For once, an article that is 'right on the money'...

As a sometime journalist myself, I read a lot of articles on IP telephony and unified communications. Often they are less than informative, mainly because a lot of people just repeat what they have read in other articles. This isn't wrong as such, as not everyone reads all the online magazines and blogs, so there is a demand for 'multiple messaging media' - i.e. regurgitation.

But it makes a nice change to see a well written and truly informative article on one of my favourite subjects: IP telephony, hence my outrageous and blatant reproduction of this article which was just published on the IP Business site:

http://www.ipbusinessmag.com/articles.php?issue_id=49&article_id=292

"Half of SMEs Want Managed IP Communications

A new survey of small and medium-sized business executives by The Yankee Group suggests there is increasing interest in managed IP telephony services.

Apparently buyers recognize that an IP phone system isn’t as easy to manage as a legacy phone system. About 47 percent of very small businesses, 53 percent of small businesses and 52 percent of medium businesses will outsource some or all of their IP telephony management, the survey suggests.

Also, 44 percent of very small businesses, 54 percent of small businesses and 56 percent of medium businesses are willing to consider a mix of on-premises and hosted solutions.

Fully 72 percent of very small businesses, 69 percent of small businesses, and 77 percent of medium businesses feel that they are only minimally or somewhat capable of supporting IP telephony within their organizations.

And though the survey confirms the continuing importance of price motivators for choosing hosted solutions over premises solutions, the survey also suggests that SMEs that outsource don’t do so for purely cost reasons.Lack of internal support staff and disaster recovery preparedness are issues that contribute meaningfully to the choice of a hosted solution.
















In fact, the survey indicates that only 21 percent to 25 percent of SMEs feel fully capable of supporting IP telephony. As a result, most SMEs who buy IP phone systems appear open to management services, either fully or in part.

Security and end-user training appear high on the list of needs. About 42 percent of very small businesses, 43 percent of small businesses, and 41 percent of medium businesses responded that security skills were one of their most lacking skills in order to deploy IP telephony.

Significantly, telecommunications companies still are viewed as an important channel for IP telephony, particularly for very small businesses. About 64 percent of medium businesses and 58 percent of small businesses indicate that it is somewhat or very important to buy data and voice solutions from the same vendor.

That tends to explain why suppliers such as Cbeyond have had such success in the small business market, while providers such as M5 Networks have been getting traction in the medium business segment. More than half (51 percent) of very small businesses worked with or plan to work with their telecommunications provider for the deployment of their IP telephony systems, the survey shows.

The survey also suggests that voice-over-broadband applications and services such as Skype are getting traction as well. Web and audio conferencing are seen as highly valuable applications, followed by unified messaging and soft phones for very small businesses.

At least so far, advanced applications still have limited rollouts and are not available to the majority of users, says Gary Chen, Yankee Group senior analyst. Somewhat oddly, very small and small business users actually have better access than medium business users to IP telephony applications, the study suggests.

The survey also suggests buyers have bought the productivity message promised by unified messaging. Fully 70 percent of very small businesses, 80 percent of small businesses and 86 percent of medium businesses think that IP telephony will make it easier to deliver services to telecommuters and road warriors.

And 40 percent of very small businesses, 38 percent of small businesses and 35 percent of medium businesses believe that unified messaging will provide the biggest productivity improvement.

One aspect of user behavior seems not to have changed, though. Most end users are not taking advantage of all the features of their IP telephony system, as SME respondents say end-user training still hasn’t motivated people to exploit all the new features. About five percent of very small businesses, 46 percent of small businesses and 46 percent of medium businesses say end-user training issues are the biggest barrier to benefiting from IP telephony and unified communications.

The survey suggests that SMEs still are primarily driven to adopt IP telephony for cost savings. But the respondents also overwhelmingly view IP communications as a strategic move. Some 66 percent of very small businesses, 72 percent of small businesses and 76 percent of medium businesses say that IP telephony is or will be strategic to their business.

Nor have voice quality concerns lessened completely. About 49 percent of very small businesses, 48 percent of small businesses and 47 percent of medium businesses say voice quality is their top technical concern.

So far, it appears that hosted IP telephony providers have been unable to raise penetration levels beyond what Centrex had achieved in the market. Less than 10 percent of surveyed SMEs say they have definite plans to adopt IP Centrex at this time.

The survey also suggests potential SME buyers are not convinced hosted providers can provide better or cheaper service than would be possible using an IP phone system. About 39 percent of very small businesses, 44 percent of small businesses and 51 percent of medium businesses believe they can do a better job of managing IP telephony than a hosted provider.

Part of the reason may simply be that providers of hosted services are confusing the market with too many different messages.

Some 44 percent of very small businesses and 48 percent of small and medium businesses will only consider IP Centrex if it is cheaper than on-premises solutions. On the other hand, 34 percent of very small businesses and 48 percent of small and medium businesses believe that hosted IP communications services can offer better uptime and disaster recovery than an on-premises phone system."

The only changes I would have made, had I written the article, is to not use the phrase "the survey also suggests" quite so often... but maybe I am just being picky!.

Best regards,

Maren

Yes, Virginia, there is a Cisco and Avaya blog.

In my last post I introduced Mark Deakin of Microsoft, but I also wrote that I would be even-handed and provide links to other UC vendor blogs. It took a while to find some, but here are the official Avaya http://www.avayablog.com/ and Cisco blog sites http://blogs.cisco.com/news/ which I have added to my links (left).

The blog up on the Cisco site on September 11th, when I wrote this, is an interesting one from Joe Burton, Cisco's CTO. It caught my eye for two reasons: the obvious one is that it provides Cisco's view of the UC market (as you would expect) but perhaps less obviously, because Mr. Burton seems to be taking a pot shot at "PC experts". I shall leave you to read the full text on Cisco's site, but I have cut and pasted (with my italics) the juicy bits below.

Why are these comments so interesting? Well, at the end of August John Chambers of Cisco and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft were declaring that peace had broken out between the two companies in the interests on their customers. Read on and work out for yourself just which 'PC expert' Joe is taking a pot shot at...

"In this ever-changing global economy, can any business wait around to get outpaced by competitors while they experiment with PC or email-client-based-architecture for unified communications? Can they afford to exclude future prospective customers, employees, or partners who do not use email as their preferred communications medium? Can they afford the 18-24 month wait for a software-client-based call control architecture that will be marginally mature and deployable? Can they really depend on PC “experts”, who are learning on-the-job to implement a business class unified communications solution that meets their communication requirements?"

"They are looking in different parts of the world where the PC or email has never been, nor will ever be an important part the communications toolbox."

"Can a business trying to win global customers or attract future employees afford to wait and build a PC (and email) centric unified communications strategy?"

"Only a network based unified communications architecture can bring services, applications, provisioning, management, and useabilty together."

"For businesses waiting to evaluate PC (or email) client-based-software architecture for unified communications, the opportunity cost associated with this inertia is difficult to justify."

Now who could he be talking about? Answers on a post card, please.

Skype: Can it ever be ‘business-class’?

Most comms business people have heard about Skype’s ‘free’ Internet phone service; many have used it. Ask them if it is ‘business-class’ and most will say no, citing the poor voice quality and security concerns. Until recently, I thought the same. Now I am not so sure…

I use Skype to communicate with business partners in this country, Europe and the United States a couple of times a week. I do so because I should use the technology I write and speak about for a living, and because it is cheap: Skype to Skype calls cost nothing (as I pay for my broadband link anyway) and the SkypeOut service costs very little - a one hour call to a US landline costs just £1.00 at peak time.

I like Skype’s simplicity. I like the choice of media: chat, voice and video. I like the multi-party audio conferencing capability. And even with four people on the call the voice quality is quite acceptable provided all participants are using one of the many Skype-compatible headsets or phones available: I use a Polycom Communicator, which is so good I voted it one of my products of the year last December.

But until a short while ago I couldn’t imagine how Skype would fit into the average small to medium business, or a larger enterprise organisation, both of which use communications as a means to an end, rather than the end in its self. I felt it wasn’t suitable for such users because the voice quality can vary if the end-point equipment is not set up properly; there is no control over its usage and there are ongoing concerns about security. My intuition has been validated by recent research by Nemertes which suggest that 46% of the respondents to a poll of enterprise users have a policy to actively block Skype on their networks. And the French Department of Research has issued a recommendation to government departments to do the same. Just say ‘non’ to Skype!

In the face of such resistance why do I now think that Skype may well be able to upgrade itself to business class? Mainly because of the research I conducted for a client’s whitepaper on peer to peer (P2P) networking, which turned up a surprising amount of plaudits from Skype business users and suggested that there are a growing number of ecosystem partners developing software and products targeted at business customers. I would be the first to admit that this is not exactly scientific proof that Skype will become a valuable business tool, but read on and see if you agree with my assessment.

The first thing I did, as always when I start a research project, was to Google Skype - two business names so successful they have been become nouns: I often say “can I Skype you at 3.00 pm” - and got an astonishing number of returns: 213,000,000 in all languages which is a big number for a company that has only been around for 5 years. Microsoft throws up 564 million returns but is over 30 years old now, and in its last fiscal year had revenues of over $50 billion, compared to Skype’s estimated $285 million in the last reported four quarters.

The vast majority (some 90%, according to the company) of its revenues are from SkypeOut, with the remainder from SkypeIn, Voice Mail and Pay per Lead services. Most of this money comes from consumers though the company’s own research suggests that some 30% of the installed base are business users, though it is suggested by some industry pundits that most of these are individuals who have installed the software on business computers without their IT department approval. And up until now most Skype ecosystem vendors have made their money by selling headsets and phones to consumers - including the bizarre Spyke the Skype robot phone.

But now there is a growing constellation of Business to Business (B2B) ISV’s and hardware companies such as VoSky (which makes a PABX to Skype gateway) and StoneVoice, with their SkyStone Cisco CallManager to Skype software, looming over the horizon. From here on in it seems there will be money to be made selling Skype equipment to businesses. The more B2B companies with an economic interest in Skype’s penetration of the business market, the more likely it is to happen.

Leaving the wishful thinking of comms business marketing managers to one side though, it is the sheer numbers of users that leads me to believe that Skype will succeed as a business tool. It has been downloaded over 220 million times. There are some 9.2 million users online at any one time. But it is mainly because its IM/chat, audio conferencing and video telephony features make unified communications a need-to-have rather than nice-to-have capability. And we all know that UC is the next great business comms revolution, which the giants of the industry will ensure succeeds - it is in everyone’s interest that Skype becomes business class, and I think that it will.

UC still has a long way to go, methinks!

Though I have no doubt whatsoever that the unification of communications will occur, and that it is the underlying technology required for the next great revolution in human communications (the others being the invention of writing, the printing press, the electric telegraph, the telephone, television, computing, the Internet and mobile telephony - which are all brought together by UC) I still think we have a long way to go!

What has caused this 'Thomas the Disbeliever' thought to enter my head and thence to this blog? A common or garden audio conference call between 5 people in 4 locations on either side of the Atlantic. First there was the confusion about which conference bridge should be used. Then there was an issue with one of the participants using a mobile phone. I must admit I added to the problem by using Skype to save me the cost of a 45 minute international call (it only cost £1.00... 8-). Suffice to say it took 15 minutes to get all the participants on-line and the call quality wasn't great. Latency was the main issue, together with some tonal harshness. But we persevered and the job in hand got done.

I dream of a time, in the not too distant future, when setting up a conference call, be it audio or video, between disparate end-points no matter which vendor nor which carrier technology: PSTN, VoIP or cellular, is as easy as setting up a blog spot was. Of course, there was only one person, his PC, a carrier and an application service provider (a.k.a. Google) involved in that... and voice quality wasn't a factor. The UC vendors are all proclaiming their solutions will deliver what I want, but in reality that will only work when everyone has the same systems and end-points from the same vendor; which will never happen.

Oh well, I can live in hope. And in the meantime I can watch with interest and, hopefully, keep the uni-comm community informed.

Cheers,

Maren

Microsoft's Office Roundtable video conference system - first thoughts.

Yesterday I had a demonstration of Microsoft's new Office Roundtable video conferencing system courtesy of Mark Deakin, the UK Product Manager for Unified Communications, at the company's Thames Valley Park headquarters. I shall be writing it up for the Audio and Video Conferencing feature article in the September edition of Comms Business magazine http://www.cbmagazine.co.uk/ so I shan't go into detail here, but I did want to post my top-level thoughts on the product whilst they were fresh in my head.

Whilst I wasn't totally blown away by the system, I was very impressed. Having spent part of my time at Cisco studying the video conferencing market, which meant seeing many different VC systems from Tandberg, Polycom, Sony and others, I think I have a reasonable feel for what will sell and (perhaps more importantly) what will be actually be used when installed: the bane of traditional VC systems being that, once bought, they would sit in meeting rooms gathering dust. Microsoft's Roundtable will sell and will be used, because it is priced right (at $3000.00 or so) and if you know how to use Outlook, you will know how to use Roundtable. No more having to call the VC guy to set the system up!

The only obvious downside to the system, to my mind, is the screen issue. Remote users will normally be expected to use their web-camera equipped PC to participate in the Roundtable conference, which is not a problem. But participants sat in the Roundtable system location (normally a meeting room) will have to turn their head between the camera/mike/speaker device (the Roundtable itself) and the display device or devices, which could be one or more lap-tops or a PC projector generated image on a screen or wall, or perhaps a monitor attached to one of the laptops. The significant loss of eye contact could be a distraction to the flow of the meeting. As we weren't actually participating in a meeting I can't be sure how much of a problem this will be.

Having said that, I expect that, some time soon, one of the many companies that produce complementary products for the vast Microsoft market will come up with a neat screen solution to this problem - perhaps a circle of LCD panels around a chassis, on top of which the Roundtable will sit.

If you want to know more about the system please go to http://www.microsoft.com/uc/products/roundtable.mspx

And of course, you can read my article in September!

Cheers,

Maren