JAA'S Analyst Blog - Current Posts

Since the relaunch, JAA's traffic has been really growing, as is our following, and your support is greatly appreciated! For those who have signed up for the blog via RSS, we hope you continue following, and sharing with others is also appreciated.

You should also know that the majority of JAA's thought leadership is published on sites other than this blog, and the best way to follow my broader coverage is to subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

A short note for navigating this section - scroll below for the most recent posts, and then for more, click on the Blog Archive box, where you can view all of my posts, going back to the beginning in March 2005.

November 01, 2016

September/October Writing Roundup

November 01, 2016/ Jon Arnold

Been a very busy stretch lately, and for some reason, I missed my writing roundup for September. It's a while ago at this point, but there are still some posts you may find of interest if you didn't see them. If you follow me, you'll know most of my posts aren't super time-sensitive.

My focus is more on industry-based trends, and very little on breaking news. I just don't move that fast, and it's surprising how many requests I get from PR reps who think that's what I do. Enough about that - here are the highlights of my writing over the past two months, and I hope you find some things here that you like.

Making Sense of the Messaging Landscape, my blog, Oct. 31

Getting the Message About Messaging, UCStrategies, Oct. 25

How VoIP Facilitates Collaboration - it's Real Time, Toolbox.com, Oct. 18

What Collaboration Features are Essential for my Organization? TechTarget, Oct. 12

The Case for Private Cloud When Considering Hosted Solutions, my blog, Oct. 10

External Collaboration Scenarios that Drive UC, Part 2, Toolbox.com, Oct. 10

My Q&A with Jeff Pulver - MoNage and the Emerging Messaging Opportunity, my blog, Oct. 7

Video Meeting Gateway - Bridging the Islands of Video, my blog, Oct. 3

What Digital Natives will NOT do when Collaborating, Toolbox.com, Sept. 28

"This is Craziness" - my Takeaways from Jeff Pulver's MoNage Event, UCStrategies, Sept. 28

How Digital Immigrants Collaborate, Toolbox.com, Sept. 19

My Video Interview with System Integrator SPS About Collaboration, my blog, Sept. 12

Impact of Disruption on UC Vendors and Providers, Toolbox.com, Sept. 8

Why aren't you using Video?, Internet Telephony Magazine, Sept. 6

October 31, 2016

Making Sense of the Messaging Landscape

October 31, 2016/ Jon Arnold

Messaging continues to carry a lot of momentum, especially in the UC&C space, and the more research you do, new avenues open up that you hadn’t considered before. If it’s a lot for analysts to follow, it’s also a lot for decision-makers to follow, but it’s our job to provide perspective, and I’ll try to add some here.

The cloud is impacting every link in the value chain, and while it’s broadening the scope for what falls under the collaboration umbrella, it has also created entrees for new providers that businesses hadn’t previously considered. To some extent this is being driven by a concurrent trend, namely the rise of Millennials. They’re not the decision-makers yet – although that will change over the next few years, so be ready! – but their communications preferences go hand-in-glove with what the cloud is enabling.

This generation is leading an unprecedented shift from voice-centric to text-centric communication, and that has a lot to do with why messaging is so hot right now. They are adapting to new technology faster than their employers or the companies they buy from, and that’s presenting some major challenges.

While all this disruption is exciting, it’s getting a lot harder for businesses to both define their needs and to evaluate the offerings. I come across all kinds of vendors, carriers and software companies with a variety of UC&C solutions, and keeping up isn’t easy. My research is ongoing, and building on this preamble, I’m going to briefly highlight in this post three very different messaging offerings. While they all support the same messaging channels - including SMS, MMS, Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, etc. – their offerings and competencies are distinct, and collectively, they show just how diverse this space has become in a short period of time.

All of these companies have solid value propositions, but they address very different collaboration challenges. That’s why it’s so important to define your needs first. When I wear my strategic advisory hat, this is the first thing I emphasize – until you clearly define the problem set, you won’t know when you have the right solution. This isn’t about technology – it’s about understanding where and how collaboration drives business value, and making sure your people have the tools they need.

With that said, let’s look at three companies, listed in alphabetical order – Nexmo, Twilio and WEBTEXT. They have each taken a distinct path to the global enterprise messaging market, and represent just a few markers along the UC&C spectrum. I urge you to consider this a starting point for further research, not just on these companies but across the rest of the spectrum. I’ll continue doing my part as my research brings me to other companies, and welcome your thoughts on whom to focus on next.

Nexmo

What really put Nexmo on the UC&C radar was being acquired by Vonage earlier this year. At the time, this was just the latest in a string of pickups that saw UC players take on messaging players to ensure their portfolios had a CPaaS offering. Whether through acquisition or in-house development, most of the leading UC players now have this, firmly validating messaging as a must-have modality for communication and/or collaboration.

In short, the big driver for CPaaS is how UC&C is becoming very user-driven. Vendors can no longer dictate the rules of the game, and instead must offer flexible, customized applications. Rather than UC being the end product, CPaaS allows communications applications to be embedded or integrated with other business-level functions, and that’s a very different use case for these technologies.

This gives rise to new forms of business value, and with Millennials being text-centric, UC&C players have been scrambling to acquire messaging platforms, which is exactly what Vonage did with Nexmo. Not only was this necessary to stay competitive with other UC players branching out into CPaaS, but also to defend against pure play messaging players like Twilio who are ready now to enter the broader UC&C space and truly disrupt the status quo. More on that shortly.

What you need to know about Nexmo is that their roots are in SMS, so their messaging DNA is very strong. They recently developed a voice API, which can be used for things like building IVR menus on the go for ad hoc collaboration and customer engagement. While their messaging business is strong, Vonage brings a lot of leverage in the business market that a pure play simply doesn’t have.

The main thing is that by running over Vonage’s network, Nexmo’s voice APIs will have a quality of service that OTT-based competitors cannot match. Another network-related benefit that’s based on economies of scale is having both low cost SMS pricing, and per-second billing instead of per-minute billing, which can be a differentiator for high volume customers. Furthermore, Vonage has a large and growing installed base of business customers, so there’s a built-in market for Nexmo to expand their footprint right from the start.

In terms of the bigger picture, I’m featuring Nexmo in this post because they represent a hybrid solution under the Vonage banner. Both businesses are focused on the cloud now, and together there’s a very compelling offering that covers all the bases. Vonage brings the UCaaS piece, which addresses internal UC&C needs, whereas Nexmo’s CPaaS capabilities are more customer-facing. This would make Vonage/Nexmo a solid choice when looking for an end-to-end, integrated solution that covers the full gamut of UC&C.

Twilio

Like Nexmo, Twilio comes from the consumer space, and the success of their recent IPO says a lot about what Wall Street thinks about the messaging opportunity. If you have any doubt about that, feel free to review this very recent – and very long – presentation by tech strategist Michael Wolf, given at the WSJ’s global tech conference. While most of his focus on messaging is consumer-related, the impact on branding and customer care certainly has implications for the contact center.

Furthermore, I echo his view that as messaging becomes a preferred mode in the enterprise, existing UC&C players could be vulnerable. Another wildcard in all this is chatbots, which takes messaging into entirely new realms such as search, AI, workflows, e-commerce, etc. There’s definitely a lot at stake here, and this is what makes companies like Twilio so important to follow.

Whether Twilio will be successful in the enterprise market remains to be seen, but right now, they are too disruptive to ignore. It’s possible that Twilio could Uberize the UC&C space by making messaging so compelling and so user-driven, that other modes drop on the depth chart to the point where creative destruction sets in and new business models emerge.

I don’t think that will happen since integrating with other modes – especially real-time – is harder to do than it looks, and the established UC players will respond accordingly to protect what they have. From what I can tell, actually, Twilio may be disruptive, but they’re not really out to reinvent UC&C in their image. That’s a very hard road to hoe, and their vision is more along the lines of helping businesses work with what they already have, but to help them communicate more effectively.

As with the Slacks of the workstream world, Twilio emerged because they didn’t feel existing communications applications could properly serve the needs of today’s workers – and consumers. They responded in the same manner by creating their own platform based on today’s technologies – primarily cloud and Web-centric – and that is very developer-friendly.

This is a big reason why it’s hard to gauge where Twilio fits in the UC&C universe. They don’t have a pedigree in telephony, or mobility, or hardware, or customer care. They certainly are a software company, but the critical mass comes from having a platform that developers want to build around.

In this regard they are a pure play, not just for messaging or voice, but for having a developer-friendly platform that can drive constant innovation. They claim to have over one million developers on their platform, and as messaging comes of age, Twilio may well be the company that sets the bar for all to follow.

Whereas Nexmo is more of a carrier play by virtue of going to market with Vonage, Twilio is an enterprise play when it comes to UC&C. Businesses will deploy Twilio where they want to use messaging to improve communication on their own terms. A real strength of Twilio is its horizontal nature, where it’s adaptable to a wide range of use cases. This flexibility makes the platform a Swiss Army knife in that enterprises can use it wherever the needs are greatest.

The contact center is a prime example, where messaging – as well as voice and video - can be integrated with CRM or mobile customer care. Being cloud-based, their platform is a very scalable solution that will appeal to enterprises looking to virtualize their contact center.

That said, Twilio would be used in accordance with existing platforms, so the onus falls on IT to make these integrations work, and to have a vision for where messaging be can used in new ways. As such, the value comes from how enterprises deploy Twilio with other things, rather than using it as a standalone solution, either inside the office or the contact center. This means that Twilio should not be viewed as a UC&C solution, but rather how their platform can enrich what you’re using now.

The challenge comes for multivendor environments where Twilio doesn’t yet have deep integrations with specific vendors. For enterprises heavily invested in these vendors, Twilio will have less value than scenarios where there’s a higher comfort level with other approaches, or a frustration that the big vendors aren’t flexible or responsive enough to meet their changing needs.

WEBTEXT

Now I want to go from perhaps the best-known name in messaging to one that you may not yet have heard of. I’m focusing on this company because they are an enterprise messaging pure play, something that neither of the above companies can claim. Nexmo and Twilio do things other than messaging, but since this post is about the state of messaging, I want to draw attention to companies that are all-in. Furthermore, with messaging getting hot now, there are lots of smaller players and startups out there, so WEBTEXT is here to make sure you don’t overlook what’s happening at this end of the market.

WEBTEXT is noteworthy not just for being solely focused on messaging, but also with a core focus on the contact center. They do support other forms of messaging, but the broader context for this post is UC&C, and by now it should be clear that the contact center is a major opportunity for messaging players. Nowhere is the disconnect greater between changing communications expectations among customers and what businesses are able to support, and this is the sweet spot for WEBTEXT.

With customer care being a top priority for management these days, they are coming to understand what’s at stake when customers try to communicate with messaging, and their contact center is handcuffed because they don’t have the right tools. Consumer technology has simply changed faster than their ability to adapt, and this is compounded by the fact that the incumbent vendors haven’t changed fast enough either.

This is exactly the void that WEBTEXT addresses on three levels. First, they have correctly identified messaging as the key channel that’s driving customer engagement, at least among digital natives. This trend is accelerating, and as IoT and chatbots start to reshape the customer journey, messaging will be at the heart of all this constant communication.

Second, their go to market strategy. They recognized a shortcoming among the major vendors in terms of integrating UC with the contact center. There is a growing need for these spaces to work more closely together, and unlike Nexmo and Twilio, that offer voice along with messaging in an attempt to disrupt the major UC vendors, WEBTEXT has avoided voice and instead partnered with the market leaders.

Rather than aiming to provide full integration for the entire UC suite across these spaces – where the value is yet to be proven – WEBTEXT has focused solely on the messaging piece, which itself has plenty of integration challenges. As per the overall tenor of this post, text is the most pressing need in terms of what’s missing in customer care, and that’s the pain point they are addressing.

As a result, they are today the only messaging CPaaS platform that integrates with every Cisco and Avaya contact center, Genesys, as well as Oracle and Salesforce service cloud. For example, the native messaging capabilities for Cisco Spark do not integrate with Cisco’s contact center offerings, and the same holds for Avaya with Zang and their contact center portfolio.

Third, these vendor relationships allow WEBTEXT to offer plug and play vendor API’s that enable contact centers to painlessly deploy messaging. With WEBTEXT, for example, contact centers using these platforms can allow agents to initiate messaging with customers to their mobile phones from the desktop. Agents can also switch to text while on a voice call, giving the customer choice on the fly for how they want to communicate. Another use case would be to allow customers to move out of an IVR queue and start a messaging-based chat session.

In this regard, WEBTEXT is really a vertical solution, since they have deep integrations with the leading contact center vendors as well as the leading messaging platforms/services. This approach makes WEBTEXT distinct from Nexmo and Twilio, and that’s why I’m featuring them in my analysis. Like voice, messaging is complex territory, and having completed the aforementioned integrations – with others coming - WEBTEXT should be seen more as a logical CPaaS partner for both vendors and carriers, rather than a direct competitor, which is more like how these other two companies are being positioned.

October 10, 2016

The Case for Private Cloud When Considering Hosted Solutions

October 10, 2016/ Jon Arnold

In the collaboration space, cloud has become a very strong trend, but like a lot of game-changing innovations, taking things at face value isn’t such a good idea. Vendors can’t seem to move their UC solutions to the cloud fast enough, and service providers are jumping into the game to compete with them via white labeled hosted offerings. IT has never before faced such a range of choices for something that in earlier times was basically a commodity – phone systems – but is today becoming a highly strategic decision.

I write about cloud regularly, and being an analyst, will look for balance as a matter of course. There are virtues for both premise-based and cloud-based forms of UC, and this time around I’m going to focus on a particular variation of cloud that doesn’t seem to get enough attention these days, namely private cloud.

People often talk about “cloud” in ubiquitous terms, as if it’s been around forever and its dominance over premise-based models is inevitable. Perhaps we’ll get to an all-cloud world someday, but what I and others see in the market is a slower-than-expected takeover. For enterprises in particular, there’s strong interest in cloud, but the favored model has been hybrid, where some elements remain onsite with others being hosted. In time, they may well go all-cloud, but IT will need to ease into it.

The reasons behind that thinking require a separate analysis, but here, my focus is on the growth opportunity I’m seeing with private cloud. Public cloud gets most of the attention, mainly because the big players are so well known – AWS, Azure, Google, Rackspace, etc. – and have the economies of scale to dominate the market. That said, it’s still early days for cloud – especially in the communications space – and IT decision makers are trying to understand where it fits for their needs as well as where the true business value lies.

No doubt, the cost efficiencies and on-demand scalability make public cloud very appealing, but as enterprises consider pushing applications offsite, some realities start to become apparent. One issue is not knowing where your data actually resides once it’s in the cloud; which can be problematic for industry-specific compliance around security. Perhaps more important is losing a sense of privacy when your data is being managed on a multi-tenant platform, shared among other hosted clients – sometimes even your competitors.

Another consideration is the simple fact that having applications hosted in the cloud doesn’t take the problem completely off of IT’s plate. They still have to manage the applications going forward, plus to get this in place effort is required to migrate legacy and premise-based applications off-prem into a cloud environment. All indications tell me this is easier said than done, serving as a deterrent for some companies to using the cloud.

On a more operational level, IT gives up control over company data – which will be the case with any form of outsourcing – and that can limit their ability to customize applications. This is becoming increasingly important for two reasons. First, IT will have customization needs for applications that will be used by everyone company-wide. Second, each line of business will have similar needs that are specific just for their domain. The more extensive these customization needs are, the more challenging a public cloud deployment will turn out to be.

For many companies, the positives about public cloud outweigh these concerns, and clearly this model is gaining traction. However, there is more to the story, and that’s where private cloud comes into the picture. I’m not alone in saying there is a lot of misunderstanding, not just about the cloud concept in general, but also about the various deployment options, namely public, private and hybrid.

When it comes to addressing the above issues, private cloud has a lot to offer. Of course, the cost is higher, as would be anything that’s private instead of public. Every scenario is different, but let me break down some specific use cases where private cloud is a good option, especially for collaboration.

· In cases where the complexity of moving to the cloud in general is a holdback, private cloud overcomes this. When IT doesn’t know what to do to make a cloud transition, they’ll just move on to other priorities that can be addressed right away in order to keep the line moving. Most public clouds are in the business of hosting on a large scale, and otherwise, there’s a lot of DIY as well as BYOA that falls to IT. To overcome this obstacle, private cloud providers can offer onboarding capabilities to make this process easier, and in some cases possible.

· For collaboration in particular, solutions are constantly evolving, with new applications/integrations coming on a regular basis. This translates into an ongoing form of customization, and that’s not what public clouds are really built for. Their ideal customer has a static application where the drivers are low cost hosting and scalability to serve a large user base. In many ways, private clouds offer more control and easier ways to customize platforms. A great example would be enterprises that want to have cloud-based platforms for both UC and contact center. Not only will each platform need to add new applications, but there’s a growing trend for integrating them so employees and agents can share a common directory. These requirements can be complex, but will be much easier to do in a private cloud, especially with a provider that has domain expertise to help IT along the way.

· Within enterprises, another important development is how LOB managers are increasingly undertaking their own initiatives independent of IT. This is becoming more common for business applications like ERP or Dynamics where the LOB wants flexibility and control as well as data security. As they get further along with UC and start realizing its business value, LOBs will want to do the same here. For whatever reason, when LOBs can’t get what they need from IT on this front, the cloud speaks loudly, and running their own cloud infrastructure is the best solution. Since the LOB is funding it, they will determine the right model, and if they feel these applications are too strategic to be housed in a public cloud, going with a private cloud provider will be the right choice.

· Vertical markets provide great use cases, with finance and healthcare being prime examples. Both are highly regulated, and private cloud makes compliance easier, especially around data sovereignty. Supporting multi-site operations is a common need for both, and when it comes to making universal changes across locations, private cloud provides IT with a lot of control and flexibility. Security is another consideration along these lines, whether it be protecting mobile payments or EMRs. On the collaboration front, private cloud makes it easier to implement and support new applications that bring true business value. FinTech is coming into its own now, and UC has a big role to play, especially for customer-facing communication. Healthcare is just as promising, especially telehealth, where there are major benefits to come both for providers and patients, as technology makes care more accessible.

There’s more to consider with private cloud, and as my research continues, I’ll have more to share. At this point, however, I’ll conclude by noting one company from my briefings. That would be Breakthrough Technology Group, a private cloud provider that is very much on the pulse of what IT decision-makers really need. Two things about BTG stand out in terms of what enterprises should be looking for in a private cloud partner.

First would be BTG’s overall capabilities in terms of hosted infrastructure, and that’s self-evident even based on a cursory review of their offerings. Marketed as Adaptable Cloud Services, their model checks many of the boxes cited herein, especially around supporting the needs of both IT for company-wide applications, as well as LOBs for their specific operational needs.

The second item would be their ability to support mid-market IT needs, especially for vertical market scenarios. Whereas large enterprises can afford private cloud as a matter of course, and SMBs will favor more economical public cloud solutions, providers like BTG have developed an attractive value proposition for the mid-market. While their architecture is built to support enterprise-grade requirements, SaaS solutions like UC, CRM, etc. can be scaled to the mid-market with cost-effective licensing that also allows for extensive customization.

Over the course of my research, I’m seeing that this is a difficult balance to strike, but if providers like BTG can do it, then mid-market IT decision makers should expect it. If that’s not your expectation, then you’ve set the bar too low for private cloud. Hopefully my post here will help change your thinking, especially if you’ve only been considering public cloud to this point.

October 07, 2016

My Q&A with Jeff Pulver - MoNage and the Emerging Messaging Opportunity

October 07, 2016/ Jon Arnold

I recently attended and spoke at Jeff Pulver's new event, MoNage - Messaging on the Net. It was a great window to explore where messaging is going and how it's impacting the broader communications space. I wrote my takeaways about MoNage here, and during the event, I spent some time with Jeff talking about his vision for messaging. We loosely followed my Q&A outline, and I've pulled it all together, with the output being the following interview format. I hope you enjoy it, and comments are welcome.

It’s great to reconnect with you Jeff, and a lot has happened since VON’s heyday. We’ll come back to that, but let’s fast forward to 2016 and your current event, MoNage. Let’s start with a basic overview of MoNage, as well as your broader vision behind it.

VON was really part of a communications continuum, and we’re still on it. In VoIP’s early days, I took a protocol, and built a community that turned it into an industry. It wasn’t just about a new technology – it attracted investors, dreamers, builders, etc.

Eight years later, we’re picking it up again. We’re still moving along the communications continuum, and the next big thing is the shift in how we communicate. It’s no longer a voice-based world like we had in the times of VON. Rather, it’s now about messaging. Not IRC or BBS either. Those modes are old – we had ways to do messaging back then – but it’s different now. Back then, messaging was community driven and it wasn’t for everyone – just a core of enthusiasts who liked communicating this way amongst themselves.

Then SMS came along – carriers started charging, and it became a big business. Just as what happened with VoIP and how it displaced TDM, innovators got into free IP-based messaging and disrupted the SMS space. Think back to email, which showed us what was possible with the Net as a transport medium for communications. It replaced the office memo, and revolutionized how we communicate. The communications space is a two trillion dollar market – and we continue to see new IP-based applications come along that want to take a piece of everything. Messaging is the latest variation, and it won’t be the last.

My view is that MoNage has a role to play in the success of this new opportunity, and is driven by the same principals I applied with VON when VoIP was disruptive. Basically, to support an emerging ecosystem – in this case around messaging - you need to have what I call the “5 C’s”; content, context, community, commerce, and communication. That’s an ecosystem, and that’s what I’m trying to support with MoNage.

No doubt messaging is a major trend in communications, and is arguably as disruptive as VoIP was a decade or so ago. Why do you think this is happening?

With VoIP, once it reached a certain point of market acceptance, Verizon told me that “you won”. This truly validated everything that I and others believed in, and now Verizon is a data company. Today, there’s no question that they’re in the data and the content business, and not the voice business. This is where the Pulver Order truly changed the face of communications. Before that, the incumbents had enough power to maintain the status quo and keep innovation out of the picture. The Pulver Order opened things up and created an environment to nurture VoIP innovation and a platform for disruptors. That same platform has been adopted across the entire telecom industry, which they now use for their benefit.

This is where Vonage really changed the game. Once they demonstrated how VoIP could be commercially viable, this validated the broader opportunity for all telcos to enter IP space and offer digital phone service. And that’s exactly what they’ve done, and the demise of the PSTN is no longer a matter of if, but of when.

Now, with messaging, we’re at the early stages of “purple messages” – things you could never do before. This is a 2016 version of my version of “purple minutes”, which I used to describe the enhanced and added value features of VoIP to elevate it beyond the limitations of TDM. This is the kind of disruption I’m envisioning with today’s messaging. Initially, it was just about delivering messages, with no intelligence or connection to anything else.

Now, messaging has context, and more is coming. It’s no longer something like ICQ or IRC – it’s mainstream and not just for geeks. For example, when messaging can drive commerce, it brings communities together, and it grows. That’s what I see unfolding now, and for me, MoNage is the age of messaging on the Net. Why now? Again, it’s the continuum – we lived through the age of VoIP, and now it’s been successfully commercialized. VoIP really isn’t disruptive any more, but I think messaging is going to have a similar impact, if not more.

Now, the continuum is about the messaging platform, and MoNage is trying to help drive what happens next. There are lots of developers doing chatbots, and it would be great if we can help standardize their work. They have a common interest to affect change and we can provide a voice to do that. The developer community is drawn to messaging because the opportunities are new and disruptive. Voice and video are so mainstream now, and that’s not interesting for them.

So, what will make messaging disruptive, and who do you see as the winners and losers?

For starters, the scope is broad. Just think about all the various messaging scenarios - one to one, many to many, many to one, one to many. Now layer IoT on top of that. IoT is a big part of what’s coming – look at how quickly things like Fitbit and Uber have gained mass adoption, and how central messaging is to their value propositions.

Then we have to look at all forms of communication and how messaging impacts each. Email is over – long live email, but it’s just not what people rely on now when they need to get things done. When all of that is considered, MoNage will help redefine who will be in the communications business. The advent of IP has shifted so many things around, and the communications landscape looks very different today.

There are many new types of service providers out there and they all provide value. Is Slack a communications provider? I think so. None of the major messaging players are owned by phone companies – at least not yet. When Facebook reaches two billion subs, it becomes way bigger than any telco – bigger and more powerful than AT&T ever was.

Think about that and all the implications when messaging displaces voice as the preferred mode of communication. Will there be regulatory issues? No doubt. Can Facebook influence the upcoming election? After all, they know a lot about their users and have the means to shape their preferences. Are they too powerful? Are they evil? Should they be anti-trusted? When one entity has this much sway over the world’s population, these questions come to mind. Will people rebel? You know, Mark Zuckerberg was at VON in 2004. Maybe he learned something from how he saw the way VoIP was disrupting telephony.

Millennials are certainly a big part of the story here, and their preference for short-form, text-based communication is very different from the conventional modes of voice and email that have dominated the enterprise space for so long. How you see things unfolding with them?

Currently, they’re 35% of today’s consumers. Millennial-speak will proliferate, and that means a big shift from voice to text. However, it won’t change the boomers, as their preferences are too hard-wired. This represents a big generation gap, as Millennials are the first generation born into the Web – it’s the only world they’ve ever known. So, be careful what you weave, and you’ll reap the products you sow.

They are also the unexpected consequences of the Web – a generation that is very much technology-defined. Beyond them, I see something else coming up – the iPad generation. For them, it’s all about their mobile devices – “pinch the glass” – that’s how they engage to communicate and consume content. I think they’ll be even more demanding than Millennials. Voice becomes old school for them – they talk face to face – but for everything else, it’s messaging and mobility.

To wrap up, Jeff, what’s your crystal ball view and the future you want us to explore at MoNage?

I’d say the big thing will be to develop a messaging value proposition – something that really has value for end users, but can also be sustained with a business model to keep innovation happening. We don’t know the impact of this generation yet, and we’ll probably be wrong based on what we think will unfold.

Basically, we need to explore the future together – open the door, share, engage, listen and see what we need. Filters will evolve, though, as we all have to discover boundaries for using messaging in beneficial rather than detrimental ways. There’s a lot we’re going to learn – so, things like cloud-based services to monitor our health are good. Using similar services to steal our identities or spew hate are not so good.

The same forces will apply for us at work – IoT can be good that way. There’s a bad side too, as employees will have less privacy, and will be monitored all the time. What we used to think of as sci-fi will soon become real-fi, and there’s probably no going back.

October 03, 2016

Video Meeting Gateway - Bridging the Islands of Video

October 03, 2016/ Jon Arnold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 28, 2016

"This is Craziness" - My Takeaways from Jeff Pulver's MoNage Event

September 28, 2016/ Jon Arnold

Last week I was in my hometown of Boston for MoNage - Messaging on the Net. This is Jeff Pulver's latest conference and marks his return to the communications space I follow since moving on from VoIP many years ago.

I have a long history with Jeff, and it's great to see him back, plus I was very pleased to be included to speak on two panel sessions. Messaging is poised to become a disruptive force in the business world, and I see it very much being a double-edged sword.

MoNage was a lively forum to explore all this, and my takeaways have been summarized in my current writeup for UCStrategies. It's posted now on the portal, and I think you'll find it a good read. As always, both comments and sharing are welcome!

September 13, 2016

Am Speaking at MoNage Next Week - Jeff Pulver's New Event

September 13, 2016/ Jon Arnold

If you've been around long enough, you'll remember VON - Voice on the Net - a conference that defined the VoIP/IP comms space in its early days when it was truly disruptive. Much has changed, and Jeff Pulver continues to explore how technology is changing our lives. Ten years ago, it was all about voice, but today it's all about messaging for Jeff, and that brings us to MoNage - Messaging on the Net.

I have a long history with Jeff - as many of us do - and am very glad to see him back in our space, and also glad to be part of next week's event. MoNage is running from September 20-22 in Boston, and many of us from the VON days will be there. I'll be speaking on a panel session about enterprise messaging, moderated by my good friend, Chris Fine. We'll be joined by Ross Daniels of Cisco, and Lawrence Miller of Symphony.

Our session runs at 10am on Tuesday on the main stage, and if you're there I hope you can join us.

Just today, I've been added to a second session, and if you scroll down further on the above link, I'll be joining Alan Duric on his 4pm session that day, titled End to End Messaging.

Otherwise, it's not too late to register and make your way to the Boston Public Library. I'll be there first thing Tuesday and will blog/tweet as time allows.

As a coda, I'm currently working on a Q&A interview with Jeff Pulver, and will post that as soon as it's ready.

September 01, 2016

August Writing Roundup

September 01, 2016/ Jon Arnold

Pretty light month on the writing front, but hey, it's August, and after getting through some bigger projects, I need to focus on my Fall pipeline for new business. Have also been busy on two other fronts.

First is adding the back end to my updated website/blog, so I've been compiling a lot of content that will be posted soon. Once that's done I'll have a formal launch, hopefully by mid-September.

The other front is researching and writing for upcoming conferences. For the next three events, I'm either presenting or speaking, and it was great to have time to do a lot of the prep work over August.

That said, here's what I'd like to share as writing highlights from August.

UC Implications from Dialpad's New Study about Anywhere Workers, UCStrategies, Aug. 30

How Should Mobile-First Apps fit our UC Strategy?, TechTarget, Aug. 29

How Market Disruptions Impact UC Buying Decisions, Toolbox.com, Aug. 24

Why You Should Consider Integrating Contact Center with UC, Toolbox.com, Aug. 19

The Parallel Worlds of UC and the Contact Center, Toolbox.com, Aug. 16

Why Are We Still Working in Offices?, Internet Telephony Magazine, Aug. 11

N ew Ways to Look at UC and the Contact Center, Toolbox.com, Aug. 9

Three Key Questions for a Successful Hybrid UC Deployment, TechTarget, Aug. 8

Three Reasons Not to Partner with a Vendor for UC, Toolbox.com, Aug. 1

August 30, 2016

Dialpad's New Study About Anywhere Workers - UC Implications

August 30, 2016/ Jon Arnold

As a UC Expert with UCStrategies, I contribute a monthly writeup to help keep our content fresh. Regular followers will know that I've been part of this group for years, and our BC Summit is coming soon! Stay tuned for updates on that, along with what I'll be speaking about there.

For my current contribution, I wanted to draw attention to a recent study commissioned by Dialpad, a company that knows a few things about disruption and innovation. I like where they're going with CPaaS, and that's at the heart of what's been shaking up the UC space lately.

The research has some pretty interesting findings, and while nothing is all that surprising, when you tie them together, the broader themes validate some of the challenges UC players are struggling with. From that, I see some opportunities as well, and that's my cue to steer you now to my analysis. I hope you give it a read, and as always, comments and sharing are welcome.