Visit InterCall at VoiceCon and Learn More About Our UC Solutions

Enterprises are showing strong interest in deploying Unified Communications (UC) solutions because of their next generation collaboration features, enhanced voice capabilities, promise of reduced cost and improved workflow. In short, UC integrates real-time and non-real-time communications, like IM, telephony, conferencing and more, across multiple communication devices in a single unified interface.

To help companies better understand, implement and embrace UC solutions, InterCall currently offers:

• Audio federation with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 and OCS R2
• Assessment and design
• Pilot program management
• Deployment assistance
• Adoption and training
• Hosted Live Meeting
• Microsoft Online Services, also known as Business Productivity Online Suite or “BPOS”

Check out the Unified Communication and Collaboration section of InterCall.com to learn more about these solutions and find out how we can help you. In addition, you can stop by our booth (#409) at VoiceCon 2009 on November 3-4 at the Moscone North Convention Center in San Francisco. Billed as "the leading enterprise communications event," the show will also feature booths and speakers from some of our partner companies like Cisco, IBM, Microsoft and Polycom.

While at the show, you may want to consider attending some of these UC-related sessions:

Monday
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Choices in UC: Comparing Microsoft Office Communications Server to IBM Lotus Sametime
3:15 pm – 4:15 pm
Managed/Hosted Services for UC

Tuesday
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
UC Leadership Roundtable: How Far Have We Come? What's Next?
2:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Comparing UC Options and Vendors: Who's Offering What?

For more information about the show, be sure to check out the VoiceCon San Francisco 2009 website or the No Jitter blog, which is brought to you by the same people who produce VoiceCon. And remember to stop by Booth #409. We'll see you there!
 

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Unified Communications Glossary of Terms

Our sales team brought me along to talk with a customer to assist their Unified Communications (UC) strategy and budget for next year. As customary for meetings about UC, the meeting assembled several cross-functional department heads–  the desktop application management team, telecom and data networking group, the person that manages the messaging systems, the individual responsible for conferencing and collaboration, senior management, and representatives from the finance team. You get the idea.  It was a typical IS-meets-business- strategy planning session.

With this group in the room, before you know it I’m saying things like “this UC-EIM system utilizes SIP and has a standards-based codec supporting VoIP click-2-call by integrating with your PBX”.  And in concern to the non-IS folks in the room, I was becoming very aware of the amount of jargon and TLAs (three-letter acronyms) that were being thrown about during our discussion. As the meeting progressed, my concerns of the effect of “jargon-overload” on the finance guy was diminished - he was keeping up and he made several great points that let you know he was completely engaged.

But it got me thinking. We use tech terms everyday and it has a way of actually decreasing understanding and making what we’re talking about seem like it has less relevance to everyday workers in their business life.  The meeting inspired me to write this blog entry. Here are a few terms you are likely to encounter as you navigate the world of Unified Communications.

Unified Communications (UC) – I like the way Frost and Sullivan defines this term in our free Unified Communications Whitepapers.  In its most fully realized form, unified communications offers users a single application interface from which users can access a range of communications tools, including voice calls, IM chat, e-mail, faxes, voice messaging and conferencing—audio, video and web.

I’d like to add that UC is a system, and not a single-vendor product. Additional to the technologies that define the system, a UC framework includes deployment considerations (hosted, on-premise, hybrid) and system management and end-user training considerations.

Unified Conferencing and Collaboration (UCC) – also from our Whitepapers, UCC is defined as integrated audio, video and web conferencing in a single interface.

InterCall likes to call this “Unified Meetings” – whereby a single URL or shortcut can be clicked and you are joined to a rich virtual meeting environment with no complex effort to enjoy seamless audio, video, web collaboration.

Enterprise Instant Messaging (EIM) – a system that delivers secure, auditable, corporate, instant messaging on private servers that can be deployed on-premise on in “hosted” environments.

The top suppliers of EIM are Microsoft, IBM, and Jabber (recently acquired by Cisco). When designing a UC system, you will want to do some planning around federating your UC-EIM system to partners and suppliers outside of your internal networks.

Unified Messaging (UM) – a system that routes (so users can store and retrieve) different types of messages (voicemails, email, faxes, etc) from a single, “unified” inbox – which is accessible from a variety of devices and applications – like your email inbox on your laptop, or a handheld smart device, or even the ability to take a standard phone and dial-into a text-to-voice converter.

Whew! UM products are available from telephony hardware vendors (I won’t list them all, here are products briefs for Cisco and Avaya) and there are systems from InterCall partners Microsoft and IBM.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – a telephony networking solution that allows you to transmit voice telephone calls across an IP network as an alternative to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Ha! I threw that last one in for free… ;-)

Softphone (IP Softphone) - a software application (that runs on your laptop or smartdevice) for making and receiving telephone calls on a computer using VoIP.

A softphone should ot to be confused with an IP telephone handset device. A “soft” phone provides an on-screen interface for outbound dialing and must interoperate with the computer’s sound card and microphone or accessories that plug into the computer’s USB port. There are business-grade and consumer-grade softphones. The term “click-to-call” refers to mouse-clicking on a contact or phone number using your softphone in order to “dial” the connection.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) – an Internet standard (see RFC 3261) used for session establishment and teardown for voice communications and video conferencing over an IP network.

At InterCall, we utilize SIP on our audio conferencing platform to effectively manage media stream (audio) sessions to deliver robust conferencing as efficiently as technically possible.

If this glossary of terms has been helpful, respond in the comments section below, and I’ll continue this topic on my next posting.

Ken Kurz, Director of Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible for the end-user success of Unified Communications deployments; ensuring businesses have a more efficient, easier-to-use communications environment.

Too Plugged In? Change How You’re Connected

Even with so many new forms of mobile communication emerging and becoming popular with workers, it can some times be harder to reach people.  You now have tools that “follow” you when you’re out of the office like SMS text, e-mail, BlackBerry, cell phone, fax, and even the old-fashioned Post-It Note.  But with so many ways to communicate it can actually be harder for you to get a simple message to the right device, at the right time, to actually get through to someone.

Unified Communications lets you choose which technologies your co-workers use to communicate with you.  For example, mobile executives can use new technology to ensure they get e-mail when they’re at the airport, launch a Web meeting when they’re working from home, or send an instant message during a conference call. UC is the big discussion in corporate IT departments.  Many people find that UC helps them become more productive and efficient.  Businesses are learning that it promotes information sharing, and can significantly speed up the decision-making process. 

Did You Know?

+ Nearly 60 percent of North American businesses provide cellular handsets and service, or reimburse their employees for wireless service, according to a recent Frost & Sullivan study.

+ Information workers receive 100 messages per day in up to 7 different places according to a survey by Harris Interactive.

Conferencing and Collaboration companies like InterCall play several distinct roles in the formation of a good Unified Communications and Collaboration strategy. (You know I can't help the plug, I am a PR girl after all!) 

The goal of any UC strategy should be to help your company get more done in a smarter fashion, while handling all of the pieces of the various technologies involved in UCC implementations.   We can do a UC evaluation, help with the implementation process and consult with your company to help you make the right decisions, at the right time about what technologies will make a difference in your UCC strategy.  It’s a great advantage to have a company that keeps an eye on the big picture for you and your employees. 

Key things to think about when finding the right partner to help you build a UC strategy:

+ Consultation - It's important to have a partner whose core training revolves around helping your company increase productivity by reducing human workflow latency due to communication inefficiencies...of course this has been our core focus for years. 

+ Implementation - Key strategic partnerships as well as core competencies in communications technologies allow your partner to take your UCC project from concept and evaluation to installation, integration, and adoption.

+ Management, Support and Service - Find a company whose reputation is built on their ability to manage scalable services and technologies for their customers, with the best support and service levels.  Whether your perfect UCC solution is entirely on-premise, hosted off-site, or a mix of solutions, you need a company that can balance your internal resources or provide a completely turn-key technology support and management program for you.

When you’re ready to get serious about Unified Communications, make sure you have a partner who can help you plan, test, execute and prove a positive return on investment.   At the end of the day, look for a company who has the deep knowledge and relatioships needed to fully integrate Microsoft, IBM and Cisco Unified Communication products into your current network, voice and collaboration systems.. 

If you have any questions about UC, talk to us about them in the comments below. If you’ve already implemented a UC strategy in your organization, let us know how you did it!

Cambria Vaccaro is Director of Marketing, Corporate Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

Planning for Unified Communications

For most enterprise companies, a fully-integrated Unified Communications solution is a huge project and is typically deployed in multiple phases spanning several months (if not years).  A well thought-through plan considers the business objectives your company must realize from a UC solution and always factors in the “readiness” of your network, server architecture, software, and even your organization’s resource ability to execute the plan. Readiness should also allow for the “x-factors”.  For example, What kind of additional resource utilization occurs when a powerful UC application supporting messaging, voice, video, and conferencing media is rolled out to every desktop in your organization?  A good plan considers the necessary cultural and service adoption factors - so that investments in your UC system are adopted and maximized by members of your user community.

Last week, I met with one of our customers to review the current status of their Unified Communications (UC) initiative. Much has been accomplished; just a few days prior to my visit, they completed rolling out the latest phase of the company- wide UC solution to their entire workforce (about 10,000 users). For this customer, the process started early this year and should complete early in the third quarter of 2009.

Here’s what has been accomplished: all employees have a UC desktop application that enables secure, auditable, enterprise Instant Messaging, Presence, and Click-to-Call Voice over IP (UC client-to-client voice). To support this rollout, the UC server pools were completely upgraded with new software and hardware, a new datacenter was brought online, the data networks were engineered to the forecasted usage levels, and new systems architecture was deployed utilizing geo-redundancy to support the multi-national user-base as well as providing failover survival capabilities. In addition, every user was given remote access so that all UC presence, messaging, and voice features were supported wherever the employee happens to be working.

In the coming months, the internal support team will be performing a series of utilization studies. Capacity evaluations will measure the utilization and performance of the new UC solution and the study will provide a capacity management and systems administration plan. During the evaluation, user-community internal support records will be audited for issues. Some adoption hurdles are expected, so the end-user study will contain training and adoption recommendations.

For now, it’s a major accomplishment that the foundations of a UC system have been brought online and are enabling every employee to “IM” or “UC-talk” with a fellow employee. But there is more on the way as this UC initiative has several future phases planned and funded. Federation with partners, vendors, or customers, has yet to be accomplished, but that phase will quickly follow on the completion of the above-mentioned capacity study. And by this time next year, the UC System will integrate with the company PBX so telephony functions like “click-to-call” to any phone number is possible.

I mention all this because I want to illustrate that this customer has invested wisely in an extensive amount of pre-deployment planning, and the successful rollout results are the obvious evidence of a solid plan.

Did you know that InterCall offers “UC Planning” services to our customers? These services grew out of our existing meeting consulting services and our extensive partner relationships with industry-leading UC vendors. InterCall’s UC Planning services are consultative in nature and designed to help you construct a sound UC strategy that is tailored to achieve your business objectives. For example, our engineering studies place UC engineers on your site with your team to evaluate your UC objectives and your communications infrastructure’s “readiness” to support a UC system. The result of the engagement is an extensive study and recommendation - to help define your UC plan scope, phases, requirements, and budget.

In my next posting, I’ll continue this theme. I may have some interesting research to share.  If you’d like more information on how InterCall supports Unified Communications, attend one of our free webinars this month.

Ken Kurz, Director of Unified Communications. Kurz is responsible for the end-user success of Unified Communications deployments; ensuring businesses have a more efficient, easier-to-use communications environment.

The UC Puzzle: Piece # 2 – UC & The Teleworker

I telecommute, or “work from home,” about once a week these days.  I do this not because I get to pet the dog or forego a shower, but because it saves me time, increases my flexibility, and even helps save the planet in a small way.  I’m enabled in this because my tools at home are now every bit as capable as my tools in the office; in most cases they are the same exact tools. 

I “have UC”, whatever that means.  I no longer take phone calls on my desk phone.  Oh, I still have one in the office; although, these days, I’m not sure why.  It is permanently forwarded to a number that rings a soft phone on my laptop.  Why?  Because I don’t have to check four voice mail boxes to get your message.  I don’t have to record out of office messages any more.  My laptop is every bit as good a “phone” as the phone at my desk.  I can take your call just as I would in the office, even though I am in a hotel room or in my home office.

How does UCC play into this?  Here are some examples of things I expect from my communication tools, and that any Intercall customer can expect from their tools as well.  A UC Bill Of Rights, if you will.

• I expect to click a link in a meeting invite to get into a meeting using voice, video, and web.

• I expect to be able to do this 30 seconds before the meeting starts.

• I expect to be able to see who is attending the meeting (so I know which jokes not to tell).

• I expect to know who is speaking.

• I expect to be able to share content with everyone else

• I expect to be able to do most of these things when away from my desk in a place where voice is all that the network can handle. 

• Here’s one that some UC vendors have ignored: I expect to be able to use my conferencing subscription as a “meeting place” because it is accessible from anywhere on the planet with the lowest common denominator phone technology.

• I expect to meeting participants to be able to join my meeting from a desk phone, cell phone, satellite phone, VoIP phone, hard phone, soft phone, or home phone.

• I expect to be able to start a meeting whether I am physically in an office, coffee shop, airport lounge, hotel room, or taxi cab.

Five years ago this amount of telework would have been unthinkable for someone in my role.  I submit that five years from now companies will be seriously asking themselves “Why are we paying these high rents for fancy offices when 80% of our people can be every bit as productive from home?”  Personally, I will be very surprised if I even have a “traditional office” to commute to in 2013.  Will I still be driving 18 miles each way, spending 30 minutes driving and buying gas at $6 a gallon in 2013? No way.  Unified Communications (UC) and Unified Conferencing & Collaboration (UCC) in particular, are key enablers of this trend.

Warren Baxley is the Senior Director of Product Management & Development and the “Unified Communications and Collaboration” blogger. The holder of five patents in the conferencing industry including reservationless conferencing, Warren is building out InterCall’s global infrastructure for secure, reliable and rapid integration of new productivity solutions.

The UC Puzzle: Piece # 1 – Conferencing & Collaboration

Many businesses and business people cannot afford, either in terms of dollars, in terms of focus, or in terms of information technology priority, to bite off the whole Unified Communications (UC) thing all at once, so let’s talk about grabbing big chunks of UC without a big budget or a big project.

To do that, I will focus on the ‘Conferencing and Collaboration’ piece of our UC definition for a minute.  Unified Conferencing and Collaboration, or UCC, is arguably the hardest part of UC because it is simultaneously real-time and multiparty in nature.  Each person has a slightly different combination of interface technology between them and the rest of the group, and each person’s representation of themselves to the group (be it voice, video, cartoon avatar, content, etc.) is conveyed by a slightly different mix of technologies that transport content.  These differences translate directly into complexity, and it is exactly this complexity that has made UCC service providers like InterCall as successful as they are.

I see UCC as the vanguard of UC because its delivery today often exemplifies the mix of hosted, managed, and premise-based enabling technologies of tomorrow’s unified world, and because UCC is available today in a very mature form.  It is quite common today to see web conferencing tools that are able to display audio participants in an integrated way and allow the audio experience to be controlled from the “meeting console” that is the web conferencing client application.  InterCall alone does this with more than a half dozen different web tools and has for some time.  For example, thousands of meetings occur every day using web conferencing hosted by WebEx, integrated with audio conferencing hosted by InterCall, and scheduled using Microsoft Outlook enabled by Exchange free/busy services hosted on the enterprise premise.  This diversity and interoperability of providers and delivery models is common in the UCC community today, and must continue to be supported as other UC pieces are layered on.

Now, and always, the communications buyer within the enterprise must be able to mash up services in this way.  UC solutions that require particular vendors or particular deployment models are insufficiently flexible to meet the UC or even UCC challenge in the real world.  There is only one company in the world today (to my knowledge) that is running Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, Office 2007, OCS, and Vista.  That company happens to be a very important partner of InterCall’s, and I am by no means being critical of their strategy, but if all of these things are required to make a UC service work with all of the advertised functionality, then nobody’s experience will live up to their expectations for some time.  Fortunately, there are smart service providers which, along with their smart partners, are delivering big pieces of UC today using enabling technologies and tools that people already have.  You can “get” UC through UCC, and you can get it today as a service for which you do not have to spend big bucks or take big risks.

Warren Baxley is the Senior Director of Product Management & Development and the “Unified Conferencing and Collaboration” blogger. The holder of five patents in the conferencing industry including reservationless conferencing, Warren is building out InterCall’s global infrastructure for secure, reliable and rapid integration of new productivity solutions.

What is Unified Communications?

At the most basic level, Unified Communications, or UC for short, happens any time one of your communications tools becomes “aware” of any of your other communications tools. If your phone has a built in directory that you can browse to find someone’s phone number, that’s UC. If your calendar application has a button to add teleconference joining instructions to a meeting invite, that’s UC. If your voice mail system sends you an email with an audio file of a recorded message attached, that’s UC. If you can click a link and seamlessly join a meeting using voice, video, and web…that’s UC.

If you let your imagination go down this track, it could go in many different directions. So let’s do some categorizing and grouping to build a vocabulary that will allow us to answer “what is UC?” in one concise sentence:

• First, let’s take anything that does the job of a phone, in that it allows you to talk to someone else in real time using your voice, and call it “Telephony.” Lots of people want to limit this to Voice over IP, or IP Telephony, but I reject this as unnecessarily limiting – we’ll stick to a ‘user experience’ perspective for now and ignore any discussion of how the voice gets from one person to another.

• Next, let’s take everything that involves non-real time voice, text, image, or multimedia message transmission between people and call that “Messaging”. In this bucket I would include instant messaging (IM), email, fax, voice mail, and texting.

• As the third category, let’s take anything that involves multi-party real time communications, whether it be audio conferencing, video conferencing, web conferencing, or all three, and call it “Conferencing and Collaboration.”

• Finally, we have “Presence,” which is that thing that allows you to see who is available and perhaps even give you shades of just how available they are.

Now that we have those terms, we can answer the question. What is UC? Well, UC is Telephony, unified with Messaging, Unified with Conferencing and Collaboration, and enabled by Presence. It really is that simple.

UC can be something you get piece by piece over time, or something that you get all at once. Either way, UC is a key springboard to the next big buzzword, namely “communications-enabled business practices”, or CEBP. You heard it here first, and believe me you’re going to need it. Along the way is this thing called UC, and so UC is something your business needs to have a strategy for. Because many businesses and business people cannot afford, either in terms of dollars, in terms of focus, or in terms of information technology priority, to bite off the whole UC thing all at once, next time I will talk a little bit about ways you can grab big chunks of UC without a big budget or a big project.

Warren Baxley is the Senior Director of Product Management & Development and the “Unified Communications and Collaboration” blogger. The holder of five patents in the conferencing industry including reservationless conferencing, Warren is building out InterCall’s global infrastructure for secure, reliable and rapid integration of new productivity solutions.