With all due respect to a great competitor of ours, I am finding extreme humor in this recent U-turn by Cisco on email. Just one year ago, on August 7th 2007, Joe Burton (Chief Technology Officer) wrote a blog entry asking "Is Your PC Just a Paperweight?". Joe stated:

"The rapidly declining importance of email and the desktop computer is not one that I would have foreseen even as few as five years ago."

Then today I read an announcement by Cisco "Cisco Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire PostPath". For those that don't know, PostPath offers a Linux-based e-mail, calendaring and collaboration solution.

"The acquisition of PostPath complements our strategy to develop an integrated collaboration platform designed for how we work today and into the future, providing real productivity gains and a more satisfying user experience", said Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice president, Collaboration Software Group ..... Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco will pay approximately $215 million in exchange for all shares of PostPath.

$215M may not seem like much, but it is an awful lot to pay for a capability that is of "declining importance". I am wondering what changed. Maybe folks at Cisco found that actually they do spend a lot of time working on their PC, and heck, even doing email. Back in October 2007, we shared some stats on email from a research firm, Harris.

· 61% of information workers cite e-mail as their primary mode of communications at work vs. 31% phone.

· 80% of information workers are most likely to first check their computers each morning for messages vs. 14% phone and 6% cell phone or other.

· On average, e-mail comprises one-half of total business communication and consumes about 25% of a business worker’s workday.

· One in four information workers indicate that e-mail is essential to their job and that “they can’t live without it”, while one in five information workers describe e-mail as “mission critical”.

Coming from the consumer technology world, I am a big believer that the nature of communications is changing. Email on it's own is still a very important capability for most information workers, but potentially even more important is the need for seamlessly integrated communications based on presence (well articulated by Zeus in this article) where I can move from email, to IM, to voice, to video, to conferencing easily. I think this recent acquisition validates the approach but the mix of acquisitions will make it hard for Cisco to offer an integrated experience. Busy work ahead for the recently formed software group, which is playing an increasingly important role in a network company.

Fun times ahead.

From: http://greenupgrader.com/2492/telephone-sheep-exhibit-by-artist-jean-luc-cornec/  

This is a great little video on what ordering a pizza could be like if there is no data privacy. I've always felt very nervous about the amount of data that is out there on people, and the lack of a legislative framework around use. People are very free about ticking the "I Accept" button, but data on the Internet travels much more than a piece of paper so who knows where information about you ends up.

Great article from Zeus Kerravala. Comments later.

No Jitter | Presence, not VoIP is the Foundation of Unified Communications

"Unified communications (UC) has been a hot topic in the vendor community for the past couple of years, particularly with the traditional communications vendors. The majority of positioning that I have seen around UC positions VoIP as the foundation and then UC being the “stuff” that gets built on top of VoIP. I do believe this was conventional thinking for quite some time but this “old school” thinking needs to stop or UC will take years to reach its potential. Also, it’s just flat out wrong. Presence, not VoIP, should be thought of as the foundation for UC."

Many Tech Workers Would Accept Pay Cut To Telecommute

In a poll of more than 1,500 IT workers, 37% said they would be willing to take a pay cut of up to 10% to telecommute full time.

By Marin Perez; InformationWeek ; June 10, 2008 04:04 PM

Nearly 40% of U.S. information technology workers would accept a reduced salary to have the ability to telecommute, a Dice Holding survey revealed Tuesday.

In a poll of more than 1,500 IT workers, 37% of respondents said they would be willing to take "slightly less" pay to telecommute full time. The survey defined "slightly less" as up to a 10% reduction in salary.

respondents who said they wouldn't take a pay cut. But other surveys suggest that offering the ability to work from home can be a good way to attract and retain talented workers.

Workers can be drawn to the flexibility of telecommuting, and thanks to improvements to personal computers, videoconferencing, and Internet speeds, many remote workers can handle almost all their tasks from a home office.

Another growing issue is the spiraling cost of gasoline, which is more than $4 a gallon. Many private and federal offices are implementing plans that let workers work remotely, or have a compressed four-day workweek to combat the pain at the pump.

In a recent USA Today story, Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) estimated that employees who choose to telecommute can cut gas purchases by 135 gallons a year, which at $4 a gallon would save $540. Sun has 18,000 employees who have the option to telecommute.

Only 7% of respondents to Dice's survey said they are already working remotely, although many of those jobs are limited to consulting firms where telecommuting is a necessary part of the job.

There has been a lot of hype recently about telepresence as a future driver of collaboration, reduced costs and saving the planet. There is even a conference called Telepresence World with Al Gore espousing the eco-friendly benefits. A recent article in Information Week (Cisco's Emerging Collaboration Strategy) provides a neutral analysis of the topic, albeit with some glorifications. But this comment from the article really stood out for me:

The system weighs in at just over a ton and requires a room at least 15 by 19 feet. It uses the Cisco MCS 7800 series server and the 7970G IP phone, running SIP over a 6-Mbps or better connection for the ultrahigh-def, 1080p version. There are three 65-inch HD plasma displays and an internal Gigabit Ethernet switch, which means if you look behind the curtain, as it were, you'll see that the whole thing runs through a single Ethernet cable. It's a superb chunk of technology.

It's also damned expensive. A single-room Cisco TelePresence 3000 unit goes for about $300,000, and since having one telepresence room is like rowing half a canoe, a full dual-room system, including furniture and other overhead, runs in the range of three-quarters of a million bucks. Which raises the obvious question: Who's going to buy these things?

The short answer: C-level execs who want to demonstrate their techno-progressivism--and their deep pockets. "Telepresence is not going to be purchased by the same people as traditional videoconferencing," says Ira Weinstein, a senior analyst at Wainhouse Research. "Telepresence is an executive purchase that comes down from the C-level and is pushed down through the ranks." Think of it as the corporate Lear Jet for a new sensibility.

I have no doubt that video conferencing can be a powerful tool for communicating on a more emotional level to colleagues and business partners in a dispersed world of work. It has the potential to eliminate the need for some business travel and do it’s bit to saving the world. It’s also an eye catching toy in the often mundane world of enterprise technology. As a result, many people have been getting excited about the technology rather than stopping to contemplate the real value to the bottom line.

Let’s say you purchased a $300,000 telepresence set up that was physically located in one place and an annual operating cost of $150,000 which included dedicated bandwidth and support. That place was accessible by 10 people who typically rack up $500,000 of travel costs per year. If these people reduced their travel by 20%, the company could save $1M per year, you have a pay back of 5-6 months and an ROI of 80%+. Great huh? Not necessarily.

First, this is an expensive hardware solution. Video conferencing technology is progressing rapidly and investing in a physical piece of equipment where you are locked down to the technology does not necessarily allow you to take advantage of future innovation. Some vendors require pretty expensive underlying network investments to make the solution work which hides the true costs of the system.

Second, this can be difficult to use. Anything that requires a managed service is probably not “easy to use” and can drive up total cost of ownership over time. You either get locked into ongoing service contracts, or actual usage peters out over time.

Third, this is an isolated solution. You’ve added another isolated solution to your infrastructure that only shares the network in common. You can’t manage it centrally using the tools your IT folks generally use. You need specialist services. This can build a heterogeneous system that can actually increase costs within your company. Often times the expensive solutions don’t integrate with the rest of your communications or applications infrastructure, reducing their potential.

Fourth, there is a lack of interoperability. The users of the system may need to communicate with folks who do not have the same system, which may usually be the case. If your business has a lot of meetings between a few fixed branches, it may make sense. But if it has many branches or if you want to talk to outsiders, you need to interoperate with their system. As soon as you do this the quality becomes the lowest common denominator and your investment value is reduced to what everyone else is paying.

Fifth, you are ignoring the masses. If your company has more than 10 people chances are you would save more money by reducing their travel. Even if an average executive racks up 10 times as much in travel costs as his average traveling worker, there would have to just 10 times more traveling workers than executives to tip the balance. So let’s say you have 10,000 employees and 1000 of them travel often, racking up $50,000 in costs. If you could reduce their travel by 10% you would save $5M. Five times the executive savings with a lower reduction effort.

Sixth and most importantly, there are limited productivity gains. The real benefit in these technology is not just the travel cost savings but the incremental ability to reduce sales cycles, improve customer satisfaction, improve time to market and so on. These are often called “soft costs” because they don’t have immediate bottom line savings. But the benefits are real and can be critical in a competitive and more demanding business context.

Telepresence can be a great tool as part of your overall video conferencing strategy. But you should look for systems that are flexible to meet your future needs, are integrated into your IT infrastructure, are interoperable with your existing investments, can benefit your broader worker base and can deliver real improvements in productivity. Otherwise you may have an expensive shiny new toy that is left on the shelves in a few years.

What a great way to start the year! A recent article published in No Jitter (the online rendition of what used to be Business Communications Review) highlights an evaluation of Office Communications Server 2007 by Miercom (a privately held network consultancy, specializing in networking and communications-related product testing and analysis). Miercom is a respected telephony outfit known for its rigor in testing. They set up a basic implementation of OCS for 15,000 users and put a high volume of calls through it and still got availability of 5 9s!  This is one area I get questions all the time, but it is a validation of the great strides Microsoft is making in the way it architects server topologies for availability and scalability. The article is a good short read and gives an excellent overview of the main pieces of the product.

Lab Test: Microsoft OCS 2007--Voice Communication for the Next Generation?

2007 seems so far away now, but I wanted to end the year by flagging two great reviews that are an endorsement to Microsoft's approach to voice over IP. The first is a top ranking by VOIP-News in their review of VOIP innovations for 2007.

Top 25 VOIP Innovations of 2007

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007: Though far from surprising, the official October launch of Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 was a huge step forward simply because it made real the possibility that voice will someday become just another application running on corporate networks. As such, the announcement forced enterprises and vendors alike to get serious about their responses to a game-changing question: whether stand-alone PBXes will even be necessary in the future.

...The second is a review by CMP (part of CRN) that calls out the simple but powerful affect of presence in voice communications.

With the introduction of a single point of communication and unified messaging, Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS), along with Exchange integration, is revolutionizing the communication space. OCS is able to achieve a high level of transparency as to a person's presence at work and method of accessibility by maintaining a single identity that drives all avenues of communication.

Kudos to Jamie Stark on my team for being able to explain the complexities of the product in a language the telephony world understands!

Nothing to do with unified communications or social networking, but this experience was too precious not to share. Armaan is now 19 months old and it is incredible how quickly he picks up everything! He has difficulty pronouncing some things (my favorite is when he misses the "r" in "fork") but is having full blown conversations with us at this stage. I love being a Dad!

Just getting back from an exciting Unified Communications launch event in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of the rolling global launch modeled on San Francisco event. I keynoted this event and had some great conversations with our customers, field teams and partners. I'll write more about this later, but had to share some pictures in the meantime:-). Danie Gordon and the South African team put on a great show packed with content and entertainment (complete with belly dancers and a rowdy comedian named Barry Hilton). The theme was Moroccan, so many people were lounging on the floor when I presented, so that was a first for me! Anand Lakshminarayanan (who presented a number of the breakout sessions and drove the demo) and I had a great time. Thanks Danie and team!  

There is a lot of talk about the recent Microsoft investment in Facebook. While an outright acquisition at that price might have been a little crazy, a partial stake has many more benefits. Let's see if the illuminati start talking about those instead.

Microsoft-Facebook: 'A True Bubble Deal'

After the software giant struck a deal valuing the social networking site at $15 billion, commentators from around the Web are weighing the implications

It didn't take long after Microsoft (MSFT) agreed to take a stake in the social networking site Facebook (BusinessWeek, 10/25/07) for the comments from readers to start pouring in. Most of them focused on the price the software giant paid, a $240 million investment that values the fledgling company run by the 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg at an astonishing $15 billion.

"Can anyone else feel the '.com-Bust' coming again? Sell you idiot!" one person wrote on BusinessWeek.com, under the screen name Allison.

Source: Microsoft-Facebook: 'A True Bubble Deal'

I am officially super excited. Tuesday October 16th was the worldwide launch of Microsoft's Unified Communications products. Over a year ago, we held a strategy day announcing our intention to bet big in this space, and this week we backed it up with a ton of momentum.

It's been about two months since I joined the Unified Communications Group to lead the product management for Office Communications Server enterprise voice and conferencing, Microsoft RoundTable and end point devices workloads. I joined at a time when everybody was 150% focused on launching our solution and I got to watch and learn, and jump in to help in a few areas. I've been blown away by the level of orchestration that the team put in place to line up this launch ... and the reception from customers, partners and media was even more impressive.

Bill Gates kicked of the day with a keynote, talking about how the telephony industry has seen very little innovation, held back by the vertically structured hardware based solutions that have been around for years. With the move into voice over IP, there is an opportunity to reinvent this industry with the power of software. I've seen the deck a hundred times and will be presenting it myself when I keynote in South Africa next month, but somehow Bill just sounds more convincing when he says he wants to turn an entire industry 90 degrees. He described the shift about to happen as "profound as the shift from the type writer to word processing". Words can't do it justice, check out the streaming video of the talk here.

Jeff Raikes then came in with a polished run through the value unified communications brings to our customers and partners. I saw Jeff rehearse the night before although he flipped through a lot of the slides quickly. But he delivered with some choice stats and soundbites. The average worker received just under a 100 messages in 7 different locations in one day. They spend 37 minutes a day making calls to people who aren't there. This is all about to change with unified communications ... "The era of dialing blind; the era of playing phone tag; the era of voice mail jail; the era of disconnected communications – that era is ending"

Jeff brought in my manager, Eric Swift, to do the demo showcasing Outlook Voice Access, Microsoft Exchange, Outlook Mobile, Communicator Mobile, Office Communications Server, Live Meeting, Microsoft RoundTable, a Polycom USB device internally called "Catalina", an IP phone by LG Nortel we call the Tanjay and Office Communicator and how all these solutions fit together to make communications streamlined for information workers. I played the role of the Finance Manager in the demo, but props go to Manish Sharma on our team who put the whole thing together. We had a couple of minor hiccups, but overall it went very well.

Jeff also brought in a customer who had deployed our solution to talk about the benefits, the CIO of L'Occitane in France (women usually know the company!). We have a Technology Adopter Program and Rapid Deployment Program that allows early adopter customers to deploy our solutions before mainstream release and Microsoft get's to create a case study. We have over a hundred of these customer case studies showing the real benefits of unified communications with what we have today.

Over lunch I met one of our training partners who explained how over the last 17 years, Microsoft had helped him make his fortune in helping enterprises make the most of new technology. He was planning on betting big on unified communications and saw huge potential. "Microsoft's done well for me" he said. I am really proud of that about Microsoft. We couldn't be successful with the systems integrators, consultants, hardware vendors and trainers out there that form our ecosystem, and it certainly is true for the hundreds of unified communications partners.

And the media reception has been pretty phenomenal. This CNN video features Renee Lo in the background and all the folks on her IM list are on our extended team. We have seen dozens of original articles already and love it or hate it, you can't ignore Microsoft investing in this category in this way. And having Bill Gates personally front it as potentially the last big launch during his time at Microsoft makes it even more compelling.

I am really excited to be part of this. Already, my team is working with engineering and business development teams on the next generation of audio/video/web conferencing, enterprise voice solutions, end user devices that don't come packed with a hundred dumb buttons and more. I am presenting to five customers from three continents next week at our Executive Briefing Center, all eager to start realizing the benefits of unified communications. Can't wait!