VoIP, Video and Collaboration - Andy Abramson's Take

Andy Abramson's VoIP Watch blog has long been one of the best out there, and we've been helping each other as long as I've been an analyst. He's got both wide and deep perspectives, and is as well connected as anyone I know in this space. You can - and should - also follow Andy on Twitter: @andyabramson.

The other day he pinged me about a news roundup post of his from the weekend which focuses on current VoIP, video and collaboration items worth following. It's a great recap, along with Andy's personal views on where things are going - and more often than not, he's right. The post may be a couple of days old, but it's still  very timely, and you really should give it a read. 

He's considering doing this on a more regular basis, and I think that's a great idea. After you read this, I'm sure you'll agree, and by all means, let him know - he'd love to hear from you. There's a lot going on in these rapidly converging spaces, and Andy has it covered pretty well.  If there's anything else you'd like to see covered this way, let both of us know, and maybe we can take this to another level.

Customer Experience Management – the Business Value of Collaboration

It’s June already – a new month has begun, and that means it’s time for a new topic on the CIO Collaboration Network. Last month, the focus was on video and now we’re shifting to a functional area of growing importance to all businesses – the contact center. I say “all” for good reason, and Unified Communications is very much a driver here.

Prior to the advent of IP, contact centers were mostly facilities-based, centralized and costly to operate. This made them relatively easy to manage, but beyond the means of small businesses. This creates a natural paradox in the sense that smaller businesses have a harder time getting customers than large enterprises, and for them, the contact brings great value in terms of keeping those customers happy.

My readers should understand the economics of IP, and how that has opened up great opportunities for businesses of all sizes. One of the great benefits has been in the contact center, where affordable, scalable solutions are accessible to every business, even those who have no in-house infrastructure to support it. In short, there are no major barriers today to keep any business from having some semblance of a customer service operation.

Just as with UC, the call center has become a rather fluid concept, again, mainly due to the impact of IP. The call center has become the contact center to reflect that fact that agents now use more than just telephony to interact with customers. As SIP and UC have made real-time, multichannel communication more commonplace, the emphasis has shifted from agents in the contact center out to the marketplace where the impact of their actions has the most important impact.

Where a simple call to a toll-free number once constituted customer service, UC gives agents greater latitude for more engaging communication which ultimately should lead to faster, better problem solving and increased customer satisfaction. This milieu gives rise to a new area of focus – CEM – customer experience management. Instead of being evaluated on how quickly problems are resolved on the phone, agents are now gauged by how well they create and manage a customer experience.

This may seem like a tall order, but in the right hands, it can be fairly seamless and intuitive with UC. Not only can UC extend this to any agent willing and able to deliver this level of service, but for any business as well. That’s why the concept of customer experience management is exciting – it’s accessible for anyone ready to embrace the tools. UC provides the integrated environment for agents to interact – and collaborate – with customers as each situation requires. Some customers will just want one mode and others will want multiple modes. Similarly, some will be happy just dealing with one agent from start to finish, whereas others will want direct access to specialists, either brought in during the initial call, or on a subsequent call.

The scenarios here are endless, and that’s the point – as well as the business value of collaboration in the contact center. Ultimately, the value of collaboration is reflected in the results, many of which are directly measurable; transactional metrics such as AHT and FCR. There are also indirect metrics that should tick upward with effective uses of collaboration, such as customer satisfaction, repeat purchasing, referral business, etc.

Whatever the positive impact, the main idea is that collaboration adds value to the contact center by allowing agents to interact with customers on their terms. Customer expectations have come a long way from the time when all they could do was call a toll-free number, wait endlessly on hold and hope for the best. With UC, whatever works for the customer, works for the agent. Business has never been more competitive, and the timeless maxim “the customer is always right” has never been more true. By providing agents with the tools that let them respond to any situation on the fly, UC levels the playing field and meet today’s expectations, in whatever form collaboration may take. If that doesn't create value for a business, I don't know what does.

This post sponsored by the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

The Demise of Cisco Cius - UCS Podcast

Another interesting and timely topic for our weekly UCStrategies podcast - the unexpected shelving of Cisco's Cius tablet. A number of us - including myself - have written about Cius on the portal, and on Tuesday, we shared our thoughts about the news.

Pretty mixed set of views, and most of us felt it was just too difficult to compete against the iPad, and the BYOD trend which shortly followed Cius has been too strong for a vendor-centric tablet like theirs survive. I still think they can salvage Cius as part of a vertical market solution, and I'm not alone on that front.

Hopefully, that makes for a good teaser, and for the full discussion, the podcast is running now on the portal.

Videoconferencing webinar with Vidyo, May 23

Got a shout-out for another webinar I'm doing. It's been a busy month, and next week I'm presenting on a webinar sponsored by Vidyo, and hosted by UBM TechWeb.

The webinar is titled "Videoconferencing: Business and the Big Picture", and I'll be talking about the trend driving the demand for video as well as the business value it brings for everyone involved. It's next Wednesday - May 23 - from 2-3pm ET, and you can register any time now. Here's the landing page and registration form, so sign up, and I hope you can join us!

Cisco Plus Event, Toronto

It's very rare for me to have back-to-back local events, but that's what's happening this week. Yesterday I attended Cisco Plus Canada 2012 here in Toronto. As Canadian telecom events go, it's pretty big, and Cisco is one of the few vendors up here who could draw a crowd like this. It's an annual showcase of all things Cisco, primarily for IT buyers, and it sure looked like all-hands-on-deck for Cisco Canada - they were everywhere.

Lots of traffic and a healthy exhibitor space filled with key partners of all kinds. The big telcos were there - Bell, TELUS and Allstream - of course - along with a good mix of vendors, integrators and technology partners, such as Dimension Data, Exony, Flexity Solutions, CBCI Telecom and Esnatech. Adjacent to the show floor was an overwhelming mix of Cisco presentations, with in-depth sessions on every variation of collaboration imaginable. I sat in on several, and while the content was geared towards buyers, I found the quality high and the audiences pretty attendant.

The highlight for me was the TELUS demo bus outside. I've seen this before with both NSN and Ericsson - it's an impressive way to take your story on the road. What I liked most about the TELUS bus was the overall concept. This is really their Trojan Horse to win business from Bell on their home turf in Quebec. The bus is all done up in French and goes around Quebec to showcase all this cool technology. I think it's a great strategy, not just for getting business there, but also to evangelize collaboration. SMBs aren't generally the most tech-savvy, so instead of waiting for them to discover it, why not bring the technology to them? Good plan. Oh, and if you think this was also a clever ploy to divert attention from the event host, I'll keep them happy by noting that most of the gear on display inside the bus is Cisco (and Tandberg). Check out the photos below!

My UC Summit Takeaway - It's Only UC, But I Like It

You know how that song goes, right? Music is my passion, and it often provides an interesting frame of reference for the telecom space, and if you enjoy the way I connect these dots, then you should like my latest post on UC Strategies.

Last week, I attended the 4th UC Summit, and it was a solid event on all levels. I had a couple of posts about that during the summit - here and here, but haven't been able to reflect on the overall experience until now. In short, I see a lot of parallels between how the Rolling Stones created their own success, and the opportunity facing the channels now in the UC space. The Summit provided a lot of guidance about how they should do that, and I'm here to add some historical perspective from another field to show how it's possible to break the rules and still come out ahead.

If that piques your interest, then give my post a read - it's on the the UCStrategies portal now - and let me know if you want to get off or on my cloud.

UC Summit - Day 2 Highlights

The day started with what I found to be the best presentation of the summit. UCStrategies Expert Phil Edholm gave a very balanced and insightful keynote on the business value of video. Phil is fairly new to the UCStrategies team, and he brings great expertise to a space that is transforming UC more than anything else. One key idea to define the video opportunity is to distinguish between three types of workers – Knowledge, Information and Service. 

Phil gave great examples of each, and clarified how Knowledge workers derive the most benefit from collaborative video because they require the most engaging modes of communications to be effective. Going the other way, Phil talked about meeting tourists – employees who join meetings where attendance is optional. He showed how video will cut down on this activity considerably, and along the way provide a fast ROI by virtue of reducing the time lost by meeting tourists who could otherwise be doing their jobs.

There were other strong takeaways from Phil’s keynote, but hey, if I spent all morning writing them up here, you wouldn’t need to attend, and that doesn’t bode well for the long term survival of the summit.

Instead, I’ll move on to another interesting panel – the analyst roundtable, which I participated on.  This session was led by Blair Pleasant, and joining us was Samantha Kane, Art Rosenberg and Steve Leaden. We each spoke briefly about specific trends, and my focus was on the post-PBX world, and how the channel could adapt for clients that are ready to move on from having a phone system. We covered a lot of ground in an hour, and the audience wasn’t lacking for good questions.

One of the better vendor keynotes came in the afternoon from Wayne Baines of Microsoft. He made a strong case for how well MSFT is leveraging its huge installed base around Lync and cloud based services. With 1 billion Office users, there’s a major market opportunity for them with UC, and even without mentioning Skype, Wayne painted a pretty promising picture for Microsoft’s prospects.

Finally, Jim Burton hosted a panel of consultants, and that generated some good dialog about how they could work more effectively with the channel to support them in UC. Together, these groups represented most of the people in the room, and it was a great forum for paying attendees to share ideas about how to make their business more successful.

All told, the summit fully met my expectations. I was happy to have a chance to speak, and based on comments later on, it sounds like our session was well received. It was a great chance to hear first hand about how UC is being deployed, and of course what the vendors are focusing on at present. I’m of the view the nobody really knows where the market is going, and nobody really owns it, and in my mind, these ideas were validated at the summit. At least I came away with a greater sense of confidence that my ongoing research is picking up the right vibes about the state of UC. 

So, kudos to Jim Burton and his supporting cast for putting on a great show in such a relaxed setting. I think attendees got their money’s worth, and I’m pretty sure most will be back. I count myself in that circle, and if you want to share your thoughts on the event, the floor is now yours…

UC Summit 2012 - Highlights

This is my first UC Summit and so far it's been great. Things started Sunday afternoon and we had a full day yesterday. There's a nice mix here of channel partners, UC vendors, IT consultants and a handful of analysts like me.

So far, the presentations have been two basic types - keynotes by vendors, and market analysis by UCStrategies Experts. The keynotes have been good, including some nice demos, especially from Cisco. It's fair to say the audience  got more out of the market analysis sessions, which have covered a lot of ground already. Dave Michels and Marty Parker had a thought-provoking Show Me The Money session, where they drove home the message that disruption is coming to the channel in a big way. As Dave said, "it's been a tough millennium", and there's lots more disruption on the way. From there, Dave and Marty provided ideas for how the channel can adapt and reinvent themselves - or  exit if they aren't prepared to go with the flow.

Blair Pleasant joined Marty and Dave for a great roundtable discussion of the UC vendor landscape, which provided a good counterpoint to the vendor keynotes. Also of note was Michael Finneran's colorful discussion about mobility, and the challenges around integrating it with UC.

Overall, the content has been very good, and the program is nicely paced. It's not overwhelming, and there's lot of opportunity for people to mingle, especially around the grounds, which are very zen-like. It's hard not to be relaxed here, and that makes it easy to chat with just about anyone you see.

I'll have another post tomorrow about Day 2, which is well underway as I write this post. Below are a few photos from Day 1, which are ok, but Dave Michels has a real camera, and you can check out his photo gallery here.


Marc Inderhees and Rich McLeod during their demo of how Cisco and Jabber works across multiple devices and modes.

Michael Finneran during a quiet moment of his mobility overview.

Marty Parker, Blair Pleasant and Dave Michels during the UC vendor landscape session.

Using Video to Drive Growth

This is my second post for the current cycle focusing on the value of video for the CIO Collaboration Network.  Last week's post examined how video can support innovation by better enabling collaboration, and now I'm going to look at another important business driver - growth.

I'll start from the basic premise that video has a lot of value on its own, and even more so when part of a UC platform. Video is collaborative by nature, but is even more so when integrated with the other modes found in most UC offerings. Of course, with webcams built into PCs now, plus the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video is very much becoming an any time, any place tool.

This foundation may not be universal yet, but it's fast becoming the norm, and with that comes heightened expectations. End users expect more, simply because it works. IT expects more because video is becoming easier to deploy and support on the LAN. Most of all, though, management expects more because they see video's potential to make not just employees, but the organization as a whole more productive. When productivity goes up, growth should follow, so for management, video is more than just another mode for employees to communicate with each other.

Collaboration plays a key role here, and works on two levels. First is the idea that employees need to work together, among themselves to get things done. You don't need UC to collaborate for simple tasks, but it definitely brings value for more complex or longer-term projects. Within a UC solution, video is the real secret sauce when teams are decentralized and need to meet on a regular basis. This is amplified even further when the project has a strong visual element such as product design or an interactive process.

The second level of collaboration comes not from working among, but working between. First and foremost, there's an implicit degree of collaboration required between employees as end users and IT as enablers. When both work together, management is happy - IT is earning its keep and fulfilling the UC vision, and employees are working more effectively. Extending this further, employees also need to collaborate between themselves and external stakeholder groups - customers, suppliers and technology partners. Each requires a distinct collaborative effort, and all can benefit from video.

As such, IT has a lot at stake to make collaboration work, and I've already cited why video is now at the heart of this imperative. Let's tie this now to the main storyline of my post - driving growth. IT can certainly stay with the familiar and focus on metrics that show how video-based collaboration drives traditional growth - namely increased revenues and profits (via decreased costs). Nobody gets fired for meeting those objectives, and they're certainly achievable with today's UC deployments.

Fair enough, but we can think a little bigger too. Reducing costs is a great way for IT to shine, but it's really just table stakes. Increasingly, management views IT and communications as strategic differentiators, and true market leaders expect more. They need IT to be innovators; not just in getting more for less, but in leveraging their technology investment into competitive advantage.

One way to do that is to introduce new growth metrics that add value to the business and reflect the outcomes enabled by collaboration. For example, I believe that IT can build a strong case for a growth metric built around the concept of human capital. In today's post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, human capital is becoming the real asset of a business. Outside of traditional manufacturing operations, bricks and mortar assets have limited value now, and forward-thinking management teams know this.

Building on that premise, communications is the primary enabler for building human capital; employees can get mundane tasks done on their own, but the real work that drives the business forward can only come from teamwork, aka collaboration. People must communicate to work together, and UC provides the richest palette of tools for enterprises to support their employees.

When those dots are connected together, IT can bring some innovative thinking to the boardroom and show management how UC - and video in particular - can drive growth from the company's greatest asset, its employees. With the right metrics, IT should be able to define a baseline value of human capital for each employee, and as employees adopt collaborative tools like video, show how that value is growing. This isn't the place to define those metrics - I'm just trying to seed the idea that IT can raise their standing by showing how video-based collaboration can do more than just drive traditional growth drivers. Are you with me?

This post sponsored by the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya.

How Video Drives Innovation

This post kicks off my current cycle for the CIO Collaboration Network, where the focus is on video. I've been writing about video a fair bit lately, and for this series, it will be in the context of business value and collaboration. To start off, this post ties these ideas to innovation, a magical characteristic that defines all successful companies.

Innovation is a subjective, loaded term – just like collaboration. For both, we know it when we see it, but each is difficult to clearly define. Both are also positive forces and highly valued by business on their own merits. However, the two are highly intertwined and can be enabled by a common technology – video.

There are certainly several aspects of collaboration that can be easily measured, especially around streamlining operations and business processes. These are the attributes that define ROI and support the business case that IT needs to sell upwards to management. Conversely, by the way, there could be a top-down mandate where management deems that collaboration is the new imperative. In this scenario, management may also define the collaboration metrics, and then it becomes IT’s job to meet them – or risk losing budget and staff.

Collaboration, of course, means many things, and things get interesting when you want this to drive innovation. Most businesses would hold that innovation is the product of teamwork and from that, collaboration is the process by which new ideas get put into action and commercialized to help grow the business.

So, where does video fit in? Let’s work backwards from the desired result first. The end product is innovation, which can be both inward and outward-facing. Internal innovation is about finding new or better ways for the organization to perform, reduce costs or increase revenues. There are predictable efficiencies that come from applications such as UC which can drive these results, but that’s not true innovation. Working smarter is great, but innovation is about breakthroughs and thinking outside conventional rules. In that regard, innovation usually comes from unexpected sources, and that’s what makes collaboration so powerful.

The same holds for outward-facing innovation, which takes the form of new products/services, or better ways of dealing with customers, suppliers and partners. I could go on at length about how this can happen, but not in this post. My main idea here is that both inward and outward-facing innovation depends on collaboration, and now it’s time to bring video into the picture.

Measuring the costs and the benefits of innovation is difficult, and if organizations become too dogmatic about this, they’re more likely to stifle innovation rather than nurture it. The musician in me understands the creative process, and the best results always come from an environment that supports the free flow of ideas. For companies that want great innovation, they need to support it with a fine balance of fiscal accountability and openness. Technology plays a key role, but ultimately you need the right culture.

Innovation isn’t in a box that sits on a shelf in the lab; it’s in all of us, and can be drawn out when properly supported. In short, the more we can collaborate – and the more easily we can collaborate – the more likely those conditions will exist to generate innovative ideas. Video has a central role to play given the decentralized nature of work today. Sitting at your cubicle all day is no longer the norm, and with the globalization of business, teamwork almost always has a virtual element. This trend is only going to continue, and it is becoming the exception rather than the rule for teams to work on projects face-to-face from start to finish.

By now it shouldn’t be too hard to connect the dots to see the value of video to support collaboration in an atomized workplace. Whether working from home, auto, airport, hotel, client or branch office, video – especially as part of UC – is the great enabler for collaboration. This actually holds true on two levels. First is technology – today’s video experience is powerful, intuitive, economical and nearly ubiquitous. Video is the most engaging communications mode, making it ideal for collaboration. For collaboration to drive innovation, the process must involve the senses. Great ideas don’t come from talking on the phone or swapping emails. You need richer communication – talking, seeing, watching, showing, listening, reading, sharing, etc. – and today’s video delivers that.

Second is generational. For many businesses, innovation is about using technology to make their products/services better or finding better ways of bringing them to market. Increasingly, this is becoming the domain of Millennials – workers who have grown up their whole lives with the Internet. Not only do they have a highly attuned understanding of technology, but they’re also very comfortable with video as a means of communicating. This is no small consideration, given that a key holdback for video adoption has been the low comfort level many people have for using it.

As such, the business value of video becomes quite strong when the people who are most comfortable using it are also the most at home with the technology upon which innovation will largely be based. This demographic is also accustomed to the virtual organization and the need to collaborate with disparate team members.

Coming back to the idea that innovation lies within all of us, it stands to reason that the easier it is to collaborate, the better able to business will be to draw ideas and inspiration from as broad a pool as possible. Innovation is just as likely to come from a happy accident as from a structured process, and if that’s the end result, why limit yourself? Putting a price tag on this seems futile, and given the affordable options with video today, there really is no excuse for businesses to let that get in the way of collaboration to drive innovation that creates competitive differentiation.

This post sponsored by the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya.

Can you monetize video? Should you?

These are the pressing question I'm asking of the channel in my last post for UCStrategies. This is a series I'm writing in support of the upcoming UC Summit 2012, which I'll be attending May 6-9 in La Jolla, CA. Can't wait!

I have no doubt that video is a driving force for UC, but I'm not sure the channel can really monetize it. However, by effectively supporting/enabling video, the channel can position themselves for bigger things with a full-featured UC solutions. That's what I have in mind for my post, and it's running now on the UCStrategies portal. As always, comments are welcome.

Are your clients ready for video? Are you?

I've been on a video theme lately when writing about UC, and this one is my latest post for the series I'm doing on the channel for UCStrategies. Video poses all kinds of questions for businesses, and for VARs and integrators that are ahead of the curve, this is a great opportunity to add value.

My post is running now on the UCS portal, and once there, you're find lots of other fresh content focused on the channel. This effort is part of the lead-up to the 2012 UC Summit, being held a few weeks from now in La Jolla, CA. If you can imagine all the brainpower associated with UCStrategies in one place, that's what the summit is about, and you won't find a better place to immerse yourself in the UC of Things. It's invitation-only, but there's still time to be involved.

Busy in a good way

Blogging has been off and on lately, but that's because I'm busy, with some new projects and writing gigs.

If you saw my ShoreTel/M5 analysis a couple of weeks back, that helps explain my busy-ness. I've never had a post get this much readership, and if I could somehow sustain those numbers here, I'd have a pretty lucrative blog!

Following that, last week's post about the opportunity I'm seeing now in cloud-based video conferencing has also kept me busy, and you'll be hearing more about that space here in due time.

Starting next week, you'll start to see some new content here around collaboration that I'm doing now as part of a broader thought leadership program for a major vendor.

I'm also about to start a monthly column with a publisher you all know. For now, all I can say is that it's titled Rethinking Communications - my first piece has been written and it will run in their May issue. Stay tuned.

Otherwise, I have some new custom projects on the go, and as the deliverables become public, you'll hear about them here.

Also, I'm pushing into a new focus area - helping companies monetize their patents and intellectual property (the other IP). It's a natural fit for the circles I travel in, and if this is on your to-do list, I'd be happy to tell you more.

Back to work...

ShoreTel/M5 was good news for voice, but perhaps even better for cloud-based video - why the time is right

I recently posted about ShoreTel’s acquisition of M5 Networks (which is still getting tons of readership!), which may signal the strongest validation yet for cloud-based VoIP as an alternative to premises-based telephony systems. The deal is good news for both companies, and even better news for the broader cloud communications space. ShoreTel’s move spells out a few realities that I think are becoming important drivers for everyone – vendors, service providers, businesses – especially SMBs, and the investment community.

First is the fact that ShoreTel had a simple make or buy decision on its hands. They have a healthy premises-based business, but have read the tea leaves, and recognized the need for a cloud-based offering sooner than later. ShoreTel is not known as innovator, so they did the smart thing and bought the best company on the market. Not only does that give them an instant entrée for cloud services, but they now have M5’s rich expertise in-house, which will now be their engine to keep the offering fresh. That’s a pretty good model for competitive differentiation, and is far more of a sure thing than trying to build it internally and hope the market buys it.

On top of that, the investment community now has a valuation benchmark based on what the market will bear for cloud-based communications at this early of its lifecycle. If ShoreTel can makes things work with M5 – and it’s theirs to lose, really – the pressure will be on for competitors to keep up, and with so few cloud VoIP players of substance out there, the deal values will jack up just to get into the game. That’s when things will get a bit crazy for everyone but ShoreTel, whose first-mover gambit may prove to be a bargain. Nice storyline, huh?

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, it’s not about VoIP. As promising as things sound for cloud-based VoIP, telephony, voice, etc., there’s an even better opportunity shaping up for video. Since attending the ITExpo in Miami, and a few other things since, I’m of the mind that ShoreTel/M5 is setting the stage for a similar run in video. Not quite yet, but when the stars line up, the story will unfold pretty much the same way.

We all know that video is complex, and people aren’t generally comfortable using it as an everyday mode like telephony. Fair enough, but desktop video – especially when SIP-based – has come a long way, and is ready for prime-time. Indirectly, we can thank smartphones and tablets for that, as their off-the-charts adoption has helped make video more mainstream. In a business setting, however, the stakes are higher, as interoperability creates even more challenges than ease of use.

To date, legacy video has been expensive, complex, reservation-based and proprietary. In an ideal IP-based environment, the exact opposite for each is true, and businesses are starting to get a taste of that with a few early stage cloud-based offerings. ShoreTel/M5 is really just another step along the way for validating the cloud as a viable platform for business communications and collaboration solutions. Every telecom and UC-focused vendor is trying to develop some form of a hosted or cloud-based offering; some incorporate video, but it is never the lead application.

This leaves room for cloud offerings built specifically around video, which is now mature enough to manage as a standalone offering. The great thing about cloud is how easily you can offer on-demand services, which video is very well suited for. Just like M5 is a leading example of cloud-based VoIP, there are offerings carving out the same niche in video. There are two pureplays on my radar here – Vidtel and BlueJeans – and either – or both – could have a similar exit to M5 if things go well. More importantly, this market is moving so quickly now, and should that happen, I can guarantee you it won’t take 10 years like it did with M5.

While it won’t take as long, video does have different technology issues and business drivers than voice. Unlike VoIP, video is really hard to give away and still make money. There are too many variables in terms of network compatibility/traversal, codec support, endpoint support, quality of experience, etc. That said, there certainly are lots of other vendors who are gaining traction with varying degrees of cloud-based video conferencing services for SMBs and enterprises – such as Nefsis, Vidyo and Glowpoint.

With the lines blurring between personal and business services, you also need to think about consumer-focused plays like TokBox and ooVoo. I don’t see them taking much business away from the other vendors any time soon, but these days, we’re seeing a lot of consumer-based applications finding their way into the business space. Just a thought.

Anyhow, what I’m getting at are business models. Clearly, there are viable ways to offer cloud-based video services, and awareness is quickly building in the business market. As mentioned, video has more wrinkles than voice, and in terms of having success, I think the basic technology is secondary to the business models and paths to market.

As with voice, video must compete with the free offerings that serve the bottom end of the market. The likes of Skype and Google can and will serve that market, simply by virtue of being a click away for their hundreds of millions of users. Nobody can compete with that and make money, so let’s just take that as a given. These offerings are fine for ad hoc sessions, but most businesses want something that’s higher quality, more scalable and more reliable – and plenty of them are willing to pay for it.

At the top end, of course, we have premises-based systems, with immersive telepresence being the gold standard. It’s a fantastic experience, but so is driving a Porsche, and that’s not a realistic option for most businesses. Cisco may be doing big business with telepresence, but there’s a huge middle earth that can’t justify the cost, but also want something better than free. That’s the opportunity that the likes of BlueJeans and Vidtel are chasing, and I think 2012 is going to be an inflection point here.

Just like the early days of VoIP when AT&T and Vonage spent heavily to create awareness and interest, the buzz coming from both the top and bottom ends of the video market will be good for everybody. Smaller vendors will benefit from the boost in awareness, and as video becomes more demand-driven, the business models will become more stable.

Coming back to paths to market, the pureplays – Vidtel, BlueJeans, etc. – are actually one of three basic options. Of the other two, one is vendor-based and the other is operator-based. Briefly, along with Cisco, we have the usual suspects such as Polycom and Lifesize. They all provide a great user experience, but of course are expensive, and while all advocate being open, they work best with an end-to-end setup. On the operator side, it seems like everyone is getting into the act. Notable examples include 8x8 and Telesphere, and of course the customers of BroadSoft and Metaswitch can all go down this road now.

Higher up the food chain, there’s OVCC – the Open Visual Communications Consortium. This is a great way for the likes of AT&T, Verizon, BT, Orange, etc. to tap into this market, but there’s also a strong vendor element to OVCC, led by Polycom, Acme Packet and Dialogic. A cynic would say, pick your poison, as both of these broader-based options have varying degrees of vendor lock-in.

A true cloud-based service is vendor-agnostic, and works across all platforms and endpoint scenarios. That’s exactly where Vidtel and BlueJeans are zeroed in, and this should prove to be pretty fertile ground. No doubt, lots of businesses will go with the name brand vendors and carriers, especially if they’re just dipping their toes into the cloud. Fair enough, but there’s a growing segment who are ready to go further and want the full range of choice that a cloud pureplay can provide. In other words, being able to use video with different endpoint vendors, fixed or mobile devices, Web-based platforms like Skype, and connecting between IP and legacy networks, protocols and codecs (SIP, H.323, H.264, etc.).

It’s early days yet, but each company is pursuing different paths to market, and I think this should be closely followed as a barometer for what’s the best way to drive the adoption of cloud-based video. In short, Vidtel is relying on channels, whereas BlueJeans is mostly going direct and getting businesses to sign up with them on their own. This is the classic fork-in-the-road scenario from telecom, and there is definitely a place for both here – and that may turn out to be true for video.

Following these paths, Vidtel relies on partners to leverage their relationships and footprint with business customers. This group is a mix of video-centric VARs, video vendors (remember, Vidtel and BlueJeans are cloud platforms – they provide the network and virtual infrastructure – not the endpoints) and service providers who want to add video to their portfolio – ideally on a private label basis. BlueJeans, on the other hand, is building business one win at a time. By using various forms of advertising, they can quickly build up a customer base that’s theirs.

Ultimately, I think the market will decide which model works best. I think it really comes down to trust, and that’s where I think channels have the upper hand. If they have good relationships in place, adding video isn’t a big leap, especially if it’s under their own brand. As far as I know, BlueJeans does not support private labeling, as they prefer to own the customer – which creates natural conflicts if/when channels are involved. Vidtel avoids this issue, and being a smaller player, is happy to go with the flow and take their wins any way they can. On that note, it’s worth mentioning that Vidtel’s pricing is lower than BlueJeans, which itself can be another driver for adoption. Not only that, but this provides more room for channels to add an attractive margin and still be competitive on price.

Another consideration in favor of the channel is their ability – and desire – to integrate video with UC platforms. This can be a great way to strengthen the customer relationship and give them as much of a collaboration solution as they like. Furthermore, Vidtel supports both H.323 and SIP, giving channels more flexibility to work with clients who have a mix of legacy and IP in their network.

This is much harder to do when taking the best-of-breed approach by going direct with BlueJeans, at which point you’re on your own to bolt this on to whatever UC or collaboration platform you’re using. On the other hand, if what you want is an affordable, easy to use cloud-based video service, it’s hard to go wrong with either offering, and no doubt, BlueJeans will serve this niche especially well.

For either vendor, the appeal is pretty simple. Businesses can adopt video with their existing infrastructure, and not have to worry about making all the pieces work, regardless of which endpoint vendors they have, or which carriers they use. Relative to what businesses will spend going with the likes of Cisco or Polycom, both BlueJeans and Vidtel offer great value, and more flexibility to work out of the box with pretty much any current environment. So, for now, let’s watch as the big players seed the market with their push into the cloud, and hopefully along the way, the value proposition of these pureplays will bubble up and gain their fair share of this wide open opportunity.

Disclosure – I am an Advisor to Vidtel, but feel this post has been both fair and objective. I have been careful not to show bias here, and have deliberately stayed away from any in-depth analysis of the companies discussed herein. My main intent is to highlight the broad opportunity for cloud-based video and the pros/cons of the two main routes to market. Your comments are duly welcomed.

Cisco, Microsoft, Skype and Video Interop - Who's Winning?

We all know how high the stakes are getting with video, and Cisco's recent call-out to Microsoft for its plans with Skype and their proprietary applications has made this a hot topic. I would argue that MSFT has the potential to get the upper hand here, and if they find a way to integrate Skype with its business offerings - namely Lync - the desktop gains a big boost in becoming the locus for video. That's not what Cisco wants to see happen, so we've got a pretty important tete-a-tete shaping up here.

This is the topic we explored on this week's UCStrategies podcast, moderated by Dave Michels, who always has interesting things to say. It was a lively session, and is running on the site now - both in podcast form and with transcript.

Know Your Alternatives Event on Thursday - Last Call!

If you follow me, you'll know about this week's Know Your Alternatives event here in Toronto. I've be posting about it off and on, and will be speaking on the SIP Trunking session, which runs at 11:30 during Breakout #3. I won't be hard to find, and will be there all day, so if you're coming, let's connect.

As per their Twitter feed - @KYAlternatives - today is the last day to register, so get on that now if you still need to sign up. Otherwise, I hope to see you there on Thursday!

My 2011 Unified Communications Takeaways

Building on our UCStrategies podcast earlier this week on the UC year in review, I've added another take in written form.

In short, disruption was the big driver, and it's hard to imagine this degree of change being the norm for 2012 - but you never know! I've had a chance to gauge the landscape both here in Canada as well as the U.S., and disruption comes in many flavors. Some is welcome and some is not, and my take on what it means for UC is the focus of my summary. It's posted now on the UCStrategies portal, and I welcome your thoughts after you've had a chance to give it a read.

Unified Communications - 2011 Year in Review Podcast

We're getting that looking back/looking ahead time of year, right? The latest UCStrategies podcast served as our 2011 review in this space, and there was lots to talk about.

This is as complete of a roundup on what happened in Unified Communications this year as you're going to find, so if this space is on your radar, you'll want to give it a listen. The podcast - and transcript - is posted now on the portal, so head on over to hear what we had to say.

We're off next week, but our next podcast is the following week, and we'll address our 2012 UC outlook/predictions then. Can't wait!

Cisco Collaboration Summit Revisited - UCStrategies Podcast

I've done my share of blogging, tweeting and writing about Cisco's Collaboration Summit (actually, one more analysis yet to come!), but there's more good commentary out there worth following. Given our focus at UCStrategies, we have our own take on things, and the podcast we did a few days ago has just been posted on the portal. Several UCStrategies consultants and analysts were at the summit, so there's a lot of first hand commentary, especially around where UC figures into Cisco's thinking.

Without further ado, you can listen to the podcast here, or simply read the transcript if you can't spare the time. As always, comments are most welcome!

Cisco TelePresence Turns Five

I put up a short tweet about this yesterday (and if you're not following me there, well, you don't know what you're missing - sign up... @arnoldjon)- but amidst all the other things keeping me busy right now, I realized it needs more attention. Just wanted to add a few thoughts here.

So, the first question to ask now that Cisco has reached the five year milestone with telepresence is the same one I would have asked back in 2006. Aside from the fact that back then nobody really knew what to call it, I'll simply ask - is it telepresence or TelePresence? I'm still 50/50 on this one, and as a rule of thumb, when I'm talking about Cisco, it's "T", but for the category as a whole, it's "t".

Branding is just as important in tech as any other business, and if you toe the Cisco line, you will believe they invented everything around this space and by rights, then, it's TelePresence, period. Of course, they're not the only game in town, and weren't even first to market, but nobody does tech branding for business better than Cisco. The consumer market is another story, but let's not go there for now.

Whether or not Cisco is the Kleenex of telepresence - much like I used to say that Vonage was the Kleenex of VoIP - you really need to give some props here. I think they've earned it, and when John Chambers talks about making big bets and capitalizing on market transitions, I think he got it right with Telepresence. There, I said it - with a capital T.

I don't really think it matters that Cisco's lead offering is hugely expensive - they've been the frontrunners in immersive TP from Day 1, and now that Tandberg is in the fold, I think they'll stay there. It's a bit like complaining that the biggest stars in pro sports are overpaid. In absolute terms, that's absolutely true. Only whiny sportswriters care about that - it's the relative basis that really matters. So long as those athletes live up to expectations (and that's a big IF - hello John Lackey and Carl Crawford - I digress...), and big market teams like my Red Sox are willing to pay the freight, all is in balance. There are buyers and sellers at all price levels, and the market ultimately defines value. Cisco Telepresence may be out of reach for SMBs, but their book of business with the enterprise crowd is doing just fine, thank you.

That leads me to yesterday's announcement, which talks about some updates to their offering and how Cisco TelePresence can now reach a broader market. I'll save the details for another time, but the main thing is that Cisco is evolving the product as market conditions require. Again, this brings me back to why this five year milestone is worth reflecting on. We didn't have tablets or Android then, and the smartphone market was basically RIM and Nokia. You don't need me to tell you what's come along since, and that video has now become pretty mainstream for everybody.

As a result, Cisco needs to evolve its TP portfolio to cater to these new - and emerging opportunities, some of which didn't exist 2-3 years ago. Of course, Cisco would love to own every segment of the TP and collaboration market, but that's not going to happen, esp with all the free/OTT offerings out there that I've been writing about here and elsewhere recently.

Regardless, Cisco has done a lot of things right with TelePresence, and these new twists are just ensuring they'll have a place across all market tiers. More than that, Cisco wants be to remain at the innovation forefront with this technology, because if they don't, those fearsome interlopers - Apple and Google - will take their spot. I'm not saying that Cisco has all the great innovations here, but when it comes to delivering a value proposition that businesses are willing to pay for, they know what they're doing. This ground is going to be harder to defend as these other players continue to make inroads, but if anyone can to do it, it's Cisco.

Finally, for those of you sticking with me here to the end, you get a prize. If you want to step in the wayback machine to see what TP looked like at the beginning, here's a video clip I took of my first live demo at Cisco's Canadian HQ here in Toronto, back in December 2006. This clip is on my YouTube channel, which you're welcome to explore. I'm not posting video there these days - I don't know why - but wanted to share this as a sidebar to Cisco's fifth anniversary for TP. I was there at the beginning, and to show you how much interest there is out there around TP, this clip has by far received more views - over 100,000 - than anything else I've ever posted, and - as you'll see on the site, to this day, I'm STILL getting comments about that clip. How's that for the long tail of the Internet? If I could just find a way to make this pay...