UCStrategies Experts Review Microsoft, Cisco, and HP Announcements

23 Nov 2010
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In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts review a significant week in unified communications with announcements from Microsoft, Cisco, and HP.

The UC expert panel includes Jim Burton, Marty Parker, Blair Pleasant, Nancy Jamison, Don Van Doren, David Yedwab, Art Rosenberg, Jon Arnold, and Steve Leaden.

UCStrategies encourages your comments on this podcast. Please see the "Comments" section at the bottom of this page to contribute.

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For more information on UCStrategies.com about last week's announcements:

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I am joined as usual, by the UCStrategies team of experts. Big week last week - there were a lot of important announcements; it started off the week with an announcement from Mitel, who we've already covered a lot of what happened in their announcement. Microsoft, Cisco, and HP also had very important announcements, so a big week for unified communications. Marty Parker and I were at the Microsoft launch. Others were at the Cisco launch. We've got everyone pretty well covered, so I am going to turn it over to my colleague, Marty Parker, to give us his thoughts on the Microsoft launch. Marty...

Marty Parker: Hi Jim, thanks very much. Last week, as most people saw in the press and in other posts, Wednesday, November 17, was the formal availability launch of Microsoft Lync 2010, the successor to Office Communication Server 2007 and 2007R2. The presentation was quite well done by Microsoft executives. And the most significant portions of the presentation were done by Gurdeep Singh Pall, who has really been the champion of Office Communication Server for the last five or six years. And as many of us know, has been on the stage at VoiceCon and now Enterprise Connect and other venues to bring the product forward. I would say that the theme of the launch was very clear that they are completing and filling in the capabilities that people have been expecting for the last couple of releases. Certainly completing the capabilities of enterprise telephony. I am sure many could say, "well, they don't have a call center yet; they don't have these things and those things." But there has been a continued dialog in the industry about when will they add in features like call pick-up and some of those sorts of features, which are now part of the product. They also got a very good rating from Miercom, who ran a test on the Lync 2010 product and gave it a very high mean opinion score for voice quality and said it was basically a complete product for enterprise telephony at this point, so external parties are concurring that they are accomplishing that goal.

The second thing that they made very clear is that it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite and so we saw demonstrations that indicated how effectively it integrates to Exchange and Outlook, how effectively it integrates to SharePoint; how it integrates to the Office Suite of Word, Excel, PowerPoint - in those suites you will have communications capabilities available to you with a right-click or with a point-and-click on a presence indicator and so forth.

The third thing that I think they made clear was that the product is a great CEBP platform. That was their point, I am not arguing that one way or the other, but it's a communications enabled business process platform. It has the open interfaces, it has the development community, it has the developer environments and ecosystem that Microsoft is famous for - now providing a communication platform for communication enabling business processes. They emphasized their ecosystem with a significant, maybe 15- or 20-foot long wall of some six feet high with products mounted on that wall ranging from headsets to speaker phones to HD video capabilities from a whole range of providers-Polycom being the most prominent. The Polycom president actually joined the event and spoke about what they were doing for HD telepresence interoperability with Lync 2010.

So they were really putting it on display. They did a very nice display of a meeting, in a meeting room with their CX5000, formerly known as Roundtable, plus touch-sensitive white boards being part of the meeting for drawing and illustrating. So a lot of capabilities, backed up with three customers joining them on the stage talking about their rollouts. And these customers were from North America, the Dominican Republic, and Germany, so not just North America-a global presence.

To top it all off and to provide continuity from the original launch of Office Communication Server in San Francisco in September of 2007, they had a guest - a surprise guest. And the surprise guest was Bill Gates, who came on by video from his offices in Washington State and basically greeted the audience, talked about the history of the last three years and "the magic of software." That's the phrase he used to talk about Lync 2010 and to talk about how the magic isn't done, because now they have opened the platform up to thousands of developers, each of whom will be creative in their own right. So Jim, I think their message was, we're ready, here we are, here are our customers, and we want to serve you. I think that would be the summary. If you go to www.lync.com they have the announcement website at that address.

Jim Burton: Marty, I think you are right and one of the interesting things I think about having Bill Gates be that surprise guest, is that this is the first launch he's participated in since he actually left his day-to-day job at Microsoft. And a lot of people think it may be his last. What I think the importance of that is - it shows Microsoft's intention of being a major player in this space. If there is any question whatsoever it's all about that. And I would then translate that into another vendor who is in this space, but we just don't hear a lot about and that would be IBM. (Samuel) Palmisano has never been on stage that I know of and said, "unified communications is important to us." And you can kind of see the success the two firms are having and their bid for going after that.

Let's move on to Cisco, because they certainly had a lot of stuff going on last week, as well. Blair, why don't I turn it over to you and I know you and Nancy and Don and Jon Arnold were all there. So why don't you all give us some of your feedback?

Blair Pleasant: Sure, this is Blair, I will get started. The three major themes were collaboration, pervasive video, and desktop virtualization. For collaboration they talked a lot about Quad, which was introduced previously but they did talk about it a bit more. Quad is basically an enterprise platform for what they say, "delivering realtime applications and social capabilities." So in one browser-based client it integrates social communities and social software capabilities on video, unified communications and also some applets and widgets and gadgets that people add in. This is all in a web-based client. What's new and what they announced is that Cisco is launching Quad internally to its 70,000 workers. The entire company is going to be on Quad. So that will be a really great use case of how people are using it and it will be a good example for other companies to see how it's being used.

They also talked about pervasive video, basically saying they are going to make video as easy to deploy and use as voice. They talked about the ability to capture, publish, search, and edit video and all this is driving collaboration, which is their big theme. Also desktop virtualization, which someone else can talk about, because it's not exactly the area that I felt as comfortable with, but they introduced the VXI, a virtual experience infrastructure, and that's bringing together realtime voice and video in a virtualized environment.

They made lots of announcements. Cisco Unified Communication manager is going to be the single control point for all the video devices. They are adding new telepresence and end points. They also introduced SocialMiner, which I am really excited about (read related UCStrategies articles: Social Media at Cisco Collaboration Summit, and Cisco Provides New Customer Collaboration Software). So, Nancy you can jump in if you want to talk about SocialMiner. But this is basically software that is going to let companies follow things on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and other public forums and blogs, so it can monitor posts and blogs and even status messages that people post of these. And then it's going to forward and route these to contact center agents or people within the organization so that they can get this information and then be able to respond to it in a way that makes the most sense. I am really excited about SocialMiner and I think it's going to...hopefully get people realizing that they need to be more on top of what's going on out in the Twitosphere and the social world.

Nancy Jamison: I am really excited about it, too; we got to see it before the conference and then during. But what I thought was really interesting is some of the data customers that they have and they had Zone Labs, the people who do the Zone Diet as one of their beta customers. What was sort of remarkable was that this isn't a big company, 70 people, and they had three people that were manually monitoring Twitter or Facebook, what have you, and they went and worked with Cisco and in 30 days they went from this curve that Cisco talks about - sort of awareness that social media is out there to really deploying and having a complete strategy. And they used SocialMiner to monitor everything. It was interesting because what they ended up doing was finding out what the key words for competitors and products that they market and stuff, and then proactively going out to help potential customers. So they weren't like marketing and shoving it down their throats - they were just responding to tweets about things like fish oil and other stuff and giving them information and then turning around turning those people into customers.

But the other thing that was kind of remarkable for a company their size and doing it at this speed is that they had three full-time people and ended up going down to one person half-time who ended up having to monitoring all the stuff using SocialMiner. So it was really a pretty remarkable testimonial that their president gave during the conference.

Don Van Doren: Let me talk a little bit about the VXI stuff that they are doing. What is really interesting, of course, is that Cisco is really combining the work that it has done in borderless network strategies and all this collaboration work, as well their virtual data center strategies-those are some of the pillars now that they are sort of touting on their website - they are really pushing hard on virtualization as a way to make a new way for companies to obviously get away from the thick client, PC issues and all the cumbersome matters about administration, security, and things of that nature. Obviously the challenge is that there is a large installed base that is working in other ways and so a lot of inertia to try and overcome. Cisco is doing it by really cobbling together, and that's a term I really shouldn't use...they've done a nice job of bringing together some of the existing capabilities of Quad, the unified personal communicator and the unified presence server, all of which can be combined with partner input from people like Citrix, Wyse Technology, I know VMware - they are using these products to help make this virtualized experience come to life. And not so subtly what they were showing is a Windows desktop running on a Cius system. I am not sure that would be my interface of choice, but the point is that they are clearly moving in this kind of a direction.

I think overall what is interesting is that we clearly see Cisco coming up with a direct attack on sort of the traditional desktop providers. Of course, Microsoft with their entries that Marty talked about with Lync, are moving directly into some of the telephony spaces and similarly some of the unified communication spaces and really from Lync's standpoint I think it's trying to redefine the whole communications experience. So my summary comment is, "Let the games begin." I think that is where we are starting to head in all of this.

Jon Arnold: I can echo on that, too, Don, especially, "Let the games begin." This idea of reinventing the experience of communication to me was the big thing here. They really are pushing the boundaries and we've talked about this a bit that you don't have instant references to UC, but they don't really talk about UC as a specific solution. It seems to be that it is a part of a bigger range of capabilities that they're bringing to the market and so much of it is video-based now. I think their move with Tandberg last year is really starting to pay off and the way that they have integrated WebEx into the experience and they talk about having all of these really wonderful all-screen capabilities. It really pushes the focus of communication away from a phone onto any form of a screen, especially if it's mobile and Cius and all these other forms that they have. I think what they are trying to say is that collaboration is very much a video-driven experience and that's the leading application. And it contrasts quite a bit with where Mitel is going and we all saw that with Freedom the previous week. And they are probably first to the virtualization table, with VMware and all those types of applications, but their vision works very well. But when you compare that to what Cisco is doing, I think Cisco is trying very hard as to say, to put a wedge between themselves and Microsoft and between them and all the other telephony vendors out there. And whether they can pull this off - I think that's the big question mark. We understand it, but I think this is going to take a lot of work for the other people who were at that conference - the channel partners and technology partners. If they can understand it, can they sell it, can their customers actually embrace it to use? Because this is a big investment and I think with Cisco it's a kind of all or nothing thing. And if you buy into their vision, I think you can get a lot of great results, but it's asking a lot and that's my biggest question for this whole thing, can they really make this big of a leap with their customer base? I think it's going to take some time and a lot of education from the channels to really buy into it. But they are showing them where the future is going and it's pretty interesting to watch.

Don Van Doren: I think you are right, Jon, that I would say that the two really important things from my perspective from both the Microsoft and Cisco announcements are these two issues. Number one: they've engaged their ecosystems in a way that simply hasn't been seen in this kind of space before. And I think that's absolutely crucial to this; it's a concept that we've been talking about of course for half a decade. And I think that it's very clear that that's the way forward and the way of the future.

The second thing obviously, is about what disruptive competition is all about and I think that it's very clear that both Microsoft and Cisco are embarking on those kinds of strategies. Your point Jon, about will they really be able to make this or not, I think is obviously an important question. But I think what history shows us in this whole area and Marty I am sure you will jump in with a comment about Mr. Christiansen...Dr. Christiansen...but I think that what this really shows is that as these new methods of approaching marketplaces emerge, what's going to happen is that we are redefining the space and redefining how people will be approaching it. And so the old models that we've had aren't the thing to compare it to. And I think that's the thing that people tend to lose sight of. They keep comparing it to old existing models, when in fact what we need to look at what is the use case, what are the business requirements, what are the things that will really drive this kind of adaptation of change?

Art Rosenberg: This is Art. I just wanted to add one other comment and that is that when you've got everything that you want and I gave it to you all for free, will you be able to use it in the way some people think? You can't talk to everybody at once. So you are going to have to manage your time and once you have that taken care of, now you can use all the technologies you want.

David Yedwab: I would like to jump in with a comment about something that we have discussed off and on for a while now and it's the importance of the end point and the device. Certainly prior to this launch, the Lync launch, Microsoft had really downplayed the importance of end points, but as Marty certainly spoke about earlier, end points was a big portion of the Lync launch. And certainly if we are going to be having video on everything, as Cisco is claiming and certainly the HD video announcement that HP made last week and video sort of played as two words into HP's partner is a small video player by the name of Video. The importance of end points and the devices that are being brought to the table be they fixed or mobile is going to be increasingly important and is still going to be a major portion of the end user's expense. The difference perhaps in history is those end points are no longer proprietary, being provided necessarily by the same vendor providing the platform and I think that's another change - dramatic change in the market that we're seeing.

Marty Parker: Good point, David, I agree with you. I think that the whole market may be suffering from a lack of imagination of what personal computing and communications devices are going to look like five years from now. I just think it's in a state of flux that is not yet stable. It hasn't finished its innovation cycles. I think that the devices - one thing I will say for sure is those end points will be computing devices, as well as communication devices. I think that the Blackberry started it and Apple just took it to a different level, besides, it's going to be a computing device and it's able to run applications and therefore, the communication is going to be in the context of the apps, in my opinion. I think the concept of a single client on those devices is probably not going to persist. The Apple application model being one example - where they will probably be making phone calls from applications, not making phone calls from a phone client, so to speak. So I think the devices will be much more wearable and I am not sure the video will be as pervasive as Cisco thinks, because it doesn't apply in every place, it's awkward to do video in a public place because of the privacy issues and it takes quite a bit more bandwidth, which the carriers are certainly going to charge for. So just a whole bunch of questions remain as to where the device goes. David, I think you are right on target, this is a big deal and it goes to Art's point as well.

Steve Leaden: This is Steve. I am seeing a couple of things out there. One being that with this trend toward video on all fronts, including the Cisco acquisition of Tandberg, and some of these latest announcements, and video being part of their core marketing strategy going forward, I really believe it's going to take hold and I will tell you why, because there are a couple of things going on. Meet Me Conference was just a one-off maybe five, six years ago; it's now mainstream today. Webinars are part of our culture now and YouTube and all of these other kinds of one-way streaming, technologies - video streaming technologies are now here and now really part of our consumer space. So now, how does it get into the B-to-B space? - that's really the first question.

I understand one of the customers was from the Zone, the nutrition company and they are looking at a B-to-C model relative to contact center and video, which I can definitely see that as a possibility. B-to-B I think is going to take a little bit longer to some of your points Marty, about the public venues and things along those lines. I wrote an article literally fifteen years ago all about videoconferencing coming and being mainstream and yet, we're still talking about it as early adoption stage even today. So I think a lot of this is being driven by two things; the adaptability of it and the pervasiveness of it going forward - A) what's the single price point on it, to some of your points right there, Marty; what's the bandwidth, what's the return on investment on it, what's the relative cost point on that end point device, and then finally relative to that too, what's the five-nines reliability model, which people have come to accept in the telephony space as a baseline? So outside of the mobility space, people expect that kind of five-nines model and how will that play into this video space? And Cisco being on the forefront there and pushing the envelope for video, again people are going to be - at least in the enterprise space - going to be comparing that to something that they don't have. So it's going to take a little while before it becomes the de facto standard for specifications and other kinds of launches enterprise users are looking at. But Cisco being a leader in the space and having vision, for sure, I think it will definitely take hold but I think a little bit longer than I think all of us - again just UC from a basic presence point of view has been very large in the consumer space and it's finally getting into the business space because of all of the processes that have to change to get it to adapt to the business.

David Yedwab: I just wanted to jump in quickly with one thing. Not attending either event in person last week, I did attend both of them via the web and I do want to say one thing that we really haven't really touched on is the HD video of Mr. Gates. There was an awful lot of pixelating and freezing watching it on the web. So bandwidth is another issue that we still need to be concerned about and until that gets resolved, ubiquitous video is really always going to be difficult for anybody.

Mary Parker: I agree with that David, this is Marty. I was in the room; Jim was in the room. I would say that his quality in the room was like 9/10, 8-9/10 on any video meeting I have ever attended. But Jim, you were going to say?

Jim Burton: Well, I was going to say that I think that and the folks at Microsoft even admit this, that they need Cisco to help deliver the bandwidth to provide good quality audio. Certainly, there are other vendors that can do that but Microsoft admits it. I thought that the quality of the video was not particularly good and particularly if you compare it to a higher end, higher quality conference room video telepresence as an example, it wasn't quite there. But if you look at how they delivered it and the cost of delivering it, it was extremely impressive because they were using just the internet to deliver that video.

Marty Parker: Jim I will adjust my comments, Marty again. Right--it wasn't a telepresence room, but it wasn't using 3T1's either. So you're right.

Jim Burton: Yeah, I don't have a particular comment it or concern about that. So does anybody else have anything before we wrap this one up for today? There was a lot of stuff going on last week and I think David your comment about the fact that you weren't necessarily present at either one, but you got the benefit because you could stay at home and watch the videos of these things and we know that they were videoing these things. They were really capturing the same things that Marty and I were looking at when we were there and I am sure Blair and others when they were at Cisco.

Art Rosenberg: Jim, I had one question that I wanted to ask Marty from his opening remarks. In terms of the emphasis that Microsoft was putting on - everything they were offering with their Lync announcement. To what extent were they including mobility as opposed to desktop? I always smell desktop every time they talk.

Marty Parker: The demos were being done from PCs on the podium, but they certainly emphasized the Lync mobile client. They emphasized the devices they were supporting with that. They made a point that they, in addition to Blackberry and Windows devices that they would have a full-fledged Apple iPhone client within a few months. It wasn't available day one, but it would be there in just a few months. So they are very committed to the mobile device. They had one reference to tablets but they also would make the point that a PC with Wi-Fi in it is a pretty mobile device these days. You have the same form factor as a tablet...just look at your new Apple computer, right, Jim?...its pretty slim.

Jim Burton: It's the (MacBook) Air, and it's running Microsoft software, by the way.

Nancy Jamison: I have one funny comment in that, you know Cisco lives and dies by video, but when you take their high quality video and you've got John Chambers up on this huge screen - it starts to look like a Tyrannosaurus rex he's so big. It's scary it's so clear.

Jim Burton: Somebody should tweet that. "Nancy thinks John Chambers looks like...a T. rex.

Nancy Jamison: Bigger than life.

Art Rosenberg: It's too clear.

Jim Burton: Well, I can tell that we've finished. Thank you all, I enjoyed it and look forward to talking to you all again next week. Have a happy Thanksgiving, take care.

 

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