Last week, on May 25^th Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEC) announced OpenScape Office MX which is an all-in-one unified communications (UC) solution designed to meet the business communications needs of small to medium business (SMB). OpenScape Office MX is the successor to HiPath OpenOffice ME and is an upgrade that requires a simple software procedure, no hardware changes are required.

OpenScape Office MX has been designed to better address the needs of the SMB market and offers the full benefits of end-to-end unified communications at a price point to match the cost sensitivities of small to medium companies. Supporting up to 150 users, Siemens Enterprise communications has made more than 50 improvements to OpenScape Office MX.

“In the development of OpenScape Office MX, we listened to the needs of our channel partners and the market,” said Eve Aretakis, executive vice president of voice and application platforms at Siemens Enterprise Communications. “In order to stay ahead of the curve, small and medium enterprises need to be able to offer dynamic and responsive customer service, without incurring significant expenditures. Our channel partners can offer the next generation of a highly advanced UC product that dramatically reduces installation time and is intuitive and easy to use to ultimately accelerate business communications.”

Over the last couple of years, Siemens Enterprise Communications was been working hard to distinguish itself in a very completive marketplace by offering full featured, easy to implement UC solutions. This has allowed SEC to not only retain enterprise and government clients, but to also gain traction against competitors such as Avaya and Nortel (now owned by Avaya).

What’s your experience with HiPath OpenOffice ME and do you think OpenScape Office MX will offer significant improvements for your business? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

I’m gazing into the crystal ball to make some predications and observations about what we can expect in 2010 in the telecom and IT markets.

1. Although we aren’t out of the woods yet, U.S. business and consumer confidence is growing and should reach a peak about the third quarter of this year. However, attempting to guess the level of corporate or consumer spending is a dicey business because there are multiple factors that go into purchasing decisions.

2. I’ve been hearing that there is pent up demand for technology (both software and hardware) that will drive new purchases in both SMB and large enterprise businesses. Regarding pent up demand for technology, my gaze says that this will only have a small impact on spending trends in 2010. We heard similar wishful thinking in the years following the technology bubble and subsequent telecom bomb of the early 2000’s. Historically, pent up demand had no impact on business spending patterns then, and I suspect it will have little impact now in 2010.

3. Lessons learned. During our recent economic down-turn both companies and consumers have learned to make do with less. As a matter of company survival, projects and improvements have been shelved or cancelled all together. The net result is that businesses have learned they can protect profits by tightly controlling the bottom line when growing the top line is difficult (back to Business 101). This means that increases in spending will be slow in 2010 and largely driven by efforts to branch out into new markets or to increase competitive advantages.

4. Products and services that help businesses and consumers save money on essential services will continue to do well in 2010. Good money can be made by those who figure out how to deliver the things we can’t live without for less than we’re already paying. For example, AT&T has recently asked the FCC on the behalf of RBOCs around the country (and itself of course) to stop maintaining the country’s public switched telephone network (PSTN). AT&T says it wants to focus its maintenance efforts towards new fiber optic infrastructure that reaches further and further towards the end customer. In the near future look to see neighborhood micro-cell sites designed to service a customer base that isn’t driving between cell towers. This type of phone service can be installed for a fraction of the cost of trenching and running copper lines between homes, pedestals and central offices.

5. The demand for DSL technologies (ADSL, IDSL, VDSL, etc.) will decrease as increasing demand for faster Internet services push beyond what copper lines can deliver even with new modulation/DSP techniques. During 2010, the preferred Internet delivery methods will be fiber, digital cable TV and satellite systems.

6. Improvements in VoIP over wireless technologies will come this year, making it more practical and cost effective to deliver last mile access for VoIP and Internet services.

7. Last mile wireless technologies with fiber runs between pedestals and central offices will be the savior for America’s aging PSTN infrastructure.

8. Wireless Internet services owned and operated by municipalities will disappear this year as the cost of maintaining such systems increase beyond what local governments can afford.

9. In 2010, VoIP is no longer considered new. This year VoIP is a mainstream technology and simply is the way phone systems and voice services work.

10. Green was good in 2009 and saved money too. Look to see green technologies such as virtualization to do very well in 2010.

11. Late in 2010, 1 gig Ethernet within the data center and enterprise will begin to look slow as manufactures release 10 gig and 40 gig Ethernet products.

12. Software applications that merge office automation with business communications (both VoIP and cellular) will gain greater acceptance in 2010. However, due to business financial constraints all that Unified Communications promises to deliver will not be fully realized this year.

These are the changes in business infrastructure and focus that I am seeing for 2010. Do you agree? What other areas of change do you anticipate in your firm in 2010?

Rolling out large enterprise telecom solutions across many sites, as well as supporting geographically disbursed systems and call centers with maintenance, break-fix, and upgrade services creates numerous logistical and economic challenges. C-Suite executives are intuitively aware of the challenges, but often are unaware of how to address them in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

The Challenges:

1. The single vendor fallacy

Selecting a single telecom (Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens etc…) platform accomplishes far less to meet the goal of reducing long-term ownership costs than you would expect. Several flies appear in this well reasoned ointment including:

• Single Vendor maintenance services for the platform you choose/chose are largely an illusion. These global platform developers increasingly rely on small to medium distributors of varying and limited geographies and capabilities. You may have a support contract with the manufacturer; but at the end of the day, your staff will be coordinating and otherwise dealing with multiple service providers to cover your nationally distributed sites. To illustrate, Avaya and Siemens are pushing more tier 1 through 3 services to their partners. In a further outsourcing play, Siemens is outsourcing all field services to broader territories to a third party who traditionally relies heavily on hourly contract workers.
• An acquisition of other companies is likely to create a near instant mix of communication platforms. Your firm ends up managing at least one new platform with each firm acquired assuming the acquisition target had previously standardized its enterprise telecom platform. If the target hadn’t standardized, your telecom team is facing the need to manage and maintain multiple platforms over night.
• As manufacturers rapidly move to develop their VoIP and Unified Communications server technologies, legacy PBX systems are placed on end-of-life and end-of-support status prematurely; long before the installed systems fail to address the 95+% threshold of user needs for a technology refresh. The business case for a platform refresh is absent, yet the voice communication partner has an end-of-life gun pointed at your head.
• Managing new server-based communications technologies along with legacy systems presents similar interoperability and support challenges as managing multiple manufacturers’ platforms. Mix 2 manufactures with legacy PBX and IP-telephony systems and…you get the idea.

2. Multiplication issues

The internal support of IT/telecom systems spread across 50-100 cities compounds the management headache of coordinating service providers. Multiply the number of cities by the number of different platforms in the network and the headache becomes a migraine.

The primary challenge is not the physical distance. The primary challenge is information management. When the headquarters IT/Telecom team has scant records on the remote site, they view the distance (to go look and see, i.e. collect information while trying to fix a service affecting issue) as the challenge. If the design and other records from the original installation were maintained, the need to dispatch a tech to go, look and investigate would be less.

Consider the following recommendations to addressing these challenges:

1. Let go of the illusion of single vendor support. Call them PBX, IP-Telephony, Unified Communications solutions providers. This provides a clearer picture of just how many different communications vendors are entrenched in the firm. These vendors say their main business is developing and selling software-based solutions. The ongoing maintenance and support is being pushed out to distributors and channel partners. It is the rare customer who is supported directly by the manufacturer.
2. Equip your staff with tools that proactively manage the network, servers, and other devices. By proactively managing, I refer to:
   • Active monitoring and with the flexibility to fine tune what events represent “Majors” to your business.
   • Proactively build, manage, and maintain the design, carrier, cable, rack lay out and other information. Having this information readily available will accelerate problem resolution. The on-going management of this information is easier than trying to research for it under battle conditions.
   • Collaboration tools leverage the monitoring and information among the team members (employees, vendors and partners), streamlining the routine support and project management functions.
3. Become more independent utilizing proven tool sets that are designed to manage multiple platforms and generations of technologies.

These challenges and recommendations are often woven into the sales presentations of large IT outsourcing companies. They can hire large staff, apply best practices, and invest in tool sets. However, not all companies are willing to trust that an outsourcing play will not result in less control and personalization than can be accomplished by an internal team.

Telizent offers enterprises the tools and services needed to self service and fill the gaps of the challenges cited above.

What are your thoughts on the prospect of self maintaining your communications environment? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

What if you were told that you could talk (or chat) with over 400 million people for free? That is what companies that use phone systems based on the open source product, Asterisk, can now do (see “Skype for Asterisk Now Available“).

With no additional hardware, businesses can download the Skype for Asterisk module and enable their employees to direct dial Skype users right from their existing telephone! Combine this module with Skype’s existing ability to provide live text chat, video chat, and screen sharing with over 400 million Skype users around the world, you can now easily equip your organization with a robust communication platform for very little cost.

I’m not advocating that companies go out and buy an Asterisk phone system, but I am suggesting that you should be asking yourself if your infrastructure is flexible enough to effectively communicate with all of your constituents. As we know, our prospects, customers, partners and vendors want to communicate with us when and how they want. The more flexible we can be to communicate with those who have a need for our services, the more compelling our services will be to them. It is my conviction that unless you have this mindset, you will wake up one morning and realize the train has left the station and your company is not on it.

In March of this year I travelled to London to attend the 2009 UC Expo. Industry experts had indicated that Europe was about 12 months ahead of the US in the adoption and deployment of Unified Communications (UC) systems and I needed to get a sense of what was available and what was coming down the pipe. My primary focus was to understand the capabilities of Microsoft’s OCS (Office Communication Server) system because some of our customers and prospects were asking questions about OCS and how it might integrate with their existing Avaya, Nortel, and Siemens PBX systems. I’m pleased to say that one of our Microsoft partners became OCS certified ) shortly after I returned to the States, and I now have the Office Communicator client open on my desktop – right next to my Skype client.

I will spend some time in a future post talking about how impressed I am with Microsoft’s Office Communicator (MOC), especially with how it seamlessly integrates presence into my exiting Office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Live Meeting, etc). However MOC does not afford me the same type of convenient, cost effective access to our prospects, customers, partners and vendors that Skype currently does. For example, we just hired two sales people on the east coast and it was effortless to begin communicating with them via Skype – voice, chat, and now screen sharing – for no cost. Similarly, one of the modules we use on our Service Portal was developed by a company in Spain and I chat with their developers via Skype.

What is your experience with communicating with your customers, partners, vendors and prospects? Do you find chat clients like Skype valuable? Does your company allow 3^rd party chat clients on your network? What lessons have you learned? I’m all ears.

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