Presenting the VoiceCon Disconnects
Movies have Oscars, Music has Grammys – I am launching the VoiceCon Disconnects. These are my awards for the disconnects between reality and the show. This is a less crowded topic as so many (including myself) have written about the great parts of VoiceCon.
So with that in mind, I present the Disconnect for Worst Keynote to Kevin Kennedy of Avaya. Kevin took most of his keynote time to discuss the benefits of SIP. The presentation was excellent, but would have been more appropriate five years ago. To be fair, it started nicely, but quickly fell apart after discussing entropy.
The lost opportunity of the presentation was it missed what the audience really wanted to hear – about the synergies of Avaya and Nortel, about the surviving technologies and the methods behind the new road map. About what it is like for the #3 market share leader to acquire the #2 leader via bankruptcy auction. What Avaya learned from Nortel’s employees, customers, and dealers. About the inner workings of private equity. About the synergies and complexities of Skype being under the same parent ownership. About the human challenges of integrating fierce competitors into a single organization. About how Avaya, a traditional telecom equipment maker, will compete against IBM and Microsoft on IT terms.
There was some optimism in Kennedy leaving the end open for Q&A.; It was considered a unique move showing his willingness and desire to connect to the audience. But I think it was more that he ran out of things to say about SIP.
Worst Banner: Signage isn’t limited to the exhibit hall. The Gaylord Palms was adorned with voice related banners and signs throughout. Avaya clearly dominated the signage category in general – so much that the Gaylord Atrium was in perpetual shade. The Disconnect for Worst (non-booth) Signage goes to Microsoft. I don’t know what this sign was supposed to suggest, but I found it frightening. Don’t let the cut and paste graphics fool you, it was actually designed and printed that way.
I realized we were in Larry Ellison’s cloud hell where everything and anything is cloud. I tried to steer the conversation a bit with “What’s new? I had all this 20 years ago with AOL” – but it was a tough panel. I correlate virtualization with cloud telephony, but this wasn’t a virtualization panel. This panel was way too diverse for a write home cloud discussion.
Dialed Wrong Number Disconnect: This award recognizes the vendor that harps the wrong message. An example might be KFC emphasizing health benefits of transfat-free deep fryer oil, or Winnebago bragging about its fuel efficiency. Those are important messages, but it’s the wrong key message. I present the Dialed Wrong Number Disconnect to Microsoft.
Microsoft’s OCS product is impressive in many ways. In only its 2nd generation its impact is phenomenal and it appropriately challenged many long held beliefs. The product offers significant features, it penetrated the enterprise with impressive wins, it built a strong following of customers, analysts, and dealers, and continued to shake things up with a sneak peek of its next release. There are so many great things to say about OCS – but Microsoft instead offers some silly and misleading statements.
Microsoft chooses to differentiate OCS by continually stressing that it is a “software based solution”. There is no dispute that OCS is a software based solution, but so are those of its key competitors. It seems like an awfully silly thing to hang a hat on. Consider Avaya, the largest of the traditional players, their call control and applications run on industry standard servers made by Dell, IBM, and HP. Neither Avaya or Microsoft manufacture phones directly. Avaya has them made and branded. Microsoft specifies hard and soft components and licenses them to manufacturers. Both firms promote SIP trunks to eliminate the need for TDM ports. Both offer software based solutions as does Cisco, Mitel, Siemens, Digium, and many others.
Microsoft also claimed (via Alan Sulkin’s RFP) to be “half the price” of competitive offerings. First, they weren’t half the price, secondly, is price really the differentiator Microsoft wants to lead with?, and finally the statement was misleading on multiple fronts. Other vendors bid standalone IP phones, Microsoft bid USB devices that only work when connected to a logged-in PC. Microsoft omitted in its response a few key components:
The pricing does not include Microsoft Active Directory, System Center Operations Manager, Exchange, or Office Professional Plus, nor does it include the hardware load balancer shown in the system configuration diagrams.”
I understand the logic, but it gets slippery very quickly. Siemens, for example, supports a VMware virtualized environment, would it be reasonable for them to omit the server infrastructure in their bid? Exchange was omitted, but with Wave 14 Microsoft recommends dedicated Exchange Server(s) for voicemail.
Which brings me to Microsoft bidding unreleased (no date set) software. Significant portions of Wave 14 (features, pricing, architectural changes) are unknown at this time. It seems a bit unreasonable to bid vaporware and future (fictional?) pricing and very unreasonable to compare against currently released products and pricing.
Most Ignored UC Solution: Unified Communications has come a long way in just a few years. There was much less conversation about what is UC at this event than usual. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of progress made around some of the core UC applications over the past year. The big disappointment was mobility. As a result, the Disconnect for the Most Ignored UC Solution goes to Mobility. Over the past year, mobility has clearly become a major driver in UC deployments.
There were a lot of technology improvements, so I expected to see some new products. Consider location aware applications such as Foursquare and Latitude that use GPS and cellular triangulation. WiFi makers unleashed the long awaited 802.11N on the enterprise. At last year’s show, several players were embracing cellular phones (as extensions) not to mention FMC technologies and cell phone clients. Or skip FMC with femtocell technologies which started to appear over the past year.
However, at VoiceCon the mobility offerings were largely unchanged from last year. No one had an 802.11N phone. Motorola had a new SIP based WiFi phone, but none of the “voice” vendors had any new (WiFi or Dect) wireless offerings. Points to Siemens for showing cellular location (via Latitude) on their presence dashboard. And points to Microsoft for LAN location awareness by MAC address (similar to Cisco). But for the most part, it was as if the vendors figured Mobility 1.0 was sufficient despite the rising bar in the consumer/mobile space. I think this was a fairly significant disconnect worthy of an award.
Every keynote demonstrated the flexibility and intuitive nature of their products in legitimate business scenarios. But none of the senior keynote executives performed the demos. The technology remains more complex and intimidating than most executives will admit. I’ve said it for years – I want to see non technical executives do their own demos (a la Steve Jobs) or perhaps call someone up from the audience. The technology is meant for everyone, including senior executives. Cisco’s demo involved moving an HD video call from a softphone/PC to a video-phone to a cell phone – all with the push of a button. But that button was pressed by Cisco’s “Chief Demonstration Officer” (I kid you not). Gurdeep Singh Pall actually left the stage during Microsoft’s Wave 14 demo. A few of the vendors involved executives in their demos, but generally on the simple end of the call. My blood boils (with industry shame) when I hear someone say “I am not sure how to transfer the call, so sorry if I lose you”. I contend that if a CxO can do it, so can we.
Top notch report – well done. I did see Verizon and Sprint talking about service provider Hosted UC solutions – but you're right; most of the presence was from traditional prem companies whose hosted stories were somewhat weak. I wonder if the VoiceCon name change will be a catalyst for more mobile operators attending and delivering a hosted business solution next year?
nice job on calling out the microsoft koolaid as I like to call it. Their marketing overload to everyone about how OCS is software based, half cost is really marketing hype to get your attention…. If you dive deep, which we all have… everyone see's you have do whats best for your org. Bake-offs are still valid when it comes to "phone systems" or whatever term you would like to call it. From the actual operation, to training, costs, support, functionality, blah blah right?! To me, any choice made should involve a gap analysis of the "solution", not the product itself. Where you are today, where you want to be tomorrow… and then, how do we get there.
Good stuff