Collaborative Thinking

Unified Communications: The Adoption & Value Challenge

The technology side of unified communications is relatively easy to understand: e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, audio/video/data conferencing, IP Telephony/VoIP, presence, speech and fax. Many of these technologies are implemented as separate stovepipes today. And from that technology perspective, Unified Communications is an effort to establish a framework for integration, interoperability and choreography of services across devices, applications, networks and infrastructure.

But Unified Communications has a huge "people" aspect. To derive value from investments in these technologies, people adapt to working and socializing in different manners. Changing workstyle and lifestyle practices represents a larger hurdle to overcome than the technology, which itself is difficult enough.

A lot of people are also talking about benefits in terms of reducing business latency. I don't disagree with that approach. There needs to be some form of acceptable ROI as strategists formulate their business case for project funding. But latency often is applied to a time-slice of an overall process or activity. The focus should be on process outcomes in addition to intermediate steps in order to avoid the "hurry up and wait" dilema of optimizing a function that does not impact overall cycle time or output quality.

So just some preedictions that: a lack of focus on change management as it applies to people (not process or systems) will become the most cited reason why unified communication efforts - and - ROI from unified communications will remain elusive when it comes to knowledge/information workers. I believe that it is indeed there -- but it will remain a qualitative assessment, more than a quantitative measure, of value.

Microsoft & Enterprise IP Telephony

A nice summary from co-worker Irwin Lazar over at VoIP Loop: Microsoft to the Enterprise IP Telephony Market: Game On!

IBM To Microsoft: Game On!

Talking about IBM's Sametime product is like talking about your favorite Chevy or Ford  pickup truck. It might not be pretty, but it hauls a load and gets you to where you want to go. And that’s important (stability, reliability, scalability, etc.). IBM has been the long-entrenched leader for many, many years when it comes to enterprise IM and on-premise web conferencing. There might have been some more popular products for e-learning (e.g., Centra) but by-and-large, when it came to generalized infrastructure, Sametime was the platform to beat in the enterprise software market for real-time collaboration.

Unfortunately, there was that dark period a few years ago where IBM took their eyes off the entire Lotus franchise and cast doubt about the future of the brand and associated products while it became enamored with Workplace and portal-everything. While many of the strategy gaps and management malaise concerning Notes and Domino have been alleviated over the past year or so, attention to Sametime has only recently become a focus point for IBM’s efforts concerning real-time communication (RTC).

Since 2003, IBM essentially left the battlefield when it came to RTC, allowing Microsoft to move through the market almost at will. For some time there has not been a vision or coherent strategy around the convergence of audio/video/data conferencing, instant messaging, IP telephony/VoIP, presence, e-mail, and voice mail ? what many people are categorizing as Unified Communications today. There have been product updates to Sametime for sure, but no strategic vision and architectural framework or partner business model until recently that paralleled what Microsoft (and even some communication vendors) have been talking about concerning “convergence”.

And that is what’s most important about this release of Sametime. V7.5 signifies IBM’s return to competing with Microsoft when it comes to unified communications. While not a perfect release (I wish it did more to modernize the back-end), it is an initial volley. The question now is whether it is too little too late and whether the rest of the work needed to be delivered happens in a timetable that satisfies client needs and market dynamics.

What I like:

• The general emphasis on this release deals with client interfaces and the user experience. To be kind, Sametime was not a very compelling front-end compared to people’s modern user experience with clients from public IM network providers. While this seems like a trivial point, it is incredibly important in terms of user adoption and the ability of people to tailor their IM client around their personal work and lifestyle preferences.
• The user experience for web conferencing is also dramatically improved. It is easier to create a conference, add slides, obtain meeting information, co-browse web pages, poll participants and visualize polling results (to outline a few new/enhanced features).
• The unified IM client also has an extensibility model based on Eclipse so any developer familiar with the Eclipse plug-in model can start viewing the Sametime client as a platform for next-generation real-time applications. I think this is a significant point of differentiation (given my earlier post) where Microsoft’s application model seems to lack cohesiveness. IM client as application platform” presents interesting opportunities for developers to build community-oriented and social networking-based applications.
• There are also interesting cognitive features in this release around chat history. Thinking of chat as a persistent conversation rather than a temporal back-and-forth dialog that has no long term relevance is the right viewpoint. Persistent “communication spaces” have some intriguing applications (Parlano has been presenting the idea of persistent group messaging to the market with their own solution that runs on top of Microsoft LCS). Indeed, IBM has already demonstrated its own applications on top of Sametime related to expertise (“SkillTap”) and social networking.
• The revamped client also does a good job at location awareness as well (although based on IP address which is not always accurate).
• Perhaps the most significant point of differentiation though is how IBM is dealing with the audio and video aspects of unified communications. Where Microsoft has aggressively pursued implementation of native support for IP Telephony itself, IBM has instead defined an integration framework (Sametime Provider Interface) for partners such as Avaya and Premiere to plug into. Any click-to-call behaviors leverage this interface to integrate with IP Telephony, PBX or conference bridge. That will be attractive to enterprises preferring not to cede their communication infrastructure to Microsoft versus investments in Cisco, Avaya, and others. IBM is committing to some peer to peer audio though but it’s unclear how aggressive they will be compared to vendors such as Skype and others that continue to raise the bar on that model.
• The integration with Google is another aspect of the announcement I like, in part because it acknowledges that any vendor that wants to position itself as the overall presence management framework for the enterprise has to be open to other connection mechanisms (in this case XMPP) rather than being somewhat stubborn about presence only being defined by SIP/SIMPLE.

What Remains A Concern:

• Integration with Microsoft Office: IBM has been in the press regarding how it will integrate with Microsoft products (perhaps via smart tags and such). But there needs to be much more information provided along with specific patterns of integration on the client as well as with SharePoint.
• Priority: IBM still lags behind Microsoft in terms of thought-leadership as well as continued execution in this area. I know the internal Sametime team is reinvigorated but it remains unclear how much overall management commitment this area will receive given IBM’s Workplace message and portal-centricity.
• Modernization of the back-end: There is a lot of work to be done to move to standard protocols (e.g., native SIP to the client, retirement of the old T.120 code). If you look at how far someone like Adobe has come with Breeze, it makes you wonder about the ability of IBM to rapidly deliver and keep pace. If not soon, enterprises might look to Adobe as the Microsoft alternative for on-premise web conferencing.

So again, lots of Q&A to follow-up with IBM on as well as packaging my analysis into a report also due out and again working with my fellow Burton Group analyst, Irwin Lazar in this space.

Musings On Microsoft's Unified Communications Event

Bold.

I was talking to John Fontana from Network World for an article he was writing. When asked about what I thought about Microsoft’s Unified Communications strategy my gut reaction was simple ? bold.

By saying that, I do not mean to imply that it is perfect, or that it is the defacto winner in the particular market space or that Microsoft’s range of solutions here are the right match for every client. But I wanted to acknowledge what Microsoft (specifically Anoop Gupta, Gurdeep Singh Pall, Zig Serafin, Ed Simnet and others), has accomplished over several years. The event this week reflects over three years of balancing vision, risk, technology maturity, and market realities around real-time communication. The culmination of the efforts clearly will not be “real” until product ships sometime in 2Q07. 

So what are we to make of yesterday’s event in San Francisco?

Missing:

• No clear articulation on how the UC strategy relates to efforts Microsoft is undertaking under its Windows Live / Office Live framework.
• No understandable positioning with what has been going on in parallel between the enterprise side of the house (UCG) and the consumer side of the house (MSN). Microsoft acquired Teleo back in August of 2005.
• No apparent alignment with what the UCG group is doing in relation to the peer to peer communication capabilities coming out of Vista (namely, Windows Vista Meeting Space).
• Although a minor point, Microsoft’s OneNote has built out its own real-time capabilities over the years. It remains unclear how OneNote participates in the vision and roadmap presented yesterday.

Skeletons In The Closet?

• Understandably, this was not the time and place to talk about history (especially when it is not a very successful set of past experiences), but nothing about how people get to this new wave of solutions from existing Microsoft real-time tools (e.g., namely, those clients that had invested in Exchange for conferencing).
• Standards/Openess: It remains somewhat unclear exactly what extensions Microsoft has implemented (and what extensions it will continue to implement) when it comes to SIP/SIMPLE and how those extensions will be freely published and shared ? and rolled back into the IETF. Specifically, I need to chase down some grapevine debate on Microsoft’s use of session mode as opposed to page mode (I’ve been told that session mode was rejected by the IETF). I've also heard rumors that Microsoft is charging partners to connect to its implementation of SIP in LCS. If SIP is open and public, what exactly are people being charge for ? if they are truly being charged…

Remains Unclear:

• The developer model for all of this remains somewhat opaque to me. There seems to be some options where developers can choose to program directly against LCS and in other cases can choose to program against the interfaces provided by Office Communicator. There does not seem to be a common abstraction layer on the client that hides the service implementation on the backend. And it gets murkier when you start thinking about Office Web Communicator.
• I was confused with what I heard yesterday on the webcast versus what I was briefed on when it came to Round Table. Round Table has a record/playback capability and it was unclear whether it duplicates or compliments or possibly conflicts with the record/playback that might also be occurring via Live Meeting. During the webcast it sounded like Live Meeting provides the record/playback service to Round Table but that doesn’t seem to make sense (meetings can occur using Round Table without a need for Live Meeeting if there were no remote participants).
• It was unclear what new browsers and platforms would be supported with the next version of Communicator Web Access … I was hoping to hear about possible support for other browsers and the Mac platform.
• There was a lot of talk about presence but not a lot of insight into how Microsoft will approach presence management, federation between different presence servers (will we see a need for a meta-presence server for instance), support for XMPP as another presence sub-system, etc.
• I have lots of questions on how the on-premise web conferencing will work within existing LCS topologies designed for instant messaging and not conferencing. There was not a lot of clarification as to whether this is a new server role, an extension or module added onto an existing LCS server, etc.

So lots to do in terms of Q&A, follow-up and deep-dives on how these new announcements will show up in product and what Burton Group recommends to clients in terms of planning, architecture, infrastructure, development, etc. By year-end I should have an in-depth report out on Microsoft's products in this area (Office Communicator, Communicator Server, etc) that will compliment an earlier report published by fellow Burton Group analyst Irwin Lazar.

Unified Communications - Why It Matters

Close examination of a “day in the life” of many users would reveal a situation where efforts at communication and collaboration are increasingly disjointed. Users traverse multiple devices, networks and productivity tools that seem to have been secretly designed to purposefully hinder interaction and exchange of information. Despite having more tools available to us than ever before, we are all increasingly frustrated with the inability to more seamlessly communicate and collaborate with each other. The absence of a common architecture and generalized set of services that enable integration and interoperability around unified communications has created unnecessary IT complexity and user anxiety. 

A strategy for unified communications is imperative in order to respond to the business need for a more agile workplace and the continued diversity of a worker’s computing environment:

• The pace and complexity of work is increasingly, people multi-task more as they juggle multiple activities and interact with multiple groups.
• Reducing business latency remains a goal within most enterprises. After streamlining process cycle times and information flows, what's left are methods and practices that make people more efficient and effective.   
• Workplace models are shifting as organizations reduce facility burdens (thereby creating more remote workers)
• Organizations are extending computing services to employees who are mobile or work remotely (e.g., home offices)
• Outsourcing of non-strategic functions continues to persist, requiring enterprises to communicate and collaborate with sourcing partners
• Organizations continue to build collaborative relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers, and integrate worldwide operations. Communication with external parties and far flung teams remains a critical necessity.

The need for a common framework is also necessary to reduce risk:

• Business activities increasingly crisscross work and life boundaries. Users may inadvertently exacerbate the communication and collaboration challenge faced by IT groups by using consumer-oriented software and services that are readily available.
• Such services might not have been assessed by management and can expose organizations to security and compliance issues. Offering communication and collaboration solutions that can federate with public services can alleviate risk concerns while providing users with sanctioned alternatives.

Unifying communications though has to have a point. It has to make a difference in how an organization competes and flourishes. From a technology perspective, all of the talk about PC's as telephones and presence-enabled applications may seem "cool" but there needs to be a business case that illustrates how these IT investments directly, or indirectly, influence organizational productivity and process performance. At the end of the day, business and IT leaders must exploit unified communications to drive business growth and innovation -- to enhance relationships with customers, partners and suppliers -- to differentiate themselves in the market -- and in some cases, to simply survive.

Now where was I...

Apologies from dropping off the grid so to speak, between the Burton Group Catalyst conference (around 1800 attendees by the way) where I had some speaking sessions to prepare for -- and some deliverables due this month (June, a collaboration tempalte for our reference architecture) -- and the CTC conference -- and one of my daughter's high school graduation -- things have been somewhat chaotic.

Finishing the thoughts on search vendors -- I highly recommend that people involved in collaboration strategies read the book, "Ambient Findability" by Peter Morville. I'm on the second read. It is a great read. Search is not about search. It is not about information access (as suggested by other industry pundits). It is about "findability". And what I found so intriguing (and frustrating at the same time), is that most best of breed search vendors have little clue as to the non-content aspects of search. Except for Google, IBM and Microsoft, none had any real story to tell about how search is improved by understanding and thinking of search in terms of "findability", rather than about content entity extraction, clustering and so on. None had a good story to tell for instance on how tags and social bookmarks might help people "connect" to information indirectly.

So if you are dealing with vendors such as Autonomy, Convera, Endeca, FAST and other best of breed vendors -- push them on this -- challenge them as to why they seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to thinking more expansively and innovatively around search. Push them to think beyond over-simplified rationalizations that search is synonymous with information access.

Approach search as users do. Remember that search has many different experience patterns and is often an iterative activity over time. Appreciate the fact that sometimes search is not about the content but about content as a connection mechanism to interacting with other people or discovering activities of others doing similar work. Which gets back to my earlier point about thinking of search at a group level where people are acting collectively (whether they know it or not).

In other words -- think "findability".