Transcript for Enterprise Connect 2012: Why You Need To Be There
Marty Parker: This is Marty Parker with UCStrategies and today our topic is Enterprise Connect Orlando 2012. You already know where it’s going to be – Orlando, Florida. The date is March 26-29 – Monday, March 26 through Thursday, March 29. Of course, it’s the premier show for many years in the communications industry, previously called VoiceCon and other names prior to that.
The UCStrategies team, since 2006, has been organizing and producing the majority of the content on the topic of unified communications for VoiceCon and Enterprise Connect and this year, 2012, our role has expanded even further. You can see on the links that are shown here in the podcast post that the UC experts on the UCStrategies site are going to be moderating or significantly contributing to 25 of the sessions at Enterprise Connect. Not quite half, but close to half the sessions now are on the unified communication theme, and this group is taking the lead. So we really hope that you will look at that schedule and come and attend our sessions and make sure you’re getting all that you can about unified communications at Enterprise Connect.
Many of our sessions will have vendors as panelists and will be posing the important and/or tough questions to them, and so you’ll get a lot of vendor interaction without having them spend a lot of time in your offices; we think that’s one of the major values of Enterprise Connect. You can take what you see there and then go out on the trade show floor and touch and feel what they’ve talked about.
I’ll just talk about the couple things that I’m involved in, and then I’m going to call on other experts here to talk about their roles at Enterprise Connect. For my part, I have the workshop on Monday morning which I hope will help set the stage across the UC categories where we’re going to talk about the three major implementation options for unified communications, that is, expanding your voice infrastructure, expanding your document centric or desktop application infrastructure (think Microsoft and IBM in that category); or expanding your applications infrastructure (think about organizations like Salesforce.com or SAP that are building communications into their software). We’re going to talk about those three broad categories and talk about implementation details behind each of those. Hopefully that will inform what you do/what you see in the other sessions.
Then on Wednesday afternoon I will be showing part three, with eight vendors, of an RFP that has been standardized this year between David Stein, Brent Kelley and myself. On Monday, David Stein will have about eight vendors who have responded to the RFP as upgrading your PBX, including unified communication features. In other words, you’re going to replace the phones and the communication system.
On Tuesday afternoon, Brent Kelley is going to talk about buying your voice communications in the cloud and having unified communications features with that software in the cloud. Then on Wednesday afternoon I’m going to talk about buying unified communications without touching the PBX. “UC Without a New PBX” is the name of the session, and we have eight vendors who have responded to that, and you should come to that because you will be amazed at what is possible, and you may be shocked at the pricing. The vendor with the highest functional score is able to do this for $45.00 per user/per year, including software/hardware installation services and maintenance over five years. That averages out to $45.00 per user/per year; less than $5.00 per user/per month. A very compelling argument; it’s hard not to make an ROI on that number, I’ll tell you. Other vendors are slightly higher but in every case they are less costly than spending the money it would cost to replace your PBX and replace all the phones and gateways and so forth that go with the PBX. I’d say that’s an important one to attend, but enough about me. Let’s talk about all the other experts who are contributing. I’m going to call first on Blair Pleasant who is going to be extending her views on the UC market and also talking about new trends in social for business. Blair?
Blair Pleasant (4:20): Great, thanks a lot Marty. As Marty said, I’ll be doing two sessions; one is my UC market update which will be on Tuesday at 3:45 and this is my fifth year doing the UC market overview. Each year there are new things to talk about. The market really has been changing from what started as early adopters to more of mainstream implementation. A lot of the barriers that used to exist have been slowly disappearing; as Marty mentioned pricing has significantly come down and it’s a lot easier now for customers to make the case for UC. We’re also seeing the shift from unified communications to unified communications and collaboration to what I call “collaborative communication,” and I’ll be talking about that.
A big part of the session will be my latest UC market numbers and forecast and the drivers behind the market growth. Basically the market was pretty slow in 2010, a lot of that having to do with the worldwide recession. It did pick up again in 2011 and I see strong growth for the next two years and so I’ll be talking about that. I’ll also give an overview of the trends and changes we’ve seen in the market over the past year, a look at what’s ahead and also an overview of the key vendors and how they are positioning themselves, and also current and likely future patterns of adoption of unified communications. I’ve got 45 minutes to give a lot of information so I’ll be talking really fast and going through a lot of information – it will be content rich.
My other session is a customer panel called, “Building the Social Enterprise” and we’ll be talking about the benefits of integrating unified communications and social software, and that will be on Monday, March 26 at 2 p.m. This is a panel discussion with three different customers that have integrated unified communication and social in one way or another. This type of integration and just “social in the enterprise” to begin with really is a new trend that’s in its very early days and there aren’t that many companies that are doing this yet. But we were able to get three leading-edge customers to participate and talk about what they’re doing and how others can learn from their experiences. The customers on the panel are Kevin Rice from A.T. Kearney, they are a consulting firm and a Microsoft customer. Also, Leon Benjamin from Virgin Media, who is integrating Cisco Quad with Microsoft Lync and David Nettles from Rayonier, a global forest product company, and they’re integrating Siemens OpenScape with Google Apps.
So some of the things that we’ll be talking about is how tying in UC’s presence, IM, and click-to-communicate capabilities with the company’s social software community makes it easier to connect with people and share information. I’ll start out this session talking about the business value and why companies would be looking into this and what they should be thinking about, and then the panelists are going to get more into the business issues involved and some of the technical issues and challenges that the audience should consider as well as some best practices they’ve learned from both the technical and business perspective. The panelists are going to talk about how they’ve integrated their solution, the drivers for implanting it and the benefits that they’ve achieved. It should be a good give and take with a lot of information and hopefully it will be lots of fun. These are, as I said, relatively new topics so there’s a lot to learn from this and I hope to see everybody there. Back to you, Marty.
Marty Parker (7:39): Thanks Blair. I think that’s going to be really exciting. I’m really delighted that you’ve gotten those three customers to talk about the social implications in business and how that relates to unified communications functionality; that will be great.
Now one of the things – I noticed what Blair said – and there’s a lot going on about making one thing work with another. Interoperation is now front-and-center in our industry and in unified communications specifically. There’s a great session, several different sessions, but a really great one on Tuesday afternoon lead by Russell Bennett and Don Van Doren. Russell, why don’t you comment on that and other things that you’re involved in?
Russell Bennett (8:18): Thanks Marty. Yes, I actually have three sessions and I’ll deal with the first one first: “UC Interoperability; How Real, How Much.” That’s happening Tuesday at 2:30 and I’ll be supported, as Marty said, by Don Van Doren. Basically Don and I are going to be challenging the UC vendors, leading UC vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, and NEC, with a series of questions about fundamental interoperability, which I think, apart from the economic downturn is probably one of the key impediments to the deployment of UC, is that people are worried about vendor lock and interop. So we’ll be asking questions like, “Does inter vendor interoperability increase or reduce costs in real time?” and “have interoperability consortia such as SIP Forum and UCIF made an impact to date, and what are prospects for the future?” Don, do you have any other comments on this session?
Don Van Doren (9:20): I think that as you said – I think what we’re finding out, of course, is that as enterprises learn that the greatest benefit of UC deployment are really often coming from that kind of interoperability and federation (another one of your sessions), collaboration capabilities are becoming recognized as much more important and the ability to establish these kinds of close interconnections with customers, suppliers, partners and frankly even other operating units within the same company, all this is going to rely on much better interoperability, much better federation. I think these sessions that you’re involved in are going to be really important. So tell us more about the federation session.
Russell Bennett (10:11): Thanks, Don. The federation session happens pretty early on Tuesday, so please bring a coffee and come and attend. Federation is a new topic for a lot of people and many people probably don’t have exposure to it; essentially federation is a full multi-model presence-driven communications access between two key business partners in two different companies that’s using UC to communicate from company A to company B.
This is relatively new. It’s not broadly supported but I do think that it is key to the UC ROI. If you can only communicate inside your company using UC, then you can just as easily for the most part go down the hallway and speak to the person. It’s only when you actually get to save the plane ride or the car journey to go meet someone that UC starts to pay off. So we’ll be talking a lot about federation in that session.
The third session that I have on Wednesday at 3:45 is about SIP trunking interoperability. As you all know SIP trunking is probably the key mechanism for communication with the outside world from a UC system and it’s also being deployed against IP PBX’s in order to reduce cost. We also know that interoperability is a major challenge in SIP trunking and so we’re going to be talking about what the issues are around that and if there are any prospects for any meaningful specification for interoperability and whether carriers are committed to interoperability. So those are my three sessions; back to you Marty.
Marty Parker (11:51): Yeah thanks Russell and Don; those should be very, very interesting sessions and really valuable to the audience. Another hot topic in the industry now is mobility and wireless. It’s everywhere, to make a pun. Michael Finneran is the leader of a number of sessions on that topic, so Michael tell us what people will hear about mobility and wireless at Enterprise Connect 2012.
Michael Finneran (12:17): Thanks Marty. Well you’re right, there’s a lot going on. To give you a quick rundown, I think I’m on about eight different sessions; unfortunately they’re all scheduled opposite yours so I won’t get to hear you speak.
Marty Parker: Then we’ll have a contest Michael as to who they like more.
Michael Finneran: I lost already.
Marty Parker: No, no; I don’t think so. I think they want wireless, so keep telling us what you’re going to do.
Michael Finneran: Well, for those who need to be brought up to speed I have a tutorial session on Monday morning at 9:00 on developing an enterprise mobility strategy. Basically my plan there is to introduce all the major issues that are going on, particularly the ones we’re going to be talking about at Enterprise Connect. We have a number of sessions, some of which feature vendor presentations, others feature end users. On the vendor side we have a session Tuesday at 2:30 on UC mobile devices in the age of iPhones, Androids and tablets. This is a session we run every Enterprise Connect and it’s always well attended; lots to talk about the different mobile operating systems and developments on that front.
The other one is on Wednesday at 3:45, “Tablet Tactics.” We’re going to have Cisco, Avaya, RIM and Polycom talking about how they see the tablet market emerging; what role tablet is going to play in UC. We had started that one last Enterprise Connect and it was very well received. Also I’m very fortunate I have two different sessions that will be featuring end users. The first one is on Wednesday morning at 8:00 a.m. and we titled it, “Putting Mobility to Work.” We’re going to be talking about three user case studies. One is Chick-fil-A; they’re using a lot of the mobility offerings from Avaya in their 1,500-plus stores across the United States. Second one I’m very interested in hearing from is Lionbridge, they’re one of the largest deployments of Lync Mobile. Now Microsoft getting involved with the mobile story is fairly important; we’ve been after them to participate in mobility and to talk about their mobility plans for years. Well, this year they’re finally coming out of the closet and Lionbridge is one of their premier accounts.
And last we have HDI who is working with RIM. HDI makes building entrance control systems; they’re starting to look at near field communications, new capability we’re getting in cell phones as replacement for traditional door entry systems. So a few good ones there.
One of the user panels is “Managing Wireless, to BYOD or not to BYOD?” This one is going to be Wednesday afternoon at 2:30. Co-hosting with me will be Philippe Winthrop; he’s the managing director of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation, and we have well two premier customers to talk about here. One is going to be IBM, who this past year announced that they will be doing a BYOD initiative for 200,000 IBM’ers. Generally speaking, IBM does things the right way so I’m looking for some good insights there. The other is a fella named Patrick O’Keefe who is the manager of UC and Security for the City of Mesa, Arizona. He’ll be talking about his BYOD initiative. And also a consultant colleague of mine, Robert Harris, will be talking about one of the customers that he developed a mobility policy for this year.
Those are the main parts of our line-up. I’m also appearing in the Locknote and we have a mobility summit on Monday at 11:00 a.m. and another summit at 10:00 a.m. on Thursday on “Coping with BYOD and the Consumerization of IT.” Zeus Karravala is going to be on that one as well. So if you’re into mobility you’ll be seeing a lot of me, unfortunately, but we do have a great line up and I’m really looking forward to it. So Marty, back to you.
Marty Parker (15:42): Thanks, Michael. By the way, the right solution is to bring two people from your company, so one of them can watch Michael and one of them can watch me. That’s always a good idea and I know there are a lot of companies that will bring a team, two or three people – and be able to split up amongst the sessions. So joking aside, I think that might be worth your while if you’re considering bringing a second person.
Now there’s a lot of innovation going on in unified communication; and it’s been going on for 10 years and it’s not about to stop. Dave Michels has been looking into the future and last year did a fabulous job with the Innovation Showcase and is repeating that this year, as well as leading a couple of other pretty interesting sessions. Dave, tell us what’s going on with the Innovation Showcase and more.
Dave Michels (16:31): Thanks Marty. I like your concept of bringing a team; you should bring a team to Enterprise Connect and you should all come to my sessions, actually. It will be the best way to use that team. The first session that I want to talk about is the Innovation Showcase. This is not quite like a normal session. Obviously there’s a lot of innovation going on in IT and mobile and the whole UC space right now and most of it is consumer focused. We’ve had a challenge to try to find some innovative young companies that are actually targeting the enterprise, and who’s to judge what is an enterprise app and what’s a consumer app? So we’ve decided to use the Litmus test that you have to have to be considered you have to have it enterprise ready.
We’re looking at young companies who penetrate with at least one enterprise account and we’ve got 15 applicants this year. Myself, along with some other judges, reviewed these applicants very carefully. We had a real tough time this year – innovation is a tough thing to measure. Most of the judges are CIO, enterprise-type focus, and so you’ve got to meter innovation with supportability and other enterprise type of concerns. We did manage to narrow down to four companies and I’ll list these companies in a moment but please understand that these are not ranked 1 through 4. We pick four companies and each of these four companies gets to do an on-stage demo during Enterprise Connect and they’re also going to be part of our Innovation Showcase booth in the exhibit hall. The onstage demos take place on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings at 9:00 in the Keynote Auditorium and they’re about five minute demos and so we’ll do two demos on Tuesday and two demos on Wednesday.
The four winners this year into the innovation showcase are – the first one is called Hookflash, which is a young company that is making a real time voice and text and video capability, similar to Skype, but with much more of an enterprise focus. It’s a new technology – they’re coming out initially on the iPad but they have bigger plans and they just announced a click-to-dial capability with LinkedIn, so anybody in the LinkedIn environment you can look up and call easily from your iPad. So Hookflash will be there.
We’ve also got a company called Nuvixa. Nuvixa is using the Microsoft Connect software development kit on the desktop; not the game console but on the desktop. They’ve created a video conferencing and video recording capability that allows a user to effectively put themselves into their display desktop. The way this would have been done in the past is with a green screen type of technology, but now you don’t need a green screen, you just need a Kinect camera and you can put your video of yourself talking right into your PowerPoint presentation as you record or show that out with other people; very interesting stuff.
We have a company called Wrike, which is doing some online project collaboration software. Effectively project collaboration, project management/collaboration software as a service in the cloud and doing some really interesting things that is, of course, breaks down the barriers of the firewall and corporate boundaries.
The fourth company is a company called Vidtel, which is enabling any to any video conferencing, and any to any video conferencing through firewalls. A company, regardless of what type of system they have, could for example, take their room system and get a Vidtel phone number and publish that phone number and then anybody, whether they’re on Skype or a different kind of room system, can simply dial that number and go right through the firewall and connect that video system and, of course, you can also have multiple parties with an MCU-type of service. So any to any type of video services through a firewall. Four very innovative young companies that will be on display in the innovation showcase.
In addition to that I’ve got a couple sessions that I’ll just mention. On Monday, the first day, I’ve got a session called “Leveraging Voice and Video in the Cloud, Integrating Skype, Google Voice and other platforms with enterprise UC.” This is riding that trend where we’re seeing that a lot of companies are still deploying instant messaging and voice services from these providers into the desktop and some of them are even eliminating traditional telephone as an option. We’ve got that session on Monday; we’ve got Tuesday and Wednesday sessions I mentioned the Innovation Showcase. On Thursday I’ve got the same session that Michael mentioned with Zeus, the “Summit, bring your own device panel, Consumerization of IT and how to cope," that I think will be a really interesting conversation. And then on Thursday after that is my favorite session every year and that is the Locknote session where we’ll try to capture all the announcements and the themes presented at this year’s Enterprise Connect. I think there’s going to be a lot to talk about – we’re seeing a lot of interactivity – I think it’s going to be a fairly big year for news and announcements and a lot to pull together.
That’s my agenda at Enterprise Connect and I’ll turn it back to you, Marty.
Marty Parker (21:44): Thanks Dave. That will really be fun to see these exciting new companies as well as I’m hearing your other sessions.
Kevin Kieller also has an interesting session talking about the adoption of Lync in the enterprise. Kevin?
Kevin Kieller (21:56): Thank you, Marty. You are correct – the “Living with Lync” session on Monday, March 26 at 4:15 p.m. is going to be an interesting session. In fact, I’ve looked at the conference schedule, and I’ve done the work for others who are attending Enterprise Connect, and I’m pretty confident that it’s going to be the best session at this time slot. So certainly circle it, and it’s a great way to round off your Monday afternoon.
We’re going to be talking about some actual experiences with Lync. We’ve got a great panel, and we’re going to share some of the misconceptions, some of the pitfalls, some of the great opportunities and successes that organizations have had when living with Lync, when deploying Lync. And your homework assignment ahead of the session, if you choose to accept it, is to read two articles that I posted on no jitter earlier this year. The first is, “Is Lync Really That Complicated?” Where I talked about how people have a tendency to overestimate the complexity of Lync, and then a followup article at the end of February, “Is Lync Really That Simple?” Where I talked about some of the cases where people have a tendency to underestimate some of the complexity of deploying Lync. Read those articles, come with your questions, for myself and the panelists, and I’m sure it will be some time well spent.
For Tuesday afternoon I have the opportunity to present a session, “Skype in the Enterprise.” Tuesday, March 27, 3:45 p.m., where we’ll talk about the use of Skype in the enterprise, and just as a heads up, we’ll also talk about some of the rumors, some of the things we know about how Skype is being integrated by Microsoft into the Lync ecosystem, and what some enterprises have been able to achieve currently with Skype, and some of the things you should be thinking about, whether you’re using Skype today, or if you’re using Lync, some of the new integrated Skype opportunities that will be opened up to you. That’s Tuesday, a great way to round out a Tuesday afternoon. Thanks again Marty, and back to you.
Marty Parker: Great – thank you, Kevin. Steve Leaden?
Steve Leaden (24:07): Thanks Marty. I am very excited about Enterprise Connect this year and hosts Fred Knight and Eric Krapf putting together a great show once again, as usual, and it keeps on getting better. The technology in the Telephony and Unified Communications spaces is moving so quickly that, in my opinion, this is really a have-to-go-to show for anyone directly or indirectly tied to these areas.
There are some great keynotes with people I have had the opportunity to meet personally, including Brett Shockley from Avaya and Chris Hummel from Siemens. Both, I know, are seasoned speakers and will be great to see. The show is putting new emphasis on the Cloud and Communications as a Service and Social Media among others.
Marty, I am very excited to be leading two sessions at Enterprise Connect. They include “Case Studies for Hosted Communications Apps” and “What’s New in the Desktop.” The Hosted session should be intriguing bring together early adopters who have been in the trenches implementing new Cloud technology in the early adopter stage of the Cloud market. Our consulting practice has been focusing on the cloud and I am excited to bring our expertise and experience to the panel as well.
When it comes to desktops, they are changing considerably, literally almost overnight, with manufacturers offering HD video, touch screens, G.722 HD audio Codecs, Bluetooth, and BYOD strategies, interestingly, even at the desktop. We have a very strong panel of companies participating here.
And let’s not forget that many of us from the UC Strategies team will be in attendance – feel free to reach out to us to brainstorm and consult on any issues or challenges that are occurring in your enterprise.
All in all I am really looking forward to attending Enterprise Connect this year and connecting with those that I meet and those attending our sessions. Back to you, Marty.
Marty Parker (26:01): Well there’s a review of a number of the sessions that you’ll be seeing at Enterprise Connect on the topic of unified communications as you can hear in all the many dimensions from social to wireless to innovation and interoperability. Let me ask Jon Arnold, a UC expert on the call; I don’t think you’re going to be at Enterprise Connect, but Jon, just give us a few comments, if you’d like, about how you see Enterprise Connect as an event in the industry and what role it plays and why customers might or might not want to pay attention to it?
Jon Arnold (26:31): Well sure, sure thanks. Obviously from what everyone has got scheduled for the show; it’s going to be a very rich event. It doesn’t sound like there will be a better place to get exposure to everything that’s going on in terms of trends and data that Blair is talking about. The comment I would just add here is that this show is certainly targeted at the higher end of the marketplace and this is where you’ll see big money is going to be spending. I think that’s an important distinction because many of us were at the TMC IT expo last month in Miami and that tends to cater to probably more of the middle to lower end of the market in terms of size of operations and I think the scenario is for deploying UC there are more small scale and a little more ready for people to understand and get their heads around.
Here the implications at Enterprise Connect are much richer and this is also where I think the higher order of value of UC has more potential in getting into the integration with CRM and business processes and that kind of thing. I think that’s going to be an important thing to play into and I just want to add one more kind of big trend that may start to pop up in some of these sessions and that’s this whole space we’re hearing about now in the area that we’re calling “big data.” Enterprises are very much a microcosm for what big data is all about, and UC as a tool is really very prime to be in the middle of all of this. I think we will eventually start to see when the CRM and SAP’s and Oracles – these types of software applications start to look for ways to add value and make big data type of applications important for companies, UC is going to figure into it because I think that’s where the real time element comes in to bring all kinds of data flow. Especially from the contact center—so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to start hearing that is one of the new story lines, much like cloud was the big story last year. I think we’re really in a good spot for UC to have an integral role to play in helping companies at that scale really coordinate all the information they’re getting. You think about the scope of global enterprises, it really is pretty massive. I think UC, as I said, has a pretty important role to play if it can fit into that bigger ecosystem.
Marty Parker (28:47): Well thanks Jon, for those insights. I think that big data insight is really important and yes, I’ve heard that starting to buzz amongst the social communality and the collaboration communities as well as contact center communities, as you mentioned. I think that’s an important trend to watch for. Art Rosenberg, any comments you’d like to add?
Art Rosenberg (29:08): Actually there just were two and one of them was just brought up by Jon and yourself and that’s the role of the contact center, the UC-enabled contact center, because it’s not just about phone calls and it’s not just about self services using voice only; it’s multi-modal. I assume that somewhere that’s going to show up. The other thing that I think is also going to be covered, although it wasn’t mentioned specifically by Michael, and that has to do with mobile apps and the role of dual persona mobile apps so everybody who has a mobile device, they’ll be using mobile apps that are either their personal ones they get from who knows where, or they’re going to be ones they got on their job and it’s the part of their job responsibility to use it. So I assume that that will be covered, but I just want to mention that.
Marty Parker (30:05): Great, Art, thank you very much for those ideas. Thank you all for your contributions to this podcast and thank you especially for your contributions to Enterprise Connect Orlando 2012. We’re going to be there for you from the opening sessions on Monday morning to the Locknote on Thursday late morning where, as we mentioned, you’ll hear from Dave Michels, Zeus Kerravala and Michael Finneran and Don Van Doren; they’ll all be part of that. So please be there and we’ll look forward to seeing you. Please come and find us. If you download that flyer about participation at Enterprise Connect, you’ll see pictures of all of us who will be there, the ten experts – the 10 UC experts. If you see us, stop us and talk to us because we’d sure like to see you in person. We hope to see you at Enterprise Connect 2012. Thanks.