August Writing Roundup

Tough getting back to writing, but write we must. August was a pretty light month given I was away for about half of it, but there were a few posts worth sharing for my monthly writing roundup.

I have plenty going on to kickstart my fall, and will be back to my regular volume of writing in no time. With that said, if you didn't catch these posts from last month, now's your chance:

There's Something Bigger than the Internet of Things, Toolbox.com, August 29

Top 10 Risks you take with UC, Part 2, Adtran UC blog, August 28

Five Things We Can Learn From Millennials About Collaboration, UCStrategies, August 27

VoIP's Hidden Value for SMBs, Ziff Davis B2B webinar, August 26 (presentation available upon request)

BadUSB and the Risk of Remote Working, Toolbox.com, August 14

Top 10 Questions to ask UC Vendors, Adtran UC blog, August 7

How VoIP can Transform your Business, Toolbox.com, August 4

Five Things We Can Learn From Millennials About Collaboration

That's the title of my August post for UCStrategies, and if you want to know what the intersection of what collaboration and Millennials looks like, this is a good starting point.

As you may know, I'm a UC Expert with UCS, and it's a great collective of expertise aligned with this space. There are lots of strong voices in our group, and if you don't follow us regularly, I hope this gets you going! My post can be found here, and after that, I urge you poke around and see what else is on tap at UCS.

VoIP's Hidden Value for SMBs - Webinar Reminder, Aug. 26

Been away for the better part of two weeks, and it's time to get back to work! Glad to see lots of registrations for my webinar next week with Ziff Davis B2B. Just wanted to do another reminder if it's not yet on your calendar.

The webinar is at 2pm ET next Tuesday - August 26 - and I hope you can join us. Here's the landing page with the abstract and registration form - it just takes a minute.

Webinar Reminder - VoIP's Hidden Value - August 26

Am in between vacation road trips, so not much blogging right now. Just wanted to keep or get this on your radar before heading out tomorrow.

My next webinar with Ziff Davis B2B is Tuesday, August 26 at 2pm ET. My topic is "VoIP's Hidden Value", and to find out what I mean, you'll have to join us then. Along with my regular writing for ZD, these webinars are always well attended, and I hope you can make it.

Not much else to say other than here's the webinar landing page, and you're just a few short clicks away from being registered.

Is UC Succeeding or Failing?

Now, that's a good topic for discussion, and we did just that on last week's UCStrategies podcast.

It's safe to say that UC hasn't been adopted as expected, and there are lots of good reasons why. Along with my fellow UC Experts, I've written about this often, and the core obstacles remain. There certainly are plenty of success stories, but as the cloud spreads across the entire comms landscape, UC faces new challenges, and things aren't getting easier.

This is definitely a glass half full/half empty discussion, and if you're not sure which way the wind is blowing, you'll want to review the podcast. Blair Pleasant did the moderating, and we all had our say, with mine coming at the 32 minute mark. That's all I have to say now, so it's time to give it a listen - it's posted here on the UCS portal, and as always, your comments are most welcome.

July Writing Roundup

Time for another digest of my latest writing. July was a bit quiet, especially with no conferences, but here's a summary of my top posts that you may have missed and aren't time-sensitive.

Internet of Things - a Twitter Chat  hosted/posted by IT World Canada, July 30

Who Really Benefits from Remote Working  Toolbox.com, July 29

Are you Communicating or Collaborating? Internet Telephony Magazine, July issue

The Race for UC in the Cloud - is Avaya too Late?  UCStrategies, July 24

Five Ways You'll Know VoIP was the Right Decision, Toolbox.com, July 8

Top 10 Clues you Might need Unified Communications  Adtran blog, July 7

Financial Theft and VoIP Security  Toolbox.com, July 2

Internet of Things Twitter Chat - Full Replay Posted Now

As you likely know, I was a panelist on yesterday's twitter chat about the Internet of Things. The session was hosted by IT World Canada, and was ably managed by Candice So and Brian Jackson. I was joined by Laurie Desautels of PwC and Sachin Mahajan of Telus, and our views were nicely complemented by all the participants who chimed in.

I've never done a twitter chat before, and one great thing is that the results can be shared in real time, as well as right after the event. As such, IT World Canada was able to post the full set of tweets over the course of the hour within minutes of it being over. I'm sharing that now with my followers, and I hope you give it a read - here's the link.

I enjoyed the experience, but this was new for me, and it was a real struggle to keep the tweets coming. The posts come in rapid succession, and with TweetDeck some show up right away and others much later, or not at all. So, it's really hard to follow what's going on, and it's easy to miss threads. Since it happens in real time, you have to write quickly, and that's not my style. I hate making typos, but it comes with the territory, and if I had more time to think, I'd probably answer differently.

Then, there's the 140 character thing. IoT/IoE is a rich topic, and you just can't say much in this format. Wearing my biz dev hat - which must always be on - I could say that the strategy is to only say enough to sound wise and then hopefully companies will hire me to get the full set of advice. Well, that is my business, so I would always welcome that, but our main purpose was to create dialog and educate the market about why this is such a hot topic.

I think we did a good job overall, and we had some great dialog. My main caveat is that this format is unmoderated, making it a free-for-all. Spontaneity can be great, but I don't like seeing tweets promoting your work/company interspersed with genuine conversation from people who just want to learn what's going on. Anyhow, social media cuts both ways, and I'm sure you'll get something out of this, and I'd love to hear what you thought of the event.

Last Call - Today's Twitter Chat on the Internet of Things

Just a friendly reminder about this twitter chat at 1pm ET today. I've never done a panel with this format before, but it should be fun.

IT World Canada is the host, and they've outlined 10 questions for the panel. I'll be joined by Sachin Mahajan from Telus M2M and Laurie Desautels from PwC. All the details are in this post, and I hope you can join us.

VoIP's Hidden Value for SMBs - Aug. 26 Webinar

Among other things, I contribute regularly to Ziff Davis B2B and their portals, Toolbox.com and VoIP News. Aside from articles and buyer guides, I do webinars with them to provide more in-depth coverage of topics to help SMBs make better buying decisions.

My next webinar is Tuesday, August 26 at 2pm ET. The title is a bit of a hook, and the hidden value I'll be talking about is two-fold - the rich feature set of VoIP as well as the overall ease of deployment. VoIP isn't a simple matter of snapping your fingers, however, so I'll be looking at both sides of the coin for what lies in store.

The main message, however, is that there's more to VoIP than cost savings, and how it puts you on the path to where communications technology is going instead of where it's been for the past 40 years.

I hope you can join us on the 26th, and all the details for registration are one click away.

The Race for UC in the Cloud - is Avaya too late?

I don't have the definitive answer for that, but yesterday, Avaya announced their "fast track" cloud-based solution for UCC. By now, you should know that UC has morphed into UC&C - UC + Collaboration - making it a more strategic investment. This isn't what the pioneers of UC had in mind, but if that's what drives sales, so be it.

On top of that is the full-steam-ahead push to the cloud for everything, including network infrastructure. I sure hope this works, since almost everyone is now betting heavily on the cloud. I'm sure things will work out in the end, but right now, this is where you have to be to win or keep business - even if the business model isn't all there yet.

Avaya's news - and emphasis on "fast track" - got me thinking more about where UC is going, and that's what my current writeup for UCStrategies is about. I'm not sure if Avaya's "fast track" ultimately refers to them or their customers, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is getting to the cloud now, hopefully before your competitors do.

Just as the cloud is now superceding premise-based deployments, something else could come along a few years from now to supecede the cloud, but let's not go there yet. Instead, please go to the UCStrategies portal now, and I hope my post gives you some food for thought.

Shout-out for our July 30 Twitter Chat on the Internet of Things

Just wanted to keep or get this event on your radar. IT World Canada is the host, and they're doing a great job promoting it so far. There are two updates since I last posted about this:

1. New speaker from Telus M2M - Sachin Mahajan

2. A third speaker has been added: Laurie Desautel from PwC's tech advisory group.

Of course, I say "speaker" loosely since we'll all be tweeting, and I'm too old fashioned to call someone a tweeter.

Should be a great session, and I hope you can join us. For more detail, including all the related twitter handles, I'm going to steer to you to my initial post - it's all there, including the link to the sign up page.

A Twitter Chat on the Internet of Things - Join us, July 30

Well, here's something different. I'm going to be a featured speaker - for lack of a better word - on this upcoming event. It's being hosted by IT World Canada, and they've invited a speaker from TELUS and myself to discuss a series of issues around the hashtag du jour, #IoT. If you blink, that hashtag becomes #IoE - and this itself will be one of the things we'll be covering - the Internet of Things and the Internet of Everything.

Something tells me that before July 30, another concentric circle will be added to this ever-expanding IoX universe. Kinda reminds me of the 2000 Year Old Man routine, when Mel Brooks explains his initial reaction when he discovered God's existence - "you mean there's something bigger than Phil?". Oy.

All schtick aside, this is a big topic, and it needs vendor-neutral attention. There's a lot of hype but a lot of promise as well, and businesses need to be thinking about what IoT/IoE could mean to them sooner than later. Big Data has a lot to do with this, so this means thinking big about new frontiers nobody really has a handle on yet. Should we fear IoT or embrace it? Well, I'm not really sure, so why not tune in and add your own take to things.

Call it what you want - we'll be chatting, tweeting, texting, messaging, discussing, speaking with our keyboards - something to that effect, but it should be interesting. I'll be joined by Greg Stark from the M2M group of TELUS, and here's the landing page for more detail.

If you're into hashtags, you can follow me here: @arnoldjon, and for the event itself, #ITWCIOT. Tweet you there!

Are you Communicating or Collaborating?

That's the title of my current writeup for TMC's flagship Internet Telephony Magazine. As you may know, I write a monthly column there, Rethinking Communications, and I'm always looking to push the envelope on what defines value in our space.

These two words are often used in close proximity, and since the definition of UC is so fluid, I felt it important to examine the differences between communication and collaboration. They are not equivalent activities, but it's easy to see how you  might think that way, especially while hopelessly multi-tasking.

Collaboration means different things to different people -as does communication for that matter - and these will be further explored separately in future columns, but to get the ball rolling, I'll steer you now to my column - and hopefully hear what you think. Isn't that what these ideas are all about?

Multichannel and the Contact Center - join us with Fonolo, July 17

Good things take time to put together, and the good folks at Fonolo are hosting another Google Hangouts session on July 17. As you may know, Fonolo is a Toronto-based vendor that continues to do innovative things in the contact center, and they're great at sharing knowledge and educating the market.

Multichannnel is a pretty disruptive concept that changes the way contact centers operate and how communications technology is becoming so critical to today's customer service experience. What that in mind, our next Hangouts is framed by the title "Top 3 Questions About Multichannel Customer Service".

I think we'll go a bit beyond three questions, and if this is on your mind, you'll definitely want to join us next Thursday, July 17 at 3pm ET. Fonolo's CEO, Shai Berger will do his usual hosting/moderating, and the questions will be handled by a panel of four - Art Rosenberg of The Unified View (and fellow UCStrategies Expert), Keith Dawson of Ovum, Ian Jacobs of Forrester, and myself.

Google Hangouts has its pros and cons, but for sessions like this, it's a great tool, and I hope you can join us. Fonolo has posted all the details here on their blog, and after you register, I hope you spend some time on their site to see some of the cool things they're doing in this space. Canada may have come up short at Wimbledon, but we've got some pretty good tech companies, and I know a few of 'em.

Internet Trends 2014 from Mary Meeker - UC Implications

We had a great podcast last week at UCStrategies, with the focus being our take on Mary Meeker's annual state-of-the-Web address. With over 140 slides, her presentation and video chat was OTT overkill, and you'd need to do a lot of unpacking to digest all of this.

Mary's talk was high level, but with lots of big takeaways on where the Web is going. The purpose of our podcast was to view this through our collective UC lens and share how we see this impacting our space. As our discussion unfolded, it became clear there's a lot of value to the commentary, as we reflected that Mary didn't really provide much analysis to help regular folks make sense of these mega trends. Data dump comes to mind a bit here, so it was a productive exercise for us to filter all this for our audience.

So, if you think Mary Meeker is on the pulse of technology - which I would vote Yes - then you should find our podcast time well spent. The audio file has now been posted to the UCStrategies portal, and links to Mary's slides and talk are included. Dave Michels moderated the session, and if you want to follow specific comments (mine start just shy of the 15 minute mark), there are break points provided so you can find when each of us is talking.

June Writing Roundup

I was on the road a lot last month, so most of my blogging was about industry events. Otherwise, I kept up my steady diet of posts on Ziff Davis B2B, ADTRAN's blog and UC Strategies. For those of you who didn't read absolutely everything I wrote last month (really?), here's a quick digest that will still make for good reading.

Making music with the SIPtones at Interactions 2014, June 27, my blog

New contact center research from Interactive Intelligence, June 24, UCStrategies portal

Why toll fraud isn't your biggest VoIP security concern, June 23, Toolbox.com

Personal video and UC - what are you afraid of?, Part 2, June issue, Internet Telephony Magazine

Top 10 things that will change with UC, June 18, ADTRAN blog

Genband Perspectives 2014 - Takeaways, Tricks, Pix and Throwbacks, June 13, my blog

Should you worry about Blackshades with VoIP?, June 6, Toolbox.com

Interactions 2014 - PureCloud, Millennials, Boulders, Football and the SIPtones!, June 6, my blog

The Rise and Fall of Nortel - Infographic, June 2, Toolbox.com

Changing IT Spending Habits in the UC Space - UCS Podcast

Back to blogging after some time off to take in the Montreal Jazz Festival. First rate all around, and if you like jazz, it's pretty hard to beat.

For bi-nationals like me, we have a small window this week between Canada Day and July 4, so today and tomorrow are the only days that people in the U.S. and Canada will be paying much attention to things like blogs and podcasts, so I'd better do this now!

Last week, the UCStrategies team had a deep-dive podcast looking at the various ways enterprise spending is changing. It's not hard to see how UC fits into that conversation, nor how things like the cloud, BYOD, WebRTC, social media and video - just to name a few - are impacting where/how the money is being spent. This makes the topic equally interesting for buyers and sellers of UC solutions, and it's incredible to see how telephony is increasingly less relevant when budgets are being set.

Marty Parker took the lead moderating this podcast, and we all had our say during the call. The podcast has been posted now on the UCStrategies portal, and you can find my comments around the 8 minute mark. As you'll see on the link, the start times are posted for each contributor in case you just want to hear specific commentary. Give it a listen, and we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Making Music with the SIPtones at Interactions 2014

Most of you know me as an analyst, and I'm not in the habit of putting my personal life on public display. I still get my share of spam, but let's keep this upbeat!

Music is my biggest passion, and I've been playing piano and guitar most of my life. If you follow how my youngest son, Dean, is progressing with his music career, that should give you some clues as to where that's coming from. I can only take some of the credit, though - he's got a real gift, and my job is help him take it to full potential.

He bypassed my guitar playing years ago, but I still love to play, mostly blues, R&B and some jazz. I was really happy to have a chance to do that recently with the SIPtones, who got play a long, two hour set at Indy's top blues bar, the Slippery Noodle.

The gig took place earlier this month during the Interactions 2014 event, held by Interactive Intelligence, a vendor most of you will be familiar with. The SIPtones are all consultants by day, and they've been doing this a while. By night, it's Wayne Sos on bass, Stephen Leaden on drums, Rick Hathaway on saxes, and Mike Moszynski on guitar and harp.

They were nice enough to let me guest on a few numbers, with all but one on keyboard. Towards the end of the night, I comped on guitar while Mike did a Juke-like harp raveup, Off the Wall, including playing on top of the tables in the crowd. Whoo hoo!

Rick is the bandleader, and like all good bandleaders, he documents their gigs. He put together a nine minute highlight reel of the evening, and it's been posted now to YouTube. Unless you're a SIPtones groupie, you'll never find it, so I'm being the brand ambassador here and sharing it with you.

I'm on keyboard off and on throughout the compilation, and while the sound isn't great, I'm easy to spot on the far left of the stage. When comping Mike on guitar, I'm on the far right - that clip is near the end of the video.

Anyhow, watch as much as you like, and please share it with anyone who might enjoy it - or better yet, sign the band to a mega-deal and world tour. Rick is standing by on his SIP phone, and I'll keep practicing to keep the dream alive.  :-)

New Contact Center Research from Interactive Intelligence

Interactive Intelligence is a company I closely follow, and many of us at UCStrategies attended their Interactions 2014 event earlier this month in Indianapolis. The company recently sponsored Wave 2 of their Customer Experience Survey, which is a decent sweep of what makes for a good interaction between customers and the contact center.

There's lots to like about the research, and for this month's UCStrategies writeup, I put together an analysis of three takeaways that are most pertinent to the UC space. I also included a link to the study itself, as there are other findings worth reviewing, but from my end, those will have to wait for another time.

With that, I'll steer you to my post, which is running now on the UCStrategies portal.

Personal Video and UC - "What are You Afraid Of?", Part 2

That's the name of my latest article running now in TMC's Internet Telephony Magazine. My Rethinking Communications column has been featured there for some time, and this writeup builds on Part 1, which ran last month.

We all know about room-based video and immersive telepresence, but personal video opens up new possibilities, both for one-to-one communication, but also the broader spectrum of UC.

The angle I'm exploring in Part 2 is bit more future-forward, as the focus is on the recent acquisition of Viber by Japan-based Rakuten. In the shadow of WhatsApp/Facebook, these types of deals send signals for how the communications market is shifting. Personal video is a distinct opportunity in its own right, but things get even more interesting when texting/messaging is part of the package, suggesting yet another move away from telephony and voice-based communication.

Nobody has quite figured this out yet, but when big companies get involved in acquisitions like this, the UC community needs to pay attention. Disruption seems to invariably come from outside the circle of usual suspects, and my view is that the Viber deal will filter up - or down - to the UC ecosystem sooner than later.

I'll leave it at that, and now it's time to steer you to the article. Also - to do this right, make sure you read Part 1 first if you haven't done so already. Then let me know what you think - deal?