TECH and health care big on Morris county job scene Dailyrecord.com Courtney Smolen supplemented a communications degree with additional education in web work and management to stay relevant and thriving in the contemporary workplace. She works at Strategic Products and Services in Parsippany in two of the most ...

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Building an enterprise-class communications system is one thing; maintaining it is another.  Neglecting system updates, versions, and new releases can leave you lagging in functionality, while stressing the reliability of your environment. SPS will host a technical session at the IAUG Converge 2013 conference to address the importance of implementing a strategy for firmware and software updates, and the quantifiable value that you receive by combining your SPS support relationship with the Avaya Firmware and Software Update Management (SUM) service.  Part-B of this session will also include in-depth information and a live demonstration on updating Avaya Aura Communication Manager R5.2 and R6.x systems. The IAUG Converge 2013 conference takes place in Orlando FL on 3-7 June.  If you haven’t yet registered, then register now!  Discounted registration is available through SPS – use discount code strategic3 to register for a reduced rate of $895. Registered already?  be sure to enroll in sessions # 727A and 727B: “The Why and How of Software and Firmware Updates (part 1 and 2)”.  And don’t forget to visit SPS at booth# 409!

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Mutare recently announced that its EVM Plus giSTT and giSTT Hosted speech-to-text applications have been certified "Avaya Compliant" with the IP Office messaging platform.

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IT is under pressure to provide support for Unified Communications – and the plan must support current UC trends including mobility and “bring your own device” (BYOD); collaboration via voice, video and web; and the ability to federate UC capabilities between companies, their partners, and customers. IT organizations need to develop a balanced strategy to deliver user-friendly solutions, ensure user adoption, guarantee enterprise security, and provide the flexibility to support future trends.  According to the results of an InformationWeek survey, an incredible 72% organizations stated they expect to implement BYOD – yet only 43% of companies have or are deploying a Mobile Device Management (MDM).  Security is a key component of a successful BYOD and must be factored into any plan to deploy BYOD. Join SPS at the IAUG Converge 2013 conference for a 60-minute, technical session on UC infrastructure design – enroll in session# 1301: “Building an Infrastructure to Support a UC Strategy” –  hosted by Mike Taylor and Bob Kent of SPS.  The conference takes place 3-7 June in Orlando FL.  If you haven’t registered yet, then do it today!  Discounted registration is available through SPS – use discount code strategic3 to register for a reduced rate of $895.  Register today, and don’t forget to visit SPS at booth# 409!

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In the old days, you had a phone on your desk at work. It was a necessity but purely a cost. Nowadays, communications comes in many flavors. And savvy CIOs understand that it's not simply about containg costs anymore.

 

Today's key, said several CIOs in front of 1,000+ attendees at the Avaya Evolutions New York conference in Manhattan on Tuesday, is making sure you have an open, flexible foundation for collaboration that allows you to deliver new tactics and maximize your long-term ROI.

"The telecom system lifecycle is still pretty long," said Neil Isola, director of IT for a 440,000-member benefits and pension fund based in New York City. Yet "how you execute 1-2 years from now is vague." What companies need is an "open and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to scale upon."

For Isola, that is a virtualization-heavy architecture. 95% of the applications on the company's 1,000 servers are virtualized, including the Avaya IQ, AES and ACE applications and Avaya gateway controllers that Isola upgraded to last year.  Not only does virtualization allow Isola's team to upgrade hardware more easily when needed, it also enables his team to get their large call center - it gets 4,000 inbound calls per hour - back up in case of a disaster within 13 minutes, with agents working from home.

Avoiding Being a Slave to Technology

Responding to fast-moving technology trends can be as difficult as keeping up with fashion, according to Jason Cohen, CIO for a division of the sprawling media and marketing conglomerate, the Omnicom Group.

"In my opinion, too much time is spent on the accoutrements," he said. "Pick the right foundation and then you have something that can handle almost anything you want."

When Cohen started as CIO back in 1999, there were 100+ agencies at Omnicom, all cobbled together through acquisitions, and all running different technologies.

To unify this, Cohen wanted a powerful communications platform, one that would attract individual agencies to voluntarily standardize upon it without having to strong-arm them. Yet, it had to flexible to accommodate the existing diversity. "I needed a vendor that could support us globally on multiple types of platforms, as opposed to one that says 'If you have this, then you must use that.'"

Using Avaya, Cohen now has just 4 data centers worldwide with 75% of the branches under his watch now standardized onto a single platform.

SEFCU credits its flexible communications foundation for letting it automate its call center at its own pace.

For another company, New York state-based credit union SEFCU, the challenge was accommodating fast customer growth while upgrading its technology at its own pace.

SEFCU's membership had grown at a zippy 8% a year for the past half-decade. Even better - revenue from its outbound call center agents has grown 170% in the last 3 years.

Chris Ward, vice-president for retail distribution at SEFCU, credits SEFCU's "personal service heritage...our long-term members are accustomed to a person-to-person approach," as well as its well-trained call center agents, most of whom are college educated.

So what's the problem?

SEFCU recently introduced a new, more-secure online banking platform that was raising questions among some long-time customers. As a result, the number of calls into SEFCU's 65-person call center was up 17% year-over-year in 2012, and threatening to grow another 23% this year.

"It was pretty close to exemplifying the definition of insanity," Ward said.

SEFCU had a 15-year-old Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that was handling about 2 million calls a year, versus the 700,000 calls handled by its agents. "We had always viewed that 3:1 ratio as good," Ward said. But now, Ward wanted to divert more routine calls to the automated system, while leaving complicated inquiries to the operators. He also wanted to control the pace of deploying new features, rather than adopting a big-bang approach.

Solution: SEFCU hired system integrator SPS to deploy new call center software, the Avaya Aura Experience portal. Aura Experience gives SEFCU a foundation with "unparalleled reliability," says Ward, for it to connect its existing non-SIP applications and start planning for upgrades such as smart call routing (i.e. based on customer history, not just his or her current need). 

"We now have the flexibility to grow over time," Ward said, without sacrificing the sort of service its customers expect. Within 2 years, SEFCU hopes to deploy Avaya Proactive Outreach manager to enhance both its sales and its bill collection. The software will allow agents that can't reach a customer on the phone to easily leave a voice mail and an e-mail instead.  

You can hear more interviews with these companies, as well as the Avaya partners that helped deploy their communications architectures, on the Avaya Podcast Network.

 

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In previous blogs we have discussed two of this year's surging trends cloud computing and self-diagnosing machine 2 machine communications from our white paper, Seven communications trends for 2013 . Let's now turn our attention to Managed Services.

Many pressures face today's CIO and IT departments. Disruptive technologies like the exploding number of mobile devices and video are impacting IT decisions. The need to support new functionality that maintains a corporate competitive advantage has out stripped IT's ability to consume the technology complexity required to deliver the new functionality. We call this the Technology Adoption Gap. This technology gap is fueling IT's need for Managed Services that can reduce the risk of deploying and supporting new as well as legacy solutions.

According to Gartner's "Hunting and Harvesting in a Digital World: The 2013 CIO Agenda," a global survey of more than 2,000 CIOs representing 36 industries in 41 countries, enterprises only realize an average of 43 percent of technology's business potential from the more than $230 billion invested in CIO IT budgets. With investments and demands running so high, more is being demanded of CIOs. CIOs are turning to solution vendors for Managed Services to help them get more out of the investment they have and will make.

Adding more pressure, as stated in the white paper Communications services: Challenging the status quo by Avaya Senior Vice president and Avaya Client Services President Mike Runda, are tightening IT budgets that are forcing more out of existing IT staffs which are already under-staffed and overwhelmed.

This need for Managed Services is called out in the Seven communications trends white paper prepared by a panel of visionary Avaya experts as hitting an inflection point:

"Business conditions are changing at a breathtaking pace within most industries and, consequently, so are the requirements on organizations' communications infrastructures. In this environment, having the flexibility to add, contract and change capabilities and leverage new technologies quickly and easily has become paramount. There is also growing interest among cost-conscious businesses in foregoing the expense of in-house staff to support their communications infrastructure, as well as the capital requirements of continually investing in new technologies. At the same time, business leaders want to focus their attention on the strategic needs, decisions and directions associated with their communications infrastructure rather than the operational requirements of running it. These shifts are leading businesses to think differently about their infrastructure strategy and examine the financial goals associated with their IT organization. Do they want their IT department to be responsible for the day-to-day operations of their communications technology with the accompanying high fixed costs? Or, do they want to adopt a utility model that enables them to add and contract communications resources as needed, whether using a service provider or an in-house, self-managed utility services approach? Such decisions will be front and center in 2013."

What are CIOs and IT departments to do given these resource constraints and user demands? If Managed Services is the key it starts by selecting a service partner who understands the marketplace and appreciates the complexity of today's systems which are typically cobbled together in a multivendor environment. "Almost every enterprise client we encounter has a complex multivendor environment, with equipment of all ages and often from different manufacturers. A great Managed Services provider will offer solutions with service level agreements covering the entire communications environment," says Mike Runda in his Communications services white paper.

So, how should CIOs and IT departments take the first step to determine the right Managed Services partner for their business needs? They should ask themselves the following seven questions:

• Will the proposed service partner support your business strategy now and in the future?


• Do you trust them to have the necessary expertise and bandwidth to provide maintenance, deliver support services or assume Managed Services responsibilities?


• Will they become trusted advisors that stay engaged and serve as an extension of your IT organization and business?


• Do they provide a portfolio of offers that span the entire service continuum and have the necessary flexibility to ensure a smooth deployment of Managed Services?


• What applications, diagnostics checks or analytic tools do they leverage to anticipate any problems or hidden issues?


• Do they provide a single point of contact that can quickly swarm experts to resolve an issue in your network?


• Do they really know you? Understand your solution?

What questions are key to you in deciding who should be providing critical IT support to your company?

Pat Patterson
Follow me on twitter Pat_Patterson_V

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With the popularity of Microsoft collaboration technologies, many organizations are asking how to integrate systems to provide their users with seamless communication services – and Microsoft Lync is a compelling solution for many companies.  But what does it take to get started?  What are the “care-abouts” and “gotchas”? If this scenario describes your organization, SPS can help you get past the hype surrounding individual products and gain an understanding of how to successfully plan and integrate Avaya and Microsoft systems.  Seek a partner that can address how these systems provide a return on investment, support corporate initiatives like “bring your own device” (BYOD), and how services can be transitioned to the cloud. Integration options include: Avaya Client Applications (ACA) client-side implementation Avaya Enablement Services (AES) click-to-call integration Microsoft Lync enterprise voice integration with Avaya systems Integration of Microsoft Lync conferencing and Exchange voice mail with Avaya voice servers Join SPS at the IAUG Converge 2013 conference for a pair of 60-minute sessions on Microsoft-Avaya integration.  Enroll in Session# 1314: “Avaya and Microsoft: Better Together – How to Do It” Session# 1327: “Lync-ing your Microsoft and Avaya Environments:  Real-world Solutions to Leverage Your Investments” Sessions will include best practices for a successful deployment, gateway services, integration with older PBX systems that lack native SIP support, SIP trunking services to providers, and time for discussion.  Additional services and considerations will also be addressed, including remote workers, home and branch offices, disaster recovery, dial-plan considerations, and adjunct services like e911, contact centers, Call Detail Records (CDR), and feature parity between systems. You will leave this session with a more advanced understanding of how systems from these two manufacturers can work better together.  Pushing past the hype, SPS will help you understand the realities of integration – helping you to provide additional services to your users, and provide a true return on existing investments.  If you haven’t yet registered for IAUG Converge 2013 – taking place 3-7 June in Orlando FL – then do it today!  Discounted registration is on us – use discount code strategic3 to register for a reduced rate of $895.  Register today, and don’t forget to visit SPS at booth# 409!

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In the 1970s, Coca-Cola wanted to teach the world how to sing (in perfect harmony). Today, Foursquare wants to teach the world how to check-in with your smartphone at your favorite shops and restaurants.

Checking-in may seem like something only for young people with too much time on their hands. But consider these numbers: 30 million users, 5 million check-ins a day, 3 billion total check-ins since Foursquare was launched 3 years ago. Sounds pretty mainstream to me.

The app is appealing partly because it's also a game: the person who checks in the most at a certain location is declared Mayor. In our irony-heavy age, being mayor is obviously a fake title, though it can result in real perks like free drinks and other discounts awarded to loyal customers. And on the flip side, many companies are using Foursquare, including, ironically, Coca-Cola, to lure customers and boost revenue.

So who is the most active Foursquare user in the the world? That's unclear (though see this interesting heat map of Foursquare check-ins worldwide). But the most active Foursquare user in technology-mad Silicon Valley, according to Wired.com, appears to be Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. He is the mayor of 24 places in the Valley alone, most of them retailers in the southern suburbs of the Valley near his Los Gatos home.

"This is a man building a Foursquare empire," according to Wired. "With 4,183 check-ins, Mayor Woz shows no signs of slowing down and could become the mayor of every building, landmark and prison in the Silicon Valley -- probably while riding his Segway."

Kinda like this.

You can check out Woz and his impressive, near-obsessive check-in habit via his Twitter account @SteveWoz. Indeed, by the time you read this, Woz should have checked into the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan, where he will be the featured speaker at the Avaya Evolutions New York conference on Tuesday, April 8th.

Evolutions is Avaya's traveling North and South American roadshow, where we bring our technology, products and experts to you the user, rather than force you to fly hours to Orlando or Vegas. Besides top Avaya executives such as Brett Shockley, Pierre-Paul Allard, Gary Barnett, John DiLullo, Jean Turgeon, John Geary, Forrester analyst Henry Dewing will talk about collaboration, while customers such as SPS, DJJ Technologies and CTI Technologies will give their first-hand experience. 

And of course, Woz will reminisce about Apple and share his thoughts about the future of technology at the afternoon keynote, as he did at the Avaya Evolutions Bay Area last fall.

About 2,000 people are registered to attend Avaya Evolutions New York. If you can't check-in and attend, you can follow the news and see the pictures via my blog or on Twitter @EricYLai, or also via the @Avaya Twitter account.

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Attracting and retaining customers today, especially younger generations, is all about giving them more choices for when and how to interact with your organization. An Avaya survey of contact center clients showed that "new" communications channels, such as mobile apps, Web, text, video and social media, are growing rapidly while use of traditional voice channels is waning. In a Frost and Sullivan survey, 75 percent of respondents cited "provides better customer service" as the top benefit of social media customer interactions, while another 58 percent of respondents said they "drive more sales."2

This trend of consumers preferring new interaction channels over voice suggests that businesses could fall behind if they don't respond. Yet at the same time, that trend could lead to opportunities for cost savings and agent efficiency improvement that help fund investment in the new channels. For example, the cost of interaction via chat, e-mail and self-service can be 50 percent, 30 percent and 10 percent less, respectively, than the cost of voice interaction.1 If those alternate channels can help generate such savings, then migration to the new channels could be self-funding over time. Consider how leading customer service organizations in the following two industries are taking advantage of these opportunities, not only for day-to-day customer contact, but also for proactive communication with customers based on other events.

Healthcare industry. Healthcare providers can remind patients of appointments and offer instructions for necessary preparations. So the number of patient no-shows is reduced, and visits are more productive when patients are more effectively prepared for the visit. For example, a large integrated health services organization, serving more than 2.6 million residents, implemented a self-service and proactive contact solution for appointment scheduling, reminders and payments. Based on information provided by the organization, it reduced calls to agents by 44 percent while improving patient service levels by 34 percent.

Financial services industry. A credit union faced increasing delinquencies in its $4 billion loan portfolio, along with declining customer satisfaction ratings. The credit union deployed a proactive multimedia contact solution that enabled it to automatically flag delinquent customers and notify them of delay and collect payments. Ultimately, the credit union reports that the solution enabled it to reduce its delinquencies by more than $35 million in eight months; in addition, it allowed the organization to move agents from collections activity to other, more value-added tasks, thereby improving agent productivity metrics.

Even personally, I am accessible at all time via email/SMS even when I may not be able to take phone calls (while in a meeting for example). So if the doctor's office/son's school/Bank wants to get hold of me in the middle of a busy working day, they need to SMS/Email me !

Regards
Sanjeev

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Today you'll be hearing from a guest blogger who I had the pleasure of introducing a few months ago. John Quaglietta has extensive hands-on learning and teaching in the realm of Customer Experience Management (CEM). He has over 20 years of experience as an accomplished leader, customer service & contact center consultant, and as a customer experience visionary. He has worked with the world's largest organizations in solving some of the most challenging and thought provoking business challenges around customer-centricity, and the effect customer and employee engaged organizations have on both top and bottom line financial success.

I was fortunate enough to attend an IMT (Instituto Mexico de Teleservices) event in Mexico City. The event was focused on improving customer engagement and experience, and the people, technology, and processes that connect to make it all possible. I was impressed with both the presentations at the event, and the discussions around the topic that took place in the hallways. Everyone was interested and excited about the possibilities.

I was asked to present on best practices & trends in Customer Experience Management (CEM) for the event. Instead of just compiling the usual industry data on CEM, I decided to share what I have been working on the past few years with the audience in Mexico City. I was interested in getting feedback and testing some of my thoughts, and I will say the feedback was very positive.

The last few years have been interesting for me. I have spent time meeting with large, global organizations focused on improving their customers' experiences. I have listened to their strategies and approaches, pouring over the various definitions of CEM put forth by analysts and others in the industry I have also spent time inspecting the role of various organizations in the CEM discussion(like the contact center for example), and finally, digging deeper into the economics behind what CEM is all about. I have come to a few conclusions that formed the basis for my presentation, and truthfully, a new way of thinking about what this topic is all about. I will blog about each of these individually in the coming weeks. For now, I just want to share with you the construct.

1. CEM Definition; Everywhere you look, the definition of CEM is all from the customer's point of view. And rightfully so, after all it is called, "Customer Experience Management". The various definitions include pieces about the sum of all interactions and experiences a customer has with an organization as they move through the customer journey. I agree. But, what about the organization's point of view? Why should an organization care about CEM, and how should they think about it? After all, there are 2 sides to this story. I have put forth a supplemental definition for CEM, looking at it from the organization's point of view. It actually compliments existing definitions which tend to consider it from the customer's perspective. CEM is the discipline of managing and treating customer relationships as assets, with the goal of moving satisfied customers to loyal customers, and loyal customers to advocates of your brand. In doing so, CEM is ultimately about improving the lifetime value of a single customer or segment of customers, and increasing the duration of the customer relationship as it affects a customer's lifetime value.
2. What is CEM all about for organizations? Why should they invest?; It's actually very simple. As mentioned above, CEM is all about improving the profitability of a customer or segment of customers over the duration of their relationship with an organization. There are 2 dimensions here that matter most. Profitability & duration of relationship. Profitability can be measured in a single year and over the lifetime of a customer using customer lifetime value (CLV). Duration can be measured using retention. As the dimensions increase, a very dramatic and positive effect to an organization's top line can be seen. There are 4 revenue & cost dimensions that affect customer profitability. Again, more on this in a subsequent blog, and we'll discuss how to move these levers to positively impact customer profitability & lifetime value using the contact center for example.
3. A model to manage CEM economics; Given my definition above, and thinking about terms like "discipline" and "manage", it would seem logical that a framework must be developed to insure organizations stay on the right path and are able to link CEM investment back to top line growth. Over the past 3 years, I have compiled such a model. I call it the CLV framework. This model links technical KPI's (% application availability as an example), operational KPI's (Average Hold Time, First Call Resolution, Transfers, as examples) and strategic KPI's (NPS, Retention Rate as examples) to CLV. The model illustrates how making subtle improvements in technical, operational and strategic KPI's affect customer profitability. It also provides a means for linking CEM investment to CLV improvement. The model is valuable for many reasons. Probably the most understated value is that it provides people in the organization an understanding of how what they do every day, the things they are measured on, affect customer profitability & growth. It brings everyone along on the CEM journey. Again, we'll cover this in a lot more detail in an upcoming blog.
4. The role of the Contact Center; This may upset some people in the contact center industry, but it is my point of view. The contact center is NOT about delivering service or saving a company's money. At least not when looked at through the lens of CEM. The contact center's role in CEM is more about "growing & protecting assets", those assets being customers. In this context, service delivery is a means to an end. Contact centers are thus in the business of asset management, not service management. Furthermore, all of the focus on efficiency & reducing cost is good, but only if it is in the pursuit of efficiently "growing & protecting assets" while improving the experience for customers. If you believe this like I do, then the way contact centers operate and are measured requires further inspection. Stay tuned for more on this point as well.

I'm excited about the future of Customer Experience Management and the role the contact center should play in this revolution. We'll dive into more depth in upcoming blogs around each of these 4 topics in the CEM construct.

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Avaya recently announced the virtual version of its Avaya Aura® platform, designated as “VMware Ready”  by the leading provider of server virtualization, VMware.  The Avaya Aura Virtualized Environment is essentially an Avaya toolkit to facilitate management of Avaya Aura components in a standardized, VMware virtualization environment. Virtualization is not new territory for Avaya.  The late-2009 launch of the Avaya Aura Midsize Solution basically split the difference between an open versus proprietary approach.  It was “open” because the Linux Xen hypervisor was an open-standards tool, distributed under the GPL license; but it was “proprietary” since the Avaya Aura System Platform “owned” the server, with virtualization limited to a half-dozen Avaya Aura-branded components, including Communication Manager, Voice Messaging, SIP Enablement, and Application Enablement Services (AES). At that time, a couple of concerns prevented running Avaya Aura on a non-Avaya virtualization platform.  First, in 2009 the VMware environment was less prevalent than it is today.  Second, servers that could handle the high input/output and real-time processing requirements for applications like voice were a recent innovation, with the 2009 launch of the “Nehalem” processor architecture. Virtualizing real-time voice is more demanding than most applications, since minor delays in voice packet handling can result in dropouts and jitter, compromising the quality of the service.  Because virtualization involves a technology known as Hardware Abstraction, which presents client applications with a standardized view of the hardware and operating system, processing power can be impacted by the additional processor cycles needed to do this.  Hence, Avaya was likely being conservative about the requirements placed on the CM server by keeping virtualization semi-proprietary in the 2009 release.  (For a primer on virtualization, see Wikipedia on Virtualization and Hardware Abstraction.) Virtualizing non-real-time applications like voicemail is relatively easy; no one notices voicemail playback is delayed by a few hundredths of a second by translation for hardware-abstraction.  Thus the 2009 AA Midsize Solution allowed voicemail and other non-real time applications to “hitch a ride” on a server dedicated to Communication Manager, provided CM maintained priority. So the big news with this 2013 release is that Avaya is now confident that enterprise-grade voice quality can be assured within non-dedicated, non-Avaya, VMware environment.  The key is the Avaya Virtualization Provisioning Service (AVPS), a new component of the Avaya Virtual Network Architecture.  Acting as a plug-in of Avaya Configuration and Orchestration Management, AVPS automates provision and configuration of “edge port” network resources used for voice, and monitors these ports to ensure quality. By Chris Stelacio, Director of Systems Engineering

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In the first installment of this three-part blog, we reviewed Extension to Cellular as a built-in mobility feature in Avaya Aura Communication Manager, for which you may already have the licenses.  In the second we covered Feature Name Extension (FNE) codes, and how they enable enhanced functionality using the one-X Mobile Lite clients for iOS and Android phones. In this final installment, we will discuss Self Administration Feature access codes (SAFE). Assuming that SAFE has been enabled by your CM administrator, you can use it to enter and change your own cellular number in Extension to Cellular, without submitting a request to your administrator.  Here’s how it works: Dial the Extension to Cellular access number.  You hear a dial tone. Enter the SAFE access code.  You hear a dial tone. Enter your station extension, followed by #. Enter your station-security code followed by #.  You hear a dial tone. Press the # button again on your phone.  You hear a confirmation tone. Your cell phone is now mapped to your office extension through Extension to Cellular! Entering numbers on a mobile device is not my favorite thing to do, but since you only need to do this once to enable turning Extension to Cellular on and off with a single key press, these five steps really are worth it! Using SAFE as described above does have some requirements: Verify that your mobile device is listed as a supported device on the product listings for one-X Mobile Lite on the Apple Store, or one-X Mobile with Basic Features on Google Play. Your CM administrator must set up Extension for EC500 and SAFE. Your CM administrator must set up and assign extensions to the FNEs listed in the second part of this blog series. Extension to Cellular has been around for a while, and can be very useful and convenient when correctly configured.  But plenty of customers have implemented Avaya Aura Communication Manager without setting it up.  There are fancier ways to implement Unified Communications Mobility, but Extension to Cellular provides a lot of bang for the buck, and should not be taken for granted!

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In the first installment of this blog, we covered the benefits of Extension to Cellular, a built-in mobility feature in Avaya Aura Communication Manager R5.2.1+, included with the Enterprise Edition (EE) or Mobility Suite license. Extension to Cellular can also be used in conjunction with free software applications available for iPhone and Android devices.  The free application is called one-X Mobile Lite in the Apple Store and one-X Mobile with Basic Features in the Google Play store. Apple Store for one-X Mobile Lite Google Play store for one-X Mobile with basic features (also known as “Lite” features) Either version of this application allows you to easily access Extension to Cellular features to by pressing a button on the client device. Many current users of Extension to Cellular are unaware of its full feature set.  Features are activated by dialing DID numbers set up by your administrator.  These are called Feature Named Extensions (FNE): 9xx-8xx-5z10 – Active Appearance Select 9xx-8xx-5z11 – Call Park 9xx-8xx-5z12 – Call Park Answer Back 9xx-8xx-5z13 – Conference on Answer 9xx-8xx-5z14 – Drop Last Added Party 9xx-8xx-5z15 – Held Appearance Select 9xx-8xx-5z16 – Idle Appearance Select 9xx-8xx-5z17 – Off-PBX Call Enable 9xx-8xx-5z18 – Off-PBC Call Disable 9xx-8xx-5z19 – Send All Calls 9xx-8xx-5z20 – Send All Calls Cancel 9xx-8xx-5z21 – Transfer on Hang-Up 9xx-8xx-5z22 – Transfer to Voice Mail You set up your one-X Mobile Lite application to access these features by entering the DID numbers, as configured by your CM administrator.  That’s it.  The Enable and Disable buttons allow you to turn the application on and off. Ordinarily, usage of Extension to Cellular requires your mobile number to be entered into CM by an administrator.  But that can also be done by users if Self Administration Feature access codes (SAFE) are enabled.  In the final installment of this blog on Wednesday 3 April, we will look at SAFE so you’ll have all the available tools to maximize self-administration on Extension to Cellular. By Anne Jones, UC Solution Architect

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Last week I had the opportunity to meet over 25 CIOs and key IT decision makers to discuss collaboration and mobility in the enterprise. It was an engaging meeting, with fluid conversation and open sharing about the collaboration experience across industries as diverse as banking, health care, trans-oceanic transportation, and even flavors and fragrances manufacturers, just to name a few.

Flying back to California, I was reflecting on what I really had learned from these experts.

We did discuss the rapid advancement of BYOD, the broad adoption of video and the many creative ways to use mobile apps to solve practical problems in the enterprise.

But what really struck me was that, underlying all of these cool solutions, there was a basic need: to trust each other. Without trust there is no collaboration, without collaboration there is no execution; and without execution there is no sustainable business.

But what does trust mean for a CIO?

When it comes to trust nothing beats a face to face dialogue. But in a globally connected world, with companies leveraging talent and labor rates in different countries while serving customers around the world, trust needs to be cultivated on a day to day basis. This requires video-enabled collaboration solutions to effectively span timezones and cultural differences. And it requires that these solutions run on the devices now used by everyone - PCs and mobile devices.

Real Life, In Real Time

One executive, Mark, shared that he allows his marketing team to work from home to avoid them a very wasteful commute time; this has increased their productivity and their morale since his marketing managers across the Bay feel trusted and empowered. Mark has deployed a video solution integrated with document sharing so that they can easily review marketing presentations and programs.

Another IT executive, Gene, is adopting mobile video so field technicians can actually show engineers what's happening live, and making sure the installations are accurately performed. Aric said that one of video's greatest benefits is simply enabling him to look someone in the eye when asking them for commitment. Whether discussing the forecast during their weekly sales commit calls or when reviewing a proposal with their customers, reading the body language significantly increases the reliability of communication.

As Forrester Research puts it, video "helps to put a face and mannerism to a name and voice, enabling remote and distributed teams to feel more connected and more committed to shared goals."

That was echoed by Carson, who says video provides his team with a level of alignment you just can't get over the phone. When his product management team reviews and passionately debates the specs for a new product proposal with their overseas R&D teams he knows that at the end of the video meeting all the participants have "bought" into the plan and they will carry it out as their own.

The Advantage Of Mobile

Patrick not only streamlined the claim process in his insurance company using video, but also increased the level of trust with his customers since their claims examiners can show the damage to a car with a live video feed to his supervisor directly from his iPad.

Dan talked about a "collaboration first, mobility second" approach, focusing on building a trust framework and streamlining processes to facilitate collaboration across teams. Anne, who works in the "safety and security first" realm of nuclear power plants, is also focused less on mobility and more on enabling collaboration with a high level of security. Such examples will grow quickly, as tablets outsell desktop PCs this year, according to IDC, and notebooks next year.

In some settings, video is making possible things that simply couldn't happen before because of limited time or resources. For example, hospice nurses bring the doctor or family members to a patient's bedside via video conference; a school contracts teachers from another county to teach remotely; and children are able to take a virtual field trip to NASA when a physical field trip is impractical due to lack of time, funding or other resources.

As I mentioned earlier, the type of video matters. A couple of people mentioned that their expensive video conference or telepresence rooms are gathering dust. Simple-to-use desktop video is picking up steam, but a complete solution needs to have rich video running on the device of the employee's choice: from Android to iPad, iPhone, Mac, etc.

Practicing What We Preach

I had the opportunity to describe Avaya's own internal use of video that has skyrocketed since the introduction of Scopia® since last summer. Within the first six months, more than 100,000 meetings had been held with Scopia, with over 310,000 attendees participating in point-to-point and multipoint video calls. This will only increase when we complete the worldwide roll-out of Scopia across our 15,000 employees.

We first started using Scopia during the due diligence process of acquiring Radvision. Because Radvision has such a globally dispersed organization with development locations in Israel, China, Italy and the US, it quickly became apparent how valuable Scopia was. It not only allowed very productive meetings without the need to travel, it also spanned timezones and cultural differences. As a result of this we decided to deploy Scopia across the company. Since then Scopia has literally changed how we collaborate in Avaya.

Why? Because the soft-client runs on all the most popular devices our employees use, it can be launched very quickly after a very easy download, it securely connects through the company firewall, and it provides a low-bandwidth high-quality of experience even over lossy Internet connections. The results? We now communicate with our customers and channel partners every day and conduct staff meetings and work groups over video, bringing team members from multiple locations together that had only known each other voices for many years.

The ironic thing about most collaboration technology today is that they sacrifice intimacy for speed. The miracle of video is that it gives us back the gift of sight. That's why CIOs see video as a key way to strengthen trust, deepen collaboration and therefore accelerate execution in their business. That's Business at Light Speed.

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It’s surprising that so many organizations are unaware of the powerful Mobility capabilities that are built in to their Avaya communications solution. Extension to Cellular is a feature of Avaya Aura Communication Manager (CM) – and it’s a simple software solution that requires no additional hardware to deploy.  Avaya Aura customers with CM Enterprise Edition software have this capability today.  Avaya Aura customers moving to the new Mobility Suite will have this feature as well. Extension to Cellular provides a way to simultaneously ring your CM extension and your mobile number.  No additional servers are needed.  Users can turn this feature on and off simply by pressing a button on their deskphone, or by dialing a DID number from their mobile and entering a few touch tone commands.  (To make things even easier, these commands can be set up as a contact number on the mobile device!) Then, if a call is answered on the mobile device, the user can simply pick the call when they reach their deskphone, and disconnect their mobile.  Likewise, a call on their deskphone can be extended to their mobile with a button push.  (Who hasn’t been caught on a call when they really need to leave their desk and continue the call?) As always, there are administrative details and requirements: When a call rings your mobile device, it may end up in your cellular voice mail before you can answer the call, or before CM pulls the call back to deliver it to your corporate voice mail system.  To avoid having business voice mails in two mailboxes… Work with your CM administrator to ensure that Extension to Cellular calls ring fewer times before pulling the call back to corporate voice mail – and/or Increase the number of rings before voicemail on your mobile device Verify that your systems meet these release levels: Avaya Aura Communication Manager at software release R5.2.1+ Software/Features: Extension to Cellular (EC500) R9+ Purchased per-user, OR Included with the Enterprise Edition (EE) or Mobility Suite license Clients supported: Apple iPhone with iOS 3.2+ Google Android 2.3+ (specific device support may vary) Before you rush out to set up Extension to Cellular, you’ll want to check out the remaining installments of this blog, in which we will look at Feature Name Extensions (FNE, Monday 1 April) and Self Administration Feature access codes (SAFE, Wednesday 3 April). By Anne Jones, UC Solution Architect

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(Note: This is an excerpt from Avaya's recently-published e-book, The 2013 Guide To Collaboration Trends. Download the full 160-page PDF here.)

OPTIMIZING YOUR PRIVATE CLOUD FOR THE COLLABORATION ERA

By Marc Randall, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya and Parag Patel, Vice President of Global Alliances, VMware

A private cloud is a great choice to host collaboration solutions--if you plan upfront. Here's how not to get bit by security, integration, performance, or other common challenges.

Collaboration in the cloud is a genius idea. Massively scalable and low-cost infrastructure is just what businesses need to bring seamless communication back to a mobile, global workforce. But the way that cloud has taken hold in most enterprises, via software-as-a-service (SaaS), may be too fast and loose for some of today's enterprise data, which is highly regulated and thus must be highly secured.

Private clouds are growing in popularity as a result. A private cloud provides scalability while slashing IT costs and complexity, all without compromising security. For many organizations, it offers the best blend of public and private network.

As organizations plan their private cloud deployment, they should be aware of the typical issues that they may face. According to a June 2012 Forrester survey of U.S. IT decision-makers that had deployed private clouds at their enterprise, 62 percent encountered problems with security and compliance, while 52 percent faced trouble integrating the cloud with existing tools and apps. Meeting service-level agreements with customers and end users was a problem for nearly four out of 10 users, while nearly a third of IT buyers faced problems with software licensing or creating self-service access for users. The likelihood of these issues arising increases if your organization is running high-bandwidth applications such as video collaboration.

As with most IT-related challenges, the key to making your deployment as smooth as possible is to arm yourself in advance. Once you know the likely causes of troubles, you can forge a strategy to mitigate or avoid them.

What follows are best practices to combat each of these potential complications.

Issue: Increased security and compliance risk.

Strategy: Holistic evaluation of your security policies.

Over time, security policies tend to stack up. It's a lot easier to add new policies on top of old than it is to go back and eliminate ones that are no longer needed. To combat this, many organizations have made it a best practice to re-evaluate all policies every year. The purpose is to identify and cull older policies that could be an impediment to agility and growth.

When adding a private cloud, a security review is more important than ever. Get rid of policies that do not add value to the business and conflict with cloud use. If new policies need to be added, make sure they are fully automated and non-intrusive so as not to impede employee collaboration and workflows-- regardless of cloud use.

Issue: Integration challenges.

Strategy: Prepare and train IT staff for intervention.

Few technologies stand alone in today's data center. Collaboration tools, in particular, can involve a matrix of protocols and codecs that can make interoperability challenging.

Moreover, most organizations will be using a mix of outsourced software services in combination with internally hosted services, and these will need to connect and interact with one another. As cloud technology matures, standards will emerge to make this task easier. But for the time being, you may need to manually intervene. The sooner you prepare and train your IT staff for this hurdle, the more efficient you will be in responding to demands.

Issue: Unpredictable performance.

Strategy: Protect mission-critical workloads.

The point of cloud is to push up utilization rates to achieve greater efficiency. But adding heavy, unpredictable network traffic such as video can put SLAs (service-level agreements) and mission-critical workloads in danger.

Protect mission-critical workloads from performance degradation by isolating new rollouts. This way you can test the performance of applications that are new to your cloud without jeopardizing mission-critical workloads. You can add more applications to this environment over time, once you have a performance baseline.

Issue: Licensing that isn't designed for the cloud.

Strategy: Delay deployment or isolate to one physical server.

Not every application is built for the cloud; applications that require dedicated hardware are usually licensed by the number of physical servers used. Many software vendors have been slow to modify their licensing to make it affordable to run in the cloud, where multiple physical servers share the workload of many virtual machines. Moving these applications to the cloud can turn out to be costly.

To avoid a costly licensing hike, identify cloud-unfriendly licenses early on in your planning. Talk to vendors to see if they will renegotiate your license terms. If not, you'll have two options. First, it may make sense to defer cloud deployment for these applications, concentrating instead on software that works well atop an abstracted middleware layer or that observes dynamic resource consumption patterns. Alternatively, you can attempt to isolate the workload, dedicating the specific VMs (virtual machines) on one physical server to the application.

Clearing the Haze

Greater collaboration is a huge gift to your workers. Greater security and control over your applications are key for IT. A private cloud aligns these objectives together, making it possible for you to scale back SaaS use and still deliver the services your employees need to innovate and succeed.

While provisioning a private cloud is not always simple, the challenges are predictable. With the proper attention and planning you can flag your trouble areas early, and get down to the business of delivering efficient, affordable collaboration and other software services to your eager workforce.

Marc Randall is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Networking. He has held senior executive positions at several networking vendors, including Cisco Systems, Force10 networks and Brocade Communications.

Parag Patel is Vice President for Global Strategic Alliances for VMware, managing VMware's partner ecosystem. Avaya and VMware collaborate on a number of products, including Avaya Aura® on VMware, and Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey virtualized server platforms. Visit Avaya.com to learn more.

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An SPS Traffic Study provides a detailed technical analysis of traffic on your system – enabling you to right-size your communication resources, maximize your managed IT services, and make the most of your budget dollars. A survey of over 10,000 systems since 2009 found that 70% of communication systems are over-trunked by a 2:1 ratio.  Do the math – how much would your business save if you could eliminate up to 50% of your trunk line costs? To introduce our customers to the value provided by SPS Insight Services, we’re offering a Traffic Study at a discounted rate of $499.  Every Traffic Study includes a free 45-minute traffic consultation webinar to review the results. We’re betting that, once you’ve sampled our Traffic Study service, you’ll want to learn more about the value provided by our complete Insight Services offer as well!  The Insight Services package includes the following four services to help Avaya-platform customers (Avaya Aura, Nortel CS-1000, etc.) track and manage their communications system infrastructure: Site Survey:  System update analysis Sourcebook:  Configuration documentation management Traffic Study:  In-depth automated usage snapshot Remote System Back-up:  Quarterly backup of system programming and translations In addition, an 85-point Security Audit can be added to the Insight Services Package, or purchased separately. Proactively assessing the health of your communications network helps you save time, money and valuable assets by optimizing your communications infrastructure and minimizing risk.  The complete Insight Services Package includes a quarterly review with an SPS engineer to help you interpret results and plan corrective action.  The insights, data, and savings that you identify can help your organization make further technology and infrastructure decisions. If you think it’s worth $499 to find out just how much you can save, then contact your SPS Account Executive immediately, or fill out the online form to request a Traffic Study today. Learn more: View replay of a recent webcast on Insight Services and the benefits of conducting a Traffic Study. Learn more about Traffic Study and Insight Services package on our website.

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CallCopy is hosting students from The Ohio State University for the school’s 7th Annual Engineering Job Shadow Program. The event will be held today, Tuesday, March 12th at CallCopy’s Columbus headquarters.

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Companies can follow a four-step process to determine if their communications systems are providing strategic value: What is the true TCO of the solution? Without understanding all the expenses that aggregate – and there can be multiple components, such as hardware costs, software costs, software maintenance costs, training and support, among others – it is difficult to calculate the value-add that a particular solution offers. Did the solution deliver the expected value? Have the devices paid for themselves as expected? Is the solution still needed? Does it need to be upgraded? Can it be replaced with a more cost-effective or efficient solution? Finally – and this is the strategic part of the analysis – is this solution integral to the business, and, if so, in what way? Does it save money in a way that contributes to overall profitability? Does it take better care of customers? Does it allow you to scale effortlessly in a volatile market? What strategic value would be lost if the function were outsourced? Businesses that understand the specific value proposition of a system are much better positioned to choose the solution that meets their needs most effectively and delivers optimal results. No deep-dive cost and architectural analysis would be complete without considering the future direction of the technology and the solution’s marketplace.  Today, it is hard to imagine putting a strategic road map in place for a telecom plan that doesn’t encompass an enterprise-wide SIP architecture.  Such an architecture should consider automatic detection of user presence across devices and applications to allow services to be implemented just once and deployed across the entire organization; a simpler deployment model; and reduced training and support requirements.  Additionally, most organizations today are looking at next-generation systems that unify voice, messaging, e-mail, voice mail and more in a single platform without detracting from the quality, reliability and security of the overall solution. Articulating a business strategy and comprehensive implementation plan is paramount in today’s dynamic enterprise environment.  One way to jump-start this process is to engage SPS consultants for an objective analysis of where you are today and whether your current communications assets and processes are still delivering value at the lowest possible cost. (This concludes a series of four topics on assessing your communications assets and expenses.  The series started with Reviewing your Communication Assets and Strategy; continued with The Five Year Test and last week’s Add Process Improvement to Create More Value.)

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Once a company has passed the five-year hurdle and understands the costs of operations, it is time to move on to the truly strategic part of the process: finding new ways to enable the workforce through process improvements. For many companies that operate call centers for sales and customer support, this largely involves identifying and eliminating wasteful activities. For example, a manufacturer of industrial equipment discovered through a process review that its call center technicians were spending 22,000 hours a year answering a single question over and over – a question that arose from a misprint in its product catalog years earlier. With each call costing a total of $20, that added up to $440,000 a year – nearly half a million dollars in excess costs that were completely eliminated by sending a single e-mail message to the marketing department dictating a fix to the catalog. If the firm had been tracking metrics on the types and frequencies of calls coming into its call center – and had been on top of process inefficiencies – it wouldn’t have been literally leaking revenues for all those years. The real challenge when making process improvements? Understanding the cost and benefits of modern systems compared to systems deployed years ago. Only after this comparison can a company truly comprehend the potential value-add of a new process and determine whether it is worth keeping. The issue of measurable value-add is critical, as corporate functions that truly do not add any value are usually outsourced at the lowest possible cost. (This is the third in a series of four topics on assessing your communications assets and expenses.  The series started with Reviewing your Communication Assets and Strategy.  Last week, we introduced The Five Year Test.  This series will conclude with next week’s blog, “Determining the Strategic Value of Communications Systems”.)

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Given the speed of innovation, communications systems three or more years old are candidates for reevaluation.  However, given the advances in technology, a routine checklist is not sufficient for this effort.  Instead, companies would be better served by developing a strategic plan to assess the total cost of their systems; examine whether the original assumptions for value and ROI still apply; and evaluate whether an upgrade or replacement would cut costs today and drive value for tomorrow. Many organizations do not understand the full cost burden of their communications solutions. Although the incremental cost of adding an additional server for a TDM system can seem negligible, studies show that the true cost of owning that server is significantly higher. For example, IDC estimates that the cost of acquiring the hardware is just 20 percent of the total cost of ownership (TCO), which leaves 80 percent of costs attributable to setting up, operating and supporting the hardware.  Indeed, the ratio of capital to operating expenses keeps shrinking.  The cost of a server over a 36- to 48-month period for many companies is close to $65,000.  Despite this, capital appropriations are what most organizations focus on when they talk about reducing budgets and containing costs. After considering cost burdens, the next question should be: Are the cost assumptions that were made four, six, eight or even 10 years ago still valid? Too often the answer is no. Take voice. Long-distance rates have declined 90 to 95 percent over the past decade, yet many businesses have not analyzed how they route calls or the effects of that approach on their operating expenses. For example, an organization with 60 or 70 servers dedicated to routing enterprise call traffic may spend upwards of $1 million a year on such devices. However, when asked if route analysis has been considered, the answer may be “we’ve always done it this way,” despite the fact that performing a deep architectural review from the ground up could result in dramatic cost savings. Indeed, it would seem that with the cost advantages that can be achieved by virtualization alone, few organizations can afford not to do this type of review. The fact is, many enterprises are too busy or there is inertia based on an operational “comfort zone.” Although that operational comfort zone may “feel good” for human beings, it may have a negative effect on profit margins. Taking a more strategic approach to asset management and driving rigorous cost and technology analyses positions companies to grow their top lines and margins without linear costs associated with that growth (i.e., pumping the same amount or more traffic into less infrastructure). (This is the second in a series of four topics on assessing your communications assets and expenses.  Last week, we introduced this topic with Reviewing your Communication Assets and Strategy. In next week’s blog, we’ll address “Adding Process Improvement to Create More Value”.)

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By Eric Krapf
Will there just be more video everywhere?

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by Gary Audin, Angela Wyant, Wayne Shumate

The use of a mobile device management solution will help effectively provision, deploy and manage multi-platforms. It will …

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CallCopy's WFO and analytics solutions for contact centers will be sold through Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration and communication solutions, through the Avaya Select Product Program.

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Many businesses consider their telecom system a utility – an important businesses tool that, ironically, is all too often taken for granted.  This casualness creates certain problems.  Too few businesses closely examine their communications architectures and equipment after the initial deployment.  Their original buying decision was based on requirements, cost analyses and the technology choices available at that time.  But many enterprises rarely, if ever, take the time to revisit those assumptions. Despite the sheer amount of communications hardware and software they have installed – and the tremendous amount of duplication they might find if they looked – few businesses regularly reassess their communications infrastructure. The kind of reconciliation that routinely takes place elsewhere in the IT function simply isn’t happening in the communications space. Why not? It’s a question that should be asked, especially now when cost containment is top of mind and legacy time division multiplexing (TDM) telephony systems have given way to Internet Protocol (IP) telephony and, more recently, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-enabled systems. These latter technologies, coupled with virtualization, are driving down the cost of business communications and enabling the creation of new features, functionality and services that enterprises increasingly expect from communications solutions. In terms of a systematic evaluation of an asset base, we’re not talking about pennies shaved off of balance sheets, but potentially millions of dollars in operating and support costs that can be eliminated directly from profit and loss (P&L) statements. The value you can add to your organization by examining past assumptions and re-engineering processes can go far beyond cost reduction to driving significant competitive value. (This is the first in a series of four topics on assessing your communications assets and expenses.  In next week’s blog, we’ll address “The Five Year Test".)

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ConferenceManager™ Airport Emergency Plan System

The Sonexis ConferenceManager Emergency System has been designed to the exact guidelines set forth by the FAA and Air Force requirements for Airfield Operations. The system is easily tied into fire company garage doors, on site and remote police and rescue resources and all other required airport entities. It supports multiple emergency incidents simultaneously on both SIP and PSTN telephony.

Multifunction Notification Requirement Compliant:

• Airport management (Operations and Maintenance)
• ATCT, FSS, or other control point
• Military units JUA (at joint-use airports)
• Airport police/security
• ARFF Service
• Other authorities on or off the airport (AEP compliant)

ConferenceManager Emergency Conferencing uses BlastDial to quickly connect first responders in an audio conference. In the event of an emergency, it is critically important to get a group of emergency responders together on a conference call as quickly as possible with minimal effort. When an emergency occurs the first responder picks up a dedicated phone which instantly creates a conference and triggers a blast dial‐out to other members of the response team. When each team member is called they can be joined directly to the emergency conference in progress.

Emergency Audio Controls:

• Automatic Blast Dial simultaneously to a list of emergency personnel
• Unlimited number of emergency groups
• Up to 3 phone numbers per person
• Phone number mapping to an emergency group, requiring no user input to initiate an emergency conference
• Blast Dial when first person dials in based on dialed number, no additional user input required

Optional Integrated Functionality:

• Automatic Conference Call Recording and Storage
• Detailed Conference Call Reporting
• Web based features including Audio Console
• JITC Support – DoD/DISA Certified Configurability

Give Sonexis a Call Today to Learn more about our AEP Deployed Solutions - 888-476-6394

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Acme Packet Becomes Part of Oracle Communications Portfolio UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ... Oracle's $2 Billion Bet On The Programmable NetworkForbes Jefferies Group Reaffirms "Hold" Rating on Acme Packet (APKT)Zolmax all 11 news articles »

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The Avaya acquisition of Radvision is complete, adding significantly to the video capability that Avaya can offer throughout its portfolio. It is exciting to see Avaya get this serious about video. Radvision’s Scopia platform includes a full line of room-based and personal HD video units, along with a really slick desktop / mobile video client.  Radvision has always been known for multi-vendor support and interoperability, which is great news for those of us who are building interoperable UC solutions.  In a nutshell, it means we get more use from our video room units (such as Polycom or Tandberg) by integrating them with our Avaya and Microsoft infrastructures.  Now, click-to-call and click-to-video functionality (from Lync, if you like) can include one co-worker at his or her desktop, another on an iPhone, and a group of folks on a video room system. The Scopia desktop client enables your PC for video conference calls, while the Scopia mobile client enables your mobile devices.  Scopia mobile is a free download from the Apple App Store, and will be posted in the Android marketplace later this year (currently in beta).  The install is simple on all of the devices we have tried – in fact, while attending a desktop video call, one can install the mobile client on an iPad and iPhone and join from all three simultaneously. Among users’ favorite Scopia features: Ease of use.  Simplicity will help this product be of value in your business.  In a matter of a few minutes, you can be up and running on three devices.  The interface is intuitive and pleasant. Fan back.  How many times during a presentation has someone said something important that grabbed your attention, then changed to the next slide too quickly?  You may be too embarrassed to ask the presenter to turn back (because you weren’t paying full attention), or because it’s not an interactive presentation.  Scopia has a unique feature that fixes this.  On the desktop and mobile clients, you can fan the slides on the bottom of the screen. It is reminiscent of the album art view in iTunes where you can fan through album covers.  You can fan backwards through the slides in the presentation and even zoom in and out of them on your mobile device.  If you get lost, press the live button and you are taken to the current slide. Outlook integration.  The Scopia button (an option to add to Outlook) turns any meeting into a video-enabled meeting.  This is how it should be, with no complicated scheduling app, no external meeting configuration web site, just a button.  This adds your video and plain old audio information (for the less adventurous types) into a new or existing meeting on your calendar.  Attendees, just click the autojoin or install client links to join. Tip: When adding video to an existing meeting, copy the body of the meeting to your clip board first. When Scopia adds video instructions to an existing meeting, it seems to overwrite the existing meeting body. If you copy the body first, you can paste the body back in after the video info is written. This is not an issue for new meetings. Audio prioritization.  When using Scopia with less-than-ideal connectivity, such as driving around on a cellular data network, the audio remains clear even when the video gets choppy.  The Avaya/Radvision folks say they worked hard on a feature that keeps the audio prioritized, so the video stream doesn’t use too much bandwidth and affect the audio. It’s easy to get excited about such simple-to-use video technology.  There is great value in video collaboration because of the way it enhances and personalizes audio conferences.  You can learn faces, share information in a more interactive way and judge body language from the participants.  Avaya has made great progress in eliminating the technical adoption barrier by making the technology easy to install and use. If your users can get past the second barrier, their natural shyness of being in front of a camera, they will be rewarded with richer and more valuable interactions. by Dustin Donaldson (Solution Architect) and Mike Taylor (CTO)

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This presentation was delivered by Gary Audin at ITExpo in Miami, FL January 30 – February 1, 2013.    Click here to access the PowerPoint slides.…

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This presentation was delivered by Gary Audin at ITExpo in Miami, FL January 30 – February 1, 2013.    Click here to access the PowerPoint slides.…

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In last week’s blog entry we announced the new, server-less way to integrate Microsoft Lync with your Avaya infrastructure.  This week, we’ll look closer at how it all works. The ACA integration is a desktop integration.  What that means is that Avaya has developed a “wizard” that your IT team (with some assistance from an able business partner, of course) can use to create a .MSI Windows installer file.  That .MSI file can then be distributed to users.  Since this .MSI contains dial plan rules and other location specific information, you would create a unique .MSI file for each location with unique dial plan requirements. Once the .MSI is installed on a user’s PC, underlying Avaya services for h.323 (not SIP yet) VoIP and for Video are installed, allowing users to click-to-call or click-to-video from their Lync (or OCS R2) client.  Because these are silent services, users only log into their Lync clients, and their Avaya h.323 extensions (with softphones enabled) gets associated to their Lync identities.  The first time they use the client they will have to enter their extensions and passwords, but from that point forward, they do not need to do anything buy launch their Lync clients. Did I forget to mention the license cost?  This new integration reduces the license cost to 1 cent ($.01) per user! You don’t need AES licenses. or ACE licenses, or servers. So, what’s the catch?  Well, software maintenance fees do apply to the solution, and you have to be at or above CM release 5.2.1 for the audio solution, and on or above CM release 6.2 for the full audio-and-video experience.  There are also patch and version requirements for OCS R2 or Lync 2010.  (Lync 2013 isn’t supported in the first release.)  Check with your business partner or reach out to your SPS contact for the specifics. In summary, this new integration creates a much simpler, significantly lower-cost way to get to a best-of-breed integration of your Microsoft desktop, and your rock solid, five nines, Avaya voice and video infrastructure.  Now you can rest easy as you enable all of those cool, click-to-whatever UC features because you haven’t compromised either of the infrastructures! So now there’s no reason to wait … integrate! by Dustin Donaldson (Solution Architect) and Mike Taylor (CTO)

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Today you'll be hearing from a guest blogger who I had the pleasure of introducing a few months ago. John Quaglietta has extensive hands-on learning and teaching in the realm of Customer Experience Management (CEM). He has over 20 years of experience as an accomplished leader, customer service & contact center consultant, and as a customer experience visionary. He has worked with the world's largest organizations in solving some of the most challenging and thought provoking business challenges around customer centricity, and the effect customer and employee engaged organizations have on both top and bottom line financial success.

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ALL ABOARD! The Customer Journey

In my last blog post, we talked about the importance of the contact center in delivering on the promise of the customer experience. The contact center has significant opportunities to elevate its role in the business by tying what it does to organizational customer experience objectives such as retention, acquisition and ultimately lifetime value. The contact center plays a considerable role in the customer journey, from a time a customer researches, selects and buys a product or service, to when a customer receives it and begins using it and requesting support.

Today, I am expanding on this line of thought to look at it through the lens of the ownership phase of the customer lifecycle, and more specifically, the customer on-boarding process. The customer on-boarding process can be best defined as the period of time at the beginning of the ownership phase of the customer journey, where a customer receives the product/service it has purchased and begins to use it. It is the process of acclimating the consumer with the organization, the organization with the consumer, and the consumer with the product/service it has acquired. The on-boarding process is different for every organization, product and customer. Generally speaking, and based on experience, I have seen it typically referred to as "the first 90-120 days of the ownership cycle".

The customer on-boarding process is a critical step in the customer journey because it begins the process of solidifying the emotional bond that takes place between a customer and organization, which if done properly, positively impacts retention, referrals and ultimately customer lifetime value (CLV). Some firms estimate that 10-20% of newly acquired customers defect within the first 12 months of being a customer. That fact alone should be reason enough to put extra emphasis and focus on the first 90-120 days of ownership.

During this acclimation process, consumers tend to have a wide range of inquiries. "How do I use this?", "When do I receive my first bill?", "Can I pay online?", "How do I return what I bought?", as well as many others. We can anticipate these inquiries because virtually every customer asks similar things. And, being a contact center, we already do a good bit of tracking of request by type and frequency because this is how we staff and plan appropriately.

With all this data at our fingertips, and armed to anticipate and address customer inquiries, the interactions that take place during the on-boarding process are still in large part consumer initiated. If our focus is to create a better on-boarding process for the customer for the reasons mentioned above, the contact center is in a unique position to do this, and to help cement the emotional bond critical to insuring customer longevity.

What are you doing to ensure that your customers are comfortable? Are you proactively answering many of the questions they may have? Do they know where to go for help? These are just some basic questions you can ask yourself to get this conversation going. For a few very simple tips, tune in next week!

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Our customers are currently very interested in integrating Microsoft Lync as a desktop, IM and presence client with the existing Avaya infrastructure, to leverage these investments while enabling click-to-call and click-to-video.  Learn more from Dustin Donaldson (Solution Architect) and Mike Taylor (CTO).

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Providea Expands Unified Communications Solutions to Asia/Pacific with New ... PR Newswire UK (press release) Providea Expands Unified Communications Solutions to Asia/Pacific with New Hong Kong Operations Center. Google Share with delicious Share with digg Share with Facebook Share with Google Share with LinkedIn Share with MySpace Share with ... and more »

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How to Avoid the Unified Communications Pilot Trap UCStrategies Ask any enterprise customer, reseller, or system integrator what's the biggest challenge when it comes to deploying a unified communications (UC) solution, most of them will say multivendor interoperability. UC is not a single product, but a solution ... and more »

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Video conferencing has been a proven technology for years, but was traditionally limited to executive desktops and conference rooms. With today's democratization of video - thanks to significant advances in quality, reliability and ease of use - knowledge workers are taking advantage of video at their desktops and on their mobile devices. They're collaborating face-to-face, sharing documents, making faster decisions and improving productivity.

Thanks to enterprise-grade video conferencing, companies are building stronger teams every day. In this blog, I'll talk about how and why our customers are improving their corporate culture and building stronger teams. I hope reading this blog is enough to convince you to give video conferencing a try. You can try Avaya Scopia for free by clicking here.

Of course with so much opportunity, there are new entrants to the market all the time. The choices can be overwhelming. Last year, I blogged on the different types of video conferencing: Not All Video Conferencing Is Created Equal. I encourage you to read that post for some input on the right solution for your organization.

Driving Adoption
Video conferencing brings people together, and businesses around the globe are discovering new applications for video. In many cases those applications are dramatically changing the way organizations do business - take HR, for example. Video is changing the way companies interact with job candidates. It expands the interview pool for companies looking to hire, and it helps employees collaborate effectively regardless of location. Today, Scopia customers are interviewing new candidates (and even recording and playing those interviews back for hiring managers) and conducting corporate training sessions via video. Video is also used very effectively for mentoring, succession planning, morale boosting, team building, and executive coaching.

Scopia customers are also increasing the frequency of video meetings as they discover the many benefits. Meeting by video frees up time so that participants can have richer and more frequent meetings without surrendering precious time to travel. It helps people collect and exchange information, meet on-the-fly, and enables faster, better decision making. It enhances work-life balance and can save companies money.

Successfully implementing a video solution that achieves these types of results takes careful planning. It's important to choose an enterprise-grade solution that features HD video and audio, content-sharing, meeting moderation, streaming and recording, chat capabilities, etc. And... it has to be easy to use! Many promising technologies have languished expensively in IT closets because users never embraced them. That is why ease of use needs to be near the top of your list when evaluating solutions.

Easy-to-use means your video solution is intuitive, always on, provides simple, one-click-to-join capabilities, delivers a rich collaborative experience, and doesn't entail complex licensing or require involvement from your IT team to set up or run a meeting. The Scopia portfolio offers all of this and has for years. Radvision Scopia was a well-kept secret, but thanks to the Avaya acquisition, our brand is quickly gaining traction. People simply have to try it to believe it.

Seeing Is Believing
I've seen firsthand since joining Avaya how Scopia video conferencing can bring teams closer together. Since the acquisition closed last June, we've attended new-hire training sessions, companywide meetings, and weekly team calls - all via video.

Before Avaya acquired Radvision, video wasn't a core part of the company's culture. Now, it's integral to our formal and informal communication strategy. In fact, since I joined Avaya, I've seen teams come together around the globe to create fun and motivational messages using Scopia technology. Some of these are for external consumption, e.g. the recent Tips for a Successful Video Conference. While others are merely to spread some holiday cheer among colleagues - our Americas marketing team has gotten creative with song and dance a number of times, putting smiles on our faces!

Our customers are reaping the benefits as well. One law firm reduced its partner review cycle in half by conducting the meetings over video. Another company achieved a zero-footprint growth strategy for its contact center by hiring all home-based employees connected via video. The opportunities to conduct business more efficiently, be more agile, and collaborate more effectively are endless when your company adopts video conferencing as part of its culture.

Simplifying Video for Everyone
How does Scopia video entice even technophobes to make video part of their daily work lives? With one-click simplicity. It doesn't matter where you're calling in from - whether you're inside an organization or outside of it - or what device you're using to join the call. Scopia video conferencing takes the guesswork out by automatically detecting the device and network being for each participant. It then leverages the built-in audio and video components on that device, or in the case of a laptop or PC, leverages the optimal connected peripherals like webcams, speakerphones, etc.

In fact, Scopia Mobile is incredibly intuitive. If you ask me, no one makes video conferencing easier than we do. My kids can use it - and so can others according to this YouTube video. When you click on the link to join a call, you automatically download the appropriate application for your device--and you're in.

All this means that when you deploy Scopia video conferencing in your organization, there is every chance it will quickly go viral. No need to set up training - with our solution, there's no complex licensing, no searching through app stores for the right download, no confusion on how to share your desktop or an individual application. And Scopia video is secure - you always know who is on a call, and whether anyone new joins or someone drops off.

It's That Easy
Some might say Scopia video conferencing is a revolutionary approach to video conferencing, but we've been doing this since 2007 with Scopia Desktop. And now, with Scopia Mobile, we've extended the same ease-of-use to mobile users. Thanks to technologies like Scopia video conferencing, I forget that I haven't met my colleagues in-person... I've spent so many hours on video with some of them, it's hard to believe we haven't been in the same room at the same time. We feel like we know each other well after so many video interactions.

If you don't believe me and haven't tried Scopia yet, I encourage you to test it out - simply click here and sign up.

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The Cloud is Ready - Are You? UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ...

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SlashGear

Cisco VoIP Phones Vulnerable to Malware UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ... Cisco issues advisory to plug security hole in VoIP phonesFierceEnterpriseCommunications all 17 news articles »

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As recently as a few years ago, the words “bring your own” might be followed by a number of words, but “device” probably wasn’t among them. For enterprises today, “BYOD” means that users bring their own devices, plus the unplanned additional expenses and operating challenges required to support these uncontrolled devices. For many organizations, BYOD strategy starts with deploying selected applications to targeted devices and platforms. In these early planning stages, it is easy to overlook the paradigm shift that BYOD requires in your IT business operations. By definition, a BYOD strategy introduces new issues to your business. Before rushing to launch attractive new BYOD applications, enterprises need to address issues such as: How to secure devices they don’t own Securing data on devices that travel home with employees each night Preventing data loss when employees leave the company, taking devices with them For years organizations have provided and controlled mobile devices directly, with complete control for management operations like security upgrades, patches, repairs and device swap-out. In a BYOD environment, ensuring device integrity is much more complex, as personally-owned devices can much more easily be stolen, broken, upgraded or hacked – all outside of standard security procedures. An effective BYOD strategy must cover both operational challenges and technical procedures. An experienced partner like SPS can help you develop a roadmap to integrate business processes and device management within a seamless rollout strategy.

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Successfully Enabling Cloud and Home Agent Solutions: Keeping Customer ... PR Newswire (press release) System integrator Strategic Products and Services (SPS) has substantial expertise with assisting companies to implement cloud programs, specifically private dedicated clouds. It has the knowledge and solutions to help firms successfully set up and ... and more »

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HP's top strategist says CEO Meg Whitman has made a five year personal commitment to take HP back to "incredible greatness."

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The Latest HIPAA violations in Idaho and Massachusetts are resulting in fines for failing to protect patient data.

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'Tis the season. Flu season, that is.

Whether it's traditional influenza paralyzing parts of the U.S. right now or the stomach flu that's been crippling families in some states, there are ways to avoid getting sick. Of course there are the traditional precautions we should all be taking, but what happens when work gets in the way of our best intentions? If you're on deadline, working on an important collaborative project or simply don't have time to take off for illness, you can work without being infected, or infecting others. How...? Well by using video conferencing, of course!

Keep your germs at home and avoid sick coworkers
We can't protect ourselves from all the bugs out there, but by staying home when we or our loved ones are sick, we can help do our part to stop spreading germs. Video conferencing enables you to collaborate in real-time, face-to-face with your colleagues from anywhere, anytime and on virtually any device. It enables productivity even when you can't make it into the office.

Even if you are feeling fine, you might appreciate the option to go the video conferencing route if you happen to work with heroic colleagues who drag themselves into the office no matter how badly they feel, and proceed to infect everyone else.

Perhaps you have even been that "hero." Have you ever gone to work when you had sick family members at home - only to "share the wealth" with your coworkers? If you have, please STOP! Get healthy and stay healthy by limiting contact with colleagues when the flu virus is floating are in the air (not to mention on your desk and in the office kitchen, rest rooms, conference rooms, etc.).

Think twice before flying
Planning a business trip? You may want to reconsider... when it comes time to travel for business, video conferencing looks more attractive than ever at the moment. According to a survey conducted by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, 40 percent of Americans would knowingly get on an airplane for a work trip while infected with the flu. 45 percent would board the plane to go on vacation! Video conferencing is a great way to stay out of the path of any flu virus that might happen to be recirculating through the airline cabin on your flight.

If you don't have the ability to video conference today, we can help. Sign up for a free trial of Scopia Desktop and Scopia Mobile. Simply click here and test it out!

Nervous about using video? Don't be - relax, be yourself, and check out our Top 10 Tips for Mobile Video Conferencing.

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Sonexis ConferenceManager™ Aids in Disaster Recovery

Sonexis In-House Conferencing System

As disasters and emergencies are continuing to have a greater national and at times global impact, a new trend of risk planning is taking precedence. Many companies are jeopardizing their future because they have little to no telecom disaster recovery planning measures in place. It is often too expensive for many small firms to invest in offsite facilities to ensure business continuity and larger organizations are faced with a diverse infrastructure that cannot be handled efficiently by one solution.

In the event of a Disaster or Emergency, features such as Blast Dial & (DID) management, can be configured to quickly connect first responders in an audio conference. When an emergency occurs, the first responder can dial an emergency number that immediately creates a conference and triggers a Blast-Dial to other members of the response team. When each team member answers, they are prompted to join the emergency conference in progress. The ConferenceManager can also be pre-configured to blast-dial distribution lists for each type of outage (network, server, facilities, etc.).

Sonexis Conferencing Bridge Provides Peace of Mind

With your conferencing capabilities intact, your organization can begin the process of executing your Disaster Recovery Plan which should include the following action items:

1. Have an up-to-date list of key personnel

2. Work off of a detailed script during a disaster

3. Test and re-test the detailed disaster recovery plan regularly

4. Each member of the team should be familiar with their defined role

5. Have a list of 24-hour supply delivery resources at the recovery site

6. Include an application list in the DR plan

7. Maintain a current network diagram of the entire network and recovery site in the DR plan

8. The DR plan should contain an easy-to-follow map and directions of how to reach the recovery site

9. Provide a current list of vendor contacts and insurance documentation such as policy numbers

10. Use Sonexis ConferenceManager to keep communications flowing during the crisis

To add appeal to the already compelling Sonexis story, we offer a unique disaster recovery solution for ConferenceManager owners. Sonexis provides users access to a bridge that they can load their accounts and data into at our co-location facility. In the event you experience a network outage or major disaster, you can seamlessly redirect your traffic to our facility and maintain your full conferencing capability without disruption. Imagine the peace of mind you’ll enjoy knowing that critical communications infrastructure will always be available.

To Begin Your Disaster Recovery Plan, Start by Calling Sonexis Today!

 

 

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When it comes to VoIP and unified communications, are you sacrificing security ... Network World However, as businesses migrate away from traditional PSTN telephony toward more affordable and feature-rich IP telephony and unified communications, security concerns should rise to the top of the list. Once-private business conversations can now be ...

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CallCopy announced today its selection by Columbus Business First as a “Best Places to Work” for 2012 based upon overwhelmingly positive feedback from employee survey data.

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Mobility in 2013: Sure Shots, Cliffhangers and Question Marks UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ... and more »

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 Next-gen videoconferencing is built on a solid UC foundation.  This unified approach to visual communications enables organizations to leverage more convenient and ubiquitous voice, data and video conferencing. The best of these UC-based systems deliver comprehensive solutions, including: Necessary network infrastructure, connectivity and Quality of Service (QoS) Management of firewalls, bandwidth, and devices Video infrastructure including endpoint equipment for conference rooms, desktops, and personal video devices Conference scheduling and directory services Monitoring and billing applications (if video capabilities are delivered to other organizations) When considering potential suppliers, organizations should evaluate partners and solutions according to the following criteria: Systems must be fully interoperable: Capable of connecting a broad range of legacy systems Endpoint support from conference room to desktop and mobile devices Look for seamless integration with audio telephony and unified communications systems. Systems should support telepresence functionality and systems. Given the extensive and sophisticated capabilities of today’s emerging generation of visual communications, how can a company reliably select the optimal solution to suit their needs, at the right cost? For many IT decision-makers, any evaluation of cost-effective collaboration technologies begins with a hard-nosed ROI analysis, starting with a realistic assessment of the capabilities needed to enable productivity.  Ask yourself exactly what costs can be eliminated by deploying a unified visual communications solution, and make sure you understand the full cost of any potential solution – including infrastructure, support, and personnel expenses. Organizations need to perform their own thorough TCO analysis, including both solution costs (as quoted) and non-vendor costs, such as: Additional costs resulting from use of existing network resources in the new solution Costs to maintain legacy video systems that will be integrated into the new solution Savings from retiring existing systems Savings from travel reduction, increased productivity, etc. Of course, in addition to the measurable benefits of cost, productivity and environmental enhancements, a complete analysis will also consider the less tangible – but very real – advantages of improved customer and partner relations, enhanced employee morale, and tighter enterprise cohesion.  Forward-looking organizations can realize all of those advantages from a next-gen unified approach to visual communications.

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 While many contemporary business communication implementations have included video conferencing, utilization of these systems has been low.  Past systems have often been difficult to use, and lacked inside technical support for basic functions like dialing another location.  In addition, traditional room-based video conference systems were typically provisioned for a handful of high-profile locations only, providing no support for conferences with smaller field offices, customer sites, partner companies and such. But if you have not investigated the technology lately, you may be in for some pleasant surprises.  Enterprise-class visual collaboration is undergoing a rapid evolution as Unified Communications extends conferencing to mobile and desktop locations, and as high-definition technologies replace traditional room-based systems.  And the new generation of solutions provides all this at a lower cost. The big question for many organizations is simple:  How can you leverage these powerful new capabilities without abandoning current, and often significant, investments in previous-generation conferencing assets?  The answer for many enterprises is the emerging generation of conferencing solutions that combine investment protection (via nearly universal support for legacy endpoints) with fast and affordable scalability, and more powerful unified-communication and collaborative capabilities. Unlike many of the highly-proprietary solutions of the past, today’s increasingly standardized video-conferencing systems give organizations the flexibility to continue using their current equipment and applications, while taking full advantage of the new features, improved displays, and more sophisticated functionality of current-generation products. Reducing the time and cost of travel is a key benefit of any good video conferencing solution.  To remain competitive, companies everywhere are increasingly replacing business travel with video conferences for regular monthly meetings, branch office communications, client presentations, and collaboration with partners and supply chain vendors. When used effectively, video can foster closer and more rewarding relationships with customers, internal teams, and external partners.  Dispersed project teams can meet face-to-face on a more regular basis, without the cost and disruption of out-of-office travel.  Workforce morale can improve greatly as employees gain work-life balance by replacing business travel with convenient and productive video meetings. Finally, environmentally-conscious organizations can claim a measurable reduction in their carbon footprint metrics, resulting from reductions in travel due to visual conferencing.  Video conferencing provides a high-profile way to demonstrate an enterprise-wide commitment to sustainability. In our next SPS blog post, we drill down into the details of exactly how organizations can create and leverage next-gen visual communications.

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By Gary Audin
It's critical to measure the success of your TEM efforts, and to publicize those results internally.

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SPS Named 2012 Avaya US Partner of the Year IT News Online PARSIPPANY, N.J., Nov. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a global systems integrator, is proud to announce it has been named Avaya Partner of the Year for 2012. Avaya is a global provider of business communications and ... and more »

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SPS Named 2012 Avaya U.S. Partner of the Year PR Newswire (press release) 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a global systems integrator, is proud to announce it has been named Avaya Partner of the Year for 2012. Avaya is a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems, ... and more »

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Forrester: The Unified Communications Journey Computerworld Australia The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement is a testimonial to the increasing influence end users have to force IT to design, develop and deploy a flexible set of UC capabilities. This profile will explore the priorities today's IT managers have ... and more »

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Enterprise-class mobility does offer clear benefits, with the ability to simplify and extend business communications – but small- and medium-sized organizations may lack extensive IT capabilities, making Mobility and BYOD implementations a daunting challenge.  But, by answering several basic questions and planning ahead, small- to medium-sized businesses can successfully implement Mobility and BYOD solutions. The highest priority for many organizations is maintaining high-touch relationships with customers, employees and supply chain partners.  To successfully implement a Mobility or BYOD solution, organizations must select products and applications that incorporate best practices for deployment, security, management and control. Here’s a quick primer on some of the major issues involved in Mobility and BYOD solutions: As a first step, define the business functions and roles that you wish to enable with Mobility or BYOD functionality.  Then, specify target outcomes with concrete, verifiable business metrics.  The often-quoted line from Stephen Covey comes to mind: “Begin with the end in mind.”  If your project starts with no targeted outcome, then your project will of course fail to hit any target at all. You can ensure your project has a clear aim by identifying and defining actual use cases.  This practice not only ensures that your implementation has a goal, it also provides concrete and testable target outcomes.  These use cases will act as the standard for performance when you develop quantifiable testing criteria to measure project outcomes. Note that use cases may involve multiple roles, including customers and supply-chain partners.  Such touch-points should be integrated in all phases of project planning – from seeking input at project kick-off, to acceptance testing at the end. When selecting technology to implement your Mobility and BYOD goals, pay close attention to mobile applications, which must be reliable and secure within the context of company-secured data.  Do not assume that corporate resources and data are secure merely because there is no intent to share specific data.  Whenever you open a secured door on selected corporate data, check to ensure that this does not expose additional windows for unauthorized access.  BYOD projects in particular can create new security faults or uncover existing exposures that were not previously detected. Finally, remember that most WiFi networks today were not designed or implemented to support real-time voice or video traffic, and do not have the right kind of identity management or security to support all BYOD devices, or the increased traffic volume that comes with them.  Assessing your WiFi infrastructure now will save you a lot of pain in your BYOD deployment later. To ensure that these considerations are all respected, while delivering the intended outcome, organizations should retain highly-qualified guidance and take advantage of proven solutions.  A broad and well-defined Unified Communications (UC) approach can help ensure that an organization’s Mobility and BYOD functions are addressed effectively – both by providing secure and tested out-of-the-box functionality, and by leading your organization to define program objectives in alignment with industry best-practices.  UC by definition leverages and integrates traditional voice, data, and visual communications, and can help make mobility a well-integrated and secure part of your enterprise environment. Mobility is no longer a luxury.  In many industries, it is critical to survival and success; in others, there is still room for innovators to gain advantage over competitors that lag in technology adoption.

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Companies strive to innovate.  Innovation alone is not enough for a company to succeed.  The key is to ensure that a new product or service solves a real problem or satisfies a need.

 

“If you create a new product that addresses a company’s or consumer’s number one or two ‘pain point’ or problem, your company will see success,” said Matt Larson, chief executive officer of Confio Corporation during a CEO Roundtable in Boulder, CO  sponsored by the Boulder County Business Report.  “If you look at a thousand companies that are addressing ‘pain’ instead of ‘nice-to-have,’ the odds of them being successful are higher.”

 

Radish Systems Case Study:    VISUAL IVR EASES THE PAIN.

The Situation.  It is well known that Interactive Voice Response (IVRs) are a serious pain for callers, especially mobile callers who want ever-faster, ever-easier transactions. IVRs in Mobility are a disaster for the customer experience due to any number of interface and device issues which result in even higher abandonment rates.  Worse yet, complex IVRs with long phone trees don’t efficiently deliver information or easily allow transfer to live agents.

The Solution.  To solve this problem, Radish Systems just introduced its Visual IVR solution. Here’s what others are saying:

 

“Radish Systems recently released the ChoiceView REST API for Visual IVR. This release is significant as it is the only solution that has the ability to currently turn outdated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems into next generation Visual IVRs that can operate with any network, phone, and just about all mobile devices.”

Carolyn J. Dawson, August 14, 2012, TMCnet.com

With a True Visual IVR customers instantly see menus while hearing information, tap choices on their smart device, rapidly move through screens in much less time than it takes to speak the options, and receive visual and voice responses.   Visual IVRs cut call time and costs, by more than half in most situations, increase understanding by 50% or more, and improve mobile user satisfaction and engagement.

“Radish Systems’ ChoiceView mobile platform and applications offer contact centers additional options to service their customers and provide innovative ways for clients to interact through live visual communications,” said Monica Tarr, SPS contact center consulting practice director. “Visual IVR provides a unique experience for smartphone users and maps caller behavior to business processes.”

Learn more:

1. See a Visual IVR in action at the video demo link at www.radishsystems.com.

2. Get the free white paper presentation, “Why Visual Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for Mobile?” at www.radishsystems.com/products/the-choiceview-ivr/.

3. Start using the ChoiceView Rest API to enhance your IVR and the ChoiceView SDK to enable your mobile app. Get it at www.radishsystems.com/for-developers/.

4. Ease the pain. Nominate companies you’d like to see improve their IVR at www.radishsystems.com/ease-the-pain/.

5.  Try ChoiceView NOW.  Download the free mobile app from the Apple and Android App Stores.  Try the demo.

 

Five Tips to Creating Income from Innovation.

 

1. Find the Pain. Look for pain points or unmet needs in the marketplace.

 

1. Innovate and Determine a Solution.  Do you have a potential solution to the problem?  Define it.

 

1. Test the Marketplace.  Talk to prospective customers, confirm the problem, and test the solution.  Is your solution a must-have?  Learn as much as you can on how to make the solution a necessity.

 

1. Iterate.  Take what you learned from the marketplace and improve your solution.  Then test some more until a prospect says, “We need what you are offering right now and we will pay you for it.”

1. Learn from the Pros.  Successful entrepreneur Steven Blank offers the free online Lean LaunchPad course.  “What we now know is that startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable and repeatable business model. This Lean LaunchPad class will teach you how to efficiently search for your scalable and repeatable Business Model Design and Customer Development.”

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Avaya Names US Channel Partners of the Year MarketWatch (press release) Avaya Partner of the Year Strategic Products and Services (SPS) -- Avaya Services Partner of the Year NACR -- Avaya Mid-Market Partner of the Year MAC Source Communications, Inc. -- Avaya Growth Partner of the Year CBTS -- Avaya Networking Partner ... and more »

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Mobile communication technologies are growing steadily more sophisticated, more accessible, and more popular – and adoption is not limited to technology professionals and adult early adopters.  An ever-expanding population of young people is becoming proficient and habitual users of these technologies at high-school and college age. In this context, employees of all ages, but especially young workers described as “millennials” or “Generation Y”, are calling upon corporate IT to provide them with more flexible options for remote communications and device support.  The good news is that these demands are not merely recreational or frivolous; in fact, Mobility and Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) support both provide significant business benefits. Mobility technologies include Unified Communications (UC) functions like access to corporate directories, federated identity (or single sign-on), simplified mobile switching, call screening, call routing, call logs, visual voicemail and location-based presence.  Many of these functions were viewed as curiosities when first introduced, but are increasingly viewed as essentials.  By enabling additional productivity at times when employees are called away from their desks, mobility is enabling competitive advantage for early adopters, and raising the bar for productivity everywhere. BYOD enables users to access corporate information and voice resources using employee-owned devices.  Doing so has the advantages of enabling employees to work from anywhere, inside or outside of business hours, and also enabling them to use their preferred computing devices, including tablets and smartphones.  The trade-off is information security.  Such devices clearly lack a wired connection to secure corporate IT resources, and lack native support for secure Virtual Private Networks (VPN). True enterprise-class mobility simplifies, extends and secures business communications.  Together, Mobility and BYOD technologies can drive significant productivity:  Providing anytime access to voice and data information allows simple activities, like reviewing voice and email messages, to be performed on the move, leaving employees ready for productive work when they return to the office. Enabling real-time access to information via mobile devices can reduce cycle time on key business transactions. Facilitating remote use of business applications can likewise accelerate transactions by enabling co-workers with up-to-date information. There are several keys to success in the scenarios above:  solid business-processes analysis, a secure WiFi network that’s ready to support real-time, and high-quality implementation of IT and business-communications functionality.  Companies that master these disciplines reap the benefits.  Companies that fail will see no impact, or may even see reduced business performance. In today’s fast-paced and competitive global enterprise environment, organizations need converged network and unified communications solutions that ensure anywhere, anytime access and collaboration – both for targeted job roles and business processes, and for general communications functionality.  Companies and agencies of all kinds are racing to adapt to this new reality as the number and diversity of mobile devices grows. In our next SPS blog post, we’ll address how to get started with creating a clear, actionable and beneficial Mobility and BYOD strategy for your enterprise.

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CallCopy today announced that Gartner has positioned it among leading integrated WFO solution providers delivering sophisticated contact center management solutions to meet a growing market demand.

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Acme Packet Named a Leader in Magic Quadrant for Session Border Controller ... UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ...

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 For small and medium businesses, Unified Communications can break down barriers between organizations, between sellers and customers, and even the barriers between processes and systems.

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CallCopy ranked #916 on the influential Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in the US. This is the third straight year CallCopy has appeared on the list and also its status as the highest ranked contact center software provider to appear on the list.

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Top Avaya Partner SPS Buys Providea Conferencing Channel Partners SPS is a top Avaya partner that also works with Microsoft, Cisco, Extreme Networks and other vendors. Together, SPS and Providea will provide UC and contact center products, and cloud and managed services. “We anticipate significant developments ... SPS Acquires Video and Telepresence Provider, Providea ConferencingSacramento Bee SP500 Acquisition: SPS Buys ProvideaTelepresence Options all 12 news articles »

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SP500 Acquisition: SPS Buys Providea CRN Strategic Products and Services (SPS), the Parsippany, N.J.-based communications and systems integration powerhouse, has acquired top video and managed services solution provider Providea Conferencing, the companies confirmed Monday. Financial ...

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 Why are businesses of all sizes showing a renewed interest in Unified Communications (UC)?  Research and real-world experience provide some solid answers.

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By Irwin Lazar
As the number of options for establishing B2B video conferencing grows, so too does the value of video conferencing investments.

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 Interest in Unified Communications has surged recently, due to a renewed focus on collaboration and productivity.  But how does UC play in the world of small- to mid-sized businesses?

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	Juniper Launches World's Most Powerful Edge Services Engine Enabling Service Providers to Maximize Top Line Revenue
SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - Oct 11, 2012) - Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), the industry leader in network innovation, today announced the world's most powerful edge services router and a single, virtualized platform for rapid deployment of multivendor applications. Combined, the new Juniper Networks® MX2020 3D Universal Edge Router and new JunosV App Engine transform the network edge into a powerful platform for rapid service deployment, speeding time to revenue by up to 69 percent compared to other solutions1. This helps service providers reverse declining revenue models by removing the complexity and time associated with service deployment. "Our vision for the new network is to provide innovations that help transform service providers into super providers," said Rami Rahim, senior vice president, Edge and Aggregation Business Unit, Juniper Networks. "Thousands of MX customers have validated the need for massive scaling and reduced complexity driven by emerging video, applications, and cloud-based services. We see our new edge services engine as the first solution that truly empowers service providers to take control of their business by removing barriers currently hindering innovation and revenue expansion." The MX Series router and JunosV App Engine build on recently announced consumer and business services that allow customers to leverage their existing infrastructure to maximize revenue opportunities through rapid service deployment. This solution offers new levels of scale for service providers by delivering a gateway for everything the network has to offer: one system, innovative software services, with unlimited revenue possibilities at unconstrained scale. News Highlights MX2020 and MX2010 3D Universal Edge Routers, the world's most powerful single-chassis routers, allow service providers to scale up to 67 percent more capacity than any other competitor2. At 80 Tbps of capacity, a single MX2020 3D Universal Edge router has enough bandwidth to deliver HD video to the equivalent of every household in New York -- and still have room for New Jersey. The routers leverage the Juniper Networks Junos® Trio Chipset with massive 3D scaling across bandwidth, subscribers and services to help service providers deliver mobile Internet, cloud and video services with reduced infrastructure and operational complexity. Existing Trio-based line cards can be used interchangeably in this new chassis, preserving investment protection for customers with MX Series 3D routers already in their infrastructure. The MX2010 3D router supports 40 Tbps of capacity. JunosV App Engine with the MX Series 3D router is the first hypervisor for the edge. Service providers can drag and drop existing applications, such as load balancing, security services, online gaming and advertising3, as well as simultaneously operate applications from any vendor to help them drive new streams of revenue quickly. MX Virtual Chassis virtualizes broadband or business edge services over multiple MX 3D routers allowing service providers to operate the systems as a single chassis and quickly add new subscribers. Benefits include faster time to provision services, higher resiliency, increased performance and scale. Path Computational Element (PCE) on the MX brings programmable properties into the network so that IT managers can find the most efficient paths to optimize on-demand bandwidth requirements. Juniper Rapid Assessment is a suite of services to enable simplified integration and testing with operating and business support systems (OSS/BSS), traffic migration, network security, and virtual application development. These services help customers accelerate production deployment and reduce time to revenue. Consultants from Juniper and its partners specialize in multivendor environments across wireless and wireline networks, IP/MPLS technology and security. Supporting Quotes "With data on Telstra's fixed network doubling approximately every 17 months we need a network that is scalable, resilient and integrated. The Juniper Edge Services Router assists Telstra to manage content delivery, is highly scalable and integrates our networks. Using this equipment in our network assists us to manage the ever increasing volumes of traffic on the Telstra network." - Mike Wright, executive director, Networks and Access Technologies, Telstra "Our ability to build highly scalable networks to support streaming video adoption and complex business applications require network innovators to deliver high performance routers and improved operational efficiency. As network bandwidth and essential business application requirements continue to advance, Juniper's routing and software solutions empower us with the massive capacity headroom and carrier-grade features to methodically evolve our network with the new world of business." - Kempei Fukuda, director, Network Services Division, NTT Communications "To stay ahead of the rapid pace of mobility and cloud-optimized applications, our enterprise customers need simplified communications services that will scale on-demand and remain highly reliable. Juniper's networking approach enables us to seamlessly accelerate the delivery of advanced communications services to our customers without being hindered by operational complexity and performance limitations. As a result, we are precisely positioned to improve our customers' experience and deliver competitive solutions in the future." - Don MacNeil, chief marketing officer, XO Communications SINET connects universities and research institutions within Japan and globally for research collaboration. "In order for us to efficiently manage demand for greater bandwidth, latency-sensitive services and additional users, we needed a more flexible and programmable architecture. Juniper's innovative approach with the JunosV App Engine is a way for us to seamlessly create and simultaneously operate multiple applications on a single platform, reducing application migration time for future and new-generation Internet." - Michihiro Aoki, research professor, National Institute of Informatics (NII) "We predict that public IT cloud services spending will reach over $40 billion this year and almost $100 billion in 2016. This opportunity, coupled with streaming video and audio driving nearly half of the broadband traffic today and growing, will enable service providers to increase revenue if they capitalize now on the cloud, content, and mobility drivers. This new generation of edge routers optimized to enable virtualized data, voice and video services from a single, scalable platform will enable providers to cost-effectively monetize their networks with new consumer and business services." - Nav Chander, research manager, Telecom Business Services and Carrier Network Infrastructure, IDC Additional Resources: Relevant Juniper Blog: Universal Edge 2020: Maximizing Service Provider Revenue and Scaling the Edge for the Next Decade Discover New Economics with Universal Edge Network Virtualization for Services Foresight Valuation Group Reports: Monetizing Business Edge with Hosted Private Cloud Services Monetizing Broadband Edge Services with TV Everywhere Relevant Juniper Website: www.juniper.net/edge Juniper.Net Community: www.juniper.net/community Juniper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junipernetworks Juniper on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JuniperNetworks About Juniper Networks Juniper Networks is in the business of network innovation. From devices to data centers, from consumers to cloud providers, Juniper Networks delivers the software, silicon and systems that transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on Twitter and Facebook. Juniper Networks and Junos are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The Juniper Networks and Junos logos are trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. 1 ACG Research, "ACG Research: New Service Provider Economics with Network Optimization Services", 2012  2 A single Juniper MX 2020 router capacity compared to a single Cisco ASR 9000 router 3 Applications listed represent examples and are not limited to these specifically cited
Copyright © 1996-2011 Juniper Networks, Inc.     All rights reserved                                                                                      Update preferences

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Emerging technologies make it possible to position video-conferencing closer to the user – on personal computers, smartphones and tablets – for unprecedented levels of adoption.

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Did you know…?  In 10,000 Traffic Studies, over 70% found that at least one trunk group was over-trunked by a factor of 2:1.  The information gained from SPS Insight Services can quickly pay for the study itself.

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 Did you know…? In 10,000 Traffic Studies, over 70% found that at least one trunk group was over-trunked by a factor of 2:1. The information gained from SPS Insight Services can quickly pay for the study itself.

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You are ready to consider Unified Communications. Will it be plug-and-play or will there be barriers to be surmounted before a successful implementation can occur? …

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If there is any theme in IT today, it is a flat or reduced the IT budget. One budget candidate is using SIP trunking and …

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It is likely that a policy does exist for enterprise owned mobile devices. Most enterprises are considering whether or not to implement policies and procedures …

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By Gary Audin
Enterprises should support the work of standards bodies that are creating specifications for APIs and other elements of connecting to cloud services.

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SPSTechBeat: Growing trend to serve customers: multichannel service http://t.co/XF9tL0hi

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Utility Company Uses Multichannel Avaya Customer Experience Management ... MarketWatch (press release) The Avaya Customer Experience Interaction Management solution for SMECO was designed and deployed by Strategic Products and Services (SPS), an Avaya Connect Platinum Partner. This announcement highlights Avaya's commitment to bringing The ... and more »

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Avaya Drives Real-time Collaboration for Crisis Management with Integrated ... UCStrategies UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies ... Collaboration during crisis with the Avaya Notification SolutionTechTarget all 2 news articles »

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Strategic Products and Services Recognized on the CRN Fast Growth 100 PR Newswire (press release) 25, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a global systems integrator, has been named by UBM Channel to the 2012 CRN Fast Growth 100 list for the second consecutive year. The annual list features the fastest-growing solution ...

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Strategic Products and Services Recognized on the CRN Fast Growth 100 MarketWatch (press release) As a multi-vendor systems integrator, Strategic Products and Services (SPS) has helped companies across the globe boost revenues, overcome business obstacles and gain an edge on the competition. With over 20 years of profitable growth, SPS has design ... and more »

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Unified Communications, or UC, is the latest buzz word describing the ability to work just as effectively and efficiently from anywhere, using any device at any time. Sounds great, doesn’t it? I personally work remotely once in a while, whether from home, while travelling, or from a conference. With today’s fragmented workforce scattered around the world, it is hard to imagine that UC is not yet table stakes.

For enterprises, UC comes in the form of various bundles of services – from Presence and IM, to Email, to Conferencing and Collaboration, MPLS and Voice telephony – all intertwined with your company’s business processes. Wow, this seems like an all-encompassing bucket…  True, but UC will simplify your world and give you a significant amount of your time back! No longer is it necessary to look up folks in the company directory, manually dial their phone number, get their voice mail, only to start all over again 30 minutes later with the hopes of a better success rate. No longer will you miss a phone call unintentionally as folks dial your office number, but you happen to be away in a conference room.

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KARL STORZ to Benefit from the Power of Customer Feedback with Verint Vovici ... DailyFinance Strategic Products and Services (SPS) is bringing further value to KARL STORZ through value-added services designed to help achieve its business goals. KARL STORZ is committed to the production and sale of medical instruments and devices. and more »

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"With the Polycom RealPresence Platform, I can be in London at 10am, Paris at 2pm, Istanbul at 4pm, and home for dinner," says Christoph Schnier, Group Purchaser IT and telecommunications

London, UK - Sep 18, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), announced today that the Vaillant Group, a global supplier of heating, climate control, and ventilation systems, has chosen to use Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions to enable 13,000 employees across 20 countries throughout Europe and Asia to connect and collaborate via HD video.

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In our last post, we discussed the importance of IT and LOB collaboration. In this post, we'll discuss how to prioritize and validate projects for a successful implementation.

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SP 500 Player SPS Launches Agent Program CRN It's increasingly trendy for large solution providers to sell products and services through or in partnership with other solution providers, and Strategic Products and Services (SPS), the Parsippany, N.J.-based networking/communications powerhouse, is ...

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When a technology solution does not deliver desired business functionality and return on investment, cause can often be found in the differing assumptions, expectations and objectives held by the IT and LOB organizations.

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SPSTechBeat: RT @enterprisecon: Telecom Fraud, Bigger than You Thought: By Gary AudinThe old problems still exist, and the emergence of more mob... h ...

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Practitioner Cart Brings Versatility and FDA Class I MDDS Clearance to ERs, Physicians' Offices, Remote Clinics – Wherever Patients Need Care

AMERICAN TELEMEDICINE ASSOCIATION (ATA) FALL FORUM 2012, New Orleans, La. - Sep 10, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications, today announced the Polycom® RealPresence® Practitioner Cart® 8000, a new ergonomic telemedicine cart.

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Conference Providers Attendees with Best Practices, Industry Trends, User Group Discussions for Peer Learning, and Opportunity to Influence Product Direction.

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By Eric Krapf
You should. Here's why.

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Co-development effort to leverage Polycom® RealPresence® video solutions and IBM Research in cloud and virtualization technologies

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Sep 05, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced an initiative with IBM Research to co-develop next-generation innovations that are designed to further accelerate cloud-delivered video collaboration applications to support key vertical and social uses. Under the initiative, Polycom will work with IBM Research to explore and develop technologies that leverage the Polycom® RealPresence® Platform and real-time video capabilities in the cloud, as businesses are increasingly evaluating Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) offerings through private, public and hybrid cloud models.

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So you're waiting for an important call from a client but you're heading into a meeting. You know the call will go to voicemail and listening to voice messages during the meeting would be unacceptable.

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
After originally basing its virtualization play on open-source Xen systems, Avaya makes the shift to VMWare with a turnkey package of storage, virtualization, and communications/networking.

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By Gary Audin
There are already more electronic devices than people in the world. It is not too late to develop a program that is good for the environment and your budget.

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by Gary Audin

There is always another standard coming. This one focused on high throughput wireless networks. It is the IEEE standard 802.11ac, a member …

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“How To …” steps needed to plan, launch, and maintain a reliable system for Disaster Recovery.

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Our ability to communicate when we want and with whom – however we choose – has never been greater and we owe much of that to the consumerization of IT. You can enable a smartphone or tablet device to become part of your organization’s instant messaging platform and seamlessly transition from office to teleworking without losing touch.  Whether you are a large or small business, a government agency or a local university, joining a web conference or video conference no longer requires you to be at the office in front of your computer or to have reserved the video conference room (remembering to have cleaned off the dust that accumulated since last year’s video conference.)  Now you can simply join these meetings from a tablet or smartphone while you are sitting at the airport in a coffee shop.

Some of you may be thinking “so what?” All those features and options sound really cool, but what is the big deal? Just having the capability doesn’t mean it adds any real value (a point my teenage daughters prove every month when they send multiple thousands of texts, many to people within their immediate physical proximity).  One of the biggest benefits Unified Communications (UC) promises and delivers on is worker productivity enhancement, and this is largely achieved by enabling people to work where they are at any time, not just while sitting at the office.

Being able to discreetly respond to an instant message from my smartphone before a client meeting begins or to join an important meeting where the additional contextual element of video is needed just before I board my flight greatly increases my productivity. It also allows my customers and colleagues to make decisions or continue with projects because I had the ability to leverage a suite of UC tools while on the go.  Recognizing the changing nature of how work gets done, President Barack Obama signed the Telework Enhancement Act of 2010 into law, providing a framework for federal agencies to better leverage technology and maximize the use of telework.
(Reference: Telework.gov)

The ability to quickly and more powerfully communicate is not only achieved on smartphones or by teleworking. At the heart of every business, government agency, or educational institution seeking to unify its communication environment is a core IP network that enables communication to occur efficiently and intelligently.   Using collaboration tools, SIP services and software integration brings the same productivity enhancements to internal communications and business processes that powerful mobile devices bring to teleworking.

If you are looking to learn more about driving productivity, growth and efficiency through unified communications, you can hear product knowledge expert, Bill Long, Vice President of Enterprise Voice Services, on August 23 at the Hyatt Dulles.  Register now or to view more information.

Bill will also be presenting on a panel discussion with SPS and Acme Packet at the NASTD Annual Conference in Baltimore on Tuesday, August 28.  For more information about the NASTD Annual Conference, visit www.NASTD.org. 

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Organizations cannot prevent disastrous interruptions - but they can plan for them, deal with them and recover from them.

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To say the past 9 months have been extraordinary would be an understatement. Let me start by answering the inevitable question, "What have you been up to?" I've transitioned into a new role, taking on the extra-long title of Senior Vice President & General Manager of Avaya Applications and Emerging Technologies; and also a new location in Avaya's Silicon Valley hub in Santa Clara, CA. My role is really multi-fold as I'm responsible for Avaya's Contact Center and Unified Communications applications portfolios and the company's emerging technologies, which includes Avaya Labs Research. All of this adds up to some pretty exciting stuff; a lot of travel, visits with customers, and the opportunity to chat with people on the leading edge of collaboration technologies.

Now that I'm settled into my new role in the California sunshine it's a good time to get back on the blogging bandwagon and share what I'm hearing from people inside and outside of Avaya as it relates to Unified Communications, Contact Centers and emerging applications - starting with enabling extraordinary user experiences in Unified Communications, the topic of today's post.

In short, the enterprise is still too complicated. Even seemingly simple tasks like document sharing, emailing and video chatting are too complex for most employees to use every day. Many of you know what I mean from our discussions earlier in the year at Enterprise Connect in Orlando.
In the consumer world, you have companies like Apple wowing their consumers at every turn. When you take a photo on your iPhone and it ends up on your iPad, for example, you might not be sure how it works, but it makes you smile. In that sense, Apple has built a true user experience - not just a pretty user interface. More importantly, they've raised the bar for consumer experiences and the expectations of consumers in the enterprise.

Wow factors aside, when you're looking at technology and communications solutions to solve business issues, the name of the game is productivity, return on investment, and an innovative path to the future. Sometimes we make the mistake of only focusing on the tactical: "how much money is this going to save me?" and "can I boost revenue without hiring additional staff?" While those questions are important factors that certainly affect this quarter's bottom line, they don't get at the heart of the relationship between your team members and your customers, spark loyalty or encourage repeat business. In other words, focusing on the bottom line alone never "wowed" anyone's customers, grew a business or brought about cutting-edge competitive advantage. Not only will an extraordinary user experience in the enterprise make your team more productive, it will do something that drives an even stronger competitive advantage - it will make you and your customer's smile.

For more information on technology products that enable extraordinary user experiences, check out the most recent additions to the Avaya lineup - Avaya Aura® Conferencing 7.0 and Avaya Flare® Experience for Apple iPad tablets and Microsoft Windows PCs and laptops. These latest Avaya innovations streamline collaboration with easy-to-use multi-media conferencing, enabling "share from anywhere" capabilities for mobile collaboration and support BYOD initiatives. With Avaya collaboration solutions we aim to change the game - with extraordinary user experiences in the enterprise just as we've come to expect in the consumer market.

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SPS Sharpens Focus on Small & Medium-Sized Businesses Virtual-Strategy Magazine 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS) is proud to announce their dedicated Small to Mid-sized Enterprise (SME) Practice. To address the explosive growth of Unified Communications and value-driven applications within this market ... and more »

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At Casual Connect Gaming Conference in Seattle, the debate continued as to whether Smart TVs will become the next gaming device.

The gaming industry expects to see 150 million connected TVs, whether it is Over-the-Top (OTT) TV or “smart” set top boxes (Cable or Roku) by 2016,.

Today, however, from a game developer’s perspective, “Smart TVs” aren’t smart enough to be a successful gaming platform. Why?

• Not enough computing power on TV hardware
• What device should be used…the remote control?
• Current app stores do not provide good search capability
• No standardization on platforms
• Game developers must structure games to be played in the living room, in “ lay back” mode, considering the whole family environment; you can’t just “transfer” a game from mobile to TV
• And the list goes on…

Over time, these issues can all be resolved.  –Or some disruptive technology provider like Apple can build a game-changing (no pun intended) TV device like they did with the iPod, iPad and iPhone and solve the whole thing.

But consider this:

Let’s take another look at the preteens in my home.  In my living room, we often have a 13 year-old boy playing the AAA title MLB^® the Show (it’s baseball season) on his Xbox, which is connected to a 42-inch Vizio TV.  At the same time, he is streaming SNL (don’t ask) from Hulu on his iPad.

His stepsister is sitting with him in the living room.  She is looking over his shoulder, watching SNL, while at the same time playing a casual game on her iPhone and occasionally looking up at the TV to appreciate a home run.

After they go to bed, my husband and I might watch a Netflix movie using the Xbox on that same Vizio TV, but we will more than likely just stream a movie on the Kindle.

So I guess, from my point of view: TV? Certainly not the TV I grew up watching.

Lucky for us at Level 3, we don’t have to make a bet on the future of devices and what choices of digital entertainment will reign in the future.  Gaming companies will want to stream live events and media companies will want to launch games.  We have a robust set of solutions that support live broadcast TV, streaming, video on demand, online gaming and downloads, all powered by a superfast global IP network.

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SPSTechBeat: Break down collaboration budgets: technology costs and business/people costs http://t.co/v1z5VpRU

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by Gary Audin

One or multi-vendors for your network can be an ongoing and seemingly never-ending discussion. The report, “Multi-Vendor Network Architectures, TCO and Operational …

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In short, the question is no longer "can they?" but "shall they?," and "by when?"

These words concluded the opening paragraph of the reply comments of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA) to the Federal Communications Commission in response to their public notice, as part of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012 which was signed into law earlier this year by the President.

Initial responses to the Notice of Inquiry were received by the Federal Communications Commission on July 6, 2012 and were filed by APCO, AT&T, Avaya, Intrado, NENA, Telecommunications Industry Association, Texas 911 Alliance, Administrative Counsel for Terminal Attachments, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, and the Voice on the Net Coalition.

The reply comments of NENA focused on five particular points. The primary highlights of these points are as follows:

I. It is clearly feasible for manufacturers to include E911 location capabilities in MLTS

Based on the responses of the original notice of inquiry, it is "unquestionably feasible for manufacturers of MLTS to include within those systems the capability to identify location of a 911 caller with sufficient precision to support an effective response." It was also noted that comments by Verizon as well as the California Public Utilities Commission both supported this claim in their responses.

II. If further standards work is required, only a mandatory deadline will insure its completion.

Although both NENA and Intrado both agree that existing standards will sufficiently allow MLTS to provide precise locations, others feel additional work is needed. NENA's argument is that although additional standards would provide further guidance, without a mandatory deadline, it is questionable if that standards work would ever be completed.

III. MLTS using circuit-switched PSTN interfaces cannot be excluded from forward-looking rules.

Although Next Generation 911 is foreseeable in the near future, NENA concedes that the legacy PSTN environment will continue to exist for "decades to come." Based on the fact that technology exists today to support TDM-based MLTS E911 location capabilities and therefore a waiver is not needed for legacy systems. They do include, however, a provision for potential "burdensome network changes", and if that could be demonstrated, NENA would consider allowing providers to offer only IP-based provisioning tools after a specific date. By doing this, the forward-looking burden would be placed only on manufacturers and operators of TDM-based MLTS.

IV. Enforcement of Part 68 rules, if adopted, will be important to the success of MLTS E911 rules.

As stated on the FCC website, Part 68 of the FCC rules (47 C.F.R. Part 68) cover the connection of Terminal Equipment (TE) to the public switched telephone network. In addition to establishing technical specifications for equipment, Part 68 also contains provisions to protect consumers as well as allowing them to access competitive services. For example, rules concerning Hearing Aid Compatibility and Volume Control for people with disabilities are covered under Part 68, as well as technical criteria for inside wiring. Establishing MLTS E911 rules under Part 68, would finally provide the appropriate legal representation MLTS E911 desperately needs.

V. Dependency of a MLTS solution on actions by a user is secondary - if not irrelevant - to the feasibility of a mandate for manufacturers.

This piece was just so well-written, that there's no way I could do it justice by paraphrasing it. I'll included in its entirety so you can enjoy its natural tone.

Several commenters note that successful implementation of MLTS E9-1-1 location capabilities on an individual installation basis is contingent on more than the underlying capabilities of the MLTS system in question. It is certainly true that MLTS owners and operators must properly install and maintain those systems to ensure that their residents, students, employees, or enlistees can be located in an emergency. But it is wrong to suggest that because some will fail in this duty many should be denied the opportunity to succeed in it: Without an MLTS location mandate, well-intentioned purchasers of such systems may fall victim to unknown and undisclosed E9-1-1 limitations. Worse, some may succumb to the perverse incentive of systems that appear cheaper because they conceal the costs of litigation and damages that may be occasioned when a user cannot be located in an emergency.

Similarly, the absence of a mandate provides a competitive advantage to manufacturers of MLTS that do not support E9-1-1 location capabilities and that therefore cost less than those which do. None of these scenarios is in the public interest. Imposition of an E9-1-1 location mandate for MLTS is.

CONCLUSION
The Commission should ignore calls for eternal delay, report to Congress that MLTS location capabilities are feasible, and begin a proceeding to establish a timeframe for mandatory implementation.

Well done NENA. At Nortel, and now Avaya, I've been working on MLTS compliance for the past 12 years or more. With MLTS systems providing more mobility today than ever before, the need for accurate location granularity for users who need to call for emergency services is something that can no longer be ignored. The problem is not difficult to fix, the technology is readily available and affordable. Only 18 states have any legislation on the books today. Based on how long that's taken, I'm not sure we can wait for the other 32 to get on board.

---

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Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

 

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Thanks to virtualization, it may be time to take another look at your collaborative capabilities. When you evaluate server deployment and maintenance costs, virtualization typically offers a very positive return on your IT investment.   

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mBlox embraces flexible working program with Polycom video collaboration and increases employee productivity by allowing people to meet face-to-face from anywhere

London, UK - Aug 08, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Wembley, UK-based mBlox, a leading mobile commerce provider, is successfully using Polycom® RealPresence® video collaboration solutions, including Polycom® RealPresence® Mobile, to combat the congestion in London during the Summer Games in late July through mid-August. With the population surging by up to a million people in the capital attending the Summer Games, London is braced for severe disruption to its transport network. The UK government has urged businesses in London to put remote working practices into place and is leading the charge with civil servants starting a flexible working programme this week.

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by Gary Audin

Connecting Microsoft’s Lync to SIP trunks and SIP qualified devices is a matter of interoperability. Both Microsoft and the SIP vendors/providers need …

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Ever try to call your preteen on that really expensive mobile phone with the not-cheap monthly plan that you bought so that you can “keep in touch?”

They never pick up.

Fairly quickly you learn that they will only respond to texts, which works until they decide that they can’t be bothered with that either.

This prompts a conversation that goes something like this: “I am not paying $70 per month for a phone so that you can play games all day…”

And then the light bulb goes on.

But before I go there, I’ll reflect on something that the founder of Level 3, Jim Crowe, used to talk to us about when we were building our network.  Actually, it’s what he did not say.  In 1997, he did not say he was building a nationwide phone network. Instead, he would refer to the project as a highly scalable, Internet Protocol-based network that would be needed to handle the future of rich media, Big Data applications such as video and, of course, gaming.

(Don’t get me wrong, you can make a phone call on our network. In fact, we handle 10s of billions of phone calls a month. But in Jim’s mind, voice traffic was not going to be the big Kahuna.)

And as it turned out, he was exactly right. Today at Level 3, we provide Internet and infrastructure solutions that enable Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming as well as Casual-Social Gaming.  We house gaming servers in our data centers and connect them to the Internet. We connect game developers to each other. We distribute AAA title game launches to consumers on our Content Delivery Network. We deliver game patches and DLC to eager gamers around the globe. And we do this quickly, reliably and securely every day.

This brings us back to the light bulb.

I have spent the last several days at the Casual Connect Gaming Conference in Seattle. It’s been awesome.  And what I learned, among other things, is that we can communicate to our preteens via mobile gaming.

So I decided to give that a try. My son spends the summer in New York, visiting his father and various family and friends. After a while, (I say “a while” because he is a preteen and the break is actually kinda nice, at first J) I start to miss him. I want to get a sense of how he is doing without becoming a stalker.

Several months ago, he had sent me an invite to play Draw Something and I was mildly interested but uncommitted to the game. Yesterday, I gave it another go.  I drew my picture and pressed send and within minutes I got a response. I felt like I was connected to him and yet playing it cool by not slobbering “I miss u” over a text that, of course, would go unanswered.

Gaming, as it turns out, is a form of communication and social connection that takes place on a phone.

How about you? How are you connecting with your kids over the ‘Net?

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I am a child of the space age. One of my earliest memories involves watching on TV the historic Apollo 11 moon mission, from launch (sitting in my pajama's, eating a big bowl of sugary cereal, probably to my parent's dismay) to the subsequent landing on the Moon.

I dreamed of being an Astronaut (until I learned about that pesky 'perfect vision' requirement). I built plastic models of the Saturn 5 rocket and launch pad. And I built and flew my own model rockets (leaning just how important it was to let the glue fully dry before you blasted them in to the atmosphere if you wanted to have them come back down in one piece).

My fascination with space, rocketry, space exploration and all its related stuff continues to this day. I even toyed with apply to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a job when I graduated college, but ended up going in a different direction.

It's seems somewhat appropriate today, therefore, to recognize the tremendous job that the teams at NASA and JPL have accomplished with the landing of the Mars science rover, Curiosity, last night.

In an interesting turn of events, I only recently finally got around to reading "Failure Is Not An Option," by Gene Kranz. Gene was a (if not the) former Flight Director for NASA, having been involved in U.S. space efforts since the initial Mercury missions. Gene actually spoke at an Avaya leadership conference a few years back, and was an engaging and entertaining speaker on the importance of teamwork, communication and collaboration.

In his book, Gene spends a lot of time talking about the dozens (if not hundreds) of different teams that had to function seamlessly as a whole to just get even the most basic elements of space exploration together. The amount of organizational discipline that went in to the various Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs is, quite honestly, staggering to the mind.

At one point, Gene expressed a key tenet of the commitment to collaboration that had to take place, noting that once the launch had started, and the engines pushed the rockets and astronauts off the pad and skyward, there was no option but success - the safety of the crew was paramount, and that there was no room for failure or being anything less than 110% convinced of the course of actions that must be taken at any point in time.

Time after time, Gene gives examples through his stories of the test simulations through which his teams prepared, to the various glitches that occurred across the missions, from the well-known-thanks-to-Hollywood story of Apollo 13, to the inadvertent Apollo 14 moon landing abort that was almost caused by a speck of metal left from the manufacturing process of the Abort switch floating loose in zero gravity and causing havoc by short circuiting the abort switch itself.

I found myself thinking that there is a lesson here for enterprises who advocate collaboration across various work groups as well. Can you state as clearly the purpose and intent of your collaboration efforts? Do you have as clear a mandate that focuses your teams? That drives how they operate, and aligns all teams to a common goal?

Clearly, the dynamics of putting a human being on the surface of the moon are somewhat unique. But all collaboration efforts have their own critically important criteria, whether it is solving a customer issue with a minimal amount of disruption, planning an event with with a limited budget and locked-down timeframe, or delivering a new service or capability to your customers. From the boardroom to the operating room, in the back-office or out on the street, there is always a key element for which "failure is not an option". Do you know what yours are?

Again, congrats to all those involved in this tremendous Mars mission success! Some have posited that it is almost guarantees that someone already born will be the first to leave human footprints on Mars. I, for one, certainly hope so.

p.s. if you want to learn more about what happens during the '7 minutes of terror' (and why the Mars Curiosity controllers pretty much held their breath while waiting to see if the landing actually worked out), check out these two landing video's narrated by two Star Trek alums... I'll leave it up to you to debate old school Star Trek vs. new school ST:TNG. I know better than to get in the middle of that debate.

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I think it's safe to say that even someone not involved in technology today will agree that voice, and the way that we communicate, has radically changed. One of the most common questions I get asked, is "When do you think that Next Generation 911 will become a reality?"

Although many people will say five years, 10 years, or even more I think it's important to sit back and look at the evolution of technology that has occurred, over the past decade alone, that certainly changes that answer to be something that is very different. For example, I think it's fair to say that Twitter is a big part of everyone's life, regardless of the fact if they actually tweet or not. It is become part of our daily lives, and our culture. So much, in fact, that many people today wonder why you can't send a text message, or tweet, to 911.

So at the same time people are saying that Next Generation 911 is 5 to 10 years out, they are forgetting that Twitter is barely 6 years old with its humble start back in March of 2006 by Jack Dorsey. Just this past February, it was reported that Twitter surpassed 500 million registered users. Were there naysayers back in March of 2006 saying "that tweeter thing is never going to fly!"? I'm sure that there were. But millions saw value, and it became one of the icons of modern pop culture. For many of us, it was our first introduction to Social Media.

Twitter Users

I can also remember, just after Y2K, we started to play with IP telephony in a serious way. Although voice over IP transport existed at the network level for quite some time, and by that I mean "packetized voice" over an Internet protocol-based transport, VoIP to the desktop was still a rarity and very much a lab project for many companies.

The network folks thought that VoIP was the next best thing since sliced bread, and easily managed as just another application of the network layer. If you ask them their opinion, they would tell you that IP telephony would completely replace the legacy TDM voice architecture in a matter of "5 to 10 years". If you asked a typical legacy TDM person the same question, they would argue that the requirements of voice on IP network were too challenging for many applications, and that traditional voice would be around "forever".

As in most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. True, in most applications, mission-critical voice needs to be carefully engineered with the appropriate resiliency, redundancy, and quality of service characteristics before you just toss it into "the cloud". However, there are so many advantages to IP-based telephony that, even with the additional costs to ensure mission-critical service, there was tremendous savings potential as networks were able to flatten, consolidate and extend their reach.

At the residential level, VoIP is common today in most metropolitan areas. So common, in fact, that there is no perceivable difference to the end-user. Once that paradigm shift took place, VoIP became commoditized. With the commoditization of voice over IP, all of the hype and drama when away.

I think it's safe to say that today, the device that is revolutionized the way we communicate is the tablet. Your fingers became your mouse, and even the tactile keyboards ultimately gave way to smooth glass. From the size perspective, the iPhone is probably one of the leading examples of a tablet device. On the back end of that device is wireless access in either a public or Wi-Fi environment. In either case, the devices on the network, and has access to network resources, such as VoIP. When size becomes a factor, what have become "normal sized tablets" such as the iPad and iPad2 made their way onto the scene with more desktop real estate. Once again, and ethernet-based device connected to the network running applications for voice over IP.

Avaya saw this trend, and came out with the Flare experience. Whether you're on a device you hold in your palm, a tablet in front of you, or even your Windows desktop environment, voice has not only become application on the network, but an application on your device. Once the general population starts to accept this paradigm shift in communications, I believe you'll see communications becoming a part of any device that has conductivity to any network.

How does this all tie into E911?

If you have a device, and you can communicate with others on that device, especially others in the general public, somewhere, someone will need to make an emergency call on that device. For example, see this article on Skype Video calling from your SmartTV. Applications like this on devices we use everyday are going to change the way we communicate with each other. This is where the NG enabled emergency services network is not only going to be desired, is going to be required by the consumer, as more and more people communicate over new and emerging modalities of technology.

Six years ago, none of us knew what a tweet even was. In about 5 minutes, this article will reach thousands of people in an instant using this exact same technology. Based on the speed of adoption of that technology, when do I think that Next Generation 911 will be here? It just might be sooner than you think.

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Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch9/Users/Fletch/Dropbox/BLOG CLOSING.TXT11

 

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BYOD offers great benefits for your employees and organization overall. Be sure to define and communicate an effective strategy.

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I got my first Apple laptop this year and was quickly in a situation where I did not know exactly how to do everything I wanted to do. Working at a company that uses a HTTP proxy, I immediately needed to know how to enable and disable a proxy. Did I call Apple for help? No, like you, I simply went to Google and searched for "how to set the proxy on a mac" (link). As I skimmed the results, I found a YouTube video on exactly this topic. I was able to play the video, pause and rewind it as needed, until I got my proxies set correctly. Ah, the wonders of the modern age!

If you are like most technology users, this is a reflexive move: search the web, find a video, and problem solved. This isn't just true for computers either: I needed to replace the trimmer line on my trimmer at home but wasn't sure of how much line to use or the best way to add it. A quick search and I was back to wiping out unwanted weeds.

At Avaya Client Services, we know that when faced with a problem on an Avaya solution, our partners and customers will turn to the web. Like most technology companies, Avaya maintains an extensive written knowledge base at http://support.avaya.com which has only gotten better with the re-launch of the site this spring. While black and white text can be helpful (after all, you are finding this blog helpful, right? Right?), raising the bar with video can really help get the knowledge across. Who better than Avaya to be the first in our industry to expand our knowledge base with video? After all, we are an industry leader in video solutions.

With great pride, I want to introduce you to the Avaya Mentor program. This programs tasks Avaya subject-matter-experts with publishing short videos on various services-related topics across all the Avaya product portfolios. These videos are primarily focused on aiding the installation, configuration, and/or troubleshooting of Avaya solutions. By making these videos available to you, we expect you will be able to resolve your problems quickly, perhaps even faster than the time it takes to open an Avaya ticket.

Since we started publishing videos in January, we have seen the consumption of these videos grow. We have now published nearly 400 videos and have received more than 56,000 views spanning 155 countries. We average 40 views per video per month, whereas our text-based KB articles average three views per month. Clearly, video is a powerful medium for our associates, partners, and customers.

This shouldn't be all that surprising as we've all experienced how much more informative a video conference can provide when compared to a standard audio call. With Avaya's acquisition of Radvision, my geographically-dispersed staff and I have been enjoying using the Scopia Desktop client for our meetings. Video provides richer context, conveying more information in the same time.

Want to learn more about the Avaya Mentor program? View the overview of Avaya Mentor embedded below, then logon to http://support.avaya.com and browse for videos. If you don't have your login handy, you can also see all our videos at http://www.youtube.com/AvayaMentor. If you want to be notified when new videos are published, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on Twitter at @AvayaMentor.

Example videos:
•How to Perform a Software Upgrade for a HA Mediant™ 3000
•How to Perform a Trace on Avaya IP Office using DbgView
•How to Change the System Time on the Avaya VSP9000
•How to Diagnose Branch Gateway Connectivity
•How to check RAID Battery status on HP DL360F7 in System Platform

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Before I joined Avaya in May, I did a lot of research on the company's history and current and past business achievements. I learned that Avaya has a long history in the communications and UC industry and more experience than anyone else in the market.

I have summed up Avaya's pedigree with a simple phrase: This is what we do. Communication and collaboration is our core business. Whether it is contact centers, video integration, unified communications or unified collaboration; Avaya has been striving to deliver solutions in these technologies since its inception. It is not a parallel component or an extension of an adjacent technology to an existing business environment.

Avaya provides solutions to customers' communication challenges by delivering nonproprietary software enablement and applications platforms designed to solve a specific unified communications problem. We create a complete and unique collaboration solution specifically tailored to the customer's needs, even when that means building a solution on top of existing competitors' hardware components.

Many of Avaya's competitors' core business is not unified communications. Instead, these companies have spent decades focused on infrastructure components, and thus they have a varied and disparate business at their core. We often see these companies bringing products to the UC market that are proprietary and only compatible with their existing legacy systems.

Avaya is laser-focused on providing open and application-based solutions the industry needs, and not fitting widgets together to build a complicated and inefficient unified communications system. We work to stay ahead of trends in the business and consumer markets and deeply understand customer pain points associated with BYOD and consumerization of IT.

Delivering solutions that are compatible with any system and tailored to each customer's unique needs is what we do. This solutions based approach is the foundation from which we will build a new Avaya and an integral part of the long-term strategy to achieve our business goals.

It is this new Avaya that our employees, customers and partners should be excited about. I ask all who have a stake in Avaya to embrace bold innovation as we embark on this road of change and transformation. The end result will redefine the company and continue its long heritage of communications leadership.

I look forward to a dynamic Avaya of the future that will remain focused on developing nonproprietary UC solutions and collaboration tools. No one can compete with what we can deliver - after all, this is what we do.

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Avaya announces SMB UC offering Express Computer Avaya has announced the availability of a new version of its Unified Communications (UC) solution for SMBs, Avaya IP Office 8.1, which now scales up to a thousand users in a single location (up from 384). Avaya IP Office 8.1—which can serve companies ... Avaya Expands Small and Mid-Size Business Communications Capabilities to ...PRWire all 2 news articles »

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As organizations move more and more mission critical functions to the cloud, many now realize a fundamental truth about this promising new technology: not all clouds are the same.

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By Marty Parker
Sorting through all the claims and making a good decision requires understanding what the product and system integrator can and will do.

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Enterprise Voice Mobility enables a person to interact with a company database using their smartphone and their voice. The technology can be used to support scripted voice input for just about any database by mobile users in the field.

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I’ve been in the telecom business for a long time and I have to admit that every once in while I consider a career change. Usually it’s after I’ve been involved in the recovery from an outage caused by one of Fred’s squirrels. Turns out that almost all of our animal damage comes from those furry little nut eaters.  I’ve often considered a career in real estate. After all I already have almost as much hair as Donald Trump, what other requirements can there be?

Luckily for me, Level 3 is sort of in the real estate business already.  And I thought that perhaps I could try out my real estate marketing skills before I started ordering new business cards. If you think about it, selling data center space is just really selling condos for computers, right? How does this sound?

Cool Space in the San Fran Area is Now Even Cooler

 

Newly Listed: Place your servers in one of the coolest locations in the San Fran area. Totally new, 10,000 sqft server home, no bedrooms, 1 bath, with concrete floors, high ceilings and access to lots of high-speed bandwidth. Closed-circuit video surveillance and secured access. Standard amenities include: redundant AC and power, high density racks, and lots of space for your family of applications.
Address: San Francisco, CA
Beds: 0
Baths: 1
Sqft: 10,000
Type: Tier III Compliant
Year Built: 2012
Cooling: Redundant
Power: UPS
Fireplace: No
Virtual Tour: Click here

Buy vs. Rent

Ever notice that it’s always a home mortgage company that is promoting buying vs. renting. Typically the math is skewed towards the rising value of a home as an investment, as opposed to the costs of maintenance, taxes and interest. In the data center business, it’s much the same equation, but you have to add in the technology variable. Data center technology is evolving at the pace of Moore’s Law. And the innovation isn’t just restricted to the density of transistors on integrated circuits.

When you consider buying vs. renting for data centers, it’s a question of timing. For example, in our premier elite data centers, we have high power density racks and plenty of space to add horsepower when demand grows. This means that you can ride the technology curve and pack more processing into less space. If you have existing data centers, imagine the cost of upgrading your infrastructure to keep up with the latest innovations. And then consider the fact that next year there will be something even better to deploy.

So why wait? Lease space in our new data center today! Your servers and applications (and customers) will thank you.

 

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The Never Never land of Peter Pan was a utopian dreamland, but it is a real place too - the term originated in the late 1800's to describe uninhabited regions of Australia. Either way, the last thing you want to happen is for your home agents to dial 911 in an emergency and have the call routed to nowhere land.

I've had many requests over the past few months to provide guidance as to how to handle E911 calls for home agents. First of all, why is E911 a problem for home agents or remote workers in general? The short answer is these emergency systems were devised in the pre-IP telephony days, when everyone's phone was hardwired to the local TelCo central office. Ma Bell knew exactly where to find us.

Then, enterprise telephony grew more sophisticated, feature-rich, and more complex. With the advent of telephony systems serving remote sites, and IP Telephony, tracing E911 calls to their source became a game of hide-and-seek. Why? Central offices use Automatic Location Information (ALI) databases to find the source of the E911 call, and then search for the closest Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). If you're calling from the office where your telephony system is located, at least emergency response is directed to the right building. If you're working remotely, all bets may be off.

What are the legalities? The uncomfortable answer is that it depends. It depends on laws enacted by the state, county and/or city where your remote workers are located. Not every state has laws requiring enterprises to report and maintain location information, but for those governmental entities where laws do exist, there is no single standard.

So where to begin? Tactics include the following:
• Education. Let your home office workers know they should not use their office phone to summon help. Some organizations even place a large sticker with warnings on any telephones they distribute. Obviously the drawback is that in a crisis they may not remember this. (You're probably thinking this approach won't cover you from a legal perspective, and I'm guessing you're right!)
• Work with each PSAP that could get a call, and give them a list of telephone numbers and the location information related to each potential caller, as well as the local access number of the proper PSAP if possible. Without such information when a misdirected call arrives, there's a mad scramble to figure out what's up and where to go. If the caller isn't lucid or can't communicate, the consequences can be dire. The drawback of this approach? If your home agents are far-flung, this will be a time-consuming exercise.
• Implement the emergency calling features available in your communications server, such as the ability for a soft client user to identify a local emergency number.
• Implement features of your communications server that immediately connect the 911 call to the PSAP and simultaneously notify someone knowledgeable such as the console operator, security office, or other responsible party in the organization. If you don't have a mapping of where each agent works, you'll need to create that. Obviously this approach is more difficult if the agents or remote workers are traveling.
• The Crisis Alert feature in your Avaya Communication Manager is one example of a way you can make sure the 911 call goes through while notifying a responsible party in your organization of the potential emergency. You set up a group of Crisis Alert stations, and if someone dials 911, specified phones sound a siren like alarm. The station receiving the crisis notification becomes locked until a responsible party takes action. Information about the line from which the 911 call originated is presented. This functionality can integrate with technology delivered through Avaya DevConnect partners such as Conveyant, flagging where that person resides.
• Whatever approach you choose to take - practice! If you have a plan in place with the local PSAP, schedule with them a time to test.

Many jurisdictions now demand the enterprise assume the responsibility of mapping IP addresses to a geographic location and passing that information to a PSAP with an emergency call. Avaya Professional Services can help you do that, from the location surveys to the location database and to testing the solution.

The real answer lies in an overhaul of the antiquated E911 system, as outlined by my colleague Guy Clinch's blog The Transition to Next Gen E911. Also reference Mark Fletcher's blogs Making E911 Smarter and E911-There's an App for That.

Let me know what your company is doing about E911 for home agents and I'll post it so others can benefit from your experience and challenges.

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Friday night, 9 p.m., and the hallways are dark.  Light spills from individual cubes here and there, and the same conversation echoes throughout the halls in surround sound.

The IT release is in full swing. New functionality is on its way to Production Systems while Development and Support Teams around the globe are using the unified communications bridge to check system status, install software, check off validations.

We do this a couple times a month, once for system upgrades and once for our custom applications.  It’s exciting because new IT software is how our telecommunications company delivers new features to customers.

And yet, is this twice-monthly formal release cycle Agile?

Some developers complain that their sprints hit a testing and deployment waterfall.  In a perfectly Agile world, scrum teams could sprint on their own schedules all the way to production.  I have read about startups with continuous integration tools that purport to streamline software delivery to complex environments.  Here at Level 3, we have hundreds of interdependent applications, some first deployed back in the ‘90s (ancient history in IT-land, and some were in operation even before Level 3 existed).  There’s a lot of testing that has to be coordinated.  Sometimes it’s like remodeling your kitchen; 20% of the work is adding the new features and 80% is making sure it works with everything that’s already there.  Our new reusable services architecture will help change that dynamic, but we have a lot of “old stuff” that reminds me of the vintage stove in my first house (a fixer-upper).  It still works, so why upgrade?

And then there’s the question of how Agile fits ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library).  In ITIL v3, release and change management are about controlled planning, process-centric implementation of change, and coordinated communications and deployments.  Sounds slow, rather than Agile.

We’ve been using ITIL as a framework for adding structure to IT services.  When Level 3 doubled in employees last year (after acquiring Global Crossing), it became apparent that we needed more structure and a common language as the two companies’ processes came together.  ITIL gave us common ground and language.

So can ITIL be Agile?
This is not a new debate, and many posts are online. At Level 3, both ITIL and Agile fit in our straightforward framework for IT delivery.

We use Agile in the “Plan-Design-Build” stages, but the “Operate” stage leverages ITIL concepts.  Increased rigor from the ITIL framework is helping us to protect the business by focusing on service availability, and Agile helps us accelerate the business with new capabilities.  We’ve struck a balance of monthly code releases, a coordinated transition to production systems for the several weeks’ of epics and sprints.  And in the spirit of ITIL’s continuous improvement, we keep looking to go faster without compromising quality.

I imagine the overall process to look more like this than the diagram above:

This month, we’re adding a lot of new features to help our operations teams run the network better.  I’m looking forward to checking the customer satisfaction numbers down the road for proof of the impact that the additional automation is bringing to the business.

So, the next time you’re working during off-business hours, when it’s so quiet that you can hear the clicking of keyboards and know who is there by the glow from their workspace, let me know your thoughts.  How does Agile meet ITIL in your organization?

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by Gary Audin

USTelecom, a trade association representing service providers and suppliers for the telecom industry,h as partnered with The SIP School to offer training …

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ConferenceManager™ Emergency Audio Conferencing

ConferenceManager™ Emergency Conferencing uses Blast Dial to quickly connect first responders in an audio conference. In the event of an emergency, it is critically important to get a group of emergency responders together on a conference call as quickly as possible with minimal effort. When an emergency occurs the first responder dials an emergency number, this creates a conference and triggers a blast dial‐out to other members of the response team. When each team member is called they are prompted to join the emergency conference in progress.

Emergency Audio and Web Conferencing

ConferenceManager Emergency Conferencing is an added feature to the already rich set of conferencing functionality provided on the platform. ConferenceManager is an in‐house audio conferencing bridge that eliminates the costly pay‐as‐you‐go fees of subscription‐based services, while setting new standards for ease of use and administration, flexibility, and control. ConferenceManager works with any existing voice or data network and is available with fully integrated web conferencing.

Emergency Audio Controls:

• Automatic Blast Dial simultaneously to a list of emergency personnel
• Unlimited number of emergency groups
• Up to 3 phone numbers per person
• Phone number mapping to an emergency group, requiring no user input to initiate an emergency conference
• Blast Dial when first person dials in based on dialed number, no additional user input required

Emergency Web Controls:

• ConferenceManager™ Audio Console provides full conference control
• Activate Blast Dial to Invitee List or Address Book
• Up to ten sub‐conferences off of the main audio conference
• Mute, Unmute, Disconnect, Hold, Add Additional Callers
• ActiveTalker™ Indication
• Viewable listing (by name or phone number)

Let Sonexis help create a Disaster Recovery Plan in the Event of an Emergency:

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Easy Web Conferencing Made Possible

A geographically dispersed workforce and clientele require more cost-effective and convenient methods than organizing and coordinating travel for face to face meetings. Web conferencing has grown drastically over the last 5 years as a primary way to meet frequently in a more efficient and cost-effective way. Web conferences are used for a multitude of purposes including customer training, sales and staff meetings, job interviews, shareholder sessions and engineering meetings.

Sonexis suggests the following for the best web conference possible:

Set up your conference ahead of time – How would you like your participants to enter? Lecture mode or unmuted? Do you want to give your participants the option to unmute themselves or only by the host? How would you like your participants to be announced; by name, tone, or nothing at all? Also, prepare your web conference with your documents, branding, and presentations ahead of time to make sure everything you require will be right at your fingertips and will transition smoothly.

Incorporate two speakers – By adding an additional speaker to your presentation, it establishes subject matter authority and also aids in keeping your participants focused by breaking up the monotony of a single speaker

Web Conference Systems

Provide engaging visuals – To get the best return on your web conferencing investment, be sure to utilize all of the tools and features that are available to you. Graphs, charts and other visuals are a great way to make complex information easier to process but you can also use the interactive whiteboard, in-room polling and desktop/application sharing to make your point and break up the possible monotony of a PowerPoint presentation.

Avoid duplicating your speech and visuals – just as you should avoid reading directly off of a sheet of paper, make sure you also do not read directly off your PowerPoint slides. Instead, limit the text on your slides to a few key bullet points, which you can expand on while presenting.

Set aside time for Q&A sessions – Provide a 10-15 minute question and answer session at the end of your presentation provided it is 30 minutes or less. If it is over the 30 minute mark, you should allow for smaller sessions throughout your meeting either between agenda items or between speakers. This will permit your participants to address questions prior to moving on to more complex material, as opposed to saving all their questions until the very end of your conference when you’ve moved on to unrelated material

If you would like to see a live web conference in action, please request a demonstration of ConferenceManager today!

 

 

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SPSTechBeat: Avoid cloud pitfalls http://t.co/bwlSGSZ9

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Practical tips to avoid challenges while adopting a cloud strategy.

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Mutare's giSTT Speech to Text supports many languages behind the firewall. giSTT auto, a fully automated in the cloud service for speed and economy, and giSTT enterprise, a fully automated behind the firewall service has the ability to convert voice messages to email in multiple languages.

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No more guessing what you’re buying. Mobile commerce customers see and save any visuals– venues, seats, tickets, receipts – while talking/chatting to buy ticketswith Mobile Ticket App’s “Show Me” feature powered by ChoiceView(TM).

Radish Systems and Mobile Ticket App (MTA) have joined forces to offer the Show Me capability that forever changes mobile ticket sales for StubNut.com and potentially hundreds of other ticket brokers. At the Ticket Summit July 11-13 in Las Vegas, MTA will demonstrate how contact center agents or individual brokers can simultaneously send visuals while talking/chatting with buyers using smart mobile devices. MTA’s Innovative Technologies workshop will be at 1-2 pm on Wednesday, July 11^th in the Cezanne room. MTA has integrated Show Me, powered by ChoiceView^TM from Radish Systems, into StubNut’s mobile application, available soon at the Apple App Store. When callers instantly see their choices, such as the seats in relation to the stage, they know what they’re buying and want to finish the sales transaction. The results from StubNut’s Show Me button are faster transactions, upsells for better seats, and higher customer satisfaction. Ticket sales is one of many uses for ChoiceView, a next-generation visual solution for mobile communications, that Radish Systems offers to mobile commerce businesses that want to seize the next-gen advantage with the growing number (over 110 million in USA per comScore) of mobile users, with over 51 percent using apps (Fierce Mobile, 7/3/12).

See the video at http://www.mobileticketapp.com/products/show-me-feature/

See full release and visuals at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/7/prweb9681539.htm

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SPSTechBeat: Is a cloud solution right for your business? http://t.co/oo9w4ThJ

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by Gary Audin

Many enterprises have or are looking to implement Microsoft Lync. The enterprise may be migrating from Office Communications Server (OCS) to Lync. …

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Leverage cloud-based systems to realize significant economic, performance and strategic advantages.

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HP and Polycom collaboration supports video chats across Facebook, Skype, and gTalk social platforms

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Jul 10, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that its social video software application is currently shipping with the newest HP webcams – the HP Webcam HD models 3310 and upcoming 4310. The Polycom HD video software is the first group social video chat application that allows users to access their contact lists in popular consumer social platforms, including Facebook, Skype, and gTalk (Google video), and conduct HD video chats with their friends and family regardless of the applications the other participants are using or where they are.

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Bringing Conferencing In-House Will Save Time and Money

Let Sonexis Show You How:

Myth 1- We can’t afford it

Reality-The fact is your company can realize significant cost saving by bringing audio conferencing in-house as opposed to pay the spiraling costs associated with the service provider. ConferenceManager™ by Sonexis pays for itself within 6 to 9 months and by the second year; those savings will be going straight to your bottom line. And with IP deployment options, the cost saving related to infrastructure, facility and administration are even more compelling. By bringing your conferencing in-house, you can realize cost savings, not cost outlay.

Myth 2- We do not have the IT staff to manage the conference bridge solution

Reality-ConferenceManager™ is easy to manager and does not require dedicated IT resources. On the contrary, most of our customers spend fewer than 8 hours a month maintaining ConferenceManager™. After Sonexis installs the bridge, customers can essentially close the door and walk away. Support issues can be handled remotely so the solution requires almost no IT attention on-site at all. Additionally, Sonexis offers a variety of managed and hosted services options if even 8 hours a month is too much.

Myth 3- My employees will find it too difficult to use

Reality-ConferenceManager™ by Sonexis utilizes familiar interfaces like Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes for the scheduling of conferences. Alternately, conferences can also be reserved and managed through an easy-to-use web interface, which requires no more technical expertise that is required to reserve a flight on-line. For those customers who prefer reservation-less conferencing (meet me conferencing), it’s even simpler. The fact is ConferenceManager™ by Sonexis provides users with an easy to learn, easy to use interface that is unsurpassed in the industry.

Myth 4-Service provider web conferencing offers more robust features than I can get in-house

Reality-The web conferencing features within ConferenceManager™ contain all of the functionality your users have grown to expect from the best web conferencing solution (and more) all with the added security and control of an on-premise solution. This includes audio and web conference management, polling, whiteboard, chat, desktop and applications sharing, audio and web recording and playback, annotation tools and much more.

Myth 5- I do not have time to retrain my end users on a new platform

Reality-ConferenceManager™ by Sonexis is one the most intuitive solutions in the industry. Our customers have consistently raved about its ease of use. Sonexis provides user and administrator training at time of installation as well as provides ongoing remote training at no additional cost for customers who have continued support on the bridge. Your training needs are met at the time of installation, as well as ongoing with little time or effort for your IT staff.

If you would like to see how easy to use ConferenceManager™ is, schedule a 15-minute demonstration with us!

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SINGAPORE - Jul 09, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open standards-based unified communications, has been named as Enterprise Video Vendor of the Year at the 9th annual 2012 Frost & Sullivan Asia Pacific ICT Awards, held in Singapore in June. The event recognizes the best in the Asia Pacific ICT industry and marks the third consecutive year Polycom has received the prestigious award.

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SPSTechBeat: Build, operate and consume IT in a way that makes resources flexible, dynamic and on-demand http://t.co/xJ7kf0ND

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A growing trend in Unified Communication Collaboration

This topic has had many asking the question as to where conferencing and web collaboration is best deployed: in the Public Cloud or within your companies Private Cloud?

The reason this question has come up is in regards to the issues concerning security, service adoption and the leveraging of an already existing infrastructure to reduce the total cost of ownership.

In the past, many companies optioned for public cloud deployments of collaboration services because it was widely believed that the cost and overhead needed to accommodate these services in-house far outweighed the need for tighter security and control. Today that is no longer the case. Because collaboration is becoming such an integral part of the way organizations do business, it is no longer acceptable to have lapses in service availability or security failures.

Currently, the Public Cloud is the incumbent when it comes to collaboration services. This is due in part because most companies are still wrestling with the idea that most applications are best suiting using the Software as a Services (Saas) model as a solution to the overhead usually associated with administering these types of applications In-House. However, this trend is changing rapidly as it pertains to Audio and Web Conferencing. In a recent study published by Enterprise Management Associates of 850 CIO’s the concluded the following in regards cloud adaptation:

• 52% wanted cloud to "reduce IT operational costs”.

• Out of 850 respondents, 52% said they planned to deploy cloud services both internally and externally, but only 11% planned for exclusively external use.

• 67% of cloud users said they have used Software as a Service, 43% said Infrastructure as a Service and 42% have used Platform as a Service.

• 75% of all the organizations who planned for cloud computing said they wanted private clouds first and public clouds later, or not at all.

 

Organizations embracing Private Cloud deployments of Unified Communications for Audio and Web Conferencing

The conferencing and collaboration markets continue to grow; especially with the inclusion of new technologies, enhanced security, and attractive price points. However, the trend for the largest increase is for the Private Cloud market. This is due in part because of privacy concerns and security, cost control, and the drastically reduced total cost of ownership that can be attained only by owning your collaboration solution.

  

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What cloud is and what it isn’t: the key trends in cloud adoption plus the promise and challenge cloud offers in the enterprise IT environment.

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TMCnet

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Telecompaper

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Jebsen & Jessen Communications Honored With Avaya DevConnect Innovation ... MarketWatch (press release) SINGAPORE, Jul 02, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Jebsen & Jessen Communications (JJC), a provider of business communications solutions, today announced that it has received a 2012 Avaya DevConnect Innovation Award for its CallMizz ... and more »

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SPSTechBeat: Ophthalmologist or business consultant? It's OK to get a little help. http://t.co/O0GpYehZ

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How simple advice from the eye doctor applies to business as well. It's OK to get a little help.

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By Gary Audin
The enterprise should be aware of the risks it accepts, as well as those that can be negotiated when signing telecom contract agreements.

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This morning during breakfast, I was reminiscing about all of my years in this business and thinking, “boy… have some things changed.”   Not only have I witnessed the complete makeover of the industry, like when the Bell System divestiture happened, the rise and fall of many upstarts, and arguably the re-consolidation of AT&T, I have also watched the transformation of the way services are used and what they cost.

Now, as someone who’s been involved in the contact center business since the mid ‘80s, Toll Free Service is something that I have worked with nearly every day.  I worked with major airlines, hotel chains, major retailers, you name it.  They all used Toll Free as the lifeblood for customers to reach them, and still do today.  Sure the Internet has taken a bite, but the nation’s businesses still spend billions of dollars on this important service.  Why?

Well…I will tell you why.  Let’s start with a history lesson.  Way back in 1967, AT&T began to offer Toll Free as an alternative to collect calling (huh, collect calling?) and to avoid the use of operators (remember them?).  In 1984 the service was refined into something very much like what we know today, and its use grew like wildfire.  Then, in 1993, something called Portability came along, which allowed companies to change carriers and take their numbers with them.  Novel concept, hey?

So why did this service expand to the huge levels it has?  Why has it become such an important business tool?  The answer is built on two simple reasons: the fact that consumers can call companies for free (business picks up the tab, but also does business); and because companies could have a great deal of control over how those calls are handled.  I suggest that one of these reasons is as important as ever, perhaps more so, and the other is a dinosaur.   Can you guess which is which?

I am thinking that you got it right.  Does anyone really care if their call is Toll Free anymore?  Does anyone really pay for long distance anymore?  No.  When you use your cell phone, minutes are minutes.  When you use your home phone, for those who still have one, you likely have an unlimited calling plan.  And if you call from work, well…

If no one really cares about calls being Toll Free anymore, why do companies still spend billions on the service?  Simple, they get the features they need to manage their business.  They control the routing of where calls go and when they are routed, they get all kinds of reporting for business intelligence, and they can access cloud-based services that help them provide high quality customer service.

So…what if I told you that it is now possible for companies to publish regular phone numbers with a regular area code (not 800, or 888, or 877) and still retain all the benefits I’ve mentioned, which business still depend on.   You would probably say, “So what?”  Well, the answer is that when companies take advantage of this type of service, like the one that Level 3 offers, they can save a bunch of money.   This alternative to Toll Free is far less expensive, and companies give up nothing.  When you think about all of those billions it makes you wonder why this has not taken off sooner…don’t worry, it will!

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 By Gary Audin

Unified Communications is not a product. It is not a single technology. It is not a network function. UC is a …

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Demand for Unified Audio Conferencing Increases

With the demand for Unified Communications on the rise, Companies are asking their Purchasing Managers’ and IT Departments’ to do their due diligence in finding the “right-fit” for their unique conferencing needs.

Sonexis Technology Conference Bridge Solution

All too often, shortly after that conversation someone is laughing on the inside who knows how unlikely it’ll be that the “right-fit” is indeed out there. As time and technology have both been progressing forward, service providers are getting closer to modeling their tiered level packages to be a closer, but still far from perfect fit. However, when it comes to on-premise conferencing solutions, the pricing models and technology have been progressing a bit faster than most would think.

ROI/TCO

Sonexis Technology is at the forefront of Advanced Conferencing Systems and Technology. Always staying one step ahead of the curve, in just the past six years alone, Sonexis has applied and been approved 3 broad, technological breakthrough patents. With our renowned Customer Support Team and our brilliant R&D Team, Sonexis Technology continues to set the bar for audio and web conferencing collaboration. In this Advanced world of conferencing, watching service providers’ structure different packages of services and features into options A, B or C, seems more of an insult than a solution.

 

Sonexis Technology continues to pride itself on never discontinuing support for our bridge, ConferenceManager™. With its completely unique ability to grow as your companies’ conferencing needs grow, it is truly the best solution. ConferenceManager™ provides only the features that you need, unlike most who will charge you for features which you didn’t ask for, but are included in the package.

 

 

 

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What?!! Stick with me for a moment - it's relevant. A colleague used this subheading in an article he had written. Once I stopped laughing and read further, the point he was making was that often we already have much of what we need to deliver an exemplary customer experience. Rather than looking up at the mountain top, it's worth a quick glance back to see how far we've already climbed.

It's very likely this topic is applicable if your company is still considering using at-home agents, but hasn't actually launched the program. Yes, you, standing there listening to the music but not dancing yet. And it's also pertinent if you've sent a few agents home but months later are still barely swaying, frozen in the piloting-a-few-agents stage. In the May 2012 issue of Contact Center Pipeline, the front page article "Making Work-at-Home Work" states that 42% of contact centers are now using home agents. Seems like it's time to move with the music!

The good news is that you already have a boatload of what you need. You've already invested in the contact center infrastructure and applications, including routing, reporting, and recording solutions. There may be a few more things on your wish list, but chances are you already have most of what it takes. Likely your biggest remaining expenditure is remote agent softphone licenses and perhaps PCs and/or some cable or DSL costs if you choose to cover them. And these costs pale in comparison to the investments you've already made.

Perhaps these expenditures aren't holding you back, but rather the headaches of working with multiple organizations within the company. You'll need to work with your HR department, write up a policy statement and have it approved by your legal department, and figure out how you're going to train home agents and keep them up to speed on an ongoing basis.

Not to minimize the overhead of navigating outside the contact center to get these agreements in place, but it's probably minimal in comparison to the work your company has already done to hire and train agents. And hire and train agents. And hire and train more agents. Because they leave! Unless you give them work at home options. At the airport just yesterday, I met the Customer Care operations manager of a large Canadian bank, who told me some pretty terrific stuff about the retention and absenteeism rates of their home agents compared to in-office agents - about 50% improvement in retention, and a 50% lower absenteeism rate.

Which category do you fit into? Still standing in the room listening to the music? Or already dancing, but rather reservedly, sending a few agents home but glancing around to see if someone notices a misstep?

If you're already shaking what your mama gave you, chances are your CFO is watching with a smile - because you are saving your company a LOT of money. If you're not shaking it yet but want to get onto the dance floor, reach out and I'll help you. I'll be happy to provide pointers to an ROI calculator if you need to show your company the financial (and the green) benefits, as well as other resources.

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Quite often, when examining a particular problem, engineers will become so entrenched with the issue that the simplest fix to a problem can sometimes fall to the wayside and never even be considered.

After discussing Next Generation Emergency Service migration strategies with several of my peers and colleagues at the NENA 2012 Workshop in Long Beach, California this past month; as well as the Enterprise E911 problem of getting detailed location information to public safety in real time, I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be a new, innovative, much more simplified KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) method that can be applied to both problems.

The root cause of the problem today, when you sift through the layers of 'techno-babble' that are out there, is that the 911 network, has minimal intelligence built in. Emergency calls are geographically contained and are routed in a hub and spoke fashion. If the origination endpoint is not in, or does not have access to the correct 'hub', you are isolated from the correct 'spoke' at the physical layer that connects you to the 911 center or PSAP serving your area.

That architecture creates a physical barrier that technology, and the laws of physics, simply cannot solve. In addition to being an isolated island in the telecom ocean, there is no way for an originator of an emergency call to insert or attach any additional enhanced information. Next Generation 911 promises to add intelligence into the network, but what is needed right now is a way to make the existing system a litter "Smarter".

Over the past year, a there has been a new service that increases both the depth and intelligence of the data surrounding an E911 caller. But instead of adding information to an architecture that clearly cannot transport the data, they have added an alternative feed to the 911 center, that is today, out of band of the legacy network. With it being out of band, it is also not handcuffed by the technology limitations imposed on calls today.

The primary function of this 'service' is to increase the amount of intelligence that surrounds an E911 call, enabling the E911 call taker to be a little 'smarter' about their job and theor decisions.

For my regular readers and listeners bear with me for 2 minutes, as I want to make sure the problem is clearly understood by everyone.

Based on recent statistics, nearly 300 million calls each year are place to 911 in the US alone. If you do the math, that works out to nearly 2,000 people dialing 911 just in the short amount of time you have spent reading this blog.

Unfortunately on the vast majority of those calls the only 'data' or information that is delivered, or can be delivered for that matter, is a telephone number. Even the method of delivering that minimal information to the PSAP is one that is antiquated, developed nearly 30 years ago, and of little relevance to the way the average nomadic citizen communicates today, and from where.

Very few in the industry will argue with those facts, and many are feverishly working on interim solutions, and ways of bridging the gaps between the legacy environment that is a reality today, and the next generation nirvana that we all dream about for the future.

Nearly every week, headlines like "New program allows citizens to provide critical information to emergency operators" dot the news

Thanks to a $43,000 grant from the state of Florida, Lake County's 911 center will soon utilize a new program from a company called Rave Mobile Safety that has been appropriately named "Smart911". What is Smart911? Basically, it is a nationwide database allows anyone with access to the internet to set up a Smart911 profile at not cost. That profile is coordinated to your telephone number (that the 911 Center gets when you call 911), and the information you have provided in your profile, is made available to Public Safety.

Gregory Holcomb, Lake County's 911 coordinator explained "There's medical information that could be allergies, or the medicine someone is on. #In addition to these details about you and your family a dispatcher wouldn't otherwise have."

Think Facebook or LinkedIn, but instead of 'likes' and 'links' your profile includes lifesaving information. The type of information that can be stored is practically unlimited, and could include codes to enter a gated community, building plans, or, you can upload your offices building plans giving first responders details about electrical panels, water mains, or fire hydrants.

Today, this valuable additional data can be relayed to 1st responders over the radio system, or to an in vehicle mobile data terminal or computer. The Smart911 profile also allows the user to upload photographs. Valuable information, such as a photo, can assist making an amber alert or missing adult event more manageable.

In Lake County, the new The Smart911 system will be up and running in August. Sign up, of course, is voluntary but recommended by local authorities.

In Collier County, the same solution is being rolled out and residents will also be able to take advantage of the The Smart911 network, and information about themselves, or even their pets will be held in the database.

While other states have it in some counties, Arkansas is making it available to residents statewide after a successful pilot program in Benton and Pulaski counties. Since nothing is ever free, what is the cost of this new technology? To the public USERS, there is never a cost to create and enter your profile. And in Arkansas, even the PSAPs get a free ride, as the state legislature authorized $1 million for startup costs. Now, although this may seem expensive, it is significantly less money that traditional ALI ANI services and CAMA trunks provided by the LEC.

Let's do the math:
If a single countywide PSAP has 20 call takers and connectivity to 2 Selective Routers for redundancy with 25 trunks each, that would be 50 CAMA circuits. If those CAMA circuits cost $1,000 apiece each month (which would be a bargain); that would equal to $50,000 monthly just for the access line. Over a year, that adds up to $600,000 just for that single center. If the state had 10 of those centers, the access charges would be over $6,000,000 annually.

And you though YOU had a big phone bill.

Again, those estimates are for the access lines. On top of those numbers, there are the charges for actually accessing the ANI/ALI database for the database provider, and the overhead costs for administration. Clearly, you can see that the incentive for moving to this new technology, and the network that will support it. The cost savings are tremendous.

15 years ago, long distance calls were mileage based, and the money businesses spent on telecom was skyrocketing. VoIP and IP technology have revolutionized the way we communicate, and the cost of that communication.

How do we fix the E911 problem today? Maybe it's already fixed and we just need to be SMART how we implement it.

---

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Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

 

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We’re delighted to announce that our ChoiceView 2.0′s new SendView features allow domestic/international callers to both send photos / videos and see any visuals – diagrams, photos, coupons, documents, etc. – on any network with mobile devices. Both callers and agents can now “See it and Hear it!”™ while talking or texting. For example, callers can snap and send a photo of their car to their insurance company while talking to an agent to report the accident. Read more at http://www.radishsystems.com/media-center/media-releases/.

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For years, Level 3 has objected to the major incumbent telcos use of “demand lock up” arrangements in the market for special access services.  The incumbent phone companies use and maintain their dominance in the special access market to demand that their customers commit to buy as much as 90 percent or more of their wired connections from these incumbents.  Customers that refuse are denied access to enormous discounts for each wired connection, and instead must pay highly-inflated “list prices.”  Customers that agree must severely restrict their purchases from competitive suppliers, or risk paying “shortfall penalties” to the incumbent.

If a customer needs to buy some connections from the incumbent phone company (and every large customer does given that the incumbents are the only providers for large percentages of the market) their overall pricing will skyrocket unless they commit to buy all, or nearly all, of their connections from them in exchange for the discount.  Given this “choice,” it is not surprising that most large customers commit to buy the vast majority of their special access service from the incumbents.  Our last objection to these unlawful practices was lodged with the FCC last Friday, June 1^st.

We were surprised to read AT&T’s comments (Communications Daily, Monday, June 4th) to our filing.  AT&T said that “[t]he Commission’s policies should be looking to move us forward to an all-IP, fiber-based world and getting companies like Level 3 off the sidelines and investing in building out fiber to the 100,000 buildings within 500 feet of its fiber network.”

We agree with AT&T that the Commission should adopt policies that encourage fiber network construction – that is the whole point of our effort to eliminate unlawful demand lock up arrangements.  We would love to construct fiber to many more buildings adjacent to our network, but AT&T’s (and the other incumbents’) lock up arrangements prevent it.  We are forced to sit out more often than we would like not because we want to, but because if we did incur the expense to build to these buildings, our prospective, large customers would be unable to buy more than a fraction of their demand from us as they are already locked in to buying from AT&T and the other incumbents instead.  The FCC itself has rightly concluded that “carriers generally are unwilling to invest in deploying their own loops unless they have a long-term retail contract that will generate sufficient revenues to allow them to recover the cost of their investment.” Consistent with the ultimate goals of the Communications Act, Commission action should be aimed at fostering the growth of facilities-based competition so that competition, rather than regulation, ensures that special access rates, terms and conditions are reasonable.  The Commission should immediately abolish price-cap LEC behavior that eliminates potential demand for competitively supplied special access in large portions of the market because that behavior impedes investment in and deployment of facilities-based competitive networks.

AT&T could help us get off the sidelines by agreeing to eliminate its use of demand lock up arrangements.  Until they do or the FCC stops them, we are stuck on the bench far more often than we would like.

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Ok so maybe I won’t qualify for the 86^th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee next year. This year’s winner Snigdha Nandipati won by correctly spelling ‘guetapens’. Seriously, guetapens? Where did they come up with that one?

Not that I’m afraid of the occasional obscure term. At my house when we play Scrabble, words like Ethernet, Centrex and Isochronous are not uncommon.

But you’re probably thinking that I don’t win too many Scrabble games by trying to spell collaboration with IP, and you’d be right (my wife is the reigning champ in our house).

But there is a moral to my spelling blunder. You see creating collaboration is the purpose of a whole series of telecommunications services designed to help us all do things better. You may have heard of these as – Unified Communications and Collaboration or UCC. UCC spans a whole breadth of communication applications, ranging from simple audio conferencing to full blown Telepresence.

But as these services continue to be deployed something interesting is happening.

As an aside perhaps you tore yourself away from the coverage of the spelling bee last week to read this article about data-only cell phone plans? The discussion is largely about how a data-only plan would allow providers to combine voice and data messaging but read a little further and you’ll find an interesting reference to VoIP calling as an alternative to traditional mobile voice services.

The thing in common between data-only plans and UCC is IP, also known as Internet Protocol. I won’t bore you with yet another blog about how great IP is. (But for my parents who are likely to be the only ones reading my blogs anyway, IP is the reason the Internet works. It‘s a universal communication language for computers.)

The important thing is that building UCC systems used to be really hard. In order to build a UCC system you had to put together all these different ways of communicating – phone, instant messaging, video conferencing, etc. And each of these applications communicated together in a different way. But once again the Internet is coming to the rescue. Well not exactly the Internet. The language of the Internet, IP is coming to the rescue.

VoIP is emerging as the foundation of UCC. Traditional voice services were built on top of TDM technology and proved to be difficult to integrate with other UCC applications like presence for example. VoIP however provides the voice services we need but works hand-in-hand with the other UCC apps because VoIP uses the exact same language that the rest of the UCC suite uses – IP. So while the rest of you may know that collaboration is spelled without IP, I’ll maintain that the proper spelling is collab’IP’oration.

Do me a favor and be sure to retweet this blog so that when I use collabIPoration in my next Scrabble match it’ll show up when my wife googles it.

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SPSTechBeat: SPS ranked 104 on @CRN SP500 list! Thank you to our great customers, partners and team members! http://t.co/a1veBHjY #CRNSP500

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SPS Named 104 on UBM Channel's Solution Provider 500 List MarketWatch (press release) PARSIPPANY, NJ, June 7, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a multi-vendor systems integrator, today announced it has been recognized by UBM Channel as a part of CRN's 2012 Solution Provider 500 list. and more »

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SPS Named 104 on UBM Channel's Solution Provider 500 List PR Newswire (press release) PARSIPPANY, N.J., June 7, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a multi-vendor systems integrator, today announced it has been ... and more »

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Transformation needs to be a core competency of solution providers today.

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As you've probably seen, yesterday we announced that Avaya has finalized the acquisition of Radvision (see the press release here).

This is a big-time milestone for both companies. With Radvision's 20-year heritage in video conferencing and Avaya Aura® and video technologies, Avaya is poised to deliver one of the industry's most open, affordable, and easy-to-use video collaboration solutions suitable for businesses of any size. Our combined portfolios tackle the expensive, complex, disconnected experiences that limit broader adoption of video as a business collaboration tool today. And, we are enabling ad-hoc desktop and mobile video capabilities that connect the separate islands of video for improved B2B and B2C communications.

Radvision, which will operate as a separate Avaya business unit, is committed to open architectures and industry standards. We've already achieved interoperability between Radvision's Scopia® endpoints and infrastructure with Avaya Aura®, Avaya Flare® Experience on the Avaya Desktop Video Device, and Avaya UC 1000 series video endpoints. And, deeper levels of integration and features are expected to follow soon. You can learn more about our combined offerings by clicking here.

Media, analyst and social media coverage of the merger recognize benefits of the acquisition, including TMC's story saying "two industry leaders (that)...will enable Avaya to make video communications more accessible to more people in more locations." Chad Bernstson of CRN says, "Radvision will go down as Avaya's most significant acquisition since it bought Nortel's former enterprise unit in 2009 and became the global leader in unified communications market share, as well as added a data networking portfolio."

And to see what our executives are saying about the deal, check out this video.

We'll be demonstrating our suite of video collaboration solutions next week at InfoComm 2012 in Las Vegas, so if you are attending, be sure to check out our booth.

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Mutare announced today that Nuance Communications, Inc. (NASDAQ: NUAN), a provider of speech technologies, has integrated Nuance's Dragon Voicemail to Text to its EVM Plus giSTT service.

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Mutare now has the ability to push text messages to Avaya IP phones. The new capability is planned to be incorporated as a standard feature into Mutare's Enterprise Notification System, Text Notification System and EVM Plus giSTT unified messaging platform.

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Combined companies will revolutionize video collaboration via enterprise-secure mobility, featuring:      •  Interoperable and affordable video application for desktop,          mobile and beyond       •  Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) capabilities      •  Complete investment protection across current systems

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Gary Audin speaks with Victor Bohnert, Executive Director of IAUG, about their conference currently happening in Boston.

This year the conference is heavily focused on …

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John R. McGovern Joins SPS as Chief Financial Officer MarketWatch (press release) PARSIPPANY, NJ, May 17, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a multi-vendor systems integrator, is proud to announce the addition of John R. McGovern as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). McGovern joins the SPS executive ... and more »

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SPSTechBeat: SPS welcomes John McGovern as CFO! http://t.co/XjxocaaC

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Integration with third party applications What if you choose a non-Avaya web conferencing system and still want to leverage the strengths of Avaya’s audio bridge for the more frequent, larger audio conferences? Maybe you decided on a web conference system such as Adobe Connect, or IBM/Lotus Sametime Web or Microsoft Live Meeting? Did you know you can still integrate the Avaya Aura audio bridge with the Non-Avaya web solution? Integrating the multivendor conferencing systems can enhance your UC solution by leveraging the strengths of your vendors, rather than making compromises by going “all-in” with one vendor.   Integration with your desktop and Smartphone Avaya Aura Conferencing integrates with your outlook calendar to enable you to schedule an Avaya conference when you create an outlook calendar appointment. This integration allows your attendees to just click a link to join your conference. In addition to this, Avaya is working on an advanced desktop integration leveraging the ACE platform. This ACE-based solution will extend the desktop integration beyond outlook to include Microsoft Lync Presence/instant messaging integration. This enables you to turn an instant messaging collaboration session into a multiparty audio/web/video collaboration session, directly from the lync client. Stay tuned for some exciting announcement s in this area.   A tip for Verizon iPhone users: Because Verizon does not allow cellular data during an iPhone call, you can only join the audio portion of the meeting from your Verizon iPhone. You cannot join the audio and web portion at the same time. However, you can work around this limitation by connecting to a wifi network. Here is a scenario: You join the audio portion of the call from you iPhone while you are on the road. Keeping your eyes on the road. When you arrive at a safe spot with wifi, you can put the call on speaker, press the home button and click the web conference link from the calendar appointment. The web conference will display on your iPhone (via the wifi data) and audio portion of the call will continue uninterrupted via cellular.  Please keep in mind that it is probably illegal, not to mention detrimental to your health, to watch a web conference on your smartphone while driving.   Emerging collaboration technology A collaboration discussion wouldn’t be complete without taking a look at emerging technology. Avaya Web.alive certainly fits this category. Web.alive is an innovative, radically different approach to collaboration. It mashes up traditional powerpoint-like presentations with interactive communications in a 3d environment that is difficult to appreciate until you experience it. Avaya plans to add video (and MAC support) to the environment in the spring of 2012. So if you get the urge to take an avatar out for a stroll through a virtual learning environment, check out http://avayalive.com/tryit    

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Plantronics Introduces New Affordable Unified Communications Headsets That Don ... IT News Online New Delhi, Delhi, India : As companies roll out unified communications (UC) solutions, they struggle to keep the cost per user low while trying to achieve widespread adoption. Great sounding, comfortable and easy to use headsets are a must-have in a UC ... and more »

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Datapoint announces Matt Taylor as Group Services Director Call Centre Clinic News (press release) 2nd May 2012 - Datapoint, the contact centre optimisation and unified communications specialist, today announces the appointment of Matt Taylor as Group Services Director. Taylor will build on Datapoint's strong 2011 performance and broaden its market ... Datapoint makes key managed services hireMicroScope (blog) all 2 news articles »

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Let's Continue to Look at Unifed Communications - Group Collaboration. Aura Conferencing and Server Virtualization Avaya Aura Conferencing leverages the enterprise class, make that carrier class, Meeting Exchange audio bridge technology. In fact, Avaya Aura Conferencing has almost all of the features of Meeting Exchange, with the exception of some advanced operator features, which likely don’t apply to your enterprise needs. The same applies to the imbedded Avaya web conferencing and Avaya Video conferencing: These three mature solutions are leveraged by virtualizing them onto a single platform. Isn’t server virtualization great? Virtualization of these mature products makes the complete audio/video/web solution, feature rich, reliable and much more affordable, especially when considering server deployment and maintenance costs.   Outsourcing vs. On-Premises If you are outsourcing your audio and/or web conferencing, you should take a look at the ROI of in-house Avaya Aura Conferencing. As collaboration technology has matured and server virtualization has become the “norm”, the typical conferencing ROI has swung from outsourcing to on-prem. It is likely in your financial best interest to explore the ROI associated with bringing your audio and web conferencing back in-house. As a plus, you will be able to integrate your on-prem solution more tightly into your business applications and processes. If the solution is outsourced (in an external cloud), it is a bit trickier to link the external platform to your internal systems.   Next time we will look at Integration with Third Party Applications! 

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New Ethernet Switches From Avaya Simplify Operations for Small and Midsize ... SYS-CON Media (press release) Avaya has introduced the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 3500, a new series of compact Ethernet switches designed exclusively for small and midsize enterprises (SME), remote branches, and open environments such as classrooms and hospitality suites.

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Presence Technology and Strategic Products and Services (SPS) Announce Partnership Virtual-Strategy Magazine Presence Technology, a worldwide leading provider of Multi-Channel Contact Center solutions, and Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a global system integrator that designs and implements technology solutions, announced they have signed a strategic ... and more »

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Frost & Sullivan: Understanding Social Media Strategies Impacting Today's ... MarketWatch (press release) In the search for a systems integrator, Strategic Products and Services (SPS) offers clients a full suite of solutions to improve operational efficiencies and lower cost; leveraging seasoned professionals and proven processes to uncover better ways to ... and more »

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Frost & Sullivan: Understanding Social Media Strategies Impacting Today's ... PR Newswire (press release) In the search for a systems integrator, Strategic Products and Services (SPS) offers clients a full suite of solutions to improve operational efficiencies and lower cost; leveraging seasoned professionals and proven processes to uncover better ways to ... and more »

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Jim Maynard, VP of Sales and Marketing and Michael Taylor CTO of Strategic Products and Services (SPS) present their views for delivering solutions not just …

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SPS integrates products to deliver solutions Telecom Reseller (press release) Jim Maynard, VP of Sales and Marketing and Michael Taylor CTO of Strategic Products and Services (SPS) present their views for delivering solutions not just products as an integrator of Avaya and other vendor's solutions for the US market.

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Avaya Has Consolidated onto Single Platform for Audio, Web and Video To increase user productivity with communication tools that enable group collaboration, you might explore items such as instant messaging, audio conferencing, web conferencing and possibly video conferencing. These solutions are typically multi-vendor, which means it takes a bit of planning and research to make sure they will integrate into your infrastructure. To help with this task, the focus of this series will be on Avaya’s web, audio and video collaboration products, with a focus on reliability and interoperability. You may be familiar with Avaya Meeting Exchange, Avaya Web Conferencing and maybe even Avaya Video, but maybe you aren’t up to speed on Avaya Aura® Conferencing? Actually, you may know more about Aura Conferencing than you think. Here is why. Avaya’s conferencing solutions have made a significant, and in my opinion an under-appreciated, move to a single platform. Avaya has combined the Avaya Meeting Exchange audio bridge, Avaya Web Conferencing and Avaya Video Conferencing into a single platform that can run on a single server. This platform is known as Avaya Aura Conferencing. This single server approach allows you to easily deploy on-premise audio-only conferencing, then trial any combination of audio, video, or web conferencing at your own pace. You can start with the Avaya Aura Conferencing audio bridge in a single server configuration. You can then enable a few trial users for web and/or video conferencing and judge the benefits for yourself, in your own environment. I think this is a great move and my hat is off to Avaya for this one. Next posting - Aura Conferencing and Server Virtualization.

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SPS Integrates Visuals For Mobile With Radish ChoiceView To Ease Contact ... Daily Markets (press release) Radish Systems announces that Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a global telecommunications technologies integrator, is offering ChoiceView(TM) as a contact center solution for mobile and enterprise communications. and more »

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
An Enterprise Connect session confirms that contact centers of all sizes are moving to the cloud.

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SPS Acquires Nortel Vendor, Jones Communications MarketWatch (press release) PARSIPPANY, NJ, March 27, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS) is proud to announce the acquisition of Texas-based Jones Communications. Jones Communications specializes in unified communications, data applications, ... and more »

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SPSTechBeat: SPS welcomes a great team from Nortel Vendor, Jones Communications http://t.co/1cCjHQFl

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By Sheila McGee-Smith
Moving beyond how or why companies should do it, beyond trials and proof of concepts to actual deployments.

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SPSTechBeat: Collaboration has matured and server virtualization has become the norm. http://t.co/XV5cc3xu (page 12)

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Join Mutare on Wednesday, March 28, at 1 PM Central for our webinar, "Integrating Voicemail Into the Call Center."

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By Fred Knight
What's needed is an approach to social that's grounded in how businesses actually operate rather than just transferring what we do during our private time.

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SPSTechBeat: Heritage Nortel Contact Center options and evolution! Don't miss Monica Tarr's webinar tomorrow! http://t.co/4CJ0qGXi

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They say you learn everything you need to know in kindergarten.  I have a confession to make: I never attended. As a result, I never learned the secret handshake or whatever else it is you kindergarten grads pick-up at those hallowed halls.  Word has it that amongst these valuable life-skills, kindergarteners learn that sharing is good.  While this behavior is noble, altruistic and all that jive, it is also economical and in our own self-interest.  Sharing your basketball at the playground is a sure way to get picked for one of the teams (not to mention it beats shooting hoops all by yourself).  Sharing a cab from the airport to the hotel can greatly diminish the impact on your wallet (and make the conversation on the way there more pleasant).

Sharing even plays an important role in telecommunications.  Enter SIP Trunking.  All the hype (particularly from hardware manufacturers pitching their wares) says it’s supposed to save you a bundle. But do the math and something’s amiss.

• SIP uses more bandwidth.  Depending on the network provider’s setting, an uncompressed SIP call (using G.711 as the codec) uses 96 Kbps –assuming 64 Kbps of payload and roughly 32 Kbps of packet overhead. This means a DS-1, which in the stodgy TDM world could handle 24 voice channels (or 23 voice plus one signaling), is now limited to 16 voice channels (2/3 the capacity).
• SIP has higher port charges.  Furthermore, carrier SIP trunks (on a per-simultaneous-call basis) can be twice as expensive as TDM.

Paying more to get less does not sound like a recipe for savings. So, what’s all the hype about?  True, you can significantly decrease the bandwidth by using a compressed codec, but even if you sacrifice on quality to triple the SIP calls you can put on that pipe, with the premium you’re paying on the ports, you’re barely breaking-even.

The true secret to savings is sharing.

• Your SIP trunks share the same access facilities as your data network, which means you can eliminate duplicative infrastructure. And voice is not a bandwidth-intensive application, so while you should make sure your data network is tuned to play well with voice, in many cases, this will not translate to the need for bigger pipes.
• Using a shared session model (which, by the way, not all carriers offer), multiple sites can share the same CCPs, which means not having to buy blocks of 23 calls which sit idle most of the day (some of this capacity may never get used). It also means when one location is idle (say, because it’s lunchtime in the east coast) another location can pick-up that calling capacity slack (say, the west-coast folks starting-off their days on the right foot).

Sharing is good.  Check!  There may be hope yet for a kindergarten reprobate like myself.  Now if I could only get someone to teach me the secret handshake, I’d be set.

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When is the best conferencing solution the most productive and cost effective?

It was recently brought to our attention that most video conferencing solutions have an average ROI of 24 months.  This return on investment is solely measure in employee quality of life and travel costs; a not hard dollar value saved by eliminating current budgtary spends.  Two years to realize a return on investment for any conferencing solution doesn't appear to be much of return considering our audio and web platform achieves an average of 8 months to see a complete return on the initial investment. 

When looking at what solution provides the most product and cost effective collaboration solution for your organizations, you cannot ignore ROI.

What is the absolute requirement for my workforce to be productive?  What costs will be eliminated by utilizing technology to achieve optimal performance?  What technology is available today that can be implemented with minimal costs; both in infrastructure support and manpower?

Your employees require real-time access to collaboration in order to be productive and to communicate effectively.  You need to implement a solution that is cost-effective, feature-rich, and can seamlessly integrate into your current network infrastructure.  There is only one solution today that meets not only the technical needs of your organization but also the needs of your IT budget; that is ConferenceManager by Sonexis.

To learn more about ConferenceManager, please visit our product page, request technical white papers, or request a live demonstration today.

 

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Unified Communications Gaining Ground CRN.in However, one aspect that CIOs are not ready to compromise on is security, and a lot of enterprises are reassessing their security posture and framework in relation to new devices,” notes Kshitij Mishra, Head, Unified Communications and Collaboration, ...

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Avaya Recognized by Frost & Sullivan for Delivering Superior Communications ... MarketWatch (press release) Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems and services, today announced it has received Frost & Sullivan's 2011 Customer Value Enhancement Award for delivering superior customer communications to healthcare customers ...

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Avaya at HIMSS 2012 Spotlights New Healthcare Technology Innovations to ... MarketWatch (press release) Avaya, a global provider of business communications and collaboration systems and services, today showcased new innovations in healthcare communications at the 2012 HIMSS Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas, NV. Demonstrated at the Avaya booth ... Avaya Recognized by Frost & Sullivan for Delivering Superior Communications ...Marketwire (press release) all 6 news articles »

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The year 2011 was one in which I learned much about the healthcare industry. It started in June of last year in a moment where my visions of ice hockey glory vastly exceeded my skill level.  The result was a shattered ankle and a 7-month journey through many facets of the healthcare system.  At the same time, I became a complex collection of data and information in the various healthcare provider information systems that treated me.  Data and information that needed to be stored, transmitted and shared all over the metro Denver area and beyond.  (I wonder if I am “big data”)

Over the course of many doctor waiting room visits, I had the opportunity to think about the networks these various healthcare providers might employ to enable their business.  While common in their industry, the various organizations I touched provide a rich diversity in which to consider data network technologies and their role in the healthcare industry.

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Mutare's Password Reset application, originally developed as a self-service voice mailbox password reset solution for Avaya Modular Messaging, is now available for resetting phone extension passwords for Avaya Communication Manager.

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Goerie.com

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SAN DIEGO, Calif. - Feb 14, 2012 : Bridgepoint Education, Inc. (NYSE: BPI) has announced that Andrew "Andy" Miller has joined its board of directors.

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Company consolidates financial, operational, and IT functions under Brown to increase efficiency and scale

PLEASANTON, Calif. - Feb 08, 2012 : Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that Eric Brown will join the company as chief financial officer, chief operating officer, and executive vice president, starting Feb. 21, 2012. In his dual roles as CFO and COO, reporting to Polycom President and CEO Andy Miller, Brown, 46, will manage all financial, operational, and IT functions at Polycom, which are being consolidated under one leader for greater efficiency and scale as the company looks to accelerate its momentum and grow faster than the overall UC market. Polycom today also announced that Mike Kourey will retire from his position as EVP & CFO of Polycom in order to pursue other opportunities, including spending more time on corporate boards and on various charitable activities (see related release here).

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	Juniper Networks Introduces New Universal Access Solution to Improve Reliability and Profitability of Mobile Networks
Juniper Networks Introduces New Universal Access Solution to Improve Reliability and Profitability of Mobile Networks SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwire - Feb 7, 2012) - Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR), the industry leader in network innovation, today introduced its Universal Access solution that is designed to support more mobile calls and transactions with fewer dropped calls, while also improving network utilization and revenue opportunities for service providers. With residential, business and mobile networks traditionally relying on separate access points, the Juniper Networks® Universal Access solution uniquely enables service providers to converge wired and wireless network access to deliver a superior subscriber experience while lowering the total cost of operating, maintaining and updating the network infrastructure. More than one billion active mobile broadband subscribers worldwide are using bandwidth-intensive applications like cloud computing and video telephony, placing significant demands on network reliability and profitability. Juniper Networks ACX Series Universal Access Routers is a family of next-generation access routers that addresses these new network imperatives with up to three times the total throughput of competitive solutions, while creating a seamless end-to-end service delivery platform that can grow and adapt to changing subscriber expectations and traffic demands. Extending the benefits of the Juniper Networks Universal Edge solution, Universal Access converges networks for capital and operational savings, provides optimal flexibility in traffic management to keep up with dynamic subscriber requirements, and provides an open platform for faster service innovation and third-party interworking. Highlights of Juniper Networks Universal Access Routers: Unlocks greater revenue potential of networks with the industry's first fully integrated end-to-end solution for mobile access networks, as well as residential and business networks Industry's highest throughput at 60 Gbps and industry's only 10 Gbps capable access router; future-proofs mobile access networks by addressing growing bandwidth needs with seamless migration from 2G to 3G and 4G/LTE Extends operational intelligence and simplicity using seamless MPLS from the network core and edge to the access network Proven and deployed network timing for better network utilization with support for more calls, fewer dropped calls and more data transported with fewer retransmissions Environmentally hardened with passive cooling to provide high reliability with no moving parts The complete Universal Access and Edge solution is powered by Juniper Networks' single operating system, Junos®, with network management and analysis enabled by Junos Space®, which further reduces management expense with rapid problem identification and resolution Open, standards-based management system with SDK-enabled programmability, allowing better interoperability with radio vendors and a broader suite of tools and solutions for network insight and control Supporting Quotes: Rostelecom Volga "Juniper's new Universal Access solution is very promising. The ability to seamlessly support our customers with new cost-effective MPLS that enables rapid and reliable service delivery with network monitoring is a very compelling story to our operations team. As a converged carrier with Juniper's MPLS solutions already widely deployed on our network, we expect to achieve an unprecedented reduction in our capital and operating expenses while providing our customers with the most advanced mobile and wireline services powered by the proven operating system, Junos." - Igor Semenov, deputy chief of networks development department, Rostelecom Volga Alaska Communications "Juniper's new Universal Access solution is optimized for our varied deployment and low maintenance requirements. Given our weather extremes, we are excited about the environmental hardening including passive cooling, extraordinary reliability metrics and the power over Ethernet. By using the same Junos operating system we run on our Juniper Networks MX Series routers, we can seamlessly support our customers in a new cost-effective way by enabling rapid and reliable service delivery." - Daniel Kerschbaum, senior manager, IP & Transmission Engineering, Alaska Communications Nokia Siemens Networks "We are adding the new Juniper ACX Series to our portfolio supporting the IP access and aggregation network. In fact, we have developed an application via the Junos SDK to make the routers aware of microwave capacities in real-time to further improve the user experience in mobile broadband networks. This approach supports our Liquid Transport offerings in terms of optimal capacity use and management." - Marc Rouanne, head of networks systems, Nokia Siemens Networks Infonetics Research "It is clear from our recent research that Ethernet and MPLS are favored by mobile operators as primary cell site backhaul connection protocols. This means that the new Juniper ACX Series with support for both Ethernet access/aggregation and MPLS should be appealing to operators. I'm sure many operators will want to evaluate the ACX Series' option of seamless MPLS for simplifying core through access operations, as well as the integrated timing/synchronization manager, and the new network management/analysis tools based on Junos Space." - Michael Howard, co-founder and principal analyst, Infonetics Research Juniper Networks "With a focus on improving the total subscriber experience and the economic viability of the mobile network, Juniper has prioritized investments in innovations that make extraordinary leaps in service delivery and operator profitability. Our new Universal Access solution works hand-in-hand with our innovative Universal Edge to deliver the industry's first fully integrated end-to-end solution that dramatically improves total service reliability and enables higher revenue generation of the mobile network while lowering total operating costs." - Rami Rahim, senior vice president and general manager, Edge and Aggregation Business Unit, Juniper Networks Additional Resources: Juniper Networks ACX Series Universal Access Routers will be available for orders beginning in Q2 2012. For more information about Juniper Networks' Universal Access solution, please refer to the following resources: ACX Series: http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/routing/acx-series Juniper.Net Community: www.juniper.net/community Juniper on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Junipernetworks Juniper on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JuniperNetworks About Juniper Networks Juniper Networks is in the business of network innovation. From devices to data centers, from consumers to cloud providers, Juniper Networks delivers the software, silicon and systems that transform the experience and economics of networking. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net). Juniper Networks and Junos are registered trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The Juniper Networks and Junos logos are trademarks of Juniper Networks, Inc. All other trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks, or registered service marks are the property of their respective owners. Copyright © 1996-2011 Juniper Networks, Inc.     All rights reserved                                                                                      Update preferences
Copyright © 1996-2012 Juniper Networks, Inc.     All rights reserved                                                                                      Update preferences

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PLEASANTON, Calif. - Feb 06, 2012 : Polycom, Inc., the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that New York Network (NYN), a service of the State University of New York (SUNY), is helping its clients extend the reach of training programs through the use of HD video collaboration enabled by the Polycom® RealPresence™ Platform. NYN is also helping many New York State agencies meet tight budgets and cost-effectively satisfy educational mandates and open government laws.

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Several months ago I needed support from a retailer with a recent purchase. The retailer had a 1-800 number, but when called I was told that number was not available from my calling area. When I called the toll long distance number, after going through a cumbersome IVR covering a wealth of services the retailer knew I had no interest in, I found the right pigeon hole, and was promptly told that support for this particular product was now only available through email. I went online to get to the retailers web site, and used the retailer's form, having foughtt my way past more irrelevant advertising, to post a question. Success! I shortly received a thank you email indicating that my request had been received, and I would receive a response in 24 hours. Even greater success! I received a response in 4 hours. The response? "We are no longer accepting email requests for support; please use the 1-800 number." While this is an amusing story, it is unfortunately too common.

Retailers, seek opportunities in an increasing myriad of ways - phone, online ordering, catalog sales, retail stores, Facebook, Twitter - to engage you in their services and products, but the end result often falls short. Having been involved with a large number of retailer customer engagement initiatives, the patterns of failure have repeated themselves. The following 5 steps are crucial to getting it right:

1. Understand how your customer wants to be engaged. It's not enough to know what you want to sell to your customer; you have to know how they want to interact. Don't assume that one style fits all, but there will be definitely be defined groups.
2. View each engagement regardless of media as a mechanism to build brand and customer experience. I was recently with a major retailer who has experienced a multi-year decline in customers and revenue. They had decided to remake their brand with "an exciting new and energized view of the stores." I was asked to help them define how they should change their self-service capabilities as part of this initiative. In the early scoping of the work I asked them to tell me about the new view they had targeted. They didn't know, but they wanted the self-service advice anyway.
3. Recognize that you are one company. Whether a customer chooses to shop in a store, online or by phone, you are one and the same to them. Consistency of approach is essential across venue and media. All of them need a common communications architecture for managing their interaction with you. That architecture, must allow the customer to move from any area of your customer area to any other - no redialing other 1-800 numbers, no "they don't have chat in that department," no "I'm sorry, that service is now delivered through..."
4. Start with the notion that social media, the Internet or the call center is a cost reduction technique, and you've chosen the wrong driver for developing "new customer interface" strategy. IVRs do cut costs of delivery, as do sales portals, but both can be very magnetic means of recognizing and engaging the customer. That magnetism is quickly lost when the focus is placed solely on minimizing investment and the lowest cost option for delivering service.
5. Have a single area responsible for you customer engagement strategy across all media. Make this organization responsible for understanding the shifts and targets in point 1 above. And, be very clear that this is different that Marketing. This organization defines the archetypes that are used for engagement, regardless of venue.

What happens as a consequence? In an economic environment that has seen dramatic erosion in the retail space, if you walk around the shopping centers, there are a few retailers that always seem to have high traffic regardless of location. I go in these stores myself, not always to purchase, but because it's a fun place to go, as are their websites and their contact centers. A former president of Avaya once said in the midst of the telecom meltdown a decade ago "cutting costs can only get a company so far. Sustainable profitability comes from developing new solutions and superior customer engagement." Thinking about a consistent framework for social media, multimedia, and multi-venue customer engagement is an essential part of retails new age innovation. Thinking about how you engage the customer to buy your services is an essential, but all to often ignored, means to growth.

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Avaya introduces iPad mobile UC appliation as mobility interest grows SearchMobileComputing.com Last week, UC provider Avaya announced the availability of an iPad version of its mobile collaboration platform, Avaya Flare Communicator. The offering, which leverages the Avaya Aura UC architecture, enables voice, instant messaging and email ... Avaya launches Avaya Flare® Communicator for iPadDominican Today all 2 news articles »

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Company Released Updated and New Products in 2011 for Workforce Management Solutions, Analytics Solution for PCI Compliance and Data Sharing, and Customer Interaction Solution

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Avaya embraces BYOD trend with iPad app Network World Avaya has launched its next-generation mobile collaboration for consumer devices with an Apple iPad application. The Avaya Flare Communicator is designed to provide enterprise-class voice, instant messaging and presence with email integration over both ... End Points or End Users – Where's the Focus?UCStrategies KPN offers new Avaya Unified Communications systemTelecompaper (subscription) all 4 news articles »

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Sonexis ConferenceManager provides Healthcare organizations with the most secure, flexible, and cost-effective solution for audio conferencing with web collaboration.

Sonexis will be attending The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference in Las Vegas, NV on February 20th-24th.  This is a very exciting event for Sonexis because it will allow us to showcase what many of our healthcare customers already know; ConferenceManager provides the most secure and cost-effective solution for audio conferencing and web collaboration for Healthcare providers. 

ConferenceManager is an outstanding audio conferencing bridge with integrated Web conferencing that sits on your network under your management. ConferenceManager’s smart, embedded security features keep your information safe from outside intrusion. You maintain control of critical business information and the security procedures that protect it.

ConferenceManager also includes Emergency Conferencing which uses Blast Dial to quickly connect first responders in an audio conference. In the event of an emergency, it is critically important to get a group of emergency responders together on a conference call as quickly as possible with minimal effort. When an emergency occurs the first responder dials an emergency number, this creates a conference and triggers a blast dial‐out to other members of the response team. When each team member is called they are prompted to join the emergency conference in progress.

If you would like to learn more about ConferenceManager for Healthcare, download our suite of Healthcare datasheets or contact us today!

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Certification continues to expand employment opportunity in global IT industry.

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Call Center Agent Turnover, Retention and Productivity Survey Launched by The ... MarketWatch (press release) Funding for the survey is provided by Avaya ( http://www.avaya.com/usa/solutions/portfolio--contact-centers ). (The underwriter, Avaya, does not have access to individual survey responses, nor will they be shared with the underwriter.) ... and more »

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An audio conference bridge provides ultimate security

In today’s competitive economy, the protection of intellectual assets is vital to the success of any organizations product or service.  To have the leading edge on bringing an idea to market, or by having a product developed ahead of analyst expectations is the make or break of most businesses in the aggressive global economy.  Organizations will continue to drive innovation through the use of communications technology such as Unified Communications and specifically through conferencing and collaboration in order to become successful. 

However, IT infrastructures are being continually invaded by intruders from all over the globe trying to gain a competitive edge by stealing intellectual property.  In 2011, The New York Times ran an interesting article about the number one problem facing companies in the United States- intellectual property theft. 

From the article:

For the United States, the No. 1 problem with China’s economy is probably intellectual property theft. Technology companies, for example, continue to notice Chinese government agencies downloading software updates for programs they have never bought, at least not legally.  No wonder China has become the world’s second-largest market for computer hardware sales — but is only the eighth-largest for software sales.

It has never been more important to protect your company’s intellectual property; and your current audio and web conferencing solution should be high on the list of security concerns.

Conference call services cannot guarantee the level of security that is needed in today’s ever changing telecommunications environments.  Between 2010 and 2011, a leader in online data security reported there was a 60% increase of records breached by unauthorized access.  Collaboration and a dynamic workforce demands the availability of reservationless conference calls, scheduled audio and web conferences, as well as online web collaboration; this demand is the exact reason many fraudulent sources are trying to gain access this information.  How does IT meet the demands of this workforce and increase innovation while protecting an organizations intellectual assets?

Only by deploying an on-premise conference bridge that sits in your environment behind your firewall can you guarantee the solution conforms to your company’s security standards. Innovation will continue to drive the increased demand for secure audio conferencing solutions, and for those who implement conferencing as a part of their overall communications strategy, the decision to migrate this important tool to a private cloud will become obvious. 

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Fierce Enterprise Communications

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Avaya US Services Chief Jumps To Top VAR CRN By Chad Berndtson, CRN Jenine Johnson, most recently Avaya's sales vice president, US services, has taken an executive operations role at Strategic Products and Services (SPS), a Parsippany, NJ-based solution provider and one of Avaya's biggest ... SPS Boosts Executive Leadership with Key AppointmentsMarketWatch (press release) all 10 news articles »

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SPSTechBeat: SPS welcomes Jenine Johnson to the Executive Leadership Team! http://t.co/pTciNYYt

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With v1.2 standards retired as of December 31, 2011, company’s call recording solutions undergo independent assessment by Coalfire, a leading PCI QSA.

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The Channel: Key to UC and Gaining Traction
UCStrategies
Examples include acquisitions by PAETEC (before they were acquired by Windstream), by Arrow Electronics, and by Strategic Products and Services (SPS). Distributors are also upping the ante for UC; one example is the proactive UC program at ScanSource ...

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Mutare's new release of its flagship Enterprise Notification System (ENS) represents the next phase in the evolution of notification systems. The new release features a more streamlined user interface for even easier administration . . .

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openPR (press release)

AudioCodes and serVonic Announce Technology Partnership openPR (press release) AudioCodes' media gateways provide connectivity for Microsoft Unified Communications (UC) components, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and Lync Server 2010 with the PSTN, while serVonic's solutions add fax and unified messaging components. ... and more »

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The State of Unified Communications: 2012 and Beyond Channel Insider Mobility and collaboration will continue to drive the adoption of unified communications in 2012. Here's a look at the state of the market. Unified communications projects moved beyond the basics of VoIP, IM and presence in 2011, with many businesses ...

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InformationWeek

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When you think back through 2011 there are a few defining events that come to mind. There was the passing of the prolific innovator Steve Jobs, the tsunami that devastated Japan (followed by the women’s world cup win 4 months later), and the many worldwide movements that were evangelized through social media.

Year of the EHR

There were many defining themes in healthcare IT as well. Numerous healthcare innovations were made, the whirlwind of legislation changes persisted, and perhaps most importantly, the adoption of electronic health records reached a record mass.   In fact, I would venture to say that if there were a healthcare zodiac, 2011 would be the year of the EHR.

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2011 Year in Review in UC UCStrategies Strategic Products and Services – SPS – has also grown this past year through acquisition, by buying Spenser Communications and Image Technologies. So the VARs are a big winner and they are consolidating. And the third point that I would emphasize is ...

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The Internet continues to grow very fast causing network operators to complain that flat rate; all-you-can-eat charging models are no longer appropriate. Many commentators assume it is inevitable that volume of data will have to be used as a basis for charging consumers extra. The theory is that broadband is the same as other utilities. Just as utilities all base their charges on consumption of the units delivered (water, electricity and gas) then so should broadband.

But there is a big problem with this comparison.

Those other utilities have two costs. They have the cost of building out the distribution network that delivers the gas, water or electricity. In this regard they are like a network operator.

They also, however, have the cost of producing the water, gas or electricity – completely unlike a network operator. It’s not that there isn’t a cost of production of network bytes. It’s that the cost of the production of those bytes is borne by someone else – the content originator. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Netflix and everyone else that produces the content have massive server farms that “create” the bytes.

There is also a more direct correlation between the number of bytes consumed and the cost to the content originators. As more bytes need to be produced more servers need to be purchased. The servers take up more space and need more power to run.

So, traditional utilities bear both the fixed cost of delivery and the variable cost of production for the units that are delivered. A network operator and a content originator share those costs. The network operator bears the somewhat fixed cost of delivery. The content originator bears the more variable cost of production.

There is another big difference between a traditional utility and a network operator – the rate of change in their costs. The delivery portion of a traditional utility actually increases over time because the equipment (pipes, cables etc.) costs increase as raw materials get more expensive. Manpower costs associated with construction are also increasing. The same is true for the cost of producing the units. The long-term trend for production of gas, electricity and water (mostly driven by increasing environmental regulations) is increasing.

But for both the network operator and the content originator the costs are falling – and falling fast. Moore’s, Kryder’s and Butter’s laws apply to all of the equipment cost elements. They all show a massive and continuing unit cost improvement. While this is partially offset by the increasing unit cost of manpower the overall cost is still trending down.

So where does all this leave us?

In part 1 I suggested that network operator’s costs are not driven by data volume. The number of customers that are trying to use the service during the busy hour drives their costs.

In part 2 I have suggested that the total cost of delivering[1] consumers the data they request is shared between the network operator and the content originator. And both the network operator’s and the content originator’s unit costs are falling very fast, and very predictably.

I believe that this sharing of cost is appropriate and should continue as both parties have revenue streams arising from what they do. It is also logical that content originators should have more of a unit based revenue stream (pay per view, per click, per ad). And that network operators should have more of a fixed fee per-consumer business model (pay per access pipe, differentiated by speed).

But, while the network use is growing extremely fast, as measured by bandwidth consumption during the busy hour(s), maybe the appropriate additional charge for a network operator to levy on its customer is use during the busy hour. If a higher percentage of their customer’s use occurs during the busy hour(s) then they should expect to pay more than people who only use the network when there is lots of unused bandwidth. Or if you want high speed during the busy hour(s) you pay a premium. If you don’t need high speed during the busy hour(s) you pay less.

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With 2012 quickly approaching, I figured I’d dust-off the old crystal ball and make a few predictions regarding the world of voice telephony over the coming year.

1. Mayan long-count calendar will be re-set to 2018

To the dismay of the hoards who had anticipated the final day next year (as preliminarily predicted by the Maya), December 21^st will be just another day. Instead, the FCC will follow the recommendation to set a date of 2018 for a transition from the PSTN to an all IP Network.

While there are technological and commercial implications for providers (non-trivial routing and inter-carrier compensation changes need to occur), as I mentioned previously, the sky is not falling because people won’t stop calling. Maybe what we need is a new name for the PSTN replacement. I propose we start calling it something futuristic like the United Federation of Platforms.

 

2. Occupy your PBX movement

While SIP adoption is growing true UC deployments are still at a nascent stage. A generous estimate would be to say 5% of business users have UC. In this information age, that leaves a large number of knowledge workers wanting a more equitable telecommunications experience.

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It seems like every method we use to access the Internet, wired or wireless, has some sort of data consumption cap. Some of those consumption caps are used to set a limit such that an additional revenue stream can be created at higher data volumes. But other caps are used to set a level that separates acceptable use of a network from abusive use of a network.

Whatever the language used or the commercial model implied, the existence of a cap seems to be fairly consistently aimed at the “top 1% of users”. It is said that the 1% consumes a disproportionate volume of data when compared to the average user. The implication being (without it really ever being stated) is that the 1% of users impose a disproportionate cost on the network operator. They are also commonly referred to as bandwidth hogs.

But there is a big problem with this. Bandwidth and volume are not the same. Bandwidth is typically measured in bits per second. Data volume is typically measured in bytes. To provide an analogy, a network’s bandwidth is equivalent to the number of lanes on a road. Data volume is equivalent to the number of miles an individual car travels along a road over a certain period of time.

The cost of building a road is almost fully correlated to the number of lanes that are built. But there is no correlation between the cost of building the road and the number of miles a car travels along it after it is built.

The same is true for a network. The cost of a network is almost completely determined by the bandwidth that is needed. And that “need” is extraordinarily predictable. Just as for a road system there is a network busy hour. The number of people you want to allow through a road system at a certain speed determines the number of lanes you build. And as a network operator, the number of people who you want to experience a certain bandwidth at the same time determines the total bandwidth you build.

Back to our 1% “bandwidth hogs”. Let’s say that this 1% all used their Internet connection fully for every minute of every day. If they did then they would consume a very large volume of data – lots of those bytes. Way more than the average person. But did they actually cost the network operator a disproportionate amount more? No. Imagine these bandwidth hogs actually turned their use off only during the busy hour – the hour that drives the cost of the network. Would removing 1% of cars from the rush hour on a road make any noticeable difference to the experience of the other 99%? No. Would those bandwidth hogs consume very much less data volume by refraining from using the network during the busy hour? No.

So there is no link between the 1% bandwidth hogs, when bytes are used to pick them out, and the cost to the network operator.

The problem is actually the large percentage of people who all want to use the network at the same time. That’s probably nearly all of us. And that’s a hard problem to solve. But making a scapegoat of people that continuously use an Internet service isn’t going to help. If all those bandwidth hogs left the network today the cost for the network operator doesn’t change and the experience we all have during the busy hour doesn’t get any better.

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Top Avaya VARs Merge: SPS Buys Imagine Technologies CRN By Chad Berndtson, CRN Strategic Products and Services (SPS), the Parsippany, NJ-based fast growth VAR and Avaya powerhouse, has acquired Imagine Technologies, a fellow solution provider and one of Avaya's recently-crowned US Channel Partners of the ... Strategic Products and Services and Imagine Technologies Complete Company MergerPR Newswire (press release) all 11 news articles »

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Strategic Products and Services and Imagine Technologies Complete Company Merger PR Newswire (press release) 13, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Strategic Products and Services (SPS) and Imagine Technologies Inc. announce they have successfully completed due diligence reviews, signed purchase agreements and completed transactions required to successfully merge the two ... and more »

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SPSTechBeat: Systems integrators, #SPS and Imagine Technologies join forces. http://t.co/7FYZ7BRB

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In the early days of the web, a consultant would have told you that an effective online business needs a simple webpage to succeed. That web page would most likely have used frames and static HTML to project your company to the world. Things have changed a lot since those days.

A Dynamic Website

If a potential customer clicks through to your website and it only contains a few static pages, chances are they will get bored and head elsewhere. The last thing any business wants is to lose a possible lead.

To keep web users engaged, companies have to build websites with interesting content that shows how you can solve a problem. Make sure your high performing website has interesting content that will drive users deeper into the site. As they learn more about your company, they are becoming more familiar with the quality of your company and will be more likely to make a purchase.

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Avaya Government Solutions Selected for US General Services Administration ... MarketWatch (press release) Avaya Government Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Avaya, today announced that it has been awarded prime contractor status on the US General Services Administration (GSA) Connections II telecommunications contract. The contract, to be shared ... and more »

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In our last installment of “things that take you beyond bandwidth” our bloggers shared with you their favorite apps of the moment. This time around (and just in time for the holiday shopping season), we share the top books we’ve read this year that have helped shape our views on networking, the Internet and all things bandwidth. Consider it your Oprah Book Club for telecom.

So instead of waking up in the middle of the night this Black Friday to fight scenes like this, feel free to just click and grab one of these titles for your boss, coworker or that crazy cousin-in-law that doesn’t quite understand what it is that you do for a living.

Without further ado, here are 7 books that take you beyond bandwidth:

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Romance languages (Italian, French, Rumanian, Catalan and over thirty others) are somewhat similar. They all derive from Latin and this common origin means knowing one gives you a leg-up in learning another (or so they claim). Over the past month, I’ve been putting this hypothesis to the test, and while it would have been really cool to say I speak a more obscure language like Galician, Picard or Norman, I’ve settled for the more broadly used Portuguese.

The way I see it, given Level 3’s deep South American presence (courtesy of the recent Global Crossing acquisition), it might actually come in handy someday. As a native Spanish speaker, I find some things do come easier (many words and grammatical rules are similar) but pronunciation is tricky and there is always a temptation to borrow from Spanish when I don’t know (or have forgotten) the right word. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the borrowed word has an altogether different meaning in Portuguese. I may intend to speak of a pregnant woman (embarazada) but folks hear of a confused woman (embaraçada) or write of sorrow (pena) and readers imagine a feather (also pena). There have even been a couple of truly embarrassing examples which I cannot repeat for this audience.

Something similar happens when it comes to SIP Trunking. Many folks assume that since SIP is a standard protocol (defined by RFCs), SIP Trunking must therefore be a common product (a single language, if you will). The truth is there are many nuances which make SIP Trunking more akin to a language family. There are many practical and philosophical reasons why these differences exist.

On one hand, you have differences in the way the carrier implements SIP which include supported cross-protocol interactions (TCP, UDP,RTP, RTCP, etc), settings for packet size, codecs supported, redirect and re-invite implementations -not to mention the fact hardware manufacturers often have different interpretations of the SIP standard itself. These nuances are often the result of trade-offs made between quality, security and cost and a lack of consensus as to the best approach.

On the other hand, you also have differences in the carrier services grouped under the SIP Trunking moniker. I’ve heard everything from PRI replacement (centralized or otherwise with each carrier’s footprint limitations), toll-free, contact center and dedicated long distance go by this name. There is no shared definition – if it uses SIP and it connects you to the PSTN, someone is likely to call it SIP Trunking. In fact, Global Crossing used the term to refer to all their VoIP products whereas Level 3 used it specifically in reference to the centralized two-way local PRI replacement (even though we offer all of these services using SIP).

I am by no means suggesting there is anarchy in the SIP world. Each carrier’s offering has consistent rules and generally works the same way for all customers using the same equipment (dialect, if you will). All I’m suggesting is it’s helpful to be aware of the nuances that exist between carriers. When you hear “SIP Trunking”, think “language family” and find out what language in that family your equipment is actually expected to know. Perhaps you’d like to share an experience? And the next time you hear me say “Oi!” I may be saying hello in Portuguese, on the other hand I may just be jamming to AC/DC’s TNT.

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Nectar Services Announces Update to its Converged Management Platform TMC Net Officials with Nectar Services said that major Version 4.0 enhancements include a new Vendor Knowledge Module (VKM) for Avaya (News - Alert) Nortel CS 1000 and Avaya Nortel Call Pilot, incorporating autodiscovery of Nortel installations, ...

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A one-on-one with Avaya's Alan Baratz reveals how Avaya thinks partners should be looking at the Avaya portfolio opportunity.

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