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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.
That's the title of my latest guest post to the RingCentral blog. There's a good chance you don't follow it, and I'm just one of many third party contributors, so it's good resource for current trends in UC and customer care. I hope you give my post a read, and from there, I'm sure you'll find other posts of interest as well.
That's the title of the session I'll be speaking on at next week's Monage conference in San Jose. Joining me will be Chris Fine, where we'll reprise the topic from last fall's inaugural Monage in Boston. Here's the full event schedule, and if you scroll down the page to Thursday, you'll see our session is scheduled for 11am.
More importantly, it's not too late to attend, and if you're still deciding, you should explore the Monage website, especially the impressive speaker roster, and the YouTube clip on the home page with Jeff Pulver giving his personal pitch to come, as only Jeff can! It's great, and if you follow him on Facebook, he's got a new clip there you won't want to miss.
Based on what I see in the ever-changing collaboration market, I think it's a fair question. My reasons and perspectives are shared in my latest column posted now on No Jitter.
In short, the underlying technology is important when making these acquisitions, but given how quickly things evolve these days, nobody nails it going in, and other factors will ultimately dictate success.
My view is that this is more about going with a strategy that works in this market, and my analysis looks at two paths - being a disruptor or an innovator. If you give it a read, you'll know what I think, and then I'd love to hear what you think.
Just one more post as a reminder about my webinar tomorrow at 2pm ET.
This is my latest Ziff Davis webinar, and the title is self-explanatory. If you want to learn more about how Gen Z is different from Gen Y, and how businesses need to think about collaboration with them, then you'll want to join me. More info is here on the registration page.
I've had a steady run of webinars lately, and my next one is coming up fast - next Wednesday at 2pm ET. The title is self-explanatory, and the topic builds on a series of posts I wrote recently for Ziff Davis on the emerging demographic, Generation Z.
They're on the cusp of entering the workplace, and in terms of collaboration, they won't be doing things exactly like their predecessors, Millennials. Am looking forward to sharing my perspectives on the webinar, and hope you can make it - all the details are here on the registration page.
I just wanted to do a quick shout-out for the second Monage event, coming in a few weeks out in San Jose. The inaugural event was in Boston last fall, and marked Jeff Pulver's return to show biz in our space. I spoke there and will be speaking again in San Jose. For reference, here's my "This is Craziness" post about the event, and here's my Q&A interview with Jeff.
If this is new for you, "Monage" is Messaging on the Net, aka the age of messaging. Of course, this is a play on VON, Jeff's claim to fame, but now the focus has shifted from voice to messaging. I'll have more to say about Monage soon, and for now, I just want to get it on your radar.
If you're looking for a next step, please explore the Monage website, but before that, Jeff's personal pitch below will be a minute of your life very well spent.
https://youtu.be/k4ev0IwVAxQ
Most industry events I attend are with larger companies, and it's great to see how smaller players go to market, especially those who are fairly new and not that well-known. That's what was on tap last week at the CafeX event in San Antonio.
Contact center has been their core focus since starting up in late 2013, and while that remains core, they are doing a strong pivot to video-based collaboration. This move follows recent rounds of Series B and Series C funding, from which Vayyoo was acquired. They've also used that money to build out their partner and channel ecosystems, most notably with Microsoft for Dynamics, and on the distribution front, agreements with Rakuten and Itochu.
CEO Rami Musallam walked us through their progress report, and it's great to see what young companies do at this stage of their growth cycle. The technology seems solid and they're certainly trying to push the envelope to become the "collaboration core" that covers workflows, productivity, CRM and customer engagement.
They're chasing a big slice of the pie - or several pies - for collaboration/communication, and they have the requisite sense of clear purpose and confidence to win. I could definitely feel that vibe in the room, and as is often the case, success will depend less on technology, and more on go-to-market execution and building up mindshare.
Of course, that's why we were there, and Rami updated us on an impressive roster of both customers and partners - not to be shared - along with solid YoY growth rates and gross margins. So traction is happening, and they're getting their share of industry recognition/awards.
Now, they just need to get better known, so much of 2016 was spent on branding CafeX, and more recently, ramping up their collaboration suite that has come out of Vayyoo, Chime. While we didn't get a breakdown on revenues by lines of business, it's pretty clear that much is expected from Chime. We got an extensive briefing on the three flavors, Chime Spaces, Chime Meetings and justchimein.com - respectively for "objective-driven collaboration", "pervasive collaboration", and "cloud-based meetings for anyone".
I wasn't alone in wondering about the difference between "objective-driven" and "pervasive" collaboration, and we had some spirited discussion about that. Let's just say if we can't figure out, then the market won't either, and it was conceded they have some work to do here. They don't have the luxury of walking before running, and I would cite this as a typical example of a tech-heavy company that hasn't quite refined the value proposition, along with the core marketing messaging. We saw some very compelling use cases, so they know the problems, and seem to have the right solutions, but as you know, this sure is a crowded space.
That's really my main takeaway, because at a high level, we don't really hear much different with Cisco Spark, Skype for Business, and the barrage of updates from the recent Avaya Engage event. To varying degrees, they all do similar things, and while Chime does have some points of difference - especially in working across all browser environments - it's going to be an ongoing challenge to break through.
Speaking of breaking through, nothing underscores the challenges of a small company trying to make its mark more than a much bigger one stepping on their toes. "That AWS thing" cast a shadow over the event, as Amazon had just launched their collaboration suite, also called Chime. Hmm. While CafeX seems confident that their legal response will carry the day - and really, it should - the timing isn't good.
We may never know how this came to be, and whether AWS is just imposing its will - even though CafeX clearly has a better offering. Perhaps AWS will cease and desist, but maybe not and this will become a war of attrition that CafeX can never win. Or maybe AWS just buys CafeX and makes the problem go away. It's too early to tell if this helps or hurts CafeX's cause, but it's out there, and as Rami told us, they want to be "an innovator, not a disruptor". They've got my vote as an innovator, and if things go their way with AWS, they may well end up being a disruptor too. Amazon is usually the one doing the disrupting, and I'll be closely watching to see if they end up being disrupted by "the other" Chime.
When I'm not travelling and writing, I'm doing webinars. My next one is tomorrow - Feb. 21 at 2pm ET, and all the details are here. I've been writing a lot recently about the impact Slack and their ilk are having on the collaboration space, and have distilled much of that into a webinar format. There's lots to talk about, and I hope you can join me!
Been doing a lot of travel lately, and thankfully, this is a short trip. Tomorrow I'll be flying to San Antonio to attend CafeX's analyst event. They've been doing some interesting things lately, including their Supervisor Assist application becoming compliant with Avaya Aura. This allows contact center supervisors to have greater real time capabilities to monitor and support agents while on calls.
Another development of note is their recent acquisition of local startup Vayoo. I've known the people behind Vayoo for years, and having long pivoted away from supporting BlackBerry, they've found a long term home being part of CafeX. Am hoping to catch up with them at the event.
Just through a run of back-to-back conferences, with the most recent being Avaya's Engage event in Las Vegas. There was lots to see, hear and learn about, and it was time very well spent. They put on a first-rate conference, and were very attentive in updating us analysts, along with consultants and the media.
I posted some photos of the event the other day, and have now got my thoughts in order. Given Avaya's core strengths, my analysis has been done wearing my UC Expert hat, and the writeup has been posted now to our UCStrategies portal. I hope you like it, and with so much industry attention focused on Avaya's future, I'd love to get your thoughts, and any sharing would be great.
I write regularly about the contact center, and cloud-based platforms have emerged as a key trend that’s re-shaping the landscape. On the vendor side, the accelerated push down this path has led to some fallout and consolidation, and it remains to be seen how successful these players will ultimately be. However, in the right hands, contact center as a service – CCaaS – can be a great opportunity, and service providers are one such example.
This is not their native forte, but much like how telephony is a Greenfield business for cable operators, so is the contact center for service providers. The key lies in having the right technology partner, but once that’s in place, as with other add-on hosted services, telcos have a natural entrée with business customers who are struggling in this area.
To illustrate, I had a briefing recently with one of Canada’s leading incumbents, Telus, and they’re a great example of taking a strategic approach to leverage the cloud for developing new business. More specifically, they have a division called Telus Sourcing Solutions, which provides BPO capabilities – business process outsourcing – primarily to mid-market enterprise customers.
BPO is a business unto itself, and while I don’t follow that space, it was very interesting to learn how contact center came into that orbit, along with how well it’s working out for Telus. Cloud is really just the latest iteration of the broader outsourcing trend that’s been running for ages, as IT departments face major challenges trying to manage everything in-house.
Telus has been offering cloud-based services for 12 years, so not only do they know what works for customers, but they also have a lot of cloud customers. Over the course of managing those relationships, Telus has recognized the contact center opportunity that many other service providers have seen globally. Most businesses are still using legacy technology and premise-based systems, and given how the expectations of today’s tech-savvy customers are changing, that model simply cannot keep pace. Aside from having limited multichannel capability, these systems lack deep integration with business-level platforms, are costly to support, and cannot be upgraded sufficiently for what’s needed now.
To address this, they have developed Elements, an end-to-end portfolio for a hosted – outsourced, really – contact center. Depending on the need, business customers can partner with Telus for any/all aspects of a contact center solution, not just for the technology, but also for providing agent staffing. Not quite offshoring, but this is a more complete form of outsourcing than you might associate as coming from a service provider.
This actually speaks to the strength of outsourcing, especially since the underlying technology is so flexible once it’s in the cloud. By partnering with a contact center vendor for the platform, Telus can draw from their broad BPO capabilities to provide the staffing if needed, and tie the offering together by hosting the solution in their data centers. In this regard, service providers are uniquely positioned to enter the CCaaS space, especially with a built-in pool of customers. So long as they have trusted partner status, it’s not a big leap for them to offer contact center.
As noted earlier, the key here is having the right technology partner, and Telus has this in Enghouse Interactive, a Canadian company, I might add. Details about this partnership were announced last month, and I’m just going to touch on three things here.
1. Contact center is Enghouse Interactive’s core business, and what stood out for Telus is the rich feature set, strong reporting, and ease of use for agents. While these are table stakes for contact center, they’re especially important when offering a turnkey solution from the cloud.
2. Multitenant platform provides Telus with great flexibility in terms of serving the broader market, especially mid-market and higher. Not only does this allow them to customize offerings for specific customers, but also support smaller line of business contact centers within an enterprise. The latter is a powerful option enabled by the cloud, and gives businesses new options for becoming customer-centric. This is where the value of outsourcing really shines, as businesses have limited means to do this internally, and even if they could, it would take much longer, so there’s a time-to-market issue that represents more value-add. Another benefit is the Opex model, as LOBs will be hard-pressed to get budget for a premise-based contact center, and the multitenant platform can scale to any size of need. Not only that, but it will enable a small LOB operation with the same feature set as an enterprise-scale contact center – again, something that a premise-based system cannot do.
3. Related to the last point above is extensive third party integration. Prime examples include CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com and Oracle CX, along with Skype for Business, WFM, PCI compliance, speech analytics, outbound notifications and social media platforms. This allows Telus to provide not just a turnkey contact center solution, but a tightly-integrated business solution that brings strategic value to their customers. Given how widely these applications are used, an outsourcing approach can be very attractive for businesses that know how difficult this would be to do on their own. Not only that, but with constant innovation, more applications are coming, so Telus offers a way to future-proof their investment with an always current contact center.
Of course, Telus brings a lot to the table, especially in terms of hosting this in their geographically redundant data centers. This matters in Canada given our large public sector, where Telus is very strong. Government agencies, hospitals, schools and municipalities, for example, are all spread thin across a vast geography, and with national coverage, Telus keeps all that data in-country, so data sovereignty is not an issue. With our small population, many of these operations will be small in scale, making them ideal candidates for CCaaS.
As these entities come to understand what’s possible here, the business case becomes stronger. Not only is the public sector under pressure to be more efficient, but also to be more “customer facing”. This means providing more channels to engage with the public, be more responsive, and deliver more services.
One such scenario would be rolling out mission-critical services like 311, along with being able to support it around the clock. Another would be responding to crisis situations, such as the wild fires that devastated Fort McMurray last year. Working with Telus, local agencies were able to respond quickly with contact center support for fire relief efforts.
This may not be the first thing that comes to mind when looking at opportunities for BPO, but with Telus Sourcing Solutions, it’s a natural fit. In my view, the key to success is a combination of having a vision for how hosted contact center will bring value to business customers, along with the right approach for choosing a CCaaS partner. This post serves to illustrate why I think Telus has succeeded on both counts, and how they represent a model for other service providers to follow.
Most of our time here has been in analyst briefing sessions, and our walkabout for the exhibitor showcase was a private tour when the hall was closed to general traffic. So, we've mostly been amongst ourselves and the Avaya team, but that's been plenty in terms of getting up to speed on their offerings and game plan during Chapter 11.
I'll have more to say about that in a separate writeup, and for now I just wanted to share a few pix of the general vibe here, and overall, it's definitely been good.
CMO Morag Lucey
Mark Castleman, VP Corporate Strategy
Here Jimmy - that's the name of this band (I think!) - very cool. WAY better than having canned music - at 8am, it's a bit early for rocking out and not really the time for dancing, but you know it would be fun if we all just decided to do that.
A few shots from the showcase and the Avaya pavilion
One of the cool launches at the event - Surge - a new approach to network security, and this is the ONA - Open Network Adapter - its works on any network, not just Avaya's.
Well, actually, I'm here, and am through Day 1. Was going to post earlier, but had major connectivity issues that kept me offline almost all day. Pretty intensive roadmap sessions for analysts and consultants, and it will take a bit of time to digest things. Lots more to come over the next two days, and soon after, I'll have some takeaways to share. Of course, Avaya is going through some major challenges right now, but there is absolutely a lot happening as they re-work their offerings for the world of digital transformation.
Unconventional view from my room, but if you've been to Vegas, you'll know where I am!
Will have more to say later, but for now, I just have time to share a few photos from the ITExpo, here in Fort Lauderdale. The show definitely looks and feels bigger than last year, and I see two reasons. One would be the ramped-up IoT conference that is co-located here. It's really taking a life of its own with a pretty substantial exhibitor roster that stands apart from the main show floor.
These exhibitors don't have much in common with the UC/VoIP crowd, and it's a reminder that communications is just a small slice of the IoT pie. It's also very interesting stuff, and I loved the drone on display - see last photo below. With a 10 mile range from the ground, powered by IoT - note the PC at the bottom of that photo showing the tracking data - you sure can do a lot of interesting things that are much more effective than using conventional approaches.
Another reason for the show being bigger is the larger number of regular ITExpo exhibitors. There just seems to be a greater variety, although still largely from the same categories we see every year. Most of my time has been spent in the press room doing briefings, , but the few sessions I've seen so far have been quite good. Friday is the last day, and I'll be busy moderating back-to-back panels, so this is my only window to post while I'm here. Below are a few photos to give you a flavor for this year's edition of the ITExpo.
As you can see from my other posts today, there sure is a lot going on, and that's good for business! Cisco Spark has been getting lots of attention since the launch event last week, and I've got one more update to share.
Many of my fellow UC Experts - both analysts and consultants - participated in the launch event, and we put our collective thoughts together for this week's UCStrategies podcast. The podcast was moderated by Dave Michels, and you can hear it here, from our site.
In terms of written analysis, I posted about it earlier this week, and aside from the podcast, some of my colleagues at UCStrategies have posted their takeaways to the site as well.
Am moderating back-to-back sessions next Friday at TMCnet's ITExpo in Fort Lauderdale. Yesterday, I blogged about the first panel, and this one is at 11am.
Emerging technologies covers a lot of ground, and I'll be joined by a diverse group who will have more than enough to talk about in the short time we have. Along with SAP, IBM Security and Plantronics, we'll have independent perspectives from Jeff Pulver and Chris Fine.
It will be a great way to wrap up the conference, and you won't be disappointed if you join us. More details are here on the Conference Program page - just scroll down to Friday in the Hot Topics in Tech and Telecom track.
2017 started slow, but that didn't last long, and back to a full schedule of writing, both in the usual places and some new ones as well. Here's a highlight list in case you didn't see these.
What, There's Something Better Than Real-Time?, No Jitter, Jan. 31
Cisco and Microsoft - Two Approaches to Room-Based Collaboration, UCStrategies, Jan. 31
3 Ways How UC is Falling Short, Toolbox.com, Jan. 26
Developing Collaboration Strategies for Gen Z Workers, Toolbox.com, Jan. 20
Expert Interview - JAA on Cloud Computing and Collaboration, TOSSC3, Jan. 19
How UCaaS Saves Time and Money When Businesses Expand Globally, RingCentral Blog, Jan. 18
Messaging Mania - Just When You Thought UC Was the Answer, Internet Telephony Magazine, Jan. 16
What Gen Z Wants in the Workplace, Toolbox.com, Jan. 13
Is Team Chat the Evolution of Business Social Software?, TechTarget, Jan. 12
Why Integrating UCaaS with CCaaS is a Win-Win for Businesses, RingCentral Blog, Jan. 10
2017 Outlook - 3 Things to Watch for in the Contact Center, Toolbox.com, Jan. 9
My 2016 - By The Numbers, JAA blog, Jan. 4
2017 Outlook - 3 Things to Watch for with VoIP, Toolbox.com, Jan. 3
TMCnet's flagship show, ITExpo gets underway next Wednesday, and I'll be there as usual. No complaints going to Florida in February, and I've got a full schedule of vendor briefings, meetings and am moderating two sessions.
The first one is on Friday at 10am, and as the title above suggests, we'll be discussing how technology is impacting customer service, and what businesses need to do to adapt. Joining me will be speakers from Plantronics, Telax, CGS and USAN. It's going to be good, and for more detail, scroll down the Conference Program page here, and when you get to Friday, look for us in the Enterprise Communications track. Hope you can join us!
That's the title of my new article that was posted yesterday on No Jitter. This marks the start of me being a regular contributor, where I'll be posting there once every six weeks. I think of No Jitter as a cousin with UCStrategies, and for this writing, I'm part of a rotating group of UC Experts where we take turns to produce articles for No Jitter on a weekly basis.
My first post is a play on the classic 2000 Year Old Man routine from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, where it is becoming apparent that there is something better than real-time communication when it comes to collaboration. This would have been unthinkable just a few years ago, but times are changing. Hopefully that piques your interest, and if you enjoy my analysis, please say so, as I'd love to create some dialog with readers.
That's the title of my latest writeup for UCStrategies. As a UCExpert, I contribute regular posts and participate in our podcasts, and all told, we produce a lot of timely content. Other UCExperts have also written about last week's Cisco Spark announcement, and the twist I've added is comparing this launch against Microsoft, who have also come to market with a new solution at the very same time.
It's not easy to make choices here, and I've written this analysis to help decision makers understand the merits of each offering, as they're quite different. My post is running now on the portal, and to learn more after reading this, I'd encourage you to read the related posts from my fellow UCStrategies colleagues.
J Arnold & Associates is an Independent Technology Research and Analyst, helping businesses understand the strategic value of communications technology as they adapt to the digital transformation of work
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