November 14, 2007

Of Tricks and Telephony

Post by Nader Nanjiani, product and systems marketing manager in Cisco's Unified Communications business unit

At a recent event, while lamenting how the phone on his desk did about the same it did years ago, a senior executive from an email company cried out: "Teach your old phone new tricks." Well, it’s about time that the executive not only upgrade his desk telephone, but also update his knowledge about the unified communications industry before venturing in.

The old phone has already learned a trick or two since the arrival of IP phones. For instance you can dial by clicking a name within a customer relationship management (CRM) application like Salesforce.com and have the call originate over your desk phone or soft-phone. You can look up your daily calendar, stock quotes and weather on your desk phone - much like you can on an iPhone – without the need to turn on your desktop PC. Some users are ordering food, making reservations, and even looking up Google maps on their IP phones. Others are conducting time and attendance applications or checking up inventory using IP phone screens. What’s more: Corridor cruisers now pick up calls directed to their IP phones anywhere on their cell phones and seamlessly switch it back in between to their IP phone upon arrival - without ever tipping off that they have long cut the chains to their desktops.

The same executive and some of his colleagues will share results of a study with audiences at conferences that suggest that voice over IP delivers substandard quality. Interestingly, they never specify whether the tests were conducted over a public or a private network. Reality check: New high-fidelity IP phones put “toll quality” of the mid-1990’s to shame. The vendor with the largest market share, Cisco, ships only IP phones. A question left unanswered each time by this company is that while a network can understandably be engineered for organizations to manage reliable quality of service or security, how a desktop can do that.

As a result of the information shared by the speaker, the industry is left wondering which to believe: The executive who is not up on the industry himself or the incoherent study that he cites. Speaking of tricks, maybe it’s time the company stopped playing them on room full of audiences.

Posted by Cisco PR at 02:20 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

November 08, 2007

The Promise of Collaboration in the Evolving Workspace

Post by Nader Nanjiani, product and systems marketing manager in Cisco's Unified Communications business unit
and
Dave Butt, Manager of operations for Cisco's Unified Communications business unit

Simply put, to collaborate is to tap into the expertise of others when performing work. An individual’s expertise on a topic may be limited, but being able to pull in the skills of others, who may be remote, preferably in real time, could improve both the efficiency and the effectiveness of our work.

Consider for a moment how we work. If we look at the functions we perform within our workspace on a daily basis, we may classify them into four distinct buckets: We devise, we transact, we produce and we interact - in no particular order.

Devising relates to all the “figuring things out” stuff that we do at work such as planning, assessing, searching, or strategizing. Transactions, on the other hand, relate to tasks around negotiation, buying, payment processing, ordering, pricing, selling or acquiring. Interaction refers to us talking, conferring or meeting other colleagues for advice, approval, input or guidance. And production refers to creation of content whether that might be documents, deliverables, widgets or services. Technology tools have always had a role, but so far have not permeated through those work buckets.

How Might Collaboration Really Play Out at Work?

Imagine while processing payroll (a desire to transact), you come up with a question (a desire to interact). To pull away from that transaction session in order to set up a separate communication session in the workspace seems inefficient. But that’s exactly what happens currently. What if the ability to interact in real-time was embedded right into the payroll processing tool? Similarly an individual creating artwork (a desire to produce) should be able to seek input (a desire to interact) on her in-progress masterpiece from a mentors or colleagues – no matter how remote they maybe – in real time without having to interrupt the creative process.

Unified Communications Leads to Collaboration

Unified communications embeds real time communications capabilities such as voice, mobility, video, instant messaging, web-based conferencing, presence, and federation within our day to day tasks – thereby making possible substantial increase in productivity. As unified communications permeate through all aspects of work and are pervasive across all types of workspace devices, we stand to unlock the full potential of collaboration. As seamless sharing of communications becomes more prevalent while devising, transacting, interacting or producing, without the risk of delays, more of us will choose to collaborate.

Preparing Today’s Workspaces for Collaboration

A workspace could best be described as any location where collaboration tools are readily available. Workspace today is more a concept of time rather than place. We can distinguish our daily life into working or non-working moments. Irrespective of whether those moments occur while waiting at the theater box-office or lounging at the swimming pool. What distinguishes work from non-work is not so much the location but the predisposition of the individual. If a worker completes a conference call while at their child’s soccer practice, the soccer field would constitute the workspace for that moment in time.

Moving from a desktop centric notion of workspace to a user centric notion of the workspace might be the first step towards building an environment for collaboration. So instead of seeking to load resources on the desktop, organizations will need to find ways to make those resources available to individual workers in multiple workspaces over multiple devices to allow those resources to follow them. As work resources follow individuals everywhere and as individuals find individuals, instead of devices, every time, unified communications will have delivered on the promise of collaboration.

Posted by Cisco PR at 02:39 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 07, 2007

Welcoming Securent to the Cisco Family

Post by Joe Burton, Chief Technology Officer, Unified Communications

As I read my colleague Alan Cohen's excellent Halloween post the other day, I was reminded of the many conversations I've had with our best customers concerning how to manage who has access to what type of information - the notion of policy management across an organization.

Virtually all our customers want the business acceleration of Unified Communications, collaboration, and web 2.0. In fact, we would all like to use these capabilities to give us what we want, how we want it, on any device, RIGHT NOW.

Unfortunately, policy and compliance concerns often prevent widespread deployment of some of the more advanced capabilities that are now available.

For Enterprise 2.0 to take off, we need to bring the web 2.0 capabilities of ad hoc, virtual, shared, flexible, distributed, dynamic collaboration inside the enterprise but without loss of security, privacy, and system integrity.

For some time now, Cisco has been working on ways to express policy in a standard form external to applications. We believe web-based policy management as a strategic tier in the enterprise IT stack and a way to facilitate our customers’ transition to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. By expressing policy in a network service that is external to individual applications, we can uniformly apply it to all applications, communications, and content within an enterprise, and in the future, across enterprise boundaries.

With that in mind, I was delighted that on November 1st we announced our intention to bring Securent into Cisco. Securent's standards-based, distributed architecture allows enterprises to administer, enforce, and audit access to data, communications, and applications in heterogeneous IT application environments based on the context of who is accessing the information.

I've known Rajiv Gupta and Sekhar Sarukkai for a long time. I'm delighted to welcome them and the rest of Securent to Cisco.

Together, I'm confident we will do great things for our customers and the future of Enterprise 2.0.

Posted by Cisco PR at 10:59 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 05, 2007

Kramer’s “Movie Phone”: Better than today’s Customer Self-Service?

Post by Sean O'Connell, Manager of Product Marketing for Cisco's Customer Contact Business Unit

Remember the great “Seinfeld” episode, in which Jerry’s neighbor Kramer attempts to imitate an automated voice self-service system for “Movie Phone,” and then after not being able to identify the dual-tone multifrequency selections (aka Touch-Tone), “upgrades” himself to support automated speech recognition? (The punch line being “why don’t you just tell me the movie you selected?”). Sadly, the reality is that Kramer’s hilarious imitation does a better job of than some (most?) of the speech recognition systems in operation today.

In the area of customer service, which offers companies the potential for competitive (dis)advantage, many today offer their customers a variety of self-service options. Typically, one of those self-service options is the interactive voice response (IVR), or voice self-service, system. If you’re like me, perhaps you prefer to use self-service systems to avoid the potential hazards of live customer service, such as long wait times or being transferred from agent to agent.

Voice self-service systems have been around for many years. Most systems today are based on traditional dual-tone multifrequency (DTMF) technology – you know, “press 1 for sales, press 2 for service”, etc. In recent years, more and more companies are beginning to roll out automated speech recognition capabilities as a feature of their IVR/voice self-service systems. These automated speech recognition systems bring the promise of a more intuitive, user-friendly, and flexible user interaction. But all too often I’ve found that the speech recognition systems do not meet the challenges of recognizing human speech (particularly in environments with high levels of background noise, such as airports). Which begs the question, what are the considerations for businesses as they begin to deploy automated speech recognition systems?

In a recent Webcast by Dimension Data and Cisco, the question of speech recognition’s maturity was discussed--citing a recent study which contrasted views from both vendors and consumers. Not surprisingly, vendor views on speech recognition are more bullish than those of consumers. But what is surprising is how dramatically different the views can be. Speech recognition, for all its hype and promise, does not work in a vacuum in the IVR/voice self-service environment. In fact, one of the conclusions of the study is that technology isn’t even the most important consideration; rather it’s understanding consumer expectations and motivations that will drive voice self-service usage.

It’s important to remember that speech recognition systems do not work alone, and must be thought of as one piece of a larger voice self-service strategy – or better yet, the even larger customer service strategy (consisting of numerous multi-channel self- and assisted-service customer touchpoints). When you begin to think about the bigger picture for voice self-service, that’s when Kramer’s automated “Movie Phone” won’t outperform today’s systems.

Posted by Cisco PR at 03:56 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

November 02, 2007

Learning Globally Using Collaborative Technology

Post by Michael Caton, Collaboration Evangelist, WebEx

Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media has an interesting podcast with Dr. John Stuppy president of TutorVista, a one-on-one virtual tutoring service. TutorVista turns the tutoring model on its ear, most students will subscribe for $100 per month and have unlimited access to tutors to help them with a range of subjects. These students would largely be either high school or college students looking for help in a given subject or subjects.

TutorVista tutors are full-time employees that are globally dispersed, have advanced degrees and use a virtual whiteboard application (it's WebEx) and VoIP to interact one-on-one with students. TutorVista has an advantage over traditional tutoring companies in that the company doesn't have to be concerned about scaling physical infrastructure, i.e. classrooms, with demand.