• UC guru Dave Michels says MS Lync does to unified communications what Outlook did to email in the 1990s. Outlook and Exchange were among the first mainstream solutions that combined email, calendaring and contacts into a single integrated application. Microsoft’s aim with Lync is to unify communications tools. What were the four most-significant improvements to the Microsoft Lync 2010 release? Michels highlights them in this Microsoft Lync article.
• Our very own Networking Media Group Director at TechTarget, Kate Gerwig, explains how Microsoft Lync disrupts the unified communications market this way: “If the future of UC is a set of features to integrate into other applications, who’s better positioned to do that than Microsoft — with its great developer environment and desktop mindshare?”
• TechTarget’s Microsoft Lync adoption survey found that — even though Lync is in it’s infancy, the product is off to a running start.  The 329 international voice and network professionals who responded to the survey cited compelling motivators for deploying Lync, as well as Lync issues.  

Are you left wondering whether Microsoft Lync is all  its cracked up to be? Leave us a comment and let us know whether you think the MS Lync fever is hype or ripe.

After the story published, Cisco requested a follow up conversation to talk more about the notion of integration and interoperability, so I got back on the phone with Roberto De La Mora, senior director of collaboration solutions marketing for Cisco.

De La Mora emphasized that customers are asking for better interoperability from Cisco, but they’re looking for the ability to integrate with third-party technology.

While Cisco’s collaboration products — like TelePresence and Jabber — can be purchased separately, they all play nice with one another. Businesses can purchase these products separately and the pieces do fully integrate with each other, even if they are purchased at different times, he said.

“We have bundling and pricing also to make it cheaper, but if you only want to buy WebEx for example, you can buy only that,” De La Mora said.

As an example, if a company starts off with only Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCUM), and then purchases Jabber down the road, Jabber will connect with CUCUM to allow phone and video calls. And because Cisco’s tools configure automatically, there is little involvement from IT needed, De La Mora added.

“All these pieces were designed to work together from the get-go, but that doesn’t mean you have to buy them all at once,” he said.

Sometimes for customers however, less is more. Other vendors — like Microsoft — bundle their collaboration product licenses into larger purchases for their customers. Cisco had always included Jabber as a separate line item charge for their customers, but recently saw the value in consolidating and began bundling Jabber licenses into CallManager.

Customers are fine with a monthly WebEx spend — but they don’t want to see the extra Jabber line item that could be growing rapidly each month. “When customers are seeing this extra line item spend increase, it’s an easy target to say ‘let’s eliminate that’,” said Bill Haskins, senior analyst for Wainhouse Research.

“People like WebEx, and so integrating that Jabber spend into something they are already buying is a great approach,” Haskins added.

Third party integration

UC and collaboration is still very much a mixed vendor environment, and customers have made it clear that they want better integration between Cisco products and their existing UC tools. Cisco will be making strides in satisfying their users in this area.

“We are doubling up on software investments, because most of those integrations users want aren’t just on a hardware level, but on a software level, too,” De La Mora said. Cisco currently offers integration to platforms like Microsoft’s Exchange, Office or Lync, and Google’s Gmail.

“If a user wants to start an instant message session with someone using Lync, or a video conferencing session with a person that has a unit from Polycom, we have open APIs and we use industry standards to make sure it’s not just integrated with Cisco,” he said.

As many sessions held during Enterprise Connect 2012 pointed out, user adoption of enterprise-grade UC tools has been a point of pain for UC vendors. But sometimes when a company goes all-in with enterprise UC or collaboration technology, it can realize serious benefits.

BJ Haberkorn, Group Product Manager for Microsoft Lync told us at the conference that Sprint has experienced a big benefit with Lync–a savings of $30 million annually.

Notably, Sprint has saved $2.5 million in avoidance of PBX upgrade costs, $6.7 million in recurring circuit costs and $4 million in cost avoidance for conferencing since the installation of Lync. The company has even been able to earn some green savings–$700,000 annually because it doesn’t have to power and cool old PBXs anymore.

Sprint has over 500 locations and was looking to do more with less, Haberkorn explained, and the collaboration tool has changed the office environment. The mobile carrier’s 39,000 users are now able to work remotely more easily with voice, IM, desktop file sharing and conferencing capabilities on one platform. As a result, Sprint has changed the layout of many of its offices and even reduced the number of its campuses. “They don’t have cubicles anymore,” Haberkorn said, noting that Sprint has set up unassigned work stations in which employees can grab a spot to get work done when they come in.

“But Sprint told us their employees are in the office no more than 40% of the time, because the employees are now enabled with the tools they need wherever they are,” Haberkorn said.

And the users love being able to go to a meeting by clicking a button without dialing any numbers or searching for conference passcodes.

In addition to cost saving benefits for the enterprise, employees enjoy the ease of use that comes along with click-to-communicate capabilities. While not every company will experience Sprint’s success, Enterprises should fully embrace UC and collaboration tools in order to get their users to follow suit, and to get the most bang for their buck.

Not only do users want to use their own devices, but they want to use applications familiar to them to get work done. “Users want consumer hardware, as well as consumer-type devices,” Finneran said. While tools like Microsoft Lync are ok, LinkedIn is preferred by many users, as is Skype over other real-time video products developed specifically for the enterprise by the likes of Avaya and Polycomm he added.

BYOD is all well and good, but this is where a mobility strategy must come into play. It’s not crucial for IT to make users happy by allowing them to use their iPhones and applications they enjoy for work, Finneran said. It is critical for IT to create a balancing act with users, however, by making them accessible and enable them to easily reach the right person at the right time, while offering a certain level of support for certain devices.

“If you can’t beat them, join them — responsibly,” he said, noting that some companies have even begun offering something of an app store for its employees and their devices. Companies are learning that if the UC product or application is not easy to use or familiar to the employee, they won’t use it.

But the responsibilities of IT are not changing with the addition of the mobility component. “Their responsibilities are staying the same with a different set of tools in a different environment,” Finneran said. In developing a mobile strategy, identifying the right tools (Apple iPhones, Android and Blackberry devices, tablets and applications) appropriate for the company and user, and ensuring security without breaking the bank is where IT should begin.

From there, different use cases should be established — like what applications can/should be downloaded on the device, depending on the user’s job function, for example. IT also must consider device issues “from the cradle to the grave,” Finneran noted, explaining that the policy must address what happens when users lose or purchase a new device or leave the company, because IT can’t worry about whether or not they can wipe a device after a person has been terminated.

Since the game is always changing in mobility, a mobile policy just can’t be set and forgotten. BYOA is a major change and new struggle for IT departments, so addressing these issues early on can mitigate problems for enterprises later.

“The goal with mobility is to enable business transactions based on what tools are available, not necessarily making users smile,” Finneran said.

BYOD and BYOA are the little issues enterprises are facing now in the grand scheme of things, but the ability to improve business with available tools in a responsible fashion, all while balancing user experience will be the grand-scale concern as the need for mobility continues to grow.

Dissension in the ranks at Microsoft has arguably contributed to the company’s ineffective acquisition assimilations and habitually slow product releases. IB Times’ Jake Thompson spelled out three reasons why Microsoft’s buyout of Skype will fail, ultimately tracking back to Microsoft’s dysfunctional corporate culture.

With Skype, Microsoft has committed to an important change in its organizational structure that may help the company overcome some of the obstacles it faced with past acquisitions. The Skype division will be reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer—a new strategy for Microsoft.

Tony Bates, the president of Microsoft’s new Skype division and former CEO of Skype, told the Seattle Times that this shift is “not just about the organization; it’s sort of a statement of strategic intent and strategic alignment.”

Bates will be the point person in charge of heading up efforts to integrate Skype with other Microsoft products. In reporting directly to Ballmer, Bates may be able to skirt some of Microsoft’s notorious in-fighting and focus on connecting Skype and Microsoft and building business for the Skype division.

More insight into the Microsoft/Skype deal:

Microsoft/Skype: Once skeptical UC pros reassessing enterprise Skype

Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5B: What does it mean for unified communications?

With bated breath: The Microsoft-Skype Deal

Is Microsoft the perfect vessel for Skype to finally break into the enterprise?

Maybe. Enterprise unified communications (UC) pros have been consistently ambivalent if not outright skeptical of Skype’s ability to be a true enterprise UC player–and that includes IT pros using Skype in their environments today.

David Gurlé, vice president and general manager of Skype Enterprise (Skype’s enterprise business unit), told me in January that Skype has no intention of competing with incumbent UC vendors, such as Cisco and Avaya:

“We are not in the substitution market. We are in the complementary market,” he said. “It’s kind of an overlay across other communications infrastructure and application that people have deployed.”

But that is likely to change under Microsoft, which holds a large chunk of the overall UC market with its Lync 2010 server and legacy Office Communications Server (OCS) footprint. Microsoft spokespeople declined to comment specifically on how Skype might fit into Lync, which has its own desktop video software, but Microsoft’s press release offers a taste of what’s to come:

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

It seems pretty clear why any UC vendor aligns with Skype: access to its user base.

This is why Logitech LifeSize recently announced its federation capabilities with Skype video conferencing a few weeks ago. Avaya, which plans to federate with Skype later this year, is also after its half-a-billion registered user base. No word yet from those vendors about what the acquisition will mean for these relationships.

Aside from the fact that Skype has been a juicy acquisition prospect for some time, Microsoft obviously sees the value in owning Skype’s massive user base. The dividends are probably much higher for Microsoft on the consumer side (especially federating Skype with its Xbox Live community and Kinect products), but don’t count it out for the enterprise. UC pros are looking for some quality, reliability and support reassurances before embracing Skype. Say what you will about Microsoft’s track record with product development (yes, we’ve heard the “Blue Screen of Skype” jokes–and love them), but it has a huge install base and has earned a heck of a lot more trust from UC pros than Skype has.

UPDATE: An Avaya spokeswoman says Avaya will continue to “honor that agreement” to support Skype for its customers.

But with just as many (or more) enterprises being loyal Exchange users, it begged the question: Where does Microsoft stand here?

Deadlines being deadlines, unfortunately the software giant’s PR team wasn’t able to get us an interview with a Microsoft executive within our time frame, and the unsigned corporate statement came too close to press time to squeeze in.

Rather than leave everyone in the lurch, I thought I’d share the statement here:

“From an enterprise perspective, interoperability is critical in unified communications, as most customers have a heterogeneous environment and need to make systems work from various vendors of different platforms. Microsoft is committed to supporting interoperability by adopting widely accepted industry standards, such as SIP/SIMPLE, and using concepts like federation consistently across our entire platform. We publish our interfaces and platform APIs to the public enabling third parties to extend the capabilities of our solution.

Microsoft’s advantage is an integrated client experience that supports presence, instant messaging, voice and video, as well as application sharing, collaboration and conferencing. This integrated experience is delivered via products like Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010, etc., but can also through our APIs be integrated in third-party software through the extensible platform APIs of Communications Server. Using automation APIs of Communicator, click-to-communicate is easy to integrate in many applications. This extensible platform has been built with the goal to achieve business productivity at its best for our customers.

From a user perspective, we definitely see a trend of business users attempting to bring together separate pieces of data and applications into a “single pane of glass” for productivity reasons. We see these typically as non-technical business users wanting to concentrate their productivity experience within Office and within SharePoint because that is where they spend the majority of their time, bringing together data from other systems. In other scenarios, the “single pane of glass” concept is often an attempt to redefine the user experience, which may be incongruent and disconnected as a byproduct of multiple vendor clients within the environment.

For individuals who want their communication and collaboration experience to be seamless but do not have the developer skills required, SharePoint provides a set of capabilities related to “do-it-yourself mashups” that we collectively refer to as “SharePoint Composites.” And, if a business user has some technical inclination or is a developer, then they can definitely use power tools or development tools as well to create solutions that incorporate presence, communication, messaging, as well as data from other applications. You can learn more from that here.

1. Integrating Group Video with PBX and UC

Tuesday at 2pm, Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research

For the last few years vendor keynotes at VoiceCon have invariably featured demos of simple, one-click video conferencing from within desktop UC clients. They make it looks so easy, but all of know that it isn’t always that simple. I think Brent’s session on integrating video with PBX and UC environments should be interesting. I look forward to the Q&A session.

2. Organizational Impacts of Convergence

Tuesday at 4pm with Don Van Doren of UniComm Consulting

I’ve attended sessions on this subject in the past and it always generates good discussion. Unified communications, for those who dive really deep into it, can create some headaches for an organization for a number of reasons. First of all, many organization are still consolidating their networking and telecommunications team in the wake of the transition to IP telephony. Then there’s the rise things like communications-enabled business processes, which will force new types of collaboration with enterprise application managers. Also, enterprises need to rethink their help desk when they dive into UC. Tier 1 support too often elevates every trouble ticket to the top because they don’t understand the technology well. Many UC and network management vendors are trying to address this one specific problem. Which leads me to…

3. Network Test Tools for Voice and Video

Wednesday at 8am, Moderated by John Bartlett of NetForecast with a panel of representatives from CA, Integrated Research (making of PROGNOSIS), Psytechnics and Apparent Networks.

I still don’t get the sense that many enterprises are properly testing and monitoring their IP telephony and video deployments, perhaps because this requires investment in tools they’re not necessarily familiar with.  It’s simply tough to know how well your VoIP system is performing unless you get complaints from your users. These vendors are sort of pushing beyond that and I like to keep tabs on this market.

4. User Forum

Wednesday at 10am, moderated b Eric Krapf of NoJitter and Zeus Kerravala of Yankee Group.

For me this one is all about the panelists. I like to hear straight from these guys what exactly they’re doing with UC. This panel features Donna Zett, CIO of Serta International; Jason Norton, director of operations and telecom at Scripps Networks; Duane Longhofer, telecom manager at AccuQuote; Darrius Jones, executive director of channel management and technical fellow at USAA; and Saustrup Arne, computer operations manager at Alamo Community College District.

5. SIP Trunking Case Studies

Wednesday at 1pm, moderated by Sorrell Slaymaker of Unified IT systems.

Everyone seems to be wondering aloud about whether and/or when SIP trunking services will become mainstream. Vendors like Acme Packet will tell you that time is very near. I’m sure we’ll hear a lot about SIP trunking from vendors and carriers at the show this year, but I’m most interested in hearing from enterprises who are actually doing it. That’s why I’ll try to attend this session, which will feature engineers Steve Blair of the University of Pennsylvania and Larry Riba of Alpine Access.

6. Challenges in Achieving the Promise of Presence

Wednesday at 3:15pm, moderated by Don Van Doren

I think everyone is intrigued by the idea of presence, but I haven’t talked to a great deal of people who are actually doing much with it yet. Vendor offerings in this area are very uneven. I think this should be an interesting panel discussion simply because of who is on the panel. It features representatives of Cisco, Avaya, IBM and Microsoft, all major players in the UC space. Some of them have excellent presence products. Others, not so much.

As Ferro points out, the original value proposition of the PBX is losing its appeal.

The PBX, or Private Branch eXhange, was designed to save a company money. It allowed employees to call other desks in a company without routing the call through the telecom provider’s network. The PBX also made people more productive by allowing them to communicate and collaborate more freely.

Nowadays, how often do you pick up your deskphone and call someone else in your office? Wouldn’t you rather send them an email or an IM or open up a video chat with them?

Heck, I don’t even give out my office number anymore. I hand my Google Voice number and set it to ring wherever I am (office, home, iPhone). The only “value” I get from my PBX is voicemail. And I’d prefer to receive voicemails in my email inbox rather than dial into the PBX.

Ferro points out that the future of the PBX is as a presence server. Rather than routing phone calls, the presence server will tell users whether people are available for a conversation and how you can reach them (email, IM, phone, etc). The server will also hold all your message, regardless of the medium.

Most vendors clearly see that this is on the horizon. See Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber, Microsoft’s Office Communications Server strategy and IBM’s Sametime strategy.

In my view, it’s not a question of if the PBX will go away, but when. Any shift away from the PBX paradigm will lead to a broader and deeper dependence on mobile phones. And mobile phones are still relatively expensive in the United States. I spend four or five hours a day on the phone. If I did all that on my iPhone, I’d blow up my minutes.

So this would require not just a big technological shift, but also a philosophical shift for business leaders. Most enterprises still adhere to the strategic deployment of mobile devices. They hand BlackBerrys to sales teams and top executives and leave the rest of the company tied to their desks.

A world without PBXes would require a big shift in thinking, and this will take time. Have you ever tried to convince the CFO that you need to give the mail room manager an iPhone?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt resigned from Apple’s board of directors today, just a few days after the FCC opened an inquiry into why Apple rejected the Google Voice application from its iPhone App Store. Google Voice, based on the technology Google acquired with GrandCentral, is sort of a UC-on-the-cheap technology, as pointed out by our Click to Talk blogger, Tony Bradley.  At it’s core, Google Voice allows users to establish a single phone number which can be set to ring any number of devices – desk phones, mobile phones, home phones. It also has some unified messaging features, such as visual voice mail and online voice mail access, and it offers some other useful features, such as call recording, conference calling and directory assistance.

When Apple rejected the Google Voice application, many bloggers were upset. Some suspected that Apple was trying to protect AT&T from losing revenue, since Google Voice users can easily use the technology to move a phone call from their mobile device to a land-line. However, the picture is much more complicated than that.

As Dave Michaels pointed out on his blog, Pin Drop Soup, Apple and Google are now competitors. Although Google remains largely a Web-based software company and Apple remains mostly a hardware company, that distinction isn’t enough to keep this bromance alive. Michaels writes: “Well, maybe not a ‘primary’ competitor since Google doesn’t make hardware. But Google does make a browser, a cell phone platform, and an OS – direct alternatives to those made by Apple.”

Historically, Google and Apple have been relatively friendly toward, based on a mutual distrust of Microsoft. Schmidt’s presence on Apple’s board formalized that friendship. But now the companies’ interests are diverging. Google, which makes the bulk of its revenue in online advertising, wants a wireless Internet that is as open as its wired cousin is. Apple, like Microsoft and the majority of wireless service providers, want maintain a market where devices, operating systems, and carriers have a high degree of control over how wireless users access the Internet.

Apple and Google should have seen this split coming. After all, Microsoft is mostly a software company, too, and it has been Apple’s fiercest rival for decades.