where we can type in a tag, and it’s time-stamped to synch up with the recording. And later - as my brain turns to mush - I can refresh it by returning to the recording.

Collaborative Tagging takes this to the next level. When I enter my tag, I instantly see it appear in a “tag cloud”. The Tag Cloud shows all of the words people have typed in a size relative to how much they were used, and it also lets you peek in and see who typed the tags.

First of all, there’s the benefit of having many diverse words labeling the recording. Not just mine, but others are added that wouldn’t have naturally occurred to me. Further, this allows the recorded conversations to be searchable. For example, if several of us on the same project record, tag, and store relevant conversations – I can easily leverage other conversations even if I didn’t sit in. Even further, the Avaya Researchers observe that conversation data provides enterprises with rich referenceable resources – analytics that could identify experts in an area or people working on similar topics. This is sort of like an audio version of twitter in that everything becomes searchable. In a blog article last year, Bruce MacVarish of Avaya envisions that we’ll all benefit from “conversations in the context of real-time flow of personal and work activities and thread them appropriately.”

Further, and more fun, the act of tagging becomes part of the collaboration. Frequently as I watched the tag cloud form, it helped me stay engaged (a side benefit for those of us that are habitual multitaskers). Also, it fosters alignment as well as new ideas. Just recently, for example, someone was talking about how to present an idea to a specific type of customer and someone entered the tag “revise forecast”. This snapped us all to attention and the meeting discussion shifted over to the business case. In attacking the new subject we realized that the product forecast may indeed have missed this customer segment. Sure, this could have come out in other ways, but the subtle overlays of a new shared texting/tagging service just served to enhance the conversation.

This is just one small example of new ways to augment a conversation. The additional data can transform a conversation into a referenceable resource, and the social aspects of tagging can also improve mutual understanding.

Just for kicks, let's try to size the video game market.

In September, Forrester reported that about 50% of adults are "gamers". Pew Reports gave roughly the same number back in December 08. So, therefore, we can assert that they're both absolutely right because they match. (Note to my Stat profs: Yes, I know that you can’t conclude they’re correct just because they match. So get out of my head.)

How much do people spend on video games? Well, NPD says that it’s about $20B in the USA. (I’ll observe that I’ve seen analysts such as Forrester reference NPD reports, so we can assume it’s a credible estimate.) (Sigh. My stat profs are complaining again.) Since we know (US Census) that there are about 113M households, this means each household spent an average of $176 last year on video gaming.

A Nielsen report says that only 24% of US households spent money on videogaming last year - that's 27M households(24% of 113M is 27M). If true, those 27M households spent an average of $740($20B/27M). That feels high. Cross-checking a another report by Forrester claims that the average spending of a video gamer, is only $113. So, either there are about 7 video gamers in each of the 24M households (7 x $113 is $791 per household), this other Forrester report of $113 spent per gamer is low, or there are more than 24% of households that spend money on games.

Yet another Nielsen report says that 83% of US teens have a video console in their home. If this is true, yet only 24% of all households spend money on videogames each year, 59% of teenagers are angry that they’re not spending money on new videogames for their consoles. Knowing the power of teenager demands, I can’t believe that as many as 59% of households suffer from video game envy. I’m guessing that the 24% estimate may be one to examine – that there are more households spending money on videogames than Nielsen suggests.

Why do I care? First of all, I just enjoy playing with statistics. (There ... that should silence those stat professors in my head.)

But, more importantly, all applications software markets are inherently cross-leveraged. A person spending money in one area makes a decision in relation to spending money in another category. Consider a decision maker in a household who feels compelled to spend $120 per year on video games. They do that in relation to the $1200/year they’re spending on communications & internet. They’ve established an inherent value. “Keeping my teen happy is worth 10% of my communications budget.” And that value perception is retained even after they walk out front door. More importantly, a person’s exposure to a user experience such as gaming impacts their usability expectations. Here’s a hypothesis: Since a huge number of people have had fun with these new powerful video game consoles, whey come into an office and start working on the computer, they’ll find the user experience less interesting. So, yeah. We care. We care a lot.

Kevin Kennedy's Keynote at the recent Interop showed a short vignette of how Avaya Research is thinking about user experiences. Click here to see our CEO's Keynote at the recent interop

Authors: Avaya Insights

For this, my inaugural post here at Avaya, I thought I'd provide a quick overview on what I do and what I hope to accomplish on Avaya Connected. As a member of the corporate communications team, my main role is help manage communications around Avaya corporate news, events and what have'ya. And yes, that includes a good...