Network and Telecom Strategies Blog

The Future of UC and the Cloud: Google Wave?

posted by: Mark Cortner

The future of real-time communications and the cloud took an interesting twist recently when Google showcased a new communication and collaboration tool: Google Wave.  Google Wave is a browser-based application that creates a shared online desktop where multiple users can interact and collaborate. As described by its inventors, Google Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.

The base applications embedded within Wave include email and instant messaging; though essentially these applications are now unified together and become a conversation in the cloud as opposed to messages sent from one place to another.  The conversation or “wave” becomes a shared communication space with email, instant messaging, and social networking elements.  Furthermore, a wave may consist of a full, integrated collaborative experience that includes rich document editing and sharing and the ability to save and store any “Wave” resulting from their interaction to the Web.

Interestingly, the questions that the inventors of Google Wave started with are very similar to those connected with the topic of unified communications (UC):

• “Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication –  email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?”
• “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today in one single continuum?”
• “What if we tried designed a communications system that took advantage of computers current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?”

The parallels to UC are very close; the concepts of breaking down silos of communication to an integrated or unified experience, transitioning from single-purpose infrastructure to multi-application infrastructure, and adapting user experience to advanced in computing and networking technologies. Google Wave diminishes the role of the computer desktop in the future of computing … and could impact the future role of unified desktop clients and cloud-based services for UC!  

Microsoft and HP: A New UC Alliance

posted by: Mark Cortner

At Interop Las Vegas 2009, Microsoft and HP announced a four-year initiative to deliver an end-to-end unified communications and collaboration solution. The initiative, a part of their existing Frontline Partnership, is expected to include investments by both companies in excess of $180M in product development, professional services, and joint sales and marketing.

The initiative is interesting on several fronts. I expect this new Microsoft “alliance” for UC to be positioned as a complementary initiative to the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA) created in 2006 between Microsoft and Nortel. But in reality, the Microsoft/HP alliance will likely act as a substitute for the ICA. With the uncertainty surrounding Nortel following its filing for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, the value to Microsoft of the ICA has undoubtedly been diminished.

In addition, the existing partnership between Microsoft and HP has enabled both companies to have a demonstrated track record of success for combined solution and professional services for collaboration applications including Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. The new alliance will add Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) to this list. I fully expect the Microsoft/HP alliance to have more impact in the market than the ICA will going forward.

The new Microsoft/HP initiative will also include product integration between Microsoft OCS and HP Halo Telepresence Solutions. The integration between these two platforms is a logical step and follows past announcements related to the integration of OCS with telepresence systems from Polycom and Tandberg. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a integrated offering in the future related to Microsoft’s cloud-based Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and HP’s Halo Telepresence Solutions.

Lastly, the announcement also included a statement that HP would obtain Microsoft Unified Communications qualification for new IP desk phones. I find this interesting, since HP does not currently offer IP desk phones. I noticed in a separate and seemingly unrelated announcement this week that Nortel is seeking a buyer for its majority stake in LG-Nortel. What is interesting about this is that LG-Nortel manufactures several SIP-based endpoints that are certified with Microsoft OCS … maybe the new IP desk phones from HP will be manufactured by “LG-HP” with an HP logo and Microsoft certification!
   

Multivendor, Immersive Telepresence

posted by: Mark Cortner

The introduction several years ago of high-end, immersive telepresence systems redefined the collaborative experience available through “videoconferencing.”The telepresence market started to accelerate at essentially the same time that the broader concept of UC started to take hold in the industry. But despite the focus on integrating previously disparate communications applications through UC, the telepresence market continued to develop a silo-based application with limited multivendor interoperability.

The “islands” of telepresence have been slowly disappearing; most telepresence vendors now support the ability for non-telepresence, IP-based videoconferencing systems to participate in visual collaboration sessions with telepresence systems. The utility and value of any video-based communication product is often related to the availability and ubiquity of compatible endpoints, and the ability to room-based videoconferencing systems with telepresence systems was a good step in this direction. But the industry still had not delivered a solution that enabled a multivendor, immersive telepresence experience—this artificial barrier has now been broken down by TANDBERG.

TANDBERG recently announced that its Telepresence T3 is the first immersive telepresence solution that maintains the multi-screen, high-definition telepresence experience when connecting to third-party telepresence systems. The ability to enable telepresence systems from multiple vendors to participate in a visual collaboration session without any degradation in the full immersive experience (that customers have paid for) will impact the market in several ways.

First, expect other telepresence vendors to quickly address this issue. The ability to support a multivendor telepresence environment should immediately become a key consideration for enterprises in future purchase decisions for this technology. Second, look for service providers to develop new services that enable inter-enterprise video communications—essentially providing a trusted, federated service that allows enterprises to extend their investments in high-end telepresence systems outside the enterprise and collaborate with key business partners … sound a lot like UC?

UC and the Cloud: Microsoft BPOS

posted by: Mark Cortner

The industry focus on the delivering cloud-based UC solutions continued to expand this week as Microsoft announced the commercial availability of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) in 20 countries worldwide. Microsoft’s BPOS is delivered via subscription services hosted by Microsoft and consists of Exchange Hosted Services, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communications Online. BPOS utilizes global datacenters located in the USA, Dublin, Singapore, Amsterdam, and Hong Kong to deliver services to customers located in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and the USA.

With particular respect to UC, the Office Communications Online service includes business-class instant messaging (IM) and presence services, peer-to-peer voice and video services with integrated Office, Exchange, SharePoint user experiences.  The service is delivered with a 99.9% service level agreement and boasts 9 levels of data security and is CyberTrust certified.

In addition to formally announcing the commercial availability of BPOS, Microsoft announced that it has signed a reseller agreement and a go-to-market agreement with EDS, an HP company. The announcement estimated the revenue potential for both companies to exceed $3B in cloud and professional services.

The initial market traction for these services will likely be small to mid-sized businesses, although the potential for enterprises to leverage the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to augment premises-based UC platform strategies will appeal to many organizations and will factor into future service delivery strategies. The focus for cloud-based UC services today is on non-real time communications applications; how suites such as BPOS can integrate with enterprise telephony applications and how closely they can replicate the functional experience of premises-based platforms will determine their viability with large enterprise customers.

UC, Collaboration, and the Cloud

posted by: Mark Cortner

Earlier this week, Cisco unveiled a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture and related enhancements to its cloud-based WebEx Connect collaboration platform. The announcement emphasizes Cisco’s vision of “everything as a service”, providing customers the ability to extend on-demand services into the on-premises network. Cisco’s vision, not surprisingly, is network-centric … where “the network is the platform.”

I have made several posts related to progress of SaaS-based UC services over the last few months. Last year, when Cisco announced the evolution of the WebEx application to a broader SaaS-based collaboration platform, they prefaced announcements from other key UC vendors including IBM and Microsoft. The Cisco WebEx Collaboration Cloud is a purpose-built network designed to deliver high-quality, highly-secure, and reliable collaboration experiences within and between companies—extending the collaborative experience beyond the enterprise to connect with business partners and customers.

Cisco announced that it is currently delivering on-demand services via the WebEx Collaboration Cloud with service levels of 99.99% availability. The underlying “cloud” consists of a purpose-built network (i.e., the MediaTone content delivery network asset acquired as part of Cisco’s acquisition of WebEx) that utilizes intelligent routing and load balancing across eight global datacenters. Last year, our research predicted that Cisco would leverage this asset to drive new UC service delivery options to augment or substitute for on-premises platforms—and Cisco has done just that and more within the context of its broader cloud-based strategy.

In the last year, Cisco has advanced the integration between the WebEx application and its other on-premises products including Unified Communication Manager, Unified MeetingPlace, and its expanding product line of video offerings, aka TelePresence. The WebEx application has simply become one application within a broader SaaS-based collaboration platform (WebEx Connect) that supports conferencing, instant messaging, and team spaces but ultimately will also deliver other core UC services including SaaS-based e-mail and presence services … how far behind is hosted, SIP-based telephony services?

VoiceCon 2009: Key Announcements

posted by: Mark Cortner

The focus and themes presented this week at VoiceCon Orlando continue to expand beyond enterprise telephony to include its accelerated intersection with unified communications and collaborative applications. The event was filled with new product announcements but several vendor announcements stood out as significant industry developments. The event has been dominated in the recent past by news from Cisco and Microsoft, but this year the key announcements came from Avaya, IBM, and Siemens.

Avaya launched a new system architecture, Avaya Aura, that integrates communications across multi-vendor, multi-modal, and multi-location businesses. The foundation of the new architecture is the SIP-based Aura Session Manager which serves to centralize communications control and application integration. Avaya Aura also includes Communications Manager and Presence Services. The new system architecture signals Avaya’s shift from a voice-centric approach to UC to a broader, more encompassing approach to voice, video, messaging, presence, and web applications.

IBM officially launched Sametime Unified Telephony, a software solution that brings “voice collaboration” to legacy and IP-based enterprise telephony systems. IBM also announced a validation program, with widespread industry support, to verify interoperability with third-party voice systems. With Sametime Unified Telephony, an enterprise can integrate a multi-vendor telephony environment with IBM’s unified communications and collaboration platform, Sametime, and provide users with a common, consistent, integrated user experience regardless of the current underlying telephony environment.

And lastly, Siemens showed off its OpenScape unified communications software running on Amazon.com’s cloud computing platform. The demonstration served as a proof-of-concept of the intersection between cloud computing and UC. Siemens noted that there are no firm plans at this time to offer any particular products as web-based services but will use the proof-of-concept with customers to gauge interest in a cloud-based service delivery model as an alternative to the capital investment for premised-based UC solutions.

UC and Catalyst 2009 – Part 1

posted by: Mark Cortner

The conversations that I’ve been having recently with our clients related to UC are increasingly focused on several topics. The dialogues have been requested as enterprise IT organizations have initiated the development of their future strategies relative to UC. The process and scope of defining an enterprise’s UC strategy can be a complex task given the inherent convergence and integration of numerous communication and collaboration applications, none of which is occurring in a vacuum as individual UC applications continue to evolve themselves.

The topics frequently include questions related to the business value of UC, the intersection of mobility and UC, and the renewed interest in video technology and its integration into an enterprise’s UC strategy. The strong interest in these topics will be reflected in our planned content related to UC at our upcoming Catalyst Conference in July. The conference sessions focused on UC will address many questions related to this list of topics including:

• How can UC show real value or mitigate costs?
  
• How should you position and take advantage of UC
• What is the relationship between mobility and UC?
• How can an enterprise avoid lock-in solutions with mobile UC?
• What benefits can an enterprise expect from visual collaboration?
• How is technology impacting the utility of videoconferencing?

I’m excited by the program we’ll be presenting at Catalyst … look for more details on our UC sessions over the coming weeks including additional topics that will be addressed.

Data Center Ethernet (DCE) - The One Wire Solution (1 of 3)

Part 1 of 3

Wires, lots of wires, have made connectivity difficult at data centers. The goal to reduce the number and amount of wiring at data centers, and even at desks, is a worthy goal. Wires under raised floors, in cable trays, in ceilings, between floors, passed through conduit between buildings – the stuff is everywhere.

Until the advent of Data Center Ethernet (DCE), data centers had separate wiring for: power; data networks - Ethernet, Token Ring (the other major LAN from days gone by); PBX for voice; Fiber Channel for San access; WAN (modem, 56k, T1, T3, OC-n); RS-232 (remember terminal servers?) just to name the major ones. With DCE we are facing the challenge of consolidating wiring to a unified fabric: 10 Gig Ethernet (10GbE). On the surface it sounds simple yet it does it pose architecture, design, process, support and ownership challenges.

Never bet against Ethernet is the same as years ago when no one got fired for using IBM. Token Ring tried and did cohabitate with Ethernet for many years, even residing in the same hub. Eventually Token Ring went the way of the Dodo. Consolidation to Ethernet was swift yet little changed as data networks were still just “computer data”. We survived.

When true VoIP installments replaced traditional PBX infrastructure, the telecom engineers who didn’t evolve to data networks slowly fell by the wayside. Migrating from phone wiring/PBX to VoIP was a more complex step than moving from Token Ring to Ethernet. This was tough as data network engineers now had to understand all the services accompanying voice: dial tone; call waiting; voice mail; CallerID; *72; etc. The voice world was truly a different bird than Token Ring making the transition to Ethernet more challenging. We survived.

Looking at the data center, wiring was still a mess. As applications evolved and as old equipment is replaced, services requiring dedicated X.25, modem and 56k wiring to the rack are being replaced. While a specific service may require specialized telecom connections, many of these services can be offered from equipment placed in a common communications rack with connectivity via Ethernet to the server. In other cases, this older garb has been replaced by services over the Internet and routed via Ethernet to the server or even end user. More wiring is reduced and replaced by Ethernet, yet this was still data. We are surviving this too.

With DCE, the goal of a single “wire” 10GbE connection from a server to a unified fabric that offers ubiquitous connectivity for access is the next hurdle which means adding SAN access via iSCSI or Fiber Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Will we survive? We should.

Part 2 will cover the wiring fabric.

Polycom Bridges Mixed-Resolution Gap

posted by: Mark Cortner

Polycom recently announced an impressive array of updates to its RMX 2000 videoconferencing platform that delivers several groundbreaking capabilities for enterprises multi-site videoconferencing applications. The new capabilities include 1080p and broadcast-quality 720p HD quality, expanded capacity and increased scalability, and the flexibility to support pure HD or mixed-resolution video environments.

The new version of the platform, the RMX 2000 V4.0 addresses a range of visual collaboration applications including traditional room-based videoconferencing, immersive room and personal telepresence, and broad-scale desktop video collaboration. The platform architecture is IP-based and built upon the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (AdvancedTCA) and interestingly, also incorporates a modular IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) design—to support highly scalable next-generation visual collaboration deployments via the cloud.

The ability to bridge mixed-resolution environments will be a further catalyst for the videoconferencing market, and in particular, Polycom. The interest in HD technology has been a contributing factor to the revived interest in videoconferencing, but most organizations today have mixed-resolution environments—in fact the vast majority of existing enterprise videoconferencing assets support either CIF or standard-definition video as opposed to HD. Furthermore, the majority of HD-capable videoconferencing systems that have been purchased over the last several years are typically used for non-HD conferencing sessions. Polycom has bridged the mixed-resolution gap was created with the emergence of HD and telepresence video experiences and has delivered a platform that meet a broad collection of videoconferencing applications, from scalable desktop video to a full telepresence experience, within a single platform.

Microsoft OCS and Telephony

posted by: Mark Cortner

Microsoft recently executed an impressive virtual event to launch Office Communication Server (OCS) Release 2 (R2). The launch event included an overview of the new product capabilities included in OCS R2, “break-out” sessions that provided technical deep dives into the product, and customer case studies. OCS R2 includes expanded telephony functionality, simplified multimedia conferencing and collaboration, and the extensibility of OCS to line of business applications and workflows through communications enabled business processes (CEBP). However, taken in its entirety, the marquis additions to OCS are the voice-related enhancements.

The new telephony capabilities include single number reach, advanced call management delegation for administrative assistant applications, and a new Office Communicator soft client interface. In addition, Microsoft has significantly expanded the handset and headset endpoint ecosystem from vendors such as LG Nortel and Polycom. The devices in the ecosystem have been optimized for Office Communicator—translation: these devices support some non-open standard protocols and voice compression techniques that are included in OCS. Microsoft has also added mobile client support for the Java and Symbian operating systems and the ability to connect directly from OCS to the PSTN through SIP trunking.

The enhancements included in OCS R2 address many of OCS’s previous gaps related to telephony functionality, although several key capabilities must be addressed before most enterprises will give serious thought to leveraging OCS as a “phone system”. For example, remote site survivability and support for analog devices will be requirements for many business customers.  By aggressively pursuing the remaining gaps in OCS’s telephony functionality, Microsoft will continue to make progress in converting those that either dismiss or are skeptical of Microsoft’s future role in telephony to believers and OCS’s role will expand from a collaborative-centric to a complete enterprise-class UC platform.

The battle for dominance in the UC market will be intriguing as the major platforms mature, cloud-based services enter the market, mobility continues its explosive growth, and the industry continues its shift to software-based products. The telephony-focused enhancements contained in OCS R2 will place further pressure on the telephony-centric vendors, as silo-based applications are integrated into multi-application UC platforms and enterprises seek the most cost-effective path to address the forces impacting its communications and collaboration strategies. And with a goal of establishing a dominant position in the UC market, Microsoft has signaled the critical importance of telephony in OCS R2 and its intent to not only complement, but ultimately replace what we know today as the phone system.