Enterprise Connect 2012 - It's About the User Experience

There were many themes at this year's Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando; analysts and reporters have already written conference wrap-up articles about the focus on video, mobility, BYOD, the cloud, etc. To me, the biggest take away was that vendors are starting to focus their unified communications and collaboration efforts more than ever on the user experience. This has implications for enterprises, vendors, and the channel.

While a couple years ago the vendors were still focusing on their technologies and the features and capabilities of their products, this year the focus was the end users. Whether in my one-on-one briefings, the floor demos, or the few sessions I attended, the vendors described how they are making things easier for end users and improving the user experience across devices and media. This ease of use includes more intuitive user interfaces and clients, the ability to access or consume UC&C capabilities from the cloud, and the ability to let workers utilize the devices they're most comfortable with.

At the opening general session, "Has the post-PBX Era Begun?," several of the vendor panelists discussed the importance of the user experience. Todd Landry, Senior VP, NEC, noted that employees are looking for tools to make them more empowered, and introduced NEC's focus on the "empowered workforce." Vishakha Radia, Managing Director, Customer Business Transformation (CBT), Cisco, highlighted the focus on the user experience by pointing out that "contextual applications are what needs to be considered, and that organizations with mobile devices and video, such as hospitals or those with mobile sales devices, are completely changing the user experience while attaining unprecedented productivity." She added that Cisco wants to deliver an experience that improves mobile and video capabilities to enable users to communicate and collaborate from any device, any place, any time, any context, and that being able to simply click and connect from within the user's business process provides contextual collaboration and enhances the user experience. Adrian Brookes, VP, Siemens Enterprise Communications, summed it up nicely when he said, "The focus is to remove the complexity, make it easy, and improve the user experience. If someone can't pick up something intuitive and use it, it won't fly."

In his keynote address entitled "Focusing on the User Experience," Avaya Senior VP and GM for Communications Applications and Emerging Technologies Brett Shockley discussed how enterprises can more easily deploy powerful, easy-to-use communications technologies to make the most of the new "Collaboration Frontier." Shockley noted, "Many collaboration tools are actually wasting our time. We've created lots of great technology, but it requires the user to make it unified and tie them together. The technologies are missing the context of what's relevant to you at the time." Avaya is now focusing on "Awareness," which Shockley states provides a relevant, pervasive, portable, persistent user experience across your devices.

There were lots of examples of the user experience focus throughout the event. Here are a few examples:

• Siemens Enterprise Communications is extending its UC suite to be brought into the cloud easily, with zero touch installation and deployment for the cloud service. Customers can get the service without having to do any manual interaction and can consume the service without doing any configuration work.
• IBM is focusing on moving the user experience "from dial tone to presence to relevance," and making it easier to find and connect with relevant experts or resources within an organization. Noting that users more easily adopt social software than UC, IBM will be integrating products to make it easier to merge the two. When I asked what IBM will do to prevent these social capabilities from taking up too much time on the part of users, who are generally expected to do things like tagging experts, John DelPizzo explained that IBM will use analytics to help users find the right people, by doing things such as identifying who are the top contributors to a blog, for example. IBM will also work to keep active rankings simple, so that users can simply press a "like" button rather than having to rate an article or do anything that takes time.

I didn't have too much time for the Exhibit Hall or demos, but here are a couple examples of what I saw related to the focus on ease of use and the user experience.

• Voice4Net demonstrated Contact Center HD (CCHD), a multi-media customer interaction ecosystem for businesses that provides "an intuitive, easy-to-deploy platform that addresses specific end-user business models, policies and real-world requirements." It provides contact center agents and supervisors with very visual and intuitive tools for controlling and managing multi-channel contacts. I got to see a demo of the tool and was impressed with how easy it is to customize the agent and supervisor screens, as well as the ability to view a single agent interface for the various contact center channels and media types. Voice4Net focuses on CCHD being easy to learn and easy to manage for the agents, and easy for supervisors to see areas like queues, agents, teams, etc. The company notes that, "The human experience is the key business differentiator in contact centers."
• Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise showed off OpenTouch Conversations, a new client and experience to provide the communication capabilities of OpenTouch across multiple media and devices through a tablet or desktop device. When I was briefed by ALU last week and asked what I thought of OpenTouch Conversations, I said that I needed to see it in action before passing judgment. Seeing is believing, and the demo proved how simple it is to initiate and join multiparty web conferencing and collaboration sessions, as well as video calls, and transparently move between devices within a conversation. OpenTouch Conversations consists of three main elements:
• The Conversation Wall is like a dynamic buddy list and keeps a timeline of all of your conversations, enabling users to have multiple conversations going on at once.
• The Community of Favorites is a static buddy list of people you communicate with most often, enabling you to search for anyone in your contacts on your iPad, Outlook contact list, or LDAP, including LinkedIn contacts.
• The Stage is where the conversations take place, allowing users to have text, phone, video, IM, and data collaboration interactions. The interface was simple enough for me to use without any training or instructions (and that really says something!).
• A new company called Starleaf focuses on "a new era in user experience," by providing a single solution for voice and video collaboration at the desktop and in the meeting room, and what they call "Telepresence made easy." They introduced the first telepresence PBX, built specifically for voice and video. Rather than creating a system where making a video call is as simple as making a phone call, Starleaf says that making a video call is the same as making a phone call. During the demo of the video phone, I was amazed at how simple it was to use. In addition, with a new cloud-based service, Starleaf Cloud, companies can get high def telepresence and conferencing without having to purchase the equipment. Users plug in the Starleaf phone and it connects to the service in the cloud - plug and play.

What does this all mean for the channel? Several things:

• The days of evangelizing about what UC is are over, and now resellers can focus on the benefits the solutions provide. Resellers/VARs can stop focusing on selling the technology and instead focus on how these products and solutions can help enterprise workers be more effective and efficient, thus helping enterprises save time and money.
• Being able to sell products that are easy to use means that resellers can spend more time focusing on the benefits of the products, rather than trying to show IT managers how to use them.
• Based on the ease of use, more and more end users are more likely to use these products, which means more seat and license sales. Rather than just the technologically-savvy users taking advantage of these solutions, more and more users within the organization are likely to use them as well. As Jon Arnold pointed out in a recent article about the user experience and UC, "If it's overly complex, nobody will adopt UC, and IT will have buyer's remorse for all the extra work with nothing to show management."
• Show not tell - the ability to demonstrate the ease of use of UC&C products will help close sales more quickly. The demos we're seeing today are much more compelling than what was available even a year ago, when it was still relatively complex to set up conferences, video calls, etc.

I wish I had more time on the show floor, and I'm sure there are lots of companies with great products focusing on ease of use and the user experience that I didn't get to see. Hopefully I won't have to wait till Enterprise Connect 2013.