UCStrategies Experts Review UC Summit 2011

In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts discuss UC Summit 2011, held March 27-30 at Estancia La Jolla Resort & Spa in La Jolla, CA. Covering unified communications applications, technologies, trends, and challenges, the UC Summit offers attendees the opportunity to learn actionable best practices, strategies and tactics from leading vendors, UC pioneers, and thought leaders. Keynotes, workshops, private focus sessions, and panel and roundtable discussions offer attendees countless options to learn, with plenty of networking opportunities. A key goal is to accelerate the adoption of unified communications.

The expert panel includes Jim Burton, Michael Finneran, Russell Bennett, Blair Pleasant, Art Rosenberg, Don Van Doren, and Dave Michels.

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I am joined with the UCStrategies team, as usual. Today we are going to talk about the UC Summit, which was last week and quite a number of us attended. I personally thought it was the best UC Summit we've had to date. I know that the platinum sponsors all gave us great thanks afterwards, as did the other sponsors, of course. And we will be redoing the Summit again next year on May 6, same place, at the Estancia La Jolla Resort & Spa in La Jolla, California. We had quite a turnout and a very, very active discussion. Michael Finneran recently wrote an article on it (The UC Summit Thrills Again) and I think it would be appropriate to turn it over to Michael, so he can give us his thoughts, because he was introducing most of the sessions. Michael?

Michael Finneran: Jim, I agree wholeheartedly. The Summit is unique, given the size of the event, the ability for everyone to meet with everyone else, and I can't think of a single shortcoming. The keynotes were excellent. The focus group sessions were probably even better. That is where small groups of either consultants or systems integrators got together with a vendor and usually it was a short presentation and a long discussion following that. One of the best sessions was a general session we had with systems integrators, talking about problems in particular converting from selling a box to selling a cloud-based service and honest to goodness we finished the session out - there was a break going on - nobody left the room. The conversation must have gone on for another 15 minutes. So I think really the neat thing about the Summit, outside of the quality of the people that show up, is just the willingness to talk openly and to exchange ideas. And it was indeed, a real event. Russell?

Russell Bennett: Thanks Michael. It was my first time at the Summit. I had a really great time and it's a wonderful venue and it was very well organized. I particularly enjoyed hearing the keynotes from all the major players in the UC space. They all had something very interesting and very different to say from their usual pitches. I also enjoyed the breakouts, which were excellent opportunities to engage in a slightly more intimate level with people on various different topics. The main thing that I enjoyed about the Summit was meeting with the resellers and the VARs and the systems integrations. This is an audience that I hadn't really had much of an opportunity to meet before in my career, having been in product development. But these people are undergoing a transformation in their industry, as the communications industry is changing above them and they have to find new partners and new ways to add value to their customers. And a lot of their customers are small and medium-sized businesses. And many of these businesses are probably looking at not deploying their own CTE technology and are probably considering going to the cloud. So the resellers are faced with quite a challenge in figuring out how they are going to add value here. But there is plenty to do in UC as everybody knows, and although the industry will be transformed, it will emerge stronger and better than it was before. Blair?

Blair Pleasant: I agree that the cloud is definitely an issue that came up a lot and it is certainly a concern for a lot of these resellers - how are they going to survive in light of cloud services - is it going to be something that they can resell or is it going to be competition to them? So that was one issue that came up a lot. Also, Microsoft Lync, one of the questions asked during a breakout with the solutions integrators was what is one of your biggest concerns, and people immediately said, Lync, and how they are going to either compete with Lync or be able to sell it and how it's going to work with the products that they are also currently selling and how Lync is going to fit into all that. So that was a big issue that came up a lot.

Also, a lot of them were talking, not so much in the sessions, but to me privately, about social software and how that is going to play a role and what they need to do to start thinking about social networking and bringing that into their product portfolio - either figuring out how to sell it or what they should be thinking about in terms of getting into that area. So as everyone said, there was great discussion, great dialogue-in the sessions, outside of the sessions, and I think everyone really got a lot out of it; I know I did. And it really helps to have some people there sharing their experiences and being open-"here's what we are finding with what works," and really sharing their best practices, which was great to see.

Jim Burton: Great, thanks Blair. Well, I think that one of the interesting things about it and one of the reasons we do the UC Summit is to help both the consultants and the reseller community understand the changes that are going on in our marketplace. And I think while some of them were a little bit surprised, I think a lot of them are so busy just taking care of business day-to-day that it was a great opportunity for them to have a chance to understand the changes that we are seeing in our market and in our industry. So I think that the kind of feedback that we are getting from the polls that people have taken after the event are telling us exactly that - the value that they have received from that and we're hoping that we will have a turnout next year similar to what we've had. We have room to add a couple more, and we are going to expand it. So we have an opportunity on our site for people who did not attend this year, to sign up and request an invitation for next year. I know it's very early, because it is even over a year from that time, but as we all know time goes by pretty quickly, and we want to make sure that we get in front of this year, so that we can have the right combination of people there for next year.

We do have a couple of other UC experts online who may have some other comments from their observations from afar about the Summit. Art, you always have some wisdom for us.

Art Rosenberg: I have a question, actually, because I don't know to what extent it was covered. But to what extent was there interest, concern, or whatever you want to call it in mobile apps? Because that seems to be the big gateway that is opening up as far as business process applications and end users; whether they are consumers or within an organization, it makes no difference. It's the smartphones that are going to be taking over, rather than the old telephony game.

Jim Burton: Well I will start with that and turn it over to Michael, since that's his area. But many of the keynote speakers spent some time talking about the mobility portions of their offerings. They all discussed the importance of it. They all discussed how they are working on various components and integrating it into their overall solutions. So Michael, let me turn it over to you with maybe more specifics.

Michael Finneran: Yeah, it certainly did come up, both in my discussions with the various vendors and also Marty Parker, in his Where is the Money session. He talked about a number of successful applications in using UC technologies and mobility was featured in a number of those. Parts of it - the mobile clients-I still think they need a little bit of work, but I am pretty encouraged that we are going to see some good movement this year.

Art Rosenberg: But about this whole concept of the mobile apps? That's not quite the same as saying, well I've got a client, but we have proactive business processes, proactively sending information, notifying, and so on - especially healthcare and financial applications and so on - that's where it's not just a passive thing. There are thousands of these apps -

Don Van Doren: Let me just amplify that - some of the things we're seeing is that there is really an opportunity such as the app stores, to bypass sort of the traditional website approach to taking these opportunities and really giving a much direct access to some of the applications that are out there. We think that can be a pretty important concept.

Art Rosenberg: Because we are looking at not just servicing just people within an organization, or just business partners, but consumers in general. I mean that's the whole world, so the opportunity is huge and I am just wondering to what extent people understand that and are migrating to that kind of positioning to take advantage of, and exploiting UC in that way, because of the device that they now have. It's not the old telephone any more.

Jim Burton: Art, I think if you extend beyond just the device we think of as a cell phone and look at how tablets are starting to come in and play - we had several vendors talk very specifically about their applications, specifically Avaya and Cisco, talk about their tablet offerings. And not only the tablet offerings that they have of their own, but how are they going to take those applications and put them on other devices. So it is not just their tablet, it would be others and they are looking at a broad range of applications that integrate back into unified communications types of components for offerings.

Art Rosenberg: Right, and this is where every individual end user has their own combination of applications they need, and nobody controls that except the end user.

Don Van Doren: That's very good, Jim, and I am delighted to hear that there was some emphasis on that, because I think the UC community in general has been a little slow on the uptake on some of this and just to amplify some of what Art is saying, I think this is going to be a very important thing going forward and it will be interesting to see how the vendors respond. It's really good that that came up as some of the issues during the Summit.

Art Rosenberg: I wasn't looking for answers, but at least a direction that people were starting to focus on.

Jim Burton: I think the important thing is that they are all talking about things that are around the corner. They are not talking about things that they have done historically and that is not to say that they don't have discussions about that, but a lot of what they are trying to let people know is where this market is headed and how the consultants and the resellers can participate in the changes that are taking place.

Art Rosenberg: Oh absolutely.

Jim Burton: I was very pleased with the approach that all the vendors took from the gateways to these session border controllers, to the messaging companies, all the way up to the big companies providing a broad platform for people to build on.

Art Rosenberg: Right, that's good.

Dave Michels: This was my second UC Summit. I think it's a pretty interesting conference, largely because of the amount of time that you have just to have casual networking opportunities. There's formal programming and sessions that generally ends around 4 or 5 p.m., and then literally for the rest of the evening, all the way until about 10, there's nothing but hospitality suites and meals, and it's a wonderful opportunity to just talk to people in the industry. I would actually suggest maybe we have a little more structure next year, with maybe some "birds of a feather" type of conversations, or something to stimulate more informal conversations. But all in all, it was a very good event.

I have a couple of observations. One is, there seems to be a gap; a gap between the vendors and the resellers that was a little bigger than I had previously understood. It came up in a couple of different ways. One way is a lot of the vendors there were doing their best to attract resellers to sell their products. And they always focus on their brand, and their speeds and feeds, their product capabilities, but it was pretty clear in the panel that I ran what the resellers are really looking for. It's about the relationship. And these resellers aren't going to just change brands based on some speeds and feeds; or specifications, it's really about the relationship. And none of the vendors really talked about this. I'm talking about things like their channel programs, their onboarding programs, how they deal with channel conflict, the distributors that they're using, their lead generation programs, their pricing programs, their training requirements; that kind of stuff was addressed in question and answer only, instead of actually part of their presentations.

Another big area of gap was interoperability, which of course was no surprise, except that some of the vendors I talked to completely dismissed it. We saw it at Enterprise Connect, we saw it at UC Summit; we keep on hearing it over and over that interoperability is a problem, that there is no vendor that has a complete UC solution on the market. And the gap that really surprised me is one of the conversations I had with one of the larger vendors at the event, that insisted that interoperability wasn't really a big problem. And it just keeps on coming up over and over and over that these vendors need to work closer together in order to solve this problem.

Another area, mobility, Art brought that up earlier. In David Jantz's presentation from NEC, he had a slide that said, "mobility changes everything." And I later questioned him on that, and I asked him, "Really? Does it change everything, or did it change everything?" And he agreed that it did change everything. So the question is, now that it is changed, what do we do about it? There doesn't seem to be a good opportunity or a good channel play to be selling smartphones. So what do these traditional UC resellers do? There was a lot of talk about FMC solutions, there was more talk about selling applications, but to Art's point, customizing applications and mobilizing existing applications really didn't come up a whole lot because we didn't have a development crowd here. I think that might be an interesting note or discussion as to whether we want to invite more software developers to a conference like this so that they better understand the opportunities, particularly around verticals-it could be good.

I enjoyed all the keynotes very much. I was a little disappointed that the keynotes from Avaya and Microsoft, the presenters, left right away, but their staff was around for questions. I would also like to see maybe next year we have more smaller VARs. We had a lot of a lot of larger VARs at the conference, but the smaller VARs are able to move more quickly, and are able to change vendors more easily, and because the smaller VARs, the people that would come, are generally touching so many parts of their business, from every customer, to their billing, to all their vendor relationship issues, to their distributor relationships, I think it would really add a lot to the conversation around some smaller VARs at the conference. So with that, I'm very much looking forward to next year's event as well.

Jim Burton: Well thank you everybody. It was a good Summit. I want to thank you all for participating in today's Podcast and look forward to talking to you all next week.