Consumer Products and Enterprise UC

In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts discuss the role of consumer products and services in the world of unified communications, and how they are impacting enterprise UC.

The UC expert panel includes Jim Burton, Don Van Doren, Art Rosenberg, Lisa Pierce, Samantha Kane, Blair Pleasant, Marty Parker, Russell Bennett, Dave Michels, and John Bartlett.

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

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton and I'm here with the UCStrategies team as usual. Today we wanted to talk about the role of consumer products in the UC world. I think all of us can fully appreciate the impact that an iPhone, for example, has had on the business world. Many of us were delighted when the iPhone had Exchange capabilities built into it. We were delighted to use it even when Exchange wasn't available because of the extra value that it had. So if we go across the list of things that are out there in the consumer world...Facebook, Skype, Google...there are a lot devices and services out there that really add some value that we see working itself up. Don Van Doren has spent a lot of time looking in this space and I'm going to turn it over to him to give us his thoughts. Don...

Don Van Doren: Thanks, Jim, very much. I think one of the things that's an interesting discussion that's going on in the blogosphere is whether or not all this innovation from the consumer electronics side of things means that that's the only place where innovation occurs or that somehow this means that what's going on on the enterprise side just isn't very important or not really going anywhere. I think that's just foolish. The fact is that yes, we're going to get innovation from the consumer electronics side and I think it's wonderful that that's happening. Some of these innovative ideas, in fact, do and will work their way into the enterprise markets. It's very clear that these kinds of capabilities will inform future products that are being developed.

I know there's been some talk in some of the blogs that have gone on, for instance, about "...this means that what's going on in unified communications isn't really very relevant or very important or anything else." Well again, I just don't think that that's right. I think that we're clearly going to see some new ways that unified communications capabilities can be developed and delivered over time. But the fact that enterprises don't come up with some of the same kinds of innovations frankly is not surprising. There are all kinds of issues, such as, how do you make it secure; how do you make scalable? These kinds of capabilities are of much more concern at an enterprise level than they are in a consumer level. So, the fact is that we're not see these innovations immediately spring to use inside enterprises isn't terribly surprising. But over the long term, things that have merit, that will play out well within the corporate world, will in fact be adopted, and I think one great example is all the mobility that has happened. So stay tuned .

Jim Burton: Thanks Don. Art, I know this is an area near and dear to your heart. What are your thoughts?

Art Rosenberg: Exactly. Enterprise organizations that do business, they do business not with themselves or even just their partners, business partners which are different organizations. But everybody's after the customer who buys things or buys services or buys products. And dealing with the customer is very key and I've always maintained that UC is what the customer will ultimately be using, especially when they become mobile and have devices that are multi-modal. And that's what's starting to happen with the Smartphones. So all of a sudden everybody has to be able to communicate for business purposes no matter who they are, where they are, and they don't have to be part of the organization, which means that you can't control what device they're going to use. You just have to be open enough to be able to let them use a device and take advantage of the flexibility of UC. I just want to mention that as a starting point. You can't look backwards and say we just want to make things cost efficient for our own people inside an organization. You have to make things open for everyone that you do business with to be able to communicate any way they like. And that's the way I'd like to kick this off. How is what I call "Consumer UC" going to impact what enterprise UC is going to be like?

Jim Burton: Great, thanks Art. I'm sure there are others who have comments. Lisa, have you got any thoughts because we haven't heard from you for a couple of weeks.

Lisa Pierce: I think one of the issues with UC is that, I'm trying to think of an easy way to summarize this...It has such great benefit to so many types of transactions, whether that's totally intra-company or totally personal or some combination of federated, etc. that it can be incredibly hard for businesses to know how to start and what to do. So, sometimes I think putting the whole world in front of them could result in...I'll phrase it inertia, which is the last thing that those of us who work on UC want to see. So I think it's important that businesses number one, understand how it is that their businesses live in this world. How much of their communications are internal, how much are external in the marketing sense and with key suppliers and partners. And then try to develop strategies that fit all those environments. Frankly at this stage in the evolution of IP communications, I think many businesses may find that such a challenge that they end up using more managed and hosted services than they had originally intended. Thanks.

Jim Burton: Really good point.

Samantha Kane: I'd like to comment, Jim, it's Samantha. Recently I read a Harvard Business Review that talked exactly about this subject. And the message really was, don't try and exceed customers' expectations because they don't want it exceeded, they just want to get it right the first time. And by having to call so many touch points to get one thing resolved does not make a customer or consumer very happy. So the message was really remove obstacles, make it right the first time, and that's by using UC practically and its best methods. And they proved that the people that were doing that were reducing their repeat calls by 22 percent.

Art Rosenberg: Good point. I would like to suggest that one way the enterprise can start off is doing their own homework in terms of use cases. Forget the technology, what's the problem that's most important that could be resolved with new technology, and the ones that have the highest priority or easiest to do, whatever. You're right, don't confuse them. Here's all this stuff. Change it all? Nobody's going to do it. I used to say if I gave it all to you for free would you know what to do, and the answer's probably no.

Samantha Kane: Well to that point, Art, as part of this article they showed a case study where a financial organization actually just took one simple thing. They actually audited the number of "no's" this company found on their recordings and started looking at those analytics, which is part of UC and it really came down to how many legacy policies had been outmoded by regulatory changes or systems or processes. And so by capturing all of the "no's" this organization modified or eliminated 26 policies and it ended up saving them $1.2 million in a 12-month period.

Art Rosenberg: That's a good case study of how to go about it and it makes no difference what business you are, you have to do your own homework in terms of things like that.

Blair Pleasant: This is Blair. I want to turn it back to the impact of the consumer market on UC. One thing that drove me crazy a few years ago when the iPhone came out, all of a sudden visual voicemail was available and people were making a big deal about visual voicemail. Well we've had that for years with unified messaging. The people really didn't know about it outside of the enterprise or enterprises that had unified messaging. So with the iPhone, all of a sudden people knew about this new capability now and it became a really big deal. But some of the innovations actually did start within the enterprise.

But one thing that we're seeing that's starting outside that's going into the enterprise is social media, and that's really starting to take off inside of the enterprise. But again, what Don talked about earlier-we have to take into account some of the security, privacy and scalability issues. So yes, Facebook is great, and Twitter is terrific, and I'm on it all the time, but they're not appropriate for enterprise types of applications and capabilities. So that's why IBM, Cisco and so many of the enterprise and Web 2.0 companies are coming out with these capabilities that are appropriate for the enterprise. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation from companies that are taking some of the things that are out there in the consumer world but making it appropriate for the enterprise. Because we can't just use the same technologies and tools that are out there for consumers because we do have to think about security, privacy and scalability. But I think we're starting to see some really good innovations coming up in that area.

Art Rosenberg: Blair, I think that's a good point. I was just going to suggest that their first step is not try to do things themselves they never did before. They've got a lot to learn. Technology's still evolving and wouldn't it be the best way to do is learn before buy and go for a managed service from someone that they can trust. And are there such services available?

Lisa Pierce: That's where it gets interesting.

Art Rosenberg: Yeah.

Marty Parker: Hi, it's Marty Parker. Let me add a few thoughts here. Perhaps there's a different viewpoint, which is the viewpoint that both consumer and enterprise solutions can co-exist. It doesn't have be either/or. Let AOL, let Skype, and let others serve the consumer markets. Let Microsoft Xbox and Microsoft Kinect or Cisco ūmi, their new video for the home, also serve the consumer markets. But then, let Microsoft Lync and Office 365, the hosted version of that, in the cloud, let IBM SameTime and Lotus Live, the hosted version of that in the cloud, let Cisco Unified Personal Communicator and WebEx serve the enterprises with concerns for security, privacy, intellectual property, enterprise architecture and total cost of ownership. In other words, why not have products for consumers AND products for businesses? And the businesses can interface with the consumer products where there are advantages, such as by using Facebook or Twitter as interfaces to that segment of their consumer audience that likes that style. That's why we see call centers using those interfaces.

The boundaries may be fuzzy, but so what? It's been that way for years. This is not new. Enterprises with home office workers have used the residential telephone and internet services to connect those people. Call centers let customers call from any phone the customer wants to use, whether that's a land line or a cable VoIP phone, or a Skype phone, or cell phones. Businesses with less concern or less risk such as small local businesses may use the public services more readily, but large public or regulated companies concerned with intellectual property, information privacy and shareholder value or with regulations like Sarbanes/Oxley, HIPAA, FERPA and others, will stick with products that assure their compliance, and protect their interests, even at a higher cost. So why not have both? Why not let each community learn from the other? It's clear that Skype and others have learned the importance of encryption from the enterprise side; it's clear the enterprise side is learning about some of the, we'll call them "personal features," from the consumer products. This is fine. Let's keep going on that theme-there's no problem with it.

Russell Bennett: I have as different perspective on this. I contend that consumer UC preceded enterprise UC. The AOL, Yahoo, MSN Messenger and Skype services probably prompted a lot of the UC vendors to get into UC in the first place when they saw the potential and the power of these services. What has actually been lacking is enterprise UC starting to emerge, without the integration of Enterprise UC with the consumer UC trends. I know that, because I worked on it, that Microsoft tried very hard to get integration of AOL, Yahoo and MSN multimedia UC integrated with Lync. And that was a tough road to hoe for a couple of years. However, I do use Windows Live Messenger now for my business communications and I found out completely by accident, I'm not even sure that it's been announced, that multi-modal wideband communications is available between Lync and MSN Messenger. Like I say, I'm not sure it's been announced, but I tried it with a friend of mine the other week and we had an HD video call from his office to my home office and it worked just great. So I think that's something that's going to emerge fairly rapidly over the next year or so. Certainly Skype is moving in this direction anyways and Microsoft with the cloud and so on, it's all going to start to merge. I think they are very compelling reasons that have already mentioned for that to happen.

Dave Michels: This is Dave Michels. To Russell's point, a very interesting epiphany for me, as I've been using Skype more and more and I was watching the Microsoft Lync launch and watching some of the other vendors with their UC clients and the UC tools...It's amazing to me that Skype really is still pretty much the champion of UC client. And the capabilities that Microsoft was showing off and that Mitel shows off and Cisco shows off, they've all been in Skype for quite some time. And I'm looking at my Skype client and it's got wideband audio, it's got 10-user video conferencing, it's got 250-user chat rooms, it's got desktop video, it's got the point that Microsoft made being able to escalate a conversation from IM to voice to video and back again. It's got a conversation history tab like Microsoft was showing. It's got desktop sharing all built into the client and it's been there for years and it's interesting that a lot of people have dismissed Skype as a free consumer service, but it's really effectively what every major enterprise UC vendor is actually striving for in a slightly different variation. But the functionality is really all there.

Don Van Doren: Dave, this is Don and I'd just like to offer one caution for what you're talking about and what Russell just mentioned. It's absolutely true that these kinds of capabilities are introducing in a very interesting way to the consumer market and hence into the enterprise market what some of these capabilities can be. But I point out that these are all what we call UC-U capabilities. That is they're focused on sort of the user productivity side of things...how does the individual user improve his or her communications with others? That's fine and there certainly are some good reasons to do that and a lot of good benefits. But I think as we've all seen a lot of times where the real benefit of these kinds of UC implementations comes, is when we get into the UC-B side. That is, how do we take these kinds of interactions that are now capable and then turn them into integrated - into a business process. That's our definition and that's a way that it really...where we really see a lot of the benefits emerging. So nothing wrong with this, but my concern slightly is that we'll stop there...that we'll see these as sort of great ways to enhance our own ability to communicate with other people as we do in the consumer marketplace. But we'll never get to the point or it will be more difficult even to get to the point of how do we make these things into changing business processes by integrating communications more effectively.

Art Rosenberg: Don this Art. I agree with you, and that's why I was suggesting that maybe step one to get from UC-U to UC-B is with managed services.

Samantha Kane: Art, are you talking about a try-and-buy-type hosted service?

Art Rosenberg: Right. In other words, there's a lot of integration issues and different tools, whatever it is you don't have now, but if things are working on the UC-U side, now we say, "so how do we get the benefit of UC-B as part of this CEBP kind of integration and things like this that nobody's done?" And so who are experts that'll help you do it or try it and prove that it does have a benefit? Because until you do it, you don't really know, do you?

Russell Bennett: There are lots of benefits out there, Art. We're clearly seeing the case studies and it is being done and frankly a lot of the work that many of us on this call are involved is to help companies with exactly those kinds of issues.

Art Rosenberg: I know you're doing it, but I'm just saying would it be easier especially when you get down to the small market...the SMB market or whoever...that you need the help of managed services.

Marty Parker: Dave and Russell make some great points, which essentially say that innovation can come from any direction. Skype has been very innovative; same with AOL Instant Messaging, Facebook, and Twitter. The key question is whether those consumer-facing companies are willing to take on the effort required to make their innovations conform to the business requirements that we discussed previously.

So far the answer is no, they have an enterprise focus on the consumer, or on the advertising value of their solutions. Most of these companies, and their investors, just hope that these innovative companies will be bought by enterprise-facing producers, who will make the costly investments to adapt the solutions to the enterprise.

The purchase of Skype by eBay, with a later spinout to Silverlake Partners, for quite a bit less money, by the way, or the purchase of Jabber by Cisco, would be examples of this kind of behavior. I think those are fine, and meanwhile, the enterprise-facing companies that have a significant position in the enterprise architectures, Cisco, and Microsoft, and IBM and some of the PBX companies, some of the database companies such as Oracle, are going to continue to advance their products in the way that their customers feel is best. So again, as I said earlier, both can exist, let's watch them both, let's value the innovations on both, and not have to do an either/or argument.

Jim Burton: John, there was something you wanted to say.

John Bartlett: I see this a lot in the video conferencing space because specifically in video conferencing there's a new set of skills that are needed to understand the equipment, to understand the integration between room-based systems and telepresence systems and desktop systems and scheduling and using bridges and so on. I am always recommending to my customers that they consider using those managed services because there's a set of folks there who do this day in and day out and can get them through the intricacies of bringing up that kind of an environment and making it work. This is a high visibility application. You go put in big telepresence systems into an office or even room-based systems, and the execs want to use them and they expect them to work right. So I'm always encouraging those folks to use the managed service providers because they have those skills. And if they're a big enough enterprise that they want to bring that in-house then think about bringing it in-house later, after you get it running, after you understand what the rules are, after you understand what the skill sets are and then migrate back in the pieces that make sense for you to migrate back, but don't start that way.

Art Rosenberg: Exactly.

Jim Burton: Any other comment before we close out today's podcast?

Samantha Kane: I just want to wish Art a Happy Birthday.

Art Rosenberg: Thank you.

Jim Burton: I think we're all in support of that. Art, Happy Birthday.

Art Rosenberg: Thank you very much.

Jim Burton: Thank you, everybody. Look forward to next week's podcast. We're going to be trying something new. We're going to be trying to do this in broadband so we can have a little bit better audio quality for those of you who might have had trouble from time-to-time listening to some of these that are in narrow band. So look forward to next week's podcast. Talk to you all later. Bye.