Categories
Business business applications UC voip webrtc

How WebRTC will deliver contextual communication and AI in the contact centre

Contextual communication, AI and chatbots are on track to revolutionise the way we communicate, prompting experts to herald the dawn of a major communications revolution. What about the contact centre, and how does WebRTC underpin this shift towards improved customer engagement?

More than just chatbots

Most of us have already grown accustomed to talking more and more with machines. Consumers have been given a taste of this new era of communication with the likes of Siri and Alexa, but we’re starting to see this new technology make its mark in the business world. Some contact centres, for instance, are starting to use chatbots to deal with common queries and complaints based on database suggestions.  We’ve also witnessed a number of councils using a form of AI as a virtual agent to deal with front line requests. As the number of interactions increases, we can expect to see robots like this learning rapidly and becoming more sophisticated.

However, the impact of AI and machine learning is greater than just for improving chatbots. If we look at the bigger story we can see there is another innovation gaining a foothold in the industry: contextual communication. Made possible by open web technologies like WebRTC, it enables context to be added to every communication to make customer interactions more efficient, personalised and engaged. These contextual communications applications mesh together pertinent information in real-time from CRMs and other databases. The end result is the ability to deal with customer enquiries via web video, chat box or through a mobile app.

The value of context

This is where AI can make a dramatic impact. Determining the right information and communication “context” to serve, informed by a wealth of data, leads to better decision making throughout sales or customer service processes. This ultimately leads to a greater customer experience and applies equally to customer-facing chatbots as it does to virtual assistants. Imagine a VA that could recommend the next course of action for a customer service agent or salesperson to take. Then, move it a stage further and consider that cognitive interactions will understand accents, sentiment and context. This will enable even greater personalisation and decision-making capabilities – a far cry from today’s annoying automated services.

This is how the future of enterprise communications is shaping up –  making communication “transparent”, so it’s integral and inherent in applications, and augmenting it with context. What does it mean for ITSPs? We can start with differentiated propositions offering huge productivity and efficiency gains – and a more natural communications experience for customers.

Join us next week to learn more

We’ll be discussing these impacts and more at the ITSPA WebRTC Workshop next Thursday 28th September, Central London. Both Tref and I will be keen to hear your views on contextual communication and how it can drive new revenue opportunities for ITSPs in the coming years. If you are in London and want to come along, register here – it’s free – using the member’s registration.

Other WebRTC content on this blog.

Categories
UC voip

UC Disappearing Like VoIP

Trefor.net welcomes VoIP Week guest contributor Mehdi Nezarati, President of EMEA, Esna Technologies Inc.

Communications, Then and Now

Old Cell PhoneIt was not that long ago that phone companies — and their charges for long distance calls — could not be avoided. We don’t often think about it now, but calling overseas used to be expensive and somewhat complicated.  It would require a certain calling plan and a special way of dialing the traditional telephone. Then along came the ability to make calls over the Internet, and now we don’t think twice about having long conversations with friends traveling abroad or scheduling conference calls with business associates in other countries. Apps such as Skype, Google Voice and Tango have made VoIP part of how we live and work, and whether the call we are on is connected via VoIP or not is no longer relevant. And the fact that we know hav the ability to use these apps on any device — a phone, tablet, or computer — means we can talk to anyone, anywhere, at any time.  Thank you, VoIP, for this seamless and standard method of communication now at our fingertips.

The same thing is happening in the field of Unified Communications (UC).  What is Unified Communications, you ask? Like many people asked about VoIP in the early 2000’s. I’ll save time and let Wiki answer that. What’s important to know is that UC saves time, improves communication and collaboration, and is becoming seamless in our lives. What was once possible only by large organizations deploying a suite of tools is now quickly becoming a part of our everyday lives. Consider these likely unnoticed aspects of UC we use every day:

  • Visual voicemail functionality built into our smartphones
  • Speech recognition capability that allows us to dictate emails and texts for communications on the goScreen Shot 2014-05-01 at 9.49.49 PM
  • Cameras as standard issue equipment on our smartphones, tablets and computers that facilitate face-to-face communications

Screen Shot 2014-05-01 at 9.50.00 PM

As VoIP replaced traditional telephony, nowadays UC is beginning to disappear into our devices and workflows, making communication faster and easier and thus improving our lives. Video calling is a natural means for communicating with one another, and talking to our phones to complete tasks is all now part of a day’s work. At UC’s maturity, where VoIP is now, we can expect to experience more benefits in the devices and cloud apps we use in everyday workflows, as both are becoming the standards for the way we work and get things done.


Tref:  As a business, trefor.net does not have a landline. We primarily use Google Hangouts, and occasionally (rarely) Skype. Of course, we also communicate via mobile, though often the mobile handset is the medium for Hanging out on Google. Not to say that this would work for every business, though, as there is a massive sunk cost in Telephony equipment out there, not to mention the investment in marketing collateral that includes inbound numbers. Businesses, however, are gradually adopting Google Apps, in great part due to the powerful collaboration capabilities it makes available. For example, looking again at our own situation, last week I met with a journalism graduate who plans to put together material on the use of tech by students. I started things by creating a Google Doc in which we could jointly work, which I then shared via her Hotmail address.

Google builds safety nets into the system in the form of policies that keep staff from using Google Docs as a means for leaking company data. The point, though, is that the Google App setup is already a Unified Communication environment in every sense of the term. It is a short step from where we are now to businesses integrating Google’s functionality with their own PBX and with their existing inbound telephone numbers.

Elsewhere, the Davies family communicates mostly through Google Hangouts and Facebook, with the occasional moment of dad calling back an offspring on their mobile when they don’t want to use up their valuable credit. The Kids are mostly always on Facebook, too, where IM often initiates a move to a video Google Hangout. We have even extended this to the setting up of whole family “video conferences” (although the term  is rapidly being replaced with video Hangout) with five participating laptops, three of which are in different rooms in the house, with mum flipping between these rooms. I suspect the quality of the group Hangout is driven by the uplink bandwidth available to one of the remote family members, but it is no doubt the way ahead.


IMG credits: voicemail – http://www.intomobile.com/2011/02/13/youmail-visual-voicemail-ios/ dictation – http://singularityhub.com/2009/12/14/dragon-dictation-voice-recognition-comes-to-the-iphone-for-free-video/ video – http://www.cultofmac.com/276995/snapchat-adds-instant-messaging-video-calls/

VoIP Week Posts:

Categories
datacentre End User

#rebelwithoutacause and other lyrical waxings

There’s a definite change in the air. The short British summer is coming to a close, people are squeezing in their last bits of holiday before school starts again and my kids are getting ready to set off for university, in one case, for the first time (yes I am excited).

It feels as if this is the last week before the rush. Traffic will get heavier and business get serious again. It’s not that it isn’t serious in August but not much gets done as half the world is out of the office – staff, suppliers and customers.

Next week all the shops will have their Christmas decorations out! There’s a lot going on in the world before you need to

Categories
Business UC voip

ITSPA talk at UC Expo, SMB – the forgotten majority of the Unified Communications market?

I’ve just been preparing a talk I’m giving on behalf of the Internet Telephony Service Providers’ Association (ITSPA) at UC Expo in London on Tuesday. When I was asked to do this talk a few months ago I proposed the title “SMB – the forgotten majority of UC?”

The title held an element of provocation intended to attract punters to hear me speak. However when I dug in to the market numbers on the face of it this is very much the case. SMB represents roughly 15.% of the total market for Unified Communications equipment. This is despite the fact that his sector represents over 50% of the PBX market and, according to the EU, 99% of all businesses in Europe.

I guess this is down to two factors. Firstly most UC vendors provide the functionality as part of a bolt on to big PBX systems, presumably as part of their added value sell. A small business might not necessarily have the expertise or be able to afford to implement UC. A vendor may also not be able to afford the cost of selling these systems in to SMBs.

Secondly when I looked into some old market research into the use of individual components of UC, (Instant Messaging, presence, Unifed Messaging, collaboration , conferencing etc) the benefits of these functions when used by a business were expressed in time savings and moreover the bigger the business the greater the compound benefit.

So by and large UC remains the domain of big business.

There is no real reason why this should be the case. Many of the features mentioned above are openly available as low or zero cost somewhere on the internet. Some even have an element of integration, which is how UC is sold to bigger companies. Skype for example has integrated voice, video, IM and an element of conferencing. There are very few service providers that provide a true UC experience on a hosted basis (Timico is one).  An experience that matches the functionality  of expensive systems bought by large enterprises.

In fact ITSPA dropped the UC category from its Awards because Timico was the only service provider entering in that category (bit of a shame 🙂 ). Timico today does a lot of business with companies with between 250 and 500 staff but when we started selling VoIP we were firmly in the game of selling mainly to small business. As small business owners become more internet savvy I think their responsiveness towards the use of technologies such as Instant Messaging is changing. This has been recognised by the likes of Cisco who have been introducing new products into this space, albeit at the upper end of the spectrum.

Because UC market share statistics are gathered largely from traditional voice equipment vendors I doubt that the true level of penetration of UC features into the SMB market is known. The fact is that due to the cost of selling to SMBs UC services for this market will have to be cloud based and not based on a piece of kit in the corner of the office. I would expect that over the next few years, as SMBs grow comfortable with outsourcing services into the cloud, we should see a change in the penetration of UC into this market which will redress the balance of market segmentation to be more along the lines of the PBX market. This has to be a large opportunity.

Categories
Business UC video voip

Unified Communications and how it made my day

I’ve just had one of those life enriching experiences. I’m currently looking at back-up and storage options to enhance our own SAAS capabilities. i365, “a Seagate company”, looked as if it would fit the bill so I called them.

As I was calling I realised it was one of the numbers provided by Timico on our VoIP platform and indeed when the Michelle receptionist answered the phone her name appeared on my screen. She transferred me to Sean O’Reilly and his name also came up.

The video then kicked in and we had a video call. Sean was using our own PC Client software and we began exchanging Instant Messages.  Sean is an intensive user of the PC Client because it allows him to keep his hands free to type. His praise of the service was fullsome and it made my day.

This really is the way forward. It was a totally adhoc video call with someone I didn’t know, had never spoken to before but that will be the norm in times to come.

Categories
Business internet UC

The forecast for Unified Communications is cloudy

Oracle has been in the news recently with the acquisition of Sun. One of the prizes that comes with this purchase is Open Office. This probably would have fitted in very well with Oracle’s Network Computer play of ten or more years ago – I remember visiting Oracle at the time to try and design in some networking components.

Lack of cheap high speed connectivity is what brought Oracle’s efforts to a halt in the 1990s. Today the environment is completely different. Today, however, I don’t see Oracle playing in the space. Instead the spotlight is on Google and what can be seen under the bright lights, understandably, bears no resemblance to what was there in Oracle’s day.

All the components are there: cheap connectivity which is getting faster and cheaper all the time, a massive cloud computing infrastructure that would have been unimaginable ten years ago and a whole bundle of applications that are easy to use and can be accessed from multiple platforms.

Google is poised to be a massive player in the Unified Communications market, at least in the consumer space and downstream probably for small business as well.

There are already many reasons why people use Google’s online facilities. Google mail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google Docs and Google Talk and of course Google the search engine.

When I log onto my iGoogle home page I can already access many features that would traditionally have been the domain of a business based Unified Communications service. From my Google Mail account I can send Instant Messages and have video conversations. I realise there are other services available where this can be done but none have the same potential for integration with other cloud based applications (Microsoft will probably disagree with me here).

Now add mobility. Despite being a clunky initial design, sales of the G1 phone have just hit the 1 million units mark and are forecast by British based analyst Informa Telecoms and Media to overtake the iPhone by 2012. And it is still early days for Android, the open sourced mobile operating system used by Google.

HTC has announced a new Android based smartphone that will support Google Mail, Google Talk, GoogleMaps, and synchronises with Google calendar and contact list. Word also has it that Samsung is also looking to introduce three models later this year. The initial clunkiness will soon be long forgotten.

All this points to more and more users using Google Unified Communications services. This doesn’t mean to say I am tolling the death knell of other UC services. I am not. Business has needs that go beyond what Google offers as a basic service.

Better office tools aka Microsoft Office, integration with other business services such as Customer Relationship Management tools operation behind secure company firewalls etc etc. These services are however becoming increasingly virtualized and hosted in the cloud, just like Google does and like Oracle wanted to do way back when I fitted into a smaller waist trousers.

As far as Unified Communications goes I can see clearly now and the future is in the cloud.

Categories
Business internet

Unified Communications Web2.0 Style

Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco.

UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer world UC  is racing ahead of what is typically available to business. Lets look at my son’s radio programme as an example.

Tom, as regular readers of this blog will know, has his own weekend breakfast show on Siren FM, a local community radio station  in my home town of Lincoln (England).  He has a website and a Facebook home page.  The Wake Up To The Weekend homepage has 318 fans as I write and each show gets around 100  listener contacts/interactions.

Tom’s listeners are by and large teenagers in the Lincoln area. They listen to his show on their laptops whilst lying in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings. When they want to conatct the show to request a song or enter a competition they send an IM via Facebook, or leave a message on the show’s wall.

Listeners also communicate via SMS and email. I doubt that many make phone calls but if Facebook had an embedded voip client then this would overcome a teenager’s cost objections to talking. The radio presenter could then escalate an IM request to a voice call – to talk to the winner of a competition for example. The show can also post photos, videos and recordings of bands they have had in the studio on the Facebook page.

So where is this leading to?  For radio show read business.  Companies are more and more going to have to move into this space.  Corporate websites are going  to change to reflect Facebook and Twitter-type functionality and begin to interact with their customers in real time in new ways.

Integration of a corporate communications strategy with Twitter has already been shown to be highly effective. Initially the domain of large corporates, smaller companies should easily embrace it.  Customer care and marketing teams will sit “on the internet”.  I anticipate doing this at Timico sooner rather than later.

As a footnote Tom’s biggest fan, me aside, is a person in Lincoln named Les. Les enters every one of Tom’s competitions and has frequent interactions with the show. Looking at his picture on the Facebook site it can be seen that Les is in fact probably in his sixties.  This then is not just the domain of the teenager!

PS if anyone is at UC 09 and wants to meet up drop me a line.

Categories
Apps Business mobile connectivity security UC voip

The Channel Wars – Which Channel Will Win The Convergence Battle?

No I’m not talking TV channels here. I’m talking channels to market for converged services. And I’m not talking about which company within a channel will win. I’m talking about which channel will win.

Out there in the big wide world there are three basic types of channel that sell communications services:

  • mobile resellers,
  • PBX resellers and
  • IT resellers

Traditionally none of these channels have stepped on each other’s toes. Ok I know there are probably companies out there that might claim to cover more than one of the spaces but seldom all three.

Certainly mobile dealers find it hard to sell non mobile services. Although PBX resellers have had to get to grips with some aspects of networking in order to be able to sell VoIP enabled products they are far from being involved in the whole gamut of IT related products and services. 

Finally in my experience an IT reseller usually doesn’t have the knowledge to be able to sell voice, be it fixed or mobile. It’s not their space.

The UK is moving at high speed towards being a totally internet connected country. If anything it is speeding up (witness yesterday’s Digital Britain announcement and last year’s roll out of 21CN) and the communications requirements of businesses are going to get evermore complex and ever more converged. 

Convergence and Unified Communications are somewhat trendy buzzwords which have different meanings to different people. The fact is however that businesses will increasingly want to buy services that work with their other services:

  • VoIP that works over a variety of both fixed and mobile networks
  • Integration of the office phone system with the applications sat on a desktop and with mobile devices
  • Seamless portability of applications and backups of key corporate data 
  • All this without compromising on network security

Currently I believe it is only high end corporates that can really indulge in a communications roadmap that embodies the true vision of Unified Communications. However I do think that a new breed of business is appearing that smaller companies and channel partners can turn to for access to the wider range of skills and technologies needed to service this new connected market.

This type of business, call it a super-convergence provider, will be able to partner with any reseller from any channel and offer them a range of products and services that is complementary to what they already do. So  mobile, voice and IT resellers can carry on with their core business without having to worry about not having all the arrows in the quiver.

So what is the answer to my original question? Which channel will win? I guess my view is that the winner will be the channel that works best with the new breed of super-convergence service providers, one of which is clearly Timico.

I’d be interested to hear from people who have views on this subject, either by commenting on this blog, on facebook or by contacting me directly.

Categories
Business UC voip

Nortel SCS500 – Unified Communications for small and medium sized businesses

Nortel has launched the SCS500. This communications system effectively provides companies with a cross between the features offered by Timico on their Nortel AS5200 hosted VoIP platform and the Nortel BCM phone system.

Timico has found that many companies want to use Instant Messaging in their business but beyond insecure consumer products such as MSN and Skype don’t know how to do it.

Timico’s VoIP for Business service provides IM and is great for businesses where there are lots of distributed locations or many homeworkers. Our real world experience shows that as companies get bigger their needs change and we then sell them a Nortel BCM.

The SCS500 adds neatly to the portfolio with IM and other Unified Communications features. We can now cover pretty much every need of every sized company in our customer base and target market.

All credit to Nortel they have been making great strides to the extent that the Financial Times newspaper recently rated their stock as a “buy”. Their leading position in the Unified Communications market is a reflection of this.

screenshot of SCS500 soft clientThis a picture I pinched from the Nortel website. It shows the SCS500 soft client. I don’t know who Chris Leary is but a larger image would shou you that he needs a shave 🙂 .

Categories
Business UC video voip

Tesco’s new VoIP telecommunications infrastructure

Tesco has just announced a new investment worth £100m over 5 years in a new next gen telecommunications platform connecting 1,800 sites over 14 countries. What the announcement doesn’t say is that it is based on Nortel technology. Specifically the multimedia collaboration features are based on the Nortel AS5200 platform. This is the same platform used by Timico for its multimedia Unified Communications based VoIP services. Tesco is using video conferencing and Instant Messaging as well as file collaboration and VoIP.

The Tesco network is big enough to justify it’s own platform. However Timico provides partitions on its Nortel platform so that smaller organisations than Tesco can benefit from the same feature set (without having to spend £100m).

This is a big milestone for the Nortel platform and an endorsement of Timico’s VoIP strategy.

Categories
Business UC video voip

Tesco's new VoIP telecommunications infrastructure

Tesco has just announced a new investment worth £100m over 5 years in a new next gen telecommunications platform connecting 1,800 sites over 14 countries. What the announcement doesn’t say is that it is based on Nortel technology. Specifically the multimedia collaboration features are based on the Nortel AS5200 platform. This is the same platform used by Timico for its multimedia Unified Communications based VoIP services. Tesco is using video conferencing and Instant Messaging as well as file collaboration and VoIP.

The Tesco network is big enough to justify it’s own platform. However Timico provides partitions on its Nortel platform so that smaller organisations than Tesco can benefit from the same feature set (without having to spend £100m).

This is a big milestone for the Nortel platform and an endorsement of Timico’s VoIP strategy.

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
Apps Business UC voip

Ribbit & BT – Unified Communications

BT has bought a company called Ribbit based in Silicon Valley, California. Why is this interesting or significant to the UK business community? Maybe it isn’t.

However there is a chance that in the UK we will see the effects of this acquisition in the next year or two. Ribbit provides the hooks to make voice calls from different applications. In itself this isn’t anything special – Timico could do the same thing using it’s Nortel 5200 platform given the time and inclination.

Ribbit has tried to make it easy for 3rd party developers to do so and as a company whose sole reason for existence seems to have been to do this then one must assume that they would be doing a good job of it.

I think my one observation relates to what BT expects to do with the platform. It seems to me that Ribbit is set up as an applicaton for a wide community. I suspect BT might just use it to develop their own embedded voice applications. This to me would be a lost opportunity. Here BT has the chance to position itself at the centre of a Web2.0/VoIP2.0 world in the UK but it needs to keep Ribbit open to all to do so.

In the world of voice, at least in business voice and Unified Communications, it is also important to keep the activity and platform UK centred when selling to UK parties. This is why I believe that a Webex service with a voice platform based in the USA will never have a huge market reach in the UK. The same applies for the apparent efforts of Microsoft with hosted OCS.

Timico is based in the UK, offers UK services and telephone numbers, and I believe will be going head to head with Microsoft and Cisco in this space. Of course in other areas we will be partnering them. Interesting times…

Categories
Business mobile connectivity UC video voip

Nortel carrier strategy

Had a really good meeting with the Nortel Carrier team on Wednesday – I’ve not really had a chance to write it up and post before now. The meeting was held to discuss their SIP/multimedia product roadmap. The Nortel Enterprise Division has been making a lot of noise in the multimedia/Unified Comms space (SCS500 – I’ll write a piece on it soon) but I had been afraid that the Carrier side had sold its soul to Microsoft.

This turns out not to be the case. The Nortel AS5200 platform, which is the SIP platform used by Timico, has been adopted by a number of major Tier 1 operators and is benefiting from what seems to be a large amount of attention and investment. This to me is a very sensible thing for Nortel to do as the 5200 represents a leading edge platform for them – one which is streets ahead of any competition in the hosted VoIP/Unified Comms space.

Timico has been selling services on the back of the 5200 for 2 – 3 years. We are talking hosted VoIP, video, IM, presence, collaboration – perfect for small offices and homeworkers. The Nortel developments look to be adding more PBX type features that fill in some holes in the 5200’s repertoire. Whats more it seems to me that this switch is moving in the direction of becoming Nortel’s main carrier play. After all the CS2k, which gives Nortel its huge lead in the market, is a platform designed to emulate legacy services but in a much cheaper way than its DMS 100 TDM swich.

What’s more, new features such as federated presence, FMC, links to external directories and better support for SIP Trunks will keep Nortel at the forefront of the business communications space and allow tight integration with its Enterprise products – something that we haven’t seen before.

This is reinforced by the movement of Enterprise staff to the Carrier to aid the process.

Lastly but by no means least Nortel is moving the 5200 to Linux which will have a huge impact on the cost of rolling out and supporting 5200 based services and which I whole heartedly welcome.

I look forward to growing our Nortel relationship.

 

Categories
Business UC voip

Text to speech

Check this out. Pretty clever stuff. It shows you how text to speech technology has progressed and would fit in nicely in a vendor’s Unified Communications solution.

http://www.oddcast.com/home/demos/tts/tts_example.php?sitepal

Categories
Business UC voip

Control

 

It is important to be in control of your lives. Technology can help. For example with my Unified Communications service I can dictate who can reach me and when they can reach me.

 

I can specify for example that during family mealtimes the phone always goes to voicemail. Moreover this voicemail message can be caller dependant. ie the message you leave for your wife can be different to the one heard by work colleagues.

 

The greeting could even inform the caller that you are having a meal and give them the option of leaving a message or pressing a button to continue with the call. Clearly, armed with the information that you are eating, the caller can in this case decide whether his call is important enough to disturb you.

 

I’m sure that there will also be times when you absolutely would not want to be disturbed and this too is an option on the same system. You are in control.

 

Sometimes though it is better to exercise the ultimate control and that is done by pressing the “off” button.

 

This is what I did yesterday when I took the kids to the Lincolnshire Show. This is the annual agricultural festival that is the highpoint of the social calendar in Lincolnshire. If you have never been you should try it.

 

The Lincolnshire Showground is blessed with a natural off button. In other words there is no mobile phone coverage worth shaking a stick (or a handset) at.

 

No calls. No emails. All this happened on the day following the night of a major network capacity upgrade. It might have been a nervous time. Engineers don’t like change because it introduces risk. The Network Operations team were in control. The upgrade was perfectly planned and perfectly executed.

 

Not that the Lincolnshire Show was devoid of technology. The picture below shows one of the earlier innovations to hit the county.

 tref with traction

This second picture is nothing to do with technology.

It’s about good beer. As long as you stay in control …

Categories
Business video voip

Will petrol price itself out of the market?

I had my first £80 tank of petrol today. It seems to me that now is the time to start investing in public transport stocks.

I also has to be time to look at ways that a business can cut down on its travel spending and Unified Communications and online collaboration is the way forward. We recently had an architect approach us for a video conferencing solution so that his business could conduct video conferences with their London office. Historically they took the train and spent the day in the office. Travel time was 2 1/2 hours each way for the two Lincoln based partners. That’s ten man hours (at whatever the going rate is for an architect) plus over two hundred pounds for the trainfare.

The video conferencing solution used was Timico VoIP for Business which cost them £10 a month per site plus a few hundred pounds for high spec telephone handsets. The broadband connectivity was already in place at each end. The service will have paid for itself on it’s first day of use. That’s a serious rate of return. 

Categories
Business UC voip

Cisco SMB day, generation Y and Unified Communications

Very interesting time at the Cisco SMB day held at the Mercedes Motor Museum in Brooklands.

Bernadette Wightman, SMB Operations Director said Cisco are expecting SMBs to be worth $1Bn to them in 2009 and today’s channel event is their first big push towards getting there. The gradual migration of the Linksys brand to Cisco is also an indicator. Cisco have traditionally been too expensive a solution for the SME market and it will be interesting to see how this changes.

Unified Communications and Web2.0 was a big part of their messaging with a big focus on the change in demographics about to hit business.

The biggest users of Web2.0 are those consumers of social networking sites belonging to generation Y. In other words those born after 1980. Currently the decision makers belong to generation X, those fortunate enough to have been born on or after 1964. As someone who came into this world in 1961 I must therefore fall into “generation W” which is somewhat disconcerting.

The point it that the biggest users of Web2.0 will within 4 years represent 20 million of the workforce in the UK. As the SMB sector (under 250 employees) represents 62% of the UK workforce Web2.0 technology will have to be to be an important part of the product offering of vendors in the communications space.

The second keynote was by Anthony Hilton, Financial journalist and former Managing Director of the London Evening Standard. He suggested that whilst some market sectors such as banking and house building were being hit hard during the current financial uncertainties, other parts of the financial services sectors such as insurance and savings were doing well as consumers stopped borrowing and started saving their money.

I asked him how he saw the technology markets being affected compared with the last post 9/11 and dot com bubble bursting recession. He expects that the current financial crisis will drive business towards adopting Unified Communications products that will save them money and improve productivity. However the likelihood is that these products will be based on fairly mature technology that has been around and in use for the last five years.

Much of what is being discussed as being targeted for business is still some way off being a production item. This is despite the fact that Web2.0 in theory allows for rapid introduction of new features and products. Witness the statement that 5,000 Facebook applications were built by 90,000 developers in 7 weeks.

On display was a mockup of Webex Connect, the next gen Web2.0 offering from the hosted provider. Webex’ biggest take up has been in the SMB space but what we saw, which was a convergence of much of what is Web2.0 was not slated for production until 2010. Look out for “dusting” which is where content on the screen of your mobile device is waved or “brushed” onto your desktop when you arrive at the office.

I can’t help but think that one day these elongated product development cycles will be a thing of the past. In fact I can see the day where companies are unable to come up with product roadmaps beyond 6 months because the pace of development will be so fast that no-one will be able so see further out than that.

That being said Cisco is making all the right noise in this space and is clearly putting its money where its mouth is. One of its biggest challenges will be to recruit a channel that faces SMB customers where traditionally its big partners have gone after big Enterprise money. This fact will potentially easy open the door for new entrants into the Cisco reseller space as there is less likely to be competition from the incumbents.