Richard McLeod, senior director, go-to-market group, worldwide channels at Cisco, discusses the significance of the Cisco collaboration portfolio to the channels.

Cisco employee Lisa Napier talks about the”Human Network Effect” that Cisco Virtual Office and collaboration technologies such as WebEx have had on the ways she lives, works and plays. Lisa explains how she is now able to spend more time with her family and help her community while balancing the complexities of working on a global team.

Post by Doug Dennerline, SVP, Collaboration Software GroupCommunications, globalisation and automation have flattened the world and transformed the competitive landscape. The traditional competitive advantages of size and scale have been replaced by speed and flexibility. In this new world, effective, adaptive collaboration is critical to achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Today’s acquisition of PostPath is part of our commitment to create a comprehensive cloud-based collaboration platform. By offering an on-demand version of the PostPath solution, we can provide flexible, cost-effective email and calendaring integrated with our collaboration portfolio of Cisco Unified Communications, WebEx and Business Video. PostPath’s Linux-based email, calendaring and collaboration solution is highly secure and scalable, and incorporates an innovative Web 2.0 architecture to meet the requirements of enterprise customers and small businesses. It’s interoperable with many different email solutions, offers an AJAX web client and is compatible with a broad range of mobile devices.We’re excited to welcome the PostPath team to Cisco and look forward to working together. For more information, I encourage you to listen to this podcast from Cisco’s Alex Hadden-Boyd, www.cisco.com/go/arpodcasts

Note: Part two, continued from yesterday’s post.Cisco believes that in order for our customers to embrace and fully leverage speech recognition, the technology must offer both solution intelligence and a simple and natural user interface.Solution IntelligenceWe do not speak as clearly and consistently as we think we do, making solution intelligence a necessary part of a successful speaker interaction experience. Our speech is filled with pauses, repetitions, partial words, and slips of the tongue, complicating the speech recognition process. Researchers have been working for years to improve the algorithms and language models that are used to create increasingly intelligent speech engines, and the results are encouraging. Cisco is actively building upon the recent advances in solution intelligence to design speech recognition solutions that can understand and interpret our everyday words and speech patterns.A Simple And Natural User Interface How will Cisco”train” people to interact with speech engines? The key is the user interface, which provides the dialogue you hear (“œWho would you like to reach?”) and the manner in which you interact with the solution to determine what action you really intend (“œDid you mean Jim Smythe?”). Cisco is developing speech solutions that use straightforward, natural questions to elicit clarity and intent from end users. There is also intelligence built into the interface -not just the speech engine -so that callers can learn over a short period of time how to interact with the speech recognition system. Conversely, the speech interface has the intelligence to alter prompts in order to slow down and provide more guidance to the user, or speed up the interaction process for more advanced users. By making it clear what we’re supposed to do and say, a well-designed user interface allows us to navigate a speech recognition solution without the safety net of a human backup on the other end of the connection. A key part of Cisco’s strategy is to recognize what speech technology can realistically deliver to customers and therefore avoid many of the mistakes made by other vendors who tried to do too much with speech technology.Speech Recognition In Action TodayCisco’s most recent entry into the world of speech recognition is Speech Connect for Cisco Unity, which is a speech-enabled auto attendant feature of Cisco’s Unity unified messaging solution. This feature allows both internal and external callers, using only their voice, to be quickly connected to any employee in the company directory. The caller is prompted with”who would you like to reach” and responds by speaking a name. Speech Connect works because it has a very simple user interface built on top of the speech engine. Adam Goldberg, Cisco Product Sales Specialist, says”Speech Connect really lays the foundation for ‘speech as a network service’. As we extend that service across all of Cisco UC, our customers will be the true beneficiaries of our ubiquitous approach.” Try it the next time you call a colleague at Cisco by dialing 408-894-3500.In the contact center market, Cisco has been fine-tuning its speech recognition products for years. The Cisco Unified Customer Voice Portal (CVP) allows organizations to develop personalized self-service over the phone, letting customers efficiently retrieve the information they need from the contact center. For example, name and address changes are easily done with a speech interface while they are nearly impossible using touch tones. Additionally, Cisco Unified IP IVR allows organizations to develop additional speech-based customer service applications. These solutions allow our customers, such as Nestle Waters, to develop the appropriate user interface to improve speech-enabled customer service.”We’re able to offer a much more personalized service to our customers by incorporating speech recognition into our self-service platform,” said Kurt Mey, national technology manager for Nestle Waters North America, Inc.”Customers are able to complete their transactions in a much more natural, conversational manner than they could ever do in a touch-tone environment.”The Future of Speech RecognitionTechnology groups throughout Cisco are rapidly innovating to add speech recognition to the Cisco Unified Communications portfolio of products. Speech solutions are being incorporated into existing unified communications applications, embedded into the company’s Integrated Services Routers (ISRs) for branch offices, made part of the Cisco Unified Application Environment in order to allow developers to integrate speech services in a variety of applications, and enhancing the customer service experience we offer in our customer contact solutions.Ultimately, Cisco will transform the user experience throughout our portfolio of unified communications solutions. For example, a speech interface could serve as your assistant, prompting you with”You have a MeetingPlace meeting in 10 minutes, would you like me to call you and connect you then?” and you can simply reply,”yes.” If you are running late, you could say”I’ll be ten minutes late” and an instant message will be sent to the participants with that notification. The speech assistant could also allow you to create ad hoc conferences by simply speaking”add” and then speaking the person’s name. Speech-to-text features could take your communications a step further, allowing you to speak into a communications client and have your conversation transcribed into a text message or email for delivery to a colleague or business partner. A”command and control” unified communications speech interface would provide the functions you need at the time you need them by knowing your calendar, your presence, your contacts and your devices.Speech is the most basic and natural human interaction -it connects us all. That’s why Cisco’s vision of the future involves the use of speech to command and interact with our communications applications and devices. Cisco’s goal is to design speech interactions with the user in mind, reducing frustration and confusion, while enhancing productivity and delivering a solution that works in a natural and effective manner.by Mark Gervase, solutions marketing manager, Cisco Unified Communications

Note: This is the first of a two-part post.Today we conduct business around the clock and around the globe using seemingly infinite combinations of phones, voice messaging, e-mail, instant messaging, and video conferencing. As unified communications solutions integrate software, phones and computers, speech recognition promises to play an increasingly important role in the way we communicate, freeing our hands to let us control our experience with spoken commands instead of memorized, menu-driven clicks, keystrokes and button pressing. Yet, for all the promise of speech recognition, the technology has left much to be desired -until recently. One of the reasons that speech recognition solutions have failed in the past is that society has not developed a usage paradigm for a pure speech-based interaction with artificial intelligence. For example, when we call a speech-enabled customer service help line, we are not completely”trained” on the process, or paradigm. We are used to saying basic identifying information, such as an account number, and then prompted to say”balance,”"transfer,” and similar commands because we do not know the specific words to say to this particular speech interface in order to check a balance. Sometimes we must navigate a system of menus and provide additional information to allow the system to better handle our query, but if things get complicated, we exit the speech session and talk to a real person to solve the problem. However, what happens when there is no person on the other end of the line acting as a safety net? Do we state our specific problem or do we provide some background information first? And if the system doesn’t understand us, do we repeat our statement or do we need to rephrase it? What are we supposed to say and how are we supposed to say it? This lack of a consistent and simple user interface is the second major reason that speech recognition solutions have failed to gain widespread traction.Cisco believes that in order for our customers to embrace and fully leverage speech recognition, the technology must offer both solution intelligence and a simple and natural user interface.by Mark Gervase, solutions marketing manager, Cisco Unified Communications

By Alan S. Cohen, vice president, enterprise/mid-market solutions”œInstant karma’s gonna get youGonna knock you off your feetBetter recognize your brother’sEveryone you meet”- John LennonIn my past few blog entries, I speculated on how new and different forms of collaboration impact the business world. With the release of the new iPhone, I am amazed not by the device (although it is impressive), but rather by the creation of an application marketplace within the iTunes environment Apple calls the”app store“. By forming a rapid development and commerce environment for iPod/iPhone owners and thousands (perhaps millions) of creative software developers -including a Wiki environment for user ratings -Apple dramatically dropped the barriers between a classic publishing model and an eBay-like marketplace model.What if we could do the same thing for work? How long would it take for meaningful units of work to surface and be completed? What if a secure online marketplace, within or across companies, could accelerate the speed of collaboration, effectively creating a market-led environment for projects versus the traditional command and control structure for work?M.I.T. Professor Tom Malone, author of the book The Future of Work, is one of the best cartographers of changing workplace dynamics, mapping the shift from command and control to collaboration. In his book, he described 4 kinds of emerging work styles: - Loose hierarchies, - Democracies, - External markets, and - Internal marketsIn Dr. Malone’s research, technology is the enabler of these work styles, but human characteristics and values dictate how workplaces come together: what we at Cisco would call a technology architecture juxtaposed beside a business architecture.I had the distinct pleasure of sharing a soda with Tom earlier this week. We discussed another work architecture: what I call”flash collaboration,” the notion that a work team could come together, across company or cultural boundaries, to rapidly complete a task or project, and then dissolve, within days, even within hours. In essence, flash collaboration is a nearly frictionless environment resulting in a tangible product or service. From Tom’s research, it is clear we are seeing this work style emerge. He cites InnoCentive as an example of a breakthrough innovation and collaboration marketplace where thousands of researchers and inventors come together to solve business and technical problems. As stated in the company’s mission statement:”InnoCentive will change the world and influence the lives of people everywhere by applying our planet’s human creativity and intelligence to solving the most important challenges facing commercial, governmental, and humanitarian organizations today. By combining technology, economic incentives, and human ingenuity, we will address and resolve these problems better, faster, and cheaper than ever before possible.”Indeed it was only five years ago that the first “œflash mob” was organized to bring groups of people to staging areas in a city. At the time, the messaging capability of a cell phone was all it took. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob. Participants were sent to locations around Manhattan and then given various instructions on the next set of actions.It turns out the idea of flash collaboration may not even be that surprising. A year after the first flash mob assembled in New York, a group of people on the other coast created the first flash mob computing environment focused on harnessing a temporary clustering of computers to form a single supercomputer. Rather than a cell phone network, a social networking and news site for our industry, Slashdot, provided the vehicle for bringing hundreds of computers into a powerful virtualized machine.So the antecedents for Flash Collaboration are very strong.I also discussed this concept with Amy Shuen, an economist, college professor and prolific chronicler of the emergence of Web 2.0. She provided additional insights: 1. Flash collaboration could be a kind of instantaneous catalyzing of knowledge incorporated in the heads of a large number of people to quickly master/achieve a mission-critical task or problem. 2. Potentially, flash collaboration is a faster or instantaneous triggering of collective (and interactive, dynamic) behavior of decentralized nodes through a Web 2.0-enabled platform. Additionally, this triggering of collective behavior might follow Web 2.0 and ‘wisdom of the crowd’ concepts and independently aggregate information algorithmically, refining input so that the outcome would be value-multiplied/enhanced.In essence, Flash Collaboration is a work environment that includes the tools and technologies to support spontaneous work teams with clear business results. Is your company ready for Flash Collaboration? If not, in the words of John Lennon, it might just”knock you off your feet.”by Alan S. Cohen, vice president, enterprise/mid-market solutions

As the buzz around skyrocketing fuel prices and travel costs continues, it’s no secret that business people continue to turn to telecommuting as a viable alternative to offset costs and carbon emissions. As CIO.com profiled this week, companies like Chorus are allowing their entire workforce to work remotely, sparing employees from the hassle of costly commuting. And after saving over $400,000 a year, who could blame them? As Chorus demonstrates, more companies are realizing that remote training and knowledge transfer can be achieved using collaboration tools. Not a bad option when gas prices are almost hitting $5 a gallon in some U.S. cities. But businesses aren’t the only ones hopping on board the trend, as reported on by the Associated Press this week. We are seeing that lately, a new generation of telecommuters has begun to take shape, as travel costs have fueled a substantial boom in the number of students who are now telecommuting to class. According to the AP, a growing number of students are feeling the pinch of high fuel costs on their budgets, and are enrolling in online classes in record numbers. Work and school aside, where else can we leverage telecommuting to reduce the need for costly travel? As noted by CNNMoney.com this week, waiting until 2010 when the market recovers is a long time away -so where else can the technology take us when we need to offset our carbon emissions and find ways to cut travel costs? Well, it may not be all that useful to telecommute to your summer vacation in Bali, but it will be interesting to see what other destinations -other than school and work -that we can put on the map. Colin Smith, Dir., Public Relations, WebEx

Shortly after fellow-Canadian Douglas Adams published his acclaimed book”Generation X”, I ran into him at a party in Vancouver, British Columbia. I remember talking, not only about the book, but also its premise that Generation X society was about the dissolution of traditional themes-the nuclear family, the”fixed” home,”lifetime” employment. I remember posturing that Mr. Adam’s characters were pursuing a newfound freedom in a prosperous society-yet were isolated by their own pursuit of that goal. It was a conversation that influenced much of my own outlook on the world as well as has reflected my own experiences with my virtual family, my incredibly mobile lifestyle, and my own hopscotch through employment.For me the workplace has been rife with incredible experiences and wonderful people. What’s common to all these experiences is that they were dependent on a technology referred to as the PC. It was the hub for how we worked together. But now things are changing-and fast. I remember presenting to a group of investor bankers in 2000 who were more interested in the quakings of their BlackBerry pagers than my presentation. It is interesting that I remember their focus more than the content of my own presentation. As with the characters in Mr. Adams book, while the PC brought the gift of innovation and productivity, it also became a new barrier to communication and collaboration. How many times have you been involved in an email war that could have easily been resolved if you could just talk to the person. Or where you’ve sat in a meeting where people are so busy communicating with the outside world that they forget to communicate with the people in the room?It wasn’t until I joined Cisco that my conversation with Mr. Adams came full circle for me. Around me I was seeing constant dissolution. Cisco is remaking itself as a collaborative company where board and councils replace command and control. Where the mission statement is being replaced by twenty-three priorities. Office and cubicles are becoming flexible workspaces where people assemble virtually and physically to tackle the task at hand. And most importantly, we’re seeing the content of those workspaces chance dramatically. Printers, fax and copy machines-the legacy of the document era-are slowing disappearing. The mobile phone and the desk phone are blending. And most interestingly, the computer and email are becoming secondary to getting people together in real time and non-real time to collaborate. And this dissolution is giving us the freedom to become a more nimble, faster moving, higher performance company.As we think about American Independence Day, we think about”freedom” given to the world by the Founding Fathers of this great country. For me, this freedom is about pursuing my hopes and dreams without inhibiting others to also do so. At Cisco, I experience this freedom in being able to be the person I am, work where I want to work, using the tools I want to use. It is the freedom to develop my competitive advantage as an individual, not at the expense of others, but so that the strength of the teams and relationships to which I belong become stronger.Last year when Cisco created its second-generation vision for unified communications, we made a couple of important assumptions. We assumed the mobile phone was more important than the PC. We assumed that no one wanted more email. (Come on, someone disagree with me!) We built a vision where the best expertise from anywhere in the world could be brought virtually to the table without regard for device, operating system or network type. It was an expression of freedom-the freedom to choose. I’m proud to be working and living in the United States yet part of the global team that is delivering a vision where everyone, everywhere is included in the collaborative experience. Only when everyone is included in the discussion can we conquer the toughest issues that face us all. And many of those discussion will never involve a PC.by Chris Thompson, senior director of solutions marketing for Cisco Unified Communications

With the recent introduction of the Apple iPhone 2.0, 35% of Fortune 500 companies have gratified Apple iPhone fans and signed up for the Apple iPhone 2.0 beta. The fact that Apple is now supporting enterprise-class security features such as Cisco IPSec VPN and WPA2/802.11x makes the business case for the iPhone even more compelling for companies with mobile workforces.Cisco’s vision for unified communications is to bring rich, compelling, and collaborative interactions to every workspace -- independent of preferred device, operating system, or location. With that vision, we are excited about iPhone 2.0 for a couple of reasons. First, our goal is to extend a superior unified communications experience to as many business applications and devices as possible. In addition, through our open interfaces, provide our customers and partners with the ability to integrate Cisco Unified Communications with an even greater number of platforms and devices critical to their businesses. Since the iPhone seems destined to be a popular device, we are eager to provide our customers and partners with the most compelling unified communications experience possible on it. Second, as we have worked with the iPhone, we have gotten very excited by its programming capabilities. The robust operating system, powerful hardware, and great programming tools allow us to consider some exciting applications and experiences for the iPhone.Over the next year or so, I look forward to bringing a series of user experiences to our customers that combine Cisco’s open, unified communications solution with many of the devices people use including the iPhone. Our engineers are already demonstrating some compelling applications. I can’t wait to use them.by Joe Burton, chief technology officer of Cisco’s voice technology group

I’ve been in a good number of training sessions and meetings the past few weeks, so in catching up on my reading, I saw this apropos post from Nicholas Carr about the multitasking virus. Josh Waitzkin (of Searching for Bobby Fischer fame) initiated the discussion on Tim Ferriss’ blog. Christine Rosen also weighs in at The New Atlantis. The idea behind Josh Waitzkin’s post, his experience watching today’s students multitasking during a lecture from one of his favorite professors, has strong correlation to meeting behavior both in-person and online. We’ve all seen people bring their notebook PCs into a meeting. The rest of us are left wondering if they spend the time checking email, chatting in IM, and watching YouTube. Bringing a notebook PC to a meeting is akin to chewing gum in same, so if you bring one, plan on sharing. Last week I participated in a couple meetings in which all the participants hunkered down for a couple hours at a stretch in a conference room to work on a project. We all brought our notebooks, but we actively used Meeting Center to share content, co-edit and transfer files. It definitely streamlined the process. Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

City Preparedness for Higher Gas Prices What do you think these 10 cities have in common?Virginia Beach, VAForth Worth, TXNashville, TNArlington, TXJacksonville, FLIndianapolis, INMemphis, TNLouisville, KYTulsa, OKOklahoma City, OKAccording to Common Current, a California-based economic sustainability group, these are the 10 major US cities least prepared for gas prices greater than $4/gallon. It turns out that residents of these cities are disproportionately prone to long solo work commutes by car.How are high gas prices affecting your budget? Have you started to explore collaboration tools to reduce travel and control costs?I ran the numbers on my own modest commute (less than 20 miles round-trip, 26MPG, regular gas at a delightful $4.59/gallon here in the Bay Area) and found -when all car expenses are taken into account -that Cisco’s WebEx PCNow remote computer access software pays for itself when I telecommute just one day per month. (And that doesn’t even include what I save by eating lunch out of my own fridge.)The ROI on other WebEx collaboration services that eliminate travel expenses is even higher.What are your commute mitigation tools of choice? Are you spending more time collaborating online and less time in your car or in Seat 28F? Is $4.00/gallon your personal”tipping point” to alter your behavior?David Bockian, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Cisco WebEx

On Wednesday May 14, WebEx and MarketingSherpa are teaming up to present Casting a Wider Web. This 2008 Marketing eSummit includes a series of webinars from experts at Marketo, Wainhouse Research, the American Marketing Association and Loomis Group on using the latest online marketing technology. In addition to these best practice and advice webinars, marketers from Cisco and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange will also talk about their real-world experience. Two of the sessions focus on presenting research. In the first, Stephan Tornquist from MarketingSherpa and John Miller from Marketo will discuss trends for 2008. In the second, Andrew Nilssen and Alan D. Greenberg, both senior analysts and partners at Wainhouse Research as well as Nancy Costopulos, CMO of the American Marketing Association, will present survey results about the changing nature of online events. The 2008 Marketing eSummit is a virtual event -in addition to the participating in the webinars, attendees have the ability to interact in real-time to discuss what they’ve seen and talk to presenters between sessions. The full program for the event is available here and registration for the event is here. Marc Blakeney, Sr. Marketing Manager, Consulting Services & Event Center, WebEx

In the 1970s, many of the climate change issues that now dominate our public debate first surfaced. Among the more enduring periodicals from that period was Mother Earth News, a homespun pioneer in practical approaches to ecology, renewable energy, recycling and Emersonian approaches to self-reliance. As I write this, just past Mother’s Day here in the U.S., it is an appropriate time to reflect on the betterment of our planet and to consult Mother Earth News for a definition of total ecology:

“A scientific means for discovering the expeditious ways of employing the world’s resources in a way which will render a higher standard of living for all mankind- a means of accumulating facts, information and statistics related to world resources-a way of discovering trends in the use and misuse of resources-a network for relating these trends and developing a logical sequence of events to show how a future state might evolve.”

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In the 1970s, many of the climate change issues that now dominate our public debate first surfaced. Among the more enduring periodicals from that period was Mother Earth News, a homespun pioneer in practical approaches to ecology, renewable energy, recycling and Emersonian approaches to self-reliance. As I write this, just past Mother’s Day here in the U.S., it is an appropriate time to reflect on the betterment of our planet and to consult Mother Earth News for a definition of total ecology:

“A scientific means for discovering the expeditious ways of employing the world’s resources in a way which will render a higher standard of living for all mankind- a means of accumulating facts, information and statistics related to world resources-a way of discovering trends in the use and misuse of resources-a network for relating these trends and developing a logical sequence of events to show how a future state might evolve.”

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In spring my thoughts turn to the”Boys of Summer” (it was Babe Ruth who said”this baseball game of ours comes up from the youth”), that time when daylight lengthens, when school gives way to the competition of baseball and the eternal imagination of youths self-identifying with sports heroes. The smell of fresh-mowed sod, the sharp crack of a fastball meeting a Louisville slugger, and the exhilarating fear and unrestrained joy of taking off for first — emotions as fresh today as they were decades ago. These are memories etched in the”YouTube” of our brains, retrieved, sometimes, just by a chance conversation or the smell of a hotdog slathered in deli mustard and sauerkraut.On May 7 we celebrate the launch of the Sports Museum of America (SMA), www.sportsmuseum.com, the first museum dedicated to just about every sport played in America. The SMA has partnered with more than 50 sport organizations’ Halls of Fame, national governing bodies and other top athletic associations to showcase exhibits, memorabilia, stories and heroes that resonate with all of us. Partnering with the museum’s founders and all-star roster of directors (from too many different sports to list here), Cisco is providing a range of visual networking and emerging technologies to build a human network within the museum and online -as the web version never closes — converging technology and history to enhance the attendee experience. Read More »