The business environment has the same sense of efficiency.  This UC Road Show event was different because it was attended by Microsoft UC Partners, resellers of Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange, rather than by the enterprise customers.  This provided an interesting insight to the customer interests and issues that the resellers need to address in their business development programs. 

The message was interesting and to the point.  German customers require demonstrable business improvements for any investment, including UC.  Thus, it is less likely that a German enterprise will just roll out UC to all their desktops and hope for personal productivity than that they will redesign a specific process for measurable improvements.   In other words, Germany has more of what we at UCStrategies.com call UC-Business Process (UC-B) than UC-User Productivity (UC-U).  

It became clear that the definition of a process can begin with personal and team productivity.   Many firms were already moving their silos of voice, web and video conferencing service contracts into the consolidated on-premise Unified Communications solution provided by OCS.  The Partners reported that their clients are investing to make the conferencing process more seamless and inclusive of supply chain partners and customers all while saving out of pocket costs.  Another process-based theme was that customers in Germany were willing to change their mobile workers’ methods, specifically by transforming from primarily mobile voice calls to mobile presence and IM that avoided the calls altogether or that allowed “click to call” on the mobile device so that the call came from the OCS server to the mobile device, a no-charge, cost-saving call in GSM countries such as Germany.

Beyond that, the Partners described UC-B applications they were installing, where their clients were changing supply chain and logistics processes by extending communications their supply partners and their customers.  Logistics were being transformed, transaction processing was being streamlined and accelerated, and customer service was being increasingly personalized via software rules and presence awareness.

However, the Partners were still very interested in proven applications and justifications, because the proof is demanded by their buyers.   This is part of the excitement of UC today, there is a rich and growing base of case studies that document UC successes and justifications.  The presentation I use has a case study behind every example of cost and resource savings, and I’m usually aware of one, two or more others.  This fact-based approach really resonated with this audience.   I think it does with any business, which is why I encourage everyone interested in UC to dig into their supplier’s case study web sites. 

Take a look, if you haven’t yet.

But that doesn’t take anything away from the technology savviness in Italy.  The IT Teams are right on top of their game, based on the enterprises attending the Microsoft UC Road Show in Milan.  We were at the Microsoft offices in the suburbs near the Linate airport.  Many other technology firms’ office signs were also visible from the airport shuttle bus, so pretty much in the high-tech neighborhood. 

The enterprises who attended were across the spectrum.  Some were from manufacturing and distribution firms, some from financial institutions, and some were communications service providers.  All had specific, direct interest in the Office Communications Server Solution. 

For the manufacturing firms, the interest was in the improvement of their customer and supply chain communications.  The discussions revealed some very insightful thoughts about how OCS might keep the firms in closer touch with their partners and customers.  Some had the idea that the OCS software clients, which the customers or partners could download for secure access to calls, meetings, training, or collaboration sessions, would improve information flow while also lowering costs.  Others were pursuing the concept of federation with their major partners who already had OCS installed.

For the financial services firms, the interest was in internal communications for productivity and cost savings.  One interest was in the use of OCS with collaboration tools such as SharePoint to improve internal processes for projects, business planning, and various approval processes.  Another interest was on how to improve communications with branch offices both for training and for linking centralized experts with the branch offices when needed, saving both time and travel expense.

For the communications service providers, the interest was both for internal use for customer services, mobile account teams and business planning teams, and for offering as a service to their business clients.  The concept of UC as a Service is a growing trend around the globe and can be especially attractive for small and mid-market businesses who would prefer a monthly per-user fee to the fixed costs of in-house staff and capital spending for hardware and software. 

At the end of the day, it seemed pretty clear to me that we will see Unified Communications flourish in Italy, with a style and graciousness for which Italy is renowned, but with intensity and energy that assure successful results, perhaps the espresso of UC.    

And, PS, it was snowing when I left Milan, and the airport closed for a while later that day; how unusual is that?  Just one more reason that my visit to Milan will be memorable.

The financial crisis is palpable in Toronto, with businesses concerned about revenue declines and consumers and government concerned about the financial markets and mortgage availability.  So, the theme of “Cost and Resource Savings through Unified Communications” was right on target.

The companies in attendance were diverse, but all had important interests in UC opportunities.   An educational course hosting company was interested in how UC might be used to enhance both operations and curriculum delivery.   A major cement and aggregate company was looking to get another notch of productivity in their highly competitive industry (though it was interesting to learn that some of their remote cement mine sites can’t even get a phone line to the property and are way out of cell tower range - not very likely UC sites).  A financial information service firm is about to move to new quarters and was looking for the best office and communications suite for their new facility.   A multi-national, multiple product line insurance company was looking to converge the multiple e-mail and communications environments that had accumulated over the years through mergers and acquisitions.

Quite a diverse set of needs, seems to me.  Yet each company found some aspect of the Microsoft UC Suite that interested them.  Some liked the rich APIs that would enable links into their business processes.  Some could see the immediate value of bringing audio, web and video in-house on a single, economical platform as an immediate cost savings, which could then be linked into SharePoint for enhanced collaboration.  Some liked the linkages and integrations with Microsoft Exchange e-mail so that users had as seamless an experience as possible in their daily tasks.  

Also, most attendees seemed to value the extensibility of the Office Communications Server software; once they had justified the installation with one of the applications mentioned above, the expansion to other areas, such as mobility or enterprise voice communications, was essentially a process of training and perhaps some added serve capacity, but not a new software kit with new or additional or upgraded licensing. 

So, the Toronto event lived up to my expectations.   Got to meet friendly Canadian business people who are intent on advancing their businesses in very pragmatic ways.   I would expect to hear about some new OCS applications or case studies from this group in the not-distant future.

But maybe because Apple took the lead in calling their multimedia device the “iPhone,” everything that can also handle voice applications will have “phone” in its name.

Of course, voice is just a piece of the “unified communications” picture, which enables application speech interfaces as well as real-time contextual voice contacts with people. But various forms of real-time text messaging are already replacing traditional phone calls, especially by online self-service applications that need timely contact with a specific person.

So, it’s really not just about voice coming into play here, but other mobile interfaces as well!

Of course, I think my session was important as well – offering a concise roadmap for the evolution of a partner business from the model that worked pretty well in the past to the model that is needed to survive and thrive going forward.  It is the roadmap that I mention in my white paper on who in the reseller channel will survive and who won’t.  Whether a reseller is offering their customers legacy PBX’s, VoIP, collaboration, unified messaging or other “solutions”, the evolution of their business is still critical.  I knew that some of the attendees would just shake their heads when they saw the roadmap and think “thanks but no thanks”.  I don’t expect that they’ll be at the elite dealers’ conference next year.  Their business will be floundering as product sales and margins continue to decrease.  Other attendees nodded their heads in agreement or understanding as I outlined the key evolutionary steps and tactics for the overall business, sales, marketing, and operations.  I expect that these executives will be back at the conference next year doing better than ever. 

So kudos to companies like Mitel – who not only talk about their own success and roadmap for the future, but ensure that their dealers have a number of the tools that they’ll need to succeed in the ever-changing world of today and tomorrow. 

Dubai is, most certainly, a center for business, with all the supporting services.   One of the attendees pointed out that Dubai is a central location between Europe, Asia, and Africa.  A quick visit to Bing Maps will make that clear (mouse over to see country names, with U.A.E. in the middle of the map).  The companies represented at the Road Show ranged across the business spectrum, from banks and financial firms, to real estate development, to a mercantile exchange, to Emirates Airline, to the operator of a major chain of sports clubs (have to be healthy to do business), to a major regional telecommunications company.

While the audience was very focused on the cost-savings element of the program theme, they were also looking for new ideas that could create competitive advantages.  Of course, this fit well with the Microsoft messages in the event.   In fact, the conversations at the breaks and lunch were really centered on which innovations would likely yield the most return via savings or cost avoidance.

Probably the biggest single interest was in connecting more effectively with internal teams and with external partners and customers.  Almost all the companies were multi-location businesses and were not satisfied with the amount of money they were spending for inter-site communications nor with the limited functionality they could achieve with those connections. 

There was real resonance with the idea that one of the best ways to cut telecom tolls and cellular bills is “don’t call in the first place.”    Thus, presence and instant messaging were either already deployed or were high on the list of projects for a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) deployment.

Once that was done, the attendees expected their users would quickly pick up on the internal company PC-to-PC calling and desktop sharing.  Also, most of the firms already had both Exchange and SharePoint installed, so the integration of OCS for communications directly from those applications was a top benefit, as well. 

There was also strong interest in linkages with field personnel, whether at construction sites, in retail banking, in development projects, or similar mobile roles.  Most of the attendees were in the planning or pilot testing phases of applications for the Communicator Mobile (COMO) client for OCS.   With that tool, calls can be placed to the cell phone under OCS control, rather than calling from the cell phone, which significantly lowers the monthly charges. 

Some companies were focused on process improvement, which of course resonated with me, based on our definition of Unified Communications as “communications integrated to optimize business processes.”  The customers’ concepts were that definition and streamlining of processes is key to competitiveness, since that avoids costly delays, mistakes and rework.  Of course, including communications in that analysis is key, often leading to simpler or more effective modes (e.g. IM vs. voice calling).  

This is all within the setting of telecom rules that do not allow Voice over IP calls to connect to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), similar to the situation in India (see blog from Mumbai).  On the one hand this is good, since it helps focus the Microsoft-based UC projects to those that did not conflict with the PSTN rules.  On the other hand, it complicates the initiatives that involve calling into the PSTN, such as requiring integration with the customers’ TDM PBXs. 

So, I’m heading home from Dubai with the same electric sense as my first impression, wishing all these customers the best of success in their UC endeavors.

Against that backdrop, it’s no surprise that customers were out in force to find new ways to enhance business and trade.  Attendees included financial institutions, trading and distribution companies, food manufacturers, and many others. 

Most of the attendees and their firms had thought through UC and were taking action.  Most had either pilots or some level of deployment already in place, and were pleased with that progress to date.  The major themes were:

• Improving productivity: Essentially all of those I spoke with were focused on helping their people work more effectively. Having both presence indication of who is available and the ability to click-to-communicate via Instant Messaging, or voice, or desktop sharing, or even video is seen as a major step forward compared to the past where each media type was in a separate application or services. on the desktop. IM and voice got the most emphasis, but video interest was increasing for branch office communications, training, or expert services (link to an expert without the time delays or travel expense).
• Office application integration: A significant portion emphasized the value of linkage between Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) and the other applications in the Office family, especially Outlook and SharePoint. The comments indicated that each product got more valuable by virtue of linkage to the other, again due to productivity increases.
• Remote working - in branch offices, home offices, or on the road. Widespread use of the Microsoft Office Communicator client so that employees could maintain their productivity while also cutting both their telecom and travel expenses.
• Linking with clients and business partners: This application was one of the “next things” being considered by several companies. The attendees could see the value for optimizing their business processes, and were working on the policies and practices that are required for including outside people and companies in the UC operations. The sense was that the initial versions would by inviting third parties into OCS Live Meeting conferences rather than by providing those people with guest accounts on the enterprise’s OCS system or by federation (which will come later as more companies have UC systems with federation capabilities).
• Mobility: Last but not least, there is always interest in cutting the mobile phone bills. With the “caller pays” billing found in most GSM networks, OCS was being used to let the user click on their mobile to make a call, then to have the call come out to the mobile device (no fees) from the OCS server in the data center which then extends the other leg of the call to the intended party.

While there was some discussion of embedding UC into business applications such as SAP or Microsoft Dynamics CRM or customer portals, it seems that the embedding of UC into apps will be in the next set of projects, in late 2010, 2011, or beyond. 

So, Istanbul lived up to, and exceeded my expectations.  I wish all the attendees the best of success as the extend the Turkish business tradition.

One thing that came across loud and clear is that Microsoft did a heck of a job getting OCS out there for enterprise IM and presence. All of the companies I met with have OCS implemented to one degree or another, and most also have Sharepoint and Live Meeting. Several of the customers are Nortel shops, which makes me wonder if part of Microsoft’s success is based on the now-defunct ICA relationship between Nortel and Microsoft, although I tend to doubt it. Side note: Avaya stated that the ICA relationship has been terminated, although the two companies will continue to work on how they engage with each other, but Nortel (now Avaya) will no longer resell OCS. It will be interesting to see if this impacts OCS sales in any way, but it’s doubtful.

It’s clear that OCS is getting lots of traction, and vendors will have to work hard to compete with and displace Microsoft in the UC arena. A good portion of the customers I met with are Cisco shops, but none are using Cisco Unified Presence Server or Cisco Unified Presence Client – or any other presence/IM solution other than OCS. While none of the customers are using OCS for call control and don’t have any immediate plans to do so, none had gone the next step to integrate OCS with their PBX/IP PBXs. I’m glad to see more companies using IM and presence, but I wish more of them were actually integrating these capabilities with their voice capabilities to get more of the benefits that UC provides.

Some of the companies I met with clearly see the benefits of integrating OCS with their voice switches, but a variety of issues have prevented them from doing so. In some cases, the IT people are aware of the benefits of UC and acknowledge that the people in their companies could greatly benefit from it, but don’t want to deal with the integration or cost issues involved, and feel that they have enough to do without adding another layer of complexity. Others want to move to UC, but realize that in their particular environments it will be a major undertaking based on their existing technology and infrastructure.

For many customers, the will is there – they just need a good way to move to the world of UC. It needs to be simpler to implement and integrate all of the various pieces (data network, telecom environment, carrier networks, etc.). The vendors need to do a better job of working with each other to simplify integration and interoperability, and to help customers migrate. And to those vendors that would rather battle with Microsoft than accept the fact that they’ve made huge inroads into the unified communications world, I suggest you work harder to find ways to coexist in a multivendor environment, and to provide the necessary tools to your partners to help them support their customers’ mixed environments. Companies want to move to UC – let’s help make it easier for them.

With the rapid adoption of personalized mobile, multimodal, smartphones by both consumers and business users, the opportunity to exploit UC for both inbound and outbound (proactive notifications) real-time interactions between customers, enterprise action-takers, and automated business applications will be increasing significantly. What that means is that both automated self-service applications and access to live assistance can be initiated by either a business process or by a customer, and the real-time medium of communication can selectively be combinations of voice conversations, “Push-to-talk” voice message exchange, online interactions, or text messaging (IM, SMS). (Social networking might also be part of the game.)

The “Apps Store” concept of wireless service providers can be extended to enterprise portals to facilitate consumer access to various mobile customer applications, while at the enterprise end, the automated business process can monitor the status of  application metrics and proactively initiate a personalized customer contact with a choice of user interfaces based on accessibility (device, Presence status) or user preference. I see CEBP getting the most mileage out of mobile online applications and proactive “process-to-person” multimodal notifications, (authorized, of course), both coupled with “click-for assistance” (choice of IM or voice connection). Such contacts will be more “intelligent” and efficient because they will be contextually initiated, based on the information source used by the customer for contact initiation or the business application that exploits CEBP. It won’t be just their identity as a caller or the location they call from.

If we are looking at UC-B as the major justification for implementing UC, we obviously must highlight customer contacts and interactions as a key target for UC flexibility. Accordingly, as consumer adoption of personalized mobile smartphones increases, the old enterprise voice-based call center game has to change as well.

Hello proactive “IVVR” applications! (Interactive Voice/-Visual Response)

You might think that businesses in Greece could be so captured by their history that they would be slow to change.  Actually, the business people I met were justifiably proud of their heritage, but they took the lessons of history as a cause for action - as illustrated by the archeology, new methods always win out, whether suddenly or inexorably. 

Sure enough, this Microsoft UC Road Show event was well attended by a broad cross-section of business and government.  Hotel chain CIOs rubbed elbows with finance and insurance firms.  Natural resources firms interacted with manufacturing and distribution firms.  Several government agencies, including the Navy, were there, too. 

The points of emphasis and inquiry by the attendees had their unique themes, including:

• Branch office and retail outlet communications. There was interest in how to support branch offices more quickly and effectively and with less cost. Certainly, Unified Communications was seen as a solution for branch office support by making the regional or central support teams more immediately available using presence, IM and click-to-communicate. Also, use of the conferencing functions of UC for training of new branch office employees and for training of all associates on changes in products or policies was seen as a potential method for saving both travel cost and time.
• Conferencing Savings. Direct cost savings were also anticipated by bringing hosted conferencing services in-house, using Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS). Those I spoke with were thinking of this savings in combination with putting the Office Communicator client on the employees’ desktops, to make conferencing easier to use. One company mentioned that after rolling out OCS, they trained their users on setting up and managing conferences using the combination of OCS and Microsoft Outlook and the use of conferencing went up by 30% in less than a month.
• Co-existence with aging PBXs. Many of the firms owned PBXs or key systems that were approaching a replacement cycle; or in some cases the firms were using direct central office support (like 1MBs or Centrex lines in the US) and were looking to reduce those monthly tariffs. The favored approach, both for ease of implementation and for the fastest cost reductions, was to implement the OCS solution for specific groups of users or for specific locations based on those which most needed a communications capability upgrade or system refresh and to connect to the remaining PBX users via gateways. There were no complaints of limitations or barriers from those who mentioned this approach.
• Management communication effectiveness and cost savings. One firm, a multi-national natural resources and minerals firm headquartered in Greece, is using OCS for their management team and their remote mining locations. They provide the managers with mobile phones equipped with the Microsoft Communicator Mobile client so the management team can see who is available for interaction and decision making at any moment, and across continents and time zones. The remote mining locations use either PCs or the USB or network-attached phones for communications to and from the sites and also to and from the management team members. The report showed lower telecom toll costs, reductions in cell bills, and economical deployments that reduce telecom costs for the remote mining sites.

So, in summary of the Athens event, it seemed to me that the Hellas business community is applying the logical methods for which their ancestors are famous to the current problems of cost savings and resource optimization and finding that software-based UC can deliver the intended benefits. 

It was a real pleasure to visit Athens both to interact with today’s business community regarding their UC actions based on Microsoft’s UC offerings and also to observe and contemplate one of the primary cradles of our western civilization.