Future Unified Communications December 6, 2011

Posted by henrychin in Cloud, Communication Enable Business Process, Mobile Communication, Unified Communication.
Tags: Cloud, Disruptors, Social, Unified Communication, Voice 3.0, Web 3.0
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Unified Communication (UC), is a term used by most tech people and companies to describe different ways of communicating. It is the mashup of realtime communications such as (voice, video, IM, presence) with non realtime communications (fax, email, voicemail). A lot of these technologies have been around for years, decades in some cases, but UC allows all of these different interaction methods to be monetized under a single solution/product offering in the market. Great for big vendors such as Cisco and Avaya who want to sell into the fortune 500 and enterprise market. Not so great for those mom and pop shops struggling to build a business from ground up. Sure this model of packaging UC and selling to businesses has been around for a long time, where vendors sell to distributors and in turn directly sell to customers. This model is old school. Today technology is no longer the issue, there is enough fiber on the planet to last the world for years to come, smartphones are everywhere and is growing faster every day. People are naturally incline to connect with other people, friends and co-workers. So why is UC limited to enterprises, in fact why can’t everyday people use it. Yes I know Skype is available and so is Yahoo Messenger not to mention the social aspect of Google+, Facebook and Twitter. However, these methods of communicating are so overlapping hard to decide how best to communicate with someone. Should I send Skype message to someone, but wait the person is not online, oh check their facebook account to see if they are vacation then post twitter message about upcoming places to connect. There are so many different permutations to consider. Why is UC so complicated to use?

The future of unified communications is not about the technology, but more about the end user. People just want to connect in the most simplistic manner possible, the web. The web is available to every modern home in the world, people can access it on mobile phones and people of all ages can use the web. The web browser has been and still is the main interface for accessing information through world wide web, so why can’t we have realtime communications supported just like GUI widgets are supported on the web through HTML tags? Just the same way that Google was able to monetize the web through online advertisements using AdWords and AdSense to allow developers to easily place small advertisement widgets related to search results, similar types of widgets can also be developed to allow people to talk directly to customer service agent. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the following sections intend to give more of a manifesto for how UC could evolve to be much more.

Current Landscape

I don’t want to bore people with a lot of market research, but identifying the current state of the industry will help provide a understanding for why change is needed and provide a sense of urgency that could help identify areas for improvement.

Timeliness of this article is really comes on the heal of two other articles Magic Quadrant for Unified Communication and Dealing with Disruptors. First off the UC market:

The market diagram provided by Gartner outlines four quadrants where UC vendors are positioned. The bottom axis identifies vendors completeness of product portfolio offering in the UC market. While the left axis identifies how the vendor is organized in terms of execution and delivery into the market. A brief explanation of these quadrants are necessary to help outline some points that I will mention later on.

Leaders

Vendors selling comprehensive UC suites that are coupled with broad communications and collaboration portfolios and strong technology partnerships. These vendors and their channel partners, have experience delivering UC to broad range of enterprise types and in most geographical regions. The obvious leaders come to mind, Cisco and Avaya, but surprisingly Microsoft is ranked up there with Lync product that used to be call Office Communicator Suit (OCS). With the new addition of Skype, I am sure Microsoft is looking to have tight integration with Lync product at the same time end-of-life Communicator client and replace it with Skype. Although, Cisco has made made progress on simplifying, consolidating and unifying its massive communications portfolio, elements of its product remain complex to understand and manage. The same can be said about Avaya, providing different products for different industries. Apart from the technology, these companies have a vast group of distributors in specific territories to provide first line support and direct customer engagement. Most UC vendors act as second or third line support for products. This distribution model is no different from other companies in other quadrants. In fact this tends to be the de facto standard for distribution to end customers.

Challengers

Offer solutions and capabilities with the potential to move into the leadership position, but lack critical elements in their suites or don’t have sufficient maturity in the broader market. One such company is IBM offering Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) portfolio based on Sametime collaboration products include IM, presence and web conferencing. The strategy is clear, by offering strong back-end server hardware and software combined with front end Sametime clients, IT managers can rest assured that interoperability will be smooth sailing. However, PBX related functionality is left to partners more verse in the capabilities of IP-PBX functionality. This will leave IBM at a disadvantage with enterprises that want to consider single-vendor solution for the entire suite.

Visionaries

Demonstrate a clear understanding of the UC market and offer a strong and differentiating approach to one or more core areas. However, these vendors lack the ability to execute across the entire set of requirements and markets, or have marketing and distribution limits to their ability to challenge the leading providers. The only vendor in this category is Mitel. This company has grown significantly after the merger with Inter-Tel, a similar company to Mitel in terms of product offering but with large distribution network in US.

Niche Players

Offer solutions that are particularly strong in one or more UC areas, but do not have a comprehensive product or they have a solution that has limited market reach. Niche players apply the traditional business way of thinking, do one thing really well then apply this concept to other areas of the product while slowly building out a product portfolio. Huawei is one such vendor with vast number of engineers working at providing cheaper solutions over competitors is primarily focus on Asian market, but recently has expanded into North America and Europe. While ShoreTel and Interactive Intelligence has focus around providing UC appliance solution that contains an out-of-box UC solution for enterprises targeted at less than 1000 users. Interactive lacks web conferencing and videoconferencing functionality that other vendors provide.

Disruptors

The last category which is not part of the Gartner quadrants are the disruptors. This category of vendors are brought on by the report from Telco 2.0 about disruptors in telecommunications market. Players in the category are Google, Apple, Facebook and Skype. One of the main reasons for not being included in Gartner report is lack of distribution network. However, I would argue that in this day in age distribution is a thing of the past. Internet is so fast with the possibility of reaching so many people and the advances in software has changed how we see products. Case in point an article “Why software is eating the world“, talks about companies moving away from proprietary hardware solutions to software only solutions. Take for example how IBM changed its entire business model of building mainframes and PCs to a software and services organization. Keep in mind this was a painful process for IBM but well worth the investment and ROI for investors who stayed with the company. Avaya is one such company that was trying to do this transition back when they were public company. Now that Avaya is private they can move much faster towards a software based company.

More on the topic of disruptors, one of the main reasons these companies can have a major impact is their speed to market without the bureaucracy of large organization. Other factors include their engineering approach towards solving problems with a user focus on providing simple solutions that are easy to use. Take Google, a company that prides itself on engineering solutions and is one of the first innovators of cloud computing. Google core competence is searching and the ability to index trillion of web pages all over the world and return a search result in meer milliseconds. Surrounding the core technology are products such as Google Docs, Google+, Google Talk, Gmail, Android, Chrome OS, and Chrome Browser just to name a few. Even though there may be many pieces to the puzzle and there is no official statement, but Google has silently mass a portfolio of products to challenge the UC market. They possess the tools for collaboration, voice capabilities for people to talk over internet, social presence to provide crowd sourcing or peer-to-peer conversations and video chat. Not to mention the strong cloud presence allows Google to provide free or even pay-per-use that users can easily adopt solutions with little or no capital expenditures.

Apple has been a disruptor for many years, first with introduction of ipod and cheap downloadable music affecting the music industry that once had total control over music distribution. With introduction of iphone, Apple has once again created an user experience unlike any other smartphone that has disrupted and dominates mobile phone industry revenue. What has long been viewed as telco controlled in terms of applications residing on feature and smartphones, Apple is able to allow users download apps that utilize valuable wireless network bandwidth.

Models to Consider

Stop the walled garden.  UC vendors have long used the approach of attracting customers to use their system, but once hooked customers are powerless to change the way things work.  Customers are locked into used complicated phone systems with many buttons, not the mention the awkward user interface trying to remember how to transfer a person on hold to another extension.  In fact a number of advance PBX functionality are tied so tightly with phone systems that switching to alternate phones would in fact cripple a company and day-to-day operations.  Choice for customers is no longer possible.  The logical reasoning behind such an approach is supported by the age old marketing concept around companies spend less money on existing customers than new customers, so better to keep customers with walled gardens.  This age old thinking has been superseded  with the advent of internet and world wide web.  Nowadays, new smaller more nimble companies are starting to open up communication services by providing simple to use APIs based on common web friendly scripting languages (Javascript, Groovy).  Take for example Twilio a company located in San Francisco is providing APIs using XML to make simple voice calls and text messaging over the internet.  A similar company called Tropo is backed Voxeo and provides similar type of service.  Both these companies are opening up voice services by providing APIs that make it easy to integrate with web applications.  End result is to open up communications so that users can develop their own way of communicating also giving them the freedom to choose how best to communicate with end-customers.

Open standards base solution that promotes interoperability.  The two main standards organizations that come to mind are IETF and W3C.  Both look at developing standards but from different perspective.  IETF looks at defining protocols and services that serve in the best interest of Internet.  While W3C looks at developing standards for accessing information on Internet.  Standards need to be developed and characterize to provide consistency and a reference point for vendors and implementors.  However, standards take time to fully develop and get buy in from all parties involve.  However, innovation shouldn’t wait for standards to finalize before starting.  Take for example, Architectural Framework for Browser-Based Real-Time Communication by Jonathan Rosenberg (SIP author now with Skype/Microsoft).  This framework certainly in draft form, envisions a different way of communicating, using browsers as smart terminals to allow communications.  Certainly a bold leap, but the proposal looks at using existing standards such as HTTP to connect browsers with backend server functionality.  A protocol that has long been used for its simplicity and ease of integration.  As oppose to proprietary protocols that lock customers in and provide no means to customize and extend functionality.  Openness will help fuel innovation.

New wave for UC called UC Social has been tooted as the next best thing for UC. In fact UC Social is not about using social media (Facebook, Twitter) and looking for ways to monetize this new form of connecting with context, but more related to concepts used at the core of Google, links. The link revolutionize how the web is used. Links connect people base on context.  So how can this apply to UC.  Well think of links not only of connecting web pages, but also people, content, places, things and documents.  Links can connect people just same way as social networking by allowing people to reach out and be reached.  In addition, apply metadata to these links such as date/time, location, click counts, etc… this information can be used in searches be provide greater search control.  Links can be used to reference documents or event phrases in a paragraph to help gain better understanding.  Think of an entire conversation glue together by a series of links that can be categorized by metadata.  This information can then be shared with colleagues to help collaborate on an idea.  Bring this all in the context of UC space and we have a means to search and be social to collaborate using voice, instant messaging and video.

UC User, how can unified communications help people who just want to connect. Focus should be on simplicity and latency.  Simplicity of using UC services without complicated user interfaces that require ten different steps in order to complete something.  Latency is a term used to monitor network quality, but can also be used as a gage for how well a service is being offer.  If people can count how long it takes for a service to respond then the service is too slow.  This is common practice at Google where Larry Page would count how long a response would take.  If response took longer than 1 sec then back to the drawing board to improve performance.  The same can be said about UC services, if phone takes more than 1 second to respond then the service is not acceptable to consumers.  People just hate waiting, so why should UC services force people to wait.  Customers would gladly promote a service that is responsive and quick, but a service that is slow and non responsive will not gain any points with customers.  Another aspect of UC User is Trust vs Control and how one affects the other.  Trust is inversely proportional to control, than means that in order to gain a users trust relinquishing control is necessary by UC vendor.  This implies letting people decide how they want to communicate and be reached.  But also giving the flexibility to let other third party applications control over how best to communicate with someone.  All of these points may seem like a mashup of different concepts, but in the end it is all about letting the user decide.

Mobile UC and the adoption of mobile apps…

Long Tail, picture worth thousand words.  A graph used in Chris Anderson’s blog, to depict how companies are selling large volume of unique items as oppose to selling fewer popular items in large quantities.  Good example of this is Amazon and Netflix, both companies promote the fact that they offer hard to find movies and videos to anyone.  Certainly, this depicts the long portion of the graph where small number of movies are sold to many customers.  So, how can this apply to UC market, well think about the many different IP Centrex or PBX related features provided.  There are most likely in the hundreds of different and custom features catering to hundreds of enterprises.  What if there was a way of offering these many features in an open market?  Would there be demand for feature X that was so unique that only a select few would buy it?  More importantly would there be enough demand coming from a mass of enterprises willing to pay for unique services?  Certainly questions worth considering.

Impediments to Change

Controversy

Walled garden, distribution and middle-man and organizational structure.  Dawn of internet age has given birth to direct sell, direct marketing, direct support, everything is direct to customer.  So why is there distributors selling UC solution out in the market. One can argue that distributors know their customer better than anyone else.  They provide direct support that is unparalleled to vendor support.  However, one could argue that the distributor limits customer interaction with UC vendor, further creating separation between customer and vendor.  Gaining understanding of customer pain points is limited through the lens of the distributor and provides little value to the overall eco-system of Unified Communication.

Standards are important but not when it comes to the web, take Session Initiating Protocol (SIP) as an example. The protocol was meant to follow HTTP standard for communicating between browsers and servers but applied to phone system. Instead the standard has grown beyond comprehension with many RFCs to replicate old PSTN functionality. At the same time while SIP drowns in its own standard, HTTP has been allowed to flourish by designers creating new and innovative ways to use the protocol. One such approach is the development of websockets over HTTP.  An innovative way to leverage HTTP for its firewall agnostic approach to tunnelling through and providing async communication.

Guidelines

Reach out to users to identify what users want from UCC.

Customer knows best, customer is in control, share ideas, critique products, add value.

It’s about people and making new connections, it all comes back to relationships in UCC market.

Create a forum for users to express their issues and problems on UCC solutions in the market (Avaya, Cisco).  Just the same way Jeff Jarvis did when he started a blog about Dell customer products and customer support.  This started a fire storm of people commenting on how Dell values its customers.  The same can be said about UC vendors, what are they doing well and what can they improve, are just some of questions to ask.

Trust vs Control aspect that just mentioned earlier when developing UC products.

Vision & Direction

TBD

Applications

New applications for UCC include crowd sourcing, crowd casting and peer-to-peer communications.

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Hope this article was helpful and enlightening, please post your comments, thanks.

Copyright 2011 Henry Chin

Email: hchin67@gmail.com Linkedin: hchin Twitter: hoichin