A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies
It was a great VoiceCon for UC! From the main stage to the concurrent sessions to the tutorials, the content was great and the interest was high. As Fred Knight observed in Issue 35, "UC: About Everything or About Nothing?" there's still a lot of game-playing by suppliers about the definition of UC. But it also was clear that the market is becoming more clearly defined, products are available and there was a lot of customer interest. Clearly, VoiceCon is a happening place for Unified Communications.
The key factor, from my perspective, is that the enterprise customers have "turned the corner" on UC. At previous recent VoiceCons, most of the questions were basic--what is UC and what can it do for my enterprise? At VoiceCon
San Francisco, the emphasis shifted to more implementation-oriented questions--what's available now, and what are the recommendations on how to shop, buy and implement.
One indication of customer interest is the attendance at the VoiceCon UC sessions. The two most highly attended focused breakout sessions that focused on UC--the intro/overview session, with panelists from
Avaya,
Cisco, IBM and
Microsoft, and my colleague Blair Pleasant's market update session. Among the tutorials, the topic "Preparing a UC RFP," ranked second in total attendance, and major keynotes delivered by IT executives from
Black & Decker and
Oracle both discussed UC as a key way to leverage their recently installed IP Telephony platforms. Clearly, the VoiceCon audience--overwhelmingly enterprise customers--is turning its attention to high return applications, like UC.
On the suppliers' side, most have either started shipping UC products or are in widespread beta programs. During a session on UC Portals and Interfaces,Mitel,
Siemens, IBM and
Microsoft each presented excellent examples of the desktop and mobile user interfaces they are offering, supported by graphical illustrations and by specific customer examples.
The Mitel team was particularly creative, showing applications both for the PC (Your Assistant) and for IP phones; compelling examples were shown of the programmable IP phone interface in retail, educational and hospitality environments. The use of IP phones in conjunction with UC was also a prominent theme on the VoiceCon exhibit floor; LiteScape, for example, displayed IP phones as information and transactional terminals,
including RFID tag scanning.
The Siemens team showed OpenScape being integrated into enterprise applications, to deliver ease and speed to business processes. For example, it showed integrations with
Salesforce.com for improved customer interactions by sales teams and with SAP for supply chain acceleration.
IBM showed integrated communications based on the combination of SameTime and Websphere services, and it had the toolkits available to customers and systems integrators to enable implementation. And
Microsoft described
highlights of the new Office Communicator 2007 and Office Communicator Mobile 2007 (aka COMO).
The capstone on UC occurred in the concluding "Locknote" session of the conference. It focused on "When Will UC Be Ready," and is available for viewing at
http://www.voicecon.com/videos/
I'm looking forward to VoiceCon Orlando 2008, and I expect this trend continue. What do you think? If you were at VoiceCon
San Francisco 2007, did you see the same trends? If not, what would you like to see at VoiceCon
Orlando 2008? Contact me through
http://www.UniCommConsulting.com or post your comments in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum --
http://voicecon-uc-eweekly.p0.com/u.d?8GZIzg5APc-_EsUfA=340