New Interview - Cognigy CX Disruptors

Been heads-down working on new projects, but have also had a good run lately for doing video interviews. The latest is with Cognigy, where they have a series called CX Disruptors, doing 1:1 interviews with thought leaders, hosted by Jarrod Davis.

The series is well-done, and the latest episode is my turn, just published today. I hope you check it out, along with other episodes featuring many of my peers.

Something Different - Judging for the Epica Awards

I enjoy wearing lots of hats, and there’s more to analyst life than endless writing and semi-glamorous travel. Judging awards events is one of those hats, and I recently got invited to be a judge for something different but very cool.

This one is for the Epica Awards, an EU-based group focused on recognizing creativity in the world of marketing and advertising. Their domain is mostly for consumer brands, and of particular interest to me is the central role that technology plays in many of these campaigns.

One of my mantras is that “consumers lead and enterprises follow” - meaning that innovation from the consumer world increasingly finds its way into the business world. I’ve been writing/speaking about this for years, and the creativity I’m seeing from these entries only validates my view. If you want to see what’s coming next for the workplace and contact center - AI, mobility, AR/VR, customer engagement, etc. - I’m seeing lots of it here.

I’m a marketing guy at heart - and an MBA to go with that - and a key way I help my clients is with their messaging and go-to-market strategy. Consumer brands are very good at this sort of thing, and I hope to take inspiration from these entries to help my tech clients sharpen their edge.

In terms of the judging process, the first cut is over, and now it’s time to evaluate the short list entries. Now I get to see the best of the best, and I’ll be taking notes for what might translate well in my back yard. Curious? Drop me a line any time!

February Writing Roundup

How do you like that? As busy as I’ve been, I only had one writeup posted publicly last month. Don’t think that’s ever happened before, so this will be a really quick roundup. My March newsletter goes out this week, and if you’re a subscriber, you’ll see that I was quite busy last month on other fronts, namely video and podcasts. Writing is ceratinly core to what I do, but it’s really just one channel for sharing my work.

The Hybrid Workplace: New Opportunities for Collaboration, Part 2, No Jitter, Feb. 23

Best Practices for Video Meetings - Our Latest BCStrategies Podcast

We’re on a roll lately at BCStrategies, this being our third podcast over the past few weeks. I hope you caught the last two - 2020 highlights, and our look-ahead for 2021. They’re easy to find on our portal, as is our current podcast - best practices for video meetings.

Every vendor has a video story now, but that doesn’t mean it has to be all video, all the time. In my view, video has its place, and should only be used if it’s additive to the meeting. Of course, video helps home-based workers feel more connected to their teams, so it’s not just about having another communications channel at our disposal.

Best practices can mean many things, and if you’re looking for ways to make your video meetings more productive, I think you’ll get a lot from our collective take on the topic. Here’s the link to the replay, and kudos to Blair Pleasant for moderating. As always, comments and sharing are welcome.

My Latest White Paper - RingCentral Video and Fixing the Meetings Milieu

This one has been a long time coming, but it’s finally public. As part of RingCentral’s recent launch of RingCentral Video, I was commissioned to produce white paper, mainly to explain the problem set around meetings, and the various ways video brings value to make them more effective.

My white paper was written earlier this year, and was finalized in late March, just around the official launch of RingCentral Video. I would have loved to tell my followers about it then, but it hasn’t been published until now. The good news is that RingCentral has made it a public document, just like all the other content posted to the Resources section of their website, so there’s no download or registration required.

If you’d like to read it, here’s the link to the Resources page, and just scroll down a ways, and you’ll find it, titled: Fixing the Meetings Miieu with a Video-First Digital Collaboration Experience. If for some reason, you can’t find it, drop me a line, and I can provide a copy.

Video Meeting Gateway - Bridging the Islands of Video

I don’t often blog about specific companies, but I recently had an interesting briefing about what West UC is doing to bring video closer to the center for how their customers collaborate. They’re an up and coming UC player, especially for the mid-market, faring well in Gartner’s most recent UCaaS Magic Quadrant. West also has a long history of growing via acquisition, and being more of a leader than a follower, it’s worth watching what they do next.

Given that much of the mid-market is still legacy-based, West adds value by helping customers retain their existing infrastructure along with integrating IP-based elements to bring them into the digital age. While this isn’t the bleeding edge, it’s leading edge for these customers, especially when it comes to addressing a major pain point, namely not stranding legacy assets as they migrate to IP.

That’s exactly what West has focused on with a new offering – Video Meeting Gateway.  As with all things cloud-based, VMG is offered “as a service”, making it easy to deploy for overtaxed IT managers who are up against some serious limitations when it comes to leveraging video.

I’m writing about this because of the age-old problems that keep video from gaining mainstream adoption in the business world. These problems are familiar to those with legacy systems – which is most of the mid-market – they’re expensive, costly to maintain, complex to both deploy and use, inflexible, and often present major interoperability challenges.

As with legacy telephony, these systems are good for their intended purpose, but largely live in a parallel world to everything else around them. Today’s IP-based video solutions are the polar opposite from legacy video in terms of being easy to use, flexible and economical, but are incompatible with each other, with the result often being islands of video that cannot be bridged.

Here’s the crux of the problem: most legacy video conferencing systems are based on SIP or H.323 endpoints. These systems are typically room-based, and while they deliver a quality experience, they can only connect with similar endpoints. Video has since evolved on several fronts, especially in terms of supporting conferencing on PCs and mobile devices. Aside from the fact that these endpoints cannot interwork with legacy systems, they’re being video-enabled in other ways. In most cases, they are following the path of least resistance, namely Skype for Business.

Most businesses use Microsoft Office, and as Office 365 gains traction, it’s becoming the hub for everyday communications. For this reason, it’s no surprise that Skype for Business – nee Lync – is one of the leading UC solutions, and with video being a native application, it’s only natural for employees to embrace it.

While this makes life easier for employees when collaborating with video via their personal endpoints, room-based legacy systems can only be integrated by using a third party MCU – multipoint control unit. This adds cost and complexity, especially when the MCU is hosted offsite.

The net result is an either/or situation, where employees can use SfB or legacy systems for video, but not together. This is far from ideal, especially when disparate teams need to collaborate whereby some are in the office with an available meeting room, and others are scattered across various remote locations.

This is the problem set West UC has addressed with VMG. They’ve done this in partnership with Yorktel, a leading developer and SI focused on video, and the result is a transcoding solution to support all the various interworking scenarios so businesses can overcome this either/or constraint. Aside from supporting Skype, H.323 and SIP endpoints, VMG also supports WebRTC, enabling a seamless video experience across pretty much any peer-to-peer requirement.

It’s also worth noting that VMG can be deployed on the customer’s site to support premise-based SfB, or from the cloud for Office 365 users. Either way, businesses can now have a seamless experience across all endpoints, with HD quality and fully-featured collaboration tools. This means that no plug-ins are needed, onboarding is fast, and employees can work with familiar Office applications and leverage video in ways they couldn’t before.

In this setting, with Office now being the home base for video, Outlook integration makes scheduling meetings easy regardless of where employees are logging in from. Another ease of use example is the ability to add H.323 or SIP addresses for video endpoints to the SfB contact directory. Once added, a desktop user can simply click on one of these addresses to bring a group sitting in a video conferencing room into a SfB collaboration session. These ease of use factors are quite important when it comes to broadening the adoption of video, especially for ad hoc collaboration – something that businesses need to get better at.

All told, VMG covers a lot of bases by bridging these islands of video. The benefits for employees are clear, and as video becomes easier to use – any place, any time, etc. – its adoption will grow. IT also benefits by virtue of having a practical solution to a problem that’s been around for a long time. They will also like having fewer integration challenges and systems to manage, and less need to train people on using legacy technology. Furthermore, when going with Office 365, the Opex-based XaaS model makes VMG financially attractive.

Finally, management benefits because they don’t have to worry as much about having stranded assets that are underutilized as times change. The greater their sunk costs in legacy video, the more sense it makes to use a solution like VMG to bridge these systems to where the action is really happening, namely SfB.