UCStrategies Discussion: The Moose on the Table (Email and UC)

In this Industry Buzz podcast, the UCStrategies Experts discuss a recent article on UCStrategies.com by Marty Parker, entitled Email and UC: The Moose on the Table. Don Van Doren moderates the podcast, and is joined by UC Experts Marty Parker, Kevin Kieller, Dave Michels, Blair Pleasant, Phil Edholm, Jim Burton, and Art Rosenberg.

Also on UCStrategies.com on this topic:

• Email and UC: The Moose on the Table, by Marty Parker

Don Van Doren: Hi, this is Don Van Doren, and I am with a number of the UCStrategies Experts for today's podcast. Marty Parker wrote an article at the beginning of October here at the UCStrategies.com entitled "Email and UC: The Moose on the Table." The phrase "moose on the table," of course, is slang for a topic or an issue that hasn't really been fully addressed and, may be something that nobody wants to address.

Marty references the Gartner Magic Quadrant for unified communications that was released in mid-September. In that article, Gartner calls email an "indispensable business tool," and lists email as one of the six criteria for inclusion in the Magic Quadrant. But then the Magic Quadrant also includes vendors that don't have any email capabilities of their own, while at the same time downgrading email vendors who lack some telephony functionality.

The issue goes to whether the sorts of plug-in arrangements or other solutions that are being offered by different vendors are adequate, and adequate to meet some of Gartner's criteria. So the real question is, is this a moose on the table, or how important are email client capabilities as an indicator of unified communications robustness? And finally, what is the role of email; how does that fit in? Perhaps a deeper question for enterprises that are planning their future infrastructures: what functionalities are important foundational elements in your UC platform, and where does email fit into all of this?

We're going to have a discussion of this today; I'm going to start with Marty, the article's author, and then ask others of the UC Expert team to weigh in with their views. Marty?

Marty Parker: Great, Don, thanks for setting the stage. Yes, my questioning about the moose did come from the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It also comes from an observation that many of our Unicomm Consulting clients actually look at their email infrastructure as less volatile and they're less willing to change it than their telephony environment. They have so much attached to the email environment, whether it's in workflows that are built around email, email as the dominant form of communication, or email as part of the images available on their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Remember, the BlackBerry was putting mobile email out there from the early 2000s, so the first smart phone was a mobile email client. This kind of thing is out there happening and people are saying, "Well that's how we communicate, and what I need to do is, if I need voice I go to my BlackBerry and I find a name and click on it, and the BlackBerry dials it for me." Or, "I see a name in an email, I click on it, and the BlackBerry dials it for me." Now, of course, that is going to be an Apple and an Android and many other products, but that's how it all started.

So the question begins to be, well, which end of this do you look at? Do you look at voice as the driver of UC, or do you look at email as the driver of UC? In the article, I put a few numbers up there, in terms of daily global numbers, and there appear to be 5.4 or 6 billion corporate telephone calls over the PSTN and cellular networks, but there appear to be about 83 billion corporate email messages and about 26 billion instant messages. We also find that the people who are the leaders in instant messaging, and they're being challenged, of course, by the other players in the UC community, but those that have far more licensing in the market are those that also have the email clients. So the question in my mind is whether the email client... which everybody uses and are looking at more time of the day than they look at their telephone and probably more time of the day than they look at their soft phone... should the email client be the anchor image or anchor client for unified communication?

Now I also argue that that may be an antiquated view. Even though it's so dominant, it turns out that we are moving more and more towards collaborative workspaces and social software for business. Maybe those are the new clients for unified communication. But this whole issue of the moose may explain why some companies are slow to deploy the UC soft phone-based client, Avaya OneX, Cisco Jabber, and so on and so forth in the industry, when they feel they already have a client on the desktop that is just fine for UC: email, directory, calendar, click-to-instant message, oh, and click to call. I would like my counterparts here, the other UCStrategies experts, to pile on. You can either chase the moose out of the room or tell me what you think the moose should be doing in the room. Let's have a debate. Thanks.

Don Van Doren: Thanks, Marty. I think that's a great invitation. Kevin Kieller, you have some views on this. How do you see all of this, especially some of the issues with the plug-in?

Kevin Kieller: Thank you very much, Don, and thank you very much, Marty. Subsequent to Marty's article, because time has passed, I actually wrote an article for UCStrategies called, "Voice is Not the Path to UC" because Marty got me thinking. Really, it builds on - so I am going to agree with Marty - that it isn't so much that telephony should be the center base to build UC off of. It really is email, or more specifically, what's at the core of email, I am going to argue, is really the centralized directory. For lots of mid and large organizations, that's Active Directory.

I think if we harken back to the old days, maybe of watching Mad Men, or whatever, people had a Rolodex and they had a black book that had specific contacts in it, and then they would use the telephone, but really they were starting with... the powerful people had a powerful Rolodex, and that's your contacts. Now that electronically has very much moved in to be your directory. And that directory is surfaced most often into either your email client or your instant messaging client, and the organizations that have those two, we are seeing those merge, as well.

The email client, I think it is important to understand, it's really not just doing email anymore. It really is the view into the organization, and a lot of these email clients provide the organizational structure and contact information. When you pick a contact that is in Active Directory, it also, through social connectors, goes out and finds information from LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. Also, your email client increasingly is what presents and allows playing of voice mail, both on your PC and also on your mobile devices. Then the email client is also the repository, in many cases, for the conversation history, even in terms of your instant messaging.

So we're seeing the email client for many vendors is becoming that center point. Email client also controls workflow rules; you can create some complicated email and voice mail workflow rules. You're not doing that on your telephony device or your soft phone, you are doing that in your email client. And when you are setting up meetings, these collaborative meetings which drive many of the decision-making processes inside organizations, you're in your email client, going to your calendar, looking at the availability of the people inside your organization and externally to schedule that meeting.

And then lastly, the email client has also become the window into persistent project-based information. So a lot of times your email client, such as Outlook with Exchange, can connect into public folders, which has all the shared documents that you may collaborate on, either through instant messaging, through your email, through the meeting that you have scheduled in your email client. And then, in some respects, when worst comes to worst, and if you have to, as Marty says, you're in the email client, you click on the person's name, and you call them, and finally now we're into the telephony system.

But certainly, for many years I think we've seen the movement towards the email client built on the directory of people inside your organization as more the core basis to build a successful UC solution off of. So, definitely there is a moose on the table, an elephant in the room, and maybe some other zoo animals, as well. With that, back to you, Don.

Don Van Doren: Thanks very much, Kevin. Okay, well, I think that is great. Dave Michels, you have some thoughts on this whole area, too.

Dave Michels: Thanks, Don. I always think about the old AOL "You've got mail!" greeting. Who doesn't have mail? And I guess that's the problem. It really is something that has become such a burden because it's so frequently abused, I feel. I listen to a lot of organizations and how they are embracing social media and trying to reduce their email with social media... and I do not mean to put down social media, I think social media is fine. But I think that the incentive to get away from email is misplaced and there is a lot of opportunity in just learning how to manage email. It's something that none of us were taught in school, and is something that we are all assumed to know in an organization. There is very little effort going into it. But most of us are using email as our file cabinet, as our to-do list, and it's not designed for those things. Things get lost, and a lot of us use it for CCYA, or CC as in carbon copy, and then CYA. That's creating such an incredible amount of email that it's killing us.

I think the first opportunity is just reexamining how we use email, and this is a cultural thing that's hard to change. I have thought about what if your email system showed, like in Facebook type of information, every email you got from somebody. If I got an email from Don, it would have these little scores right next to his name that said how many emails he sent out with a "to:" and how many he sent out with a "CC:" or something like that. If these types of things became visible, how they might impact behavior. So many people write rules in their email inbox to completely discard anything that is just a CC, but what's that really accomplishing, because people think that the message is getting out. I just see there is a lot of opportunity in the way we use email. That, to me, is one of the big parts of the moose on the table, is that it's a broken system and so we are looking to replace it as opposed to fixing the system. I think there is an opportunity to fix the system.

The other part of email that's interesting to me is that it is no longer just email. The enterprise email solutions really make a big deal about the contacts and the calendaring, and Outlook and Notes both do this, and I think that these are complex applications that are critical to communications. Now it was one thing when voice mail moved to unified messaging, every UC vendor out there or telecom vendor or PBX vendor at the time was embracing integration with Exchange, and that seemed to work pretty well. Now that Microsoft has become a legitimate competitor in that space, it really is the moose in the room...or on the table...or whatever the phrase is. It really is. Because now you have this strange form of coopetition forming where everyone... I think Cisco is in a really interesting situation because Cisco really pushes Microsoft infrastructure, Active Directory and Exchange and Office, but yet they really want nothing to do with Lync. This is true with most of the UC competitors - I think Cisco has a little bit more of it than others - but now we have this real interesting situation where we have this central part of the UC strategy is from a competitor.

So, one, it really boosts Microsoft's offering and Lync becomes a very integrated solution, but it's also really breaking a lot of others. A lot of the vendors will integrate with Lync in one level, but they don't talk about it unless you bring up Lync. They will not mention that; it's kind of a secret. It's just a very strange situation.

I'm not sure how something that is so critical as email became such a duopoly. At one level, it seems so easy to outsource email or get email from anybody, but because it's tied into our calendaring and because it's tied into our contacts, it has become a mission critical application, and it's become a duopoly of just these two vendors. The most frustrating part about that is that the email part of it isn't the issue. The email part works fine.

Calendaring is what's really hard to separate out, and the contacts, and the global directory is really hard to separate out. I'm still confused why Microsoft even has Lync as a separate client. I have often thought that it should be integrated in with Outlook because you already have your contacts there and you already have your email messages there, so you.. .They always talk about going from an instant message to a voice conversation to a video. I don't understand why you cannot go from an email to an instant message - well, you can, multiple clients - but email to an instant message to a voice conversation to a video. I have never understood why they made a separate client like that. But that is kind of a separate point.

Anyway, I think what is really frustrating about that whole thing, though, is the calendaring, itself, is broken. I just wrote a post about this, that trying to find a time, select a free busy time - intraorganizationally - is not something we can do. All these new UC applications that are really promoting, "let's do conferencing," "let's do video conferencing..." I have a video conferencing system here at my office. I can now invite you as an external person with a link, but I have to call you first to figure out a time to do this, because, I can send you an appointment but all you could do is accept it or reject it. But to actually find at time, negotiate a time, that's not something that our systems do yet, so the calendaring, to me, is what's really broken. Not as much the email.

As a final point, I think it's a shame that Cisco pulled out of email. They had gotten into email about a year or year and a half ago with WebEx, and then they cancelled that program. I think they could have made a dent with that. But we have a duopoly in the enterprise space, and it doesn't seem to be changing, and I think it actually is complicating the UC competition/competitive environment. So my first advice, I guess, is to focus on how to use email better and then, secondly, really understand how these different vendors integrate with a solution. Because unless you go with Lync, you're going to have a multi-vendor solution involving your unified communications. IBM's solution does not have the voice component. So, those are my thoughts. Thank you, Don.

Don Van Doren: Thanks, Dave, very much. I think you pointed out a lot of the complexities now that are really surrounding this and how email is just so integrally integrated into so many other different functions and some of the implications of that.

Blair Pleasant, what do you have to offer here?

Blair Pleasant: Thanks, Don. I think we really need to think about the tool that we live in as being the core of our UC solution. Right now, I currently live in my email box, but more and more people are moving toward their social software tool, especially younger generation workers. Whenever I send an email to my kids, who are young adults, I have to send them an IM to say, "check your email," because they're really not in their email boxes very much. I think more and more we are going to be seeing our social software tool as the real core, and that is where we are going to be seeing unified communications tied into.

That was one thing... my biggest complaint about Cisco when they first came out with Quad, which is now WebEx Social, is that it didn't tie in with email, and to me that was a big mistake, or a big loss, which obviously they tried to work around but were not able to. But I really think that the social software interface with the activity feeds, the contacts... that's going to be the new core for unified communications.

People who I talk to that have social software are really only using email these days for external communications, but all of their internal communications are through social software. So we're seeing more and more email as just being used for those that you really cannot interact with through social. I think in Marty's numbers, if he does these again in a few months or next year, we are going to see a big change, and email really is going down. Everyone I talk to is sending fewer and fewer emails, and a lot of it is moving to social.

Even with the hurricane that we are experiencing this week, I haven't sent out any emails to people to find out, "how are you doing?" It has all been communicating through social networks and finding out the status of people and then if we need to communicate, being able to send an IM or direct message from that. We cannot do click-to-call right now from, say, Facebook or Twitter, or some of those things, but I do think in the near future we will be able to, and that is really where we are going to be seeing UC utilized the most.

Marty Parker: I think that's great, Blair; let me jump in and just say absolutely, and I think those numbers are trending, and I agree, email volumes are trending down because of social, because of instant messaging, and also because in some organizations the application becomes the client. If you are using Salesforce.com or Siebel Sales or Siebel Service or Microsoft Dynamics, you don't see an email client. Your email can be delivered to you in the context of that environment. You don't see instant messaging separately. You don't even see social separately. I mean, your posts go back and forth within that environment. That is part of why Salesforce.com added Chatter, I think.

I think the only thing missing in the social network model is, it's not clear to me, maybe it's possible, how I do inter-domain addressing. If I could send an email... I guess I can if I work at it... I can log into LinkedIn and send an email to someone who is not on LinkedIn, but LinkedIn positions that as, "Well, please join so you can read your email." I think the social network guys have to be a little bit less possessive to really open up that environment and wipe email off the face of the earth. But for now, I think email is going to coexist with those guys. I totally agree with you, though, Blair. I thought you said it beautifully when your primary UC environment should be the client you spend the most time with. That's a great way to say it. Back to you, Don. Thanks.

Don Van Doren: Good point, Marty. Phil Edholm - you had some thoughts about whether email would just be sort of a commodity to be integrated, or part of a more complex system. What do you think?

Phil Edholm: This is a very complex discussion. Let me kind of step back a moment. Some of you know that I was with Nortel many years ago. In 2006 at Nortel we actually went through a very intense, I will call it for lack of a better word, "self-examination." One of the conclusions we came to was that you could actually draw three "circles" on a triangle of the three elements of the enterprise environment, technology environment, for users.

At the bottom left you have voice communications. On the bottom right you have the data network infrastructure. On the top you have business applications. What we saw was that from 2000 to 2005, voice communications and the data network through voice-over-IP had converged. What we began to look at was that we felt that the next convergence was going to be between that network and converged voice and the business applications.

In the business application sense, there really are two different kinds of business applications. There are, to call for a lack of a better word, "personal business applications" and back end or business process applications. What we realized was that the key, when that convergence happened, on the personal side, was your personal business process flow.

What is interesting is, we have kind of danced around this here, but in fact, it's not email that is really interesting. Email is, in fact, a commodity. You can get email for free from Google and Microsoft and Yahoo and other folks. Email, in and of itself, is not a terribly valuable thing. But in the enterprise, the personal workflow is actually what's really important.

For knowledge workers, the people who control their own time, their own personal workflow... and most of the people who listen to this podcast are knowledge workers. By the way, you are the minority of people in most companies. In most companies, no more than 30% of the employees are actually knowledge workers. If you are in a consulting company it is much higher, obviously, or high tech development. But a manufacturing company, a bank, a transportation company... the vast majority of the employees in those companies are information or service workers who don't manage their own time.

But the workflow, which is managed by a combination of calendaring and messaging, is now really where communication starts from. Because what UC is doing in that space is changing the initiation of communication from being a separate event - "I need to call Bob" - to "I got an email from Bob," or "I have a calendar event with Bob," and that causes the communication to happen. Because that system understands who Bob is and how to reach Bob, instead of it becoming a separate event of dialing a number and having to know Bob's number, it actually becomes a mouse click out of that specific application. I think that's what has created what is, in fact, the real "moose on the table," which is that in the world of knowledge workers, he who controls the personal business work process actually is driving how communication happens.

Obviously, when Nortel then partnered with Microsoft, that was because of the recognition that Microsoft had 60 percent and a growing percentage of that tool on knowledge worker's desks. It is higher today; they've actually grown in market share. Getting users to look separately and outside of that to manage communications was going to be hard. They were going to use that there. Obviously, what Quad was intended to do, from a Cisco perspective, was to change the paradigm. If you remember when Quad was introduced, it was "Quad was where you start and end your day." That really is the interesting thing. When you walk into the office in the morning, what is the thing you do first to define how your day is going to work? For most users it's Outlook.

So I think the question that the moose on the table really brings is, email itself is a commodity, and I don't think it really drives UC. But this moose on the table of your personal workflow and how you manage it, especially as a knowledge worker, is where the real collaboration, personal collaboration side of UC applies, is a huge moose on the table.

I think the real question that is going to come out of this is, will there be changes in the future that will change the way this is done? I think Dave brought up a very interesting point. In fact, if we had a more open calendaring methodology that was more a way of federating calendars wherever they were - not federating email and not federating UC, all of a sudden, all I need to know is where to go to do the communication. With the advent of new technologies that allow me to communicate directly on a system, whether it's through SIP or WebRTC or any of those technologies, all of a sudden I need that pointer that says, "At this point in time you need to do this." The rest of my communication is really driven, predominantly, by messages which can come anywhere, and how they tie to my contact list, which is really an abstraction of my own personal directory and names I have gotten again through the calendaring.

So I think Dave brought up this very interesting point that, as an industry, if we could create a general and open calendaring exchange system - not to use the Exchange from Microsoft but more federation - it probably would solve a significant part of this problem without having to make anything else really be different. I think it's not email that's the issue; it's this personal workflow. With that, I will throw it back over, Don. I think it is a very interesting question and obviously is going to really constrain the success of the UC players that do not have a workflow solution that they own for knowledge workers.

Jim Burton: Don, this is Jim. I would like to step in if I could.

Don Van Doren: Sure.

Jim Burton: I think, Phil, you're really onto something. Having observed the changes that we all have gone through over the last number of years with more things to do in our lives and opening ourselves up to people being able to reach us 24/7 on any device that happens to be in front of us, has created a very, very difficult situation for all of us.

If you look back at how people used to manage calendars, events, and, as you mentioned, Phil, workflow, it was really assistants that helped the executives and many of the people in the past generations where there were administrative assistants - we called them secretaries back then. They were the people who kind of filtered things and made life a little bit easier for the people who were constantly hit with requests for more information and requests for contacts. I think that a combination of social, and as social evolves, we are going to find that there will be agents that will be part of these social communities that will be looking at the information and do somewhat like what Dave said: you just got a message from someone and, boy, they send you a lot of messages that you do not want to look at, so they are going to go to the bottom of the list and may be bumped off, all automatically. That will force people to be a little more prudent in how they deal with those, but I think it is the agent that will make the difference. It's the agent that will make sure message that get through that have to, restrict those messages that don't. It's almost like having a learning curve on a spam filter. Show me what you think is spam and I will weed it out for you. I think it's a combination of agents and social that will help resolve a lot of this information flow that we have, and again, I think, Phil, you are right. It's part of a workflow process that we have to deal with, and I don't think we are that far away from it. I know that there are companies working on it today. I also know that they all understand it is a really, really big challenge to make this as efficient as you want it to be. I think there is light at the end of the tunnel and I don't think it is really a train. Back to you, Don.

Kevin Kieller: Don, this is Kevin. That is a great point, Jim. Can I just jump in here?

Don Van Doren: Sure.

Kevin Kieller: I want to make reference to what Blair Pleasant just wrote an article on NoJitter, "UC Training for End Users: It Matters," and it strikes me about a lot of these capabilities that we're saying, "Gosh, we hope maybe they will exist in the future." The thing is, a bunch of them actually already exist in the clients we are using today; it's just that none of us have been trained on using them.

Some of the things that Dave talks about, in terms of rating people and they send you things...those exist as add-ins to Outlook. Certainly as part of the Outlook 2013, there was reference to, we use email to manage our to-do list, and Outlook 2013 actually identifies in email messages things that look like requests and will add them to a to-do list and you can take them off when you are done. Some of the calendar federation is actually supported in Exchange. It's just that, sadly, nobody knows how to use it.

I think we are sitting on a lot of clients, the social... for example, I have a social connector that, when I get a message, it shows whatever pictures you have posted on LinkedIn or Facebook. I think people don't realize it, because I get an email from somebody and I see some crazy picture that they posted on their profile in Facebook because I am connected to them in Facebook, and that may not be the business contacts or business image that they want to portray.

So there are a lot of these tools... it's just, back to that "UC Training for End Users: It Matters" article by Blair, I think, sadly, many organizations and individuals - we don't have the time to figure out how these tools work. So maybe it becomes the agents, or maybe it almost has to be that artificial intelligence because we are never going to have the time to learn all these things, and somehow in the background something is just going to have to help us, like if any of us were ever lucky enough to have an executive assistant. In my career I have never had that yet, but I aspire to that. So a lot of capability and a lot of training that needs to happen, I think.

Don Van Doren: Well good luck, Kevin, with that objective.

Kevin Kieller: Yeah, you can always dream, Don. You can always dream.

Don Van Doren: Art Rosenburg, you had your hand up. What would you like to add to this discussion?

Art Rosenberg: Yeah, I would like to just focus on the fact, and some of it has been mentioned in various ways, that communication with people can be contextually activated from within various tools, whether it's a document or a message or whatever.

You do not have to manually initiate a call to someone, but it could be from some other information that has all the contacts needed to make the connection. It's like the personal assistant. It's done that way so that people don't have to remember everything and do everything themselves. The information needed to close the loop between people, in whatever modality is appropriate.

This is where presence management and federated presence will come into play, because you do not necessarily have to say first, "I want to talk to you." No, no - first you have to arrange for the contact, and whether it's through an instant message or text message of some kind, these are all pathways to getting to the real-time connections, which are the most expensive and difficult to manage, whether it's voice or video. So we have to look at these other tools, and tie them into not just people but an automated business process that wants to let you know your bank account is overdrawn. You do not have to have a person call you; your bank account is going to call you. It may not call you, but it will notify you in a way that is very expeditious and efficient. It does not have to be voice, especially now that you have a smart phone or tablet and can be notified that way. So we have to tie in the applications, which were mentioned by a couple of people already, as part of the communication area, and they just need to be well integrated. And that is what UC is really all about.

We need to look at this new "elephant in the room" in a different way. The elephants are all software, number one, and the room is going to be changing by moving into the clouds, it won't be limited by premise-based hardware and so on. Therefore, all these applications that we're talking about that we want to integrate and interoperate and become more useful to end users, whether it's person-to-person communications or whether it's an automated business process that needs to notify somebody/something, they'll have the flexibility of unified communications by being in the clouds. And that process is already starting in many ways, and it's just a matter of time for everything to be in the clouds, in which case the challenges that we've faced in the past for integrating and having everything working nicely together and sharing directories, etc., should be disappearing rapidly, so again, it's just a matter of time. But the cloud solutions are going to be what's going to fix some of the problems we've had in the past.

Don Van Doren: Great points, Art.

Well thank you very much. This has been a really interesting and lively discussion, I think. You know, we think of email as sort of this old passe thing, but yet, as many of you have pointed out, it really becomes central to a lot of what we are doing. But to become central, it really needs to be well integrated into all the rest of this. So, moose, elephants, ostriches, apes... I think we have a whole zoo full of different kinds of creatures interested in this whole problem, and we will have to just sort of wait and see how this industry unfolds and solves these issues. Thanks, everyone, for being with us today, and we will talk to you next week.