Communicado Currents

Unified Communications management is a big enough problem to require economies of scale

At the recent UC Summit, Microsoft's Eric Swift talked about the importance of hosted Unified Communications going forward.  Why? According to Swift, small and medium business in particular will gravitate towards hosting because the technology is difficult to manage, even more difficult than the IP telephony that is by itself a bit problematic at UC's core.  "It's a no-brainer because you need economies of scale to assemble the mature data center management talent, process and tools required."

We agree completely about the need for economies of scale as well as process and tools specific to UC to help experts in UC successfully manage it.  But an alternative to hosting the entire Unified Communications stack is hosting only UC's management. That's why we built Streamline: so the Managed Service Providers with NOC staffs that live and breathe UC can manage SMB's in-house UC environments for them.

Streamline can manage centralized, hosted environments too.  But many businesses prefer the security and competitive advantage of having unified communications technology in house, and Streamline is there to give SMBs a fully managed alternative to hosted UC that's unable to differentiate them from everyone else using the same hosted collaborative tools.

A Necessary SKU for Every VoIP Deal

Small business is being enticed more than ever to VoIP and Unified Communications.  Communicado thinks the industry needs to be straight about the risks that go along with VoIP’s siren call … and the relatively small additional cost of mitigating those risks with Management as a Service.

Microsoft, which had previously supported only analog line connection to the PSTN in its small-business-oriented Response Point product, will soon have full VoIP via SIP trunking.  Meanwhile Dell has filled out the “S” portion of its “SMB” strategy with Fonality (to go along with Dell’s previously announced Nortel offering for mid-sized businesses). Fonality is certainly a compelling choice for a small business that wants to tap the productivity of IP Telephony and Unified Communications through Dell, the largest provider of SMB gear. Fonality even has some reliability advantages through its hybrid platform and built-in management software that mitigates some of the reliability risk.

It’s just that SMB organizations need to know that VoIP depends on IP infrastructure that typically delivers 99.9 percent reliability, not the 99.999 reliability associated with “old fashioned” (PSTN and TDM) dial tone. Before a Small Business chooses  to trust their real-time collaboration and communications to their familiar PC hardware and software providers, they need to understand that, should something go wrong, they will be routed to the same offshore call centers used to handle server and PC issues. They need to know that even the best Level 1 support person answering their call will be able to do little to help them with no monitoring data, no converged network visibility, and no expertise in the interdependent technologies that make VoIP and Unified Communications work. 

The right answer? Resellers should support SMBs with Management as a Service (MaaS). SMB implementations should have a specialized NOC watching over them, manned by personnel with the ability to monitor and correlate the relevant performance data to quickly troubleshoot the problems that tend to arise in converged communication environments.

Management as a Service isn’t free. It adds to the cost of doing business the way any insurance does. But the mission critical nature of real-time communications and collaboration means SMBs need that insurance.  A problem with an SMB’s ability to communicate and collaborate cannot sit for days in an offshore trouble-ticket queue with no real hope of resolution. Management as a Service should be added as a SKU to every VoIP deal.

SOA or Not, Here UC Comes

Information Week's survey on the promise of greater productivity from Unified Communications is sure to provide insightful results when they appear.  But we felt the researchers revealed a bit of bias when their invitation email read "... by blending presence, IM, voice, and video with one another, and increasingly, with Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs).  Do you buy that?" 

Communicado for one doesn't entirely buy the notion that UC is mostly about projects to integrate the Unified Communications stack including VoIP into SOA-enabled enterprise applications such as SAP and various flavors of CRM.   We look forward to seeing if the survey will bear us out there.

Our one regret about the thoughtful Information Week survey is the huge opportunity missed in not asking respondents: "Are you getting ready to manage Unified Communications because your next Microsoft Office upgrade will enable UC for everyone using Outlook?" 

We believe the most immediate impact of Unified Communications for most enterprises will arise from users leveraging the new Unified Communications elements available once Office Communications Server (OCS) is installed.

Many IT strategists will breathe a sigh of relief upon reading how many enterprises, like their own, are choosing not to unleash the complexity of Unified Communications with ambitious SOA integration projects. We just hope they aren't surprised by the user benefits and IT stresses that will be thrust on them as Microsoft slips UC capabilities into their shops.  SOA or not, here UC comes.

Unified Outages Ahead?

There's no doubt, what with Microsoft making Unified Communications its next growth target and Cisco adding "Unified Communications" to the end of television spots, that the industry has coallesced around real-time person-to-person collaboration as the key driver of the next few years. 

InfoTech Analyst Warren Williams, who follows the market for monitoring PBXs and the rest of the converged communications environment, says there is one potential risk that concerns the big PBX vendors and carriers about what they've embarked on: a highly visible outage of communications at one of their customers. That, plus the need for greater vigilance as the telephony switching moves from bullet-proof hardware to software running on commodity hardware, has Williams projecting rapid growth in the monitoring business.

The PBX vendors aren't able to really "outage proof" Unified Communications by themselves.  Converged communications environments are by their very nature multi-vendor, which means an approach borne of listening to alarms coming in from a modem attached to the PBX misses the mark. 

Equal attention to all of the equipment involved in delivering Unified Communications is required. One vulnerability occurs at the hand-off gateways between different voice servers. Another is the result of the interdependencies among the multi-tier stack of logical servers running the collaborative application mash-up of email, IM, video conferencing, and web conference sessions. All elements end-to-end must be watched and their behavior correlated. Without this comprehensive approach -- the kind implemented in Communicado Streamline, by the way -- the vendors fears of highly visible outages are sure to come to pass.

TelecomWeb Features Kerry Shih in Guest Blog

Kerry's piece framing the User Bill of Rights is worth your consideration in its original context.

Benefits of UC are Clear ... But How Do You Measure Them?

IDC Research Manager for VoIP William Stofega hit a key point in this recent article in Business Technology Quarterly. "The benefits of unified communications are clear - you communicate more efficiently, stay in closer contact with customers and key members of your organization, and hopefully sell more products. But enterprises must take the time to measure the gains in productivity that a UC deployment brings to the table."

We couldn't agree more. It's a refrain we hear often enough that it's in the User BIll of Rights and, currently, in the roadmap for Streamline.

But the question remains: what's the best way to measure the gains in productivity?  Measuring decreases in "human latency" when UC gets the right people collaborating and making decisions more quickly? Improved response time to customers (which may be another way to measure the same thing)?  We hope our next chat with Will will help us codify what the best measurement strategy might be. 

If you have some ideas, we'd love to hear your comments.

Microsoft Unified Communications Makes Things Simple?

Microsoft has codified a marketplace that has existed for more than 10 years. For us this isn’t surprising because for many people Voice equals old phone systems moving to the IP network. However UC is really about collaboration as driven by Sales Managers and Customer Service needs relative to communicating with and managing customers. And collaboration includes voice, web conferencing, video conferencing, “presence,” instant messaging and of course email. Why are there so many things rolling into this category? Because these technologies combined into new human processes will change the way businesses do business.

Sales wants to work seamlessly no matter where they are and have instant access to support resources to get their deals done. Operational teams need to communicate via web, email, phone, video or any other way and any time the customer demands to be served. In other words the UC market has found the use case that will get executive buy in…if you collaborate your company will be competitive and grow.  If not, you're incommunicado!

Microsoft’s play is powerful since this elevated use of all communications technologies can be combined and done as software that overlays existing infrastructure. Microsoft instantly achieves mindshare leadership in that if UC starts with email, (such as click to talk, or click to conference) then everyone will have it and they won’t actually “buy” UC as much as use some aspect of it by default.

So Microsoft's offer of productivity will be difficult to resist for mid-tier companies.  We know our enterprise customers will be more cautious.  And the caution is appropriate, because organizations are having trouble coping with one VoIP infrastructure. Microsoft is essentially asking them to support a second more ambitious and complex one.

The most important thing to note is that the impact of VoIP has been dramatic on IT. Mobile users have unrealistic expectations of quality and instantantly know when the infrastructure fails, putting IT on the back-foot. Yet VoIP is just the first enterprise, real-time, person-to-person application. Add Video, Instant Messaging, and Conferencing to the equation, merge that with Email and you get the sense that UC management will be the catalyst for the next 5 years of IT workload and infrastructure build-out.   -- Kerry Shih

Unified Communications Magazine Interviews Shih on Microsoft's UC Impact

Kerry Shih tells Unified Communications Magazine that the best way to avoid problems and get the full value from Microsoft's push into Unified Communications is to work with a systems integrator or managed service provider (MSP) that has already rolled out many similar solutions. Click here to read the full article.

With Gnarls Out and Ease of Use Needed, Microsoft's UC Entry Makes Sense ... But What About Managing UC?

In this thoughtful post, InfoWorld's Sean Gallagher says Microsoft waited until most of the gnarls were out of Unified Communciations technology and will bring some much-needed ease of use to the productivity tools that ride on top.  All true ... to a point.  When anyone can click to start a video conference call on a business network, interdependent technology from Microsoft and several other vendors needs to work flawlessly under stress. Communicado is certain that a little cross-silo management is in order here to help resolve the inevitable issues ... not to mention some rearchitecting of networks that were not designed for the stress of whatever VoIP is already there (let alone what Microsoft UC layers on top).

End-to-End QoS is Necessary but not Sufficient

In this interesting post, Network Instruments' Rick Kingsley says finding VoIP problems requires tracking QoS end-to-end on the LAN and WAN with an analyzer.   Kingsley is dead to rights on needing an end-to-end view and looking for sudden change. To take it the next step requires being able to go back in time and correlate device, QoS and Layer 7 metrics to understand the cause of the problem.  Finally, you'll find it useful to be able to share that view with the NOC in control of the WAN if that's where the problem is, or get granted access to whatever link in the chain has the problem.  Thus those features in Streamline.