VOLUME 17 NUMBER 2 Fall 2019
UC&C 2020 ISSUE
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE FUTURE OF VIDEOCONFERENCING OUR PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL LIVES ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE
HUMAN-FRIENDLY DESIGN MOVING FROM COLLABORATION TO MEANINGFUL CONNECTION
THE EVOLUTION OF UC METRICS FOR 2020 AND BEYOND WE’VE NOW ENTERED THE BUSINESS VALUE ERA
THE NEW, MODERN WORKFLOW HOW DOES IT CHANGE COLLABORATION?
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Unified Communications And Collaboration 2020: A sneak preview of what this issue has in store. By David Danto
contents
contributors
Darrin Caddes VP of Corporate Design Poly
4 UC&C
6 VIDEOCONFERENCING
A Brief History Of The Future Of Videoconferencing: Our personal and professional lives are about to change. By Joe Manuele
10 SOUND
No UC And Collaboration Without Good Audio: The laws of physics break for no one. By Michael Sinclair
14 DESIGN
Human-Friendly Design: Moving from collaboration to meaningful connection. By Darrin Caddes
18 OPINION Irwin Lazar VP and Service Director Nemertes Research
David Maldow Founder and CEO Let’s Do Video
The Perfect Storm: Why 2020 truly is the year of videoconferencing. By Simon Dudley
20 WORKFLOW
The New, Modern Workflow: How does it change collaboration? By David Maldow
22 METRICS
Joe Manuele CEO Highfive
Catelyn Orsini Principal Engineer Cisco Systems
The Evolution Of UC Metrics For 2020 And Beyond: We’ve now entered the Business Value Era. By Irwin Lazar
25 VOICE
The Expanded Role Of Voice In Real-Time Collaborations: The common denominator of personal interaction is clear, intelligible audio. By Catelyn Orsini
28 OPINION
The Changing View Of UC&C: Separating service providers and endpoint providers. By David Danto
Michael Sinclair Owner Audio, Inc.
Josh Srago, CTS Award-winning AV professional
30 OPINION
From The Eye Of The Law: Ignorant agreements: The risk of complacent acceptance. By Josh Srago, CTS
32 VIEWPOINT
The Future Of UC&C: Which model of service is the best one? By Carol Zelkin
39 CONNECTIONS
A selection of IT/AV-related products. Compiled by editorial staff
Ira M. Weinstein Founder and Managing Partner Recon Research
www.ITAVReport.com
Carol Zelkin Executive Director IMCCA
42 OPINION
The Last Word: Will UC finally work for me? By Ira M. Weinstein
Fall 2019
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uc&c
Unified Communications And Collaboration 2020 A sneak preview of what this issue has in store. By David Danto In the early 1990s, we were happy to call things what they were: videoconferencing (newfangled), telephony (mature), etc. Then, tools that could detect presence were inserted into the mix at firms such as IBM, and the histor y of unified communications (UC) was initiated. The concepts that formed UC were understandable: having all the methods of communication and collaboration come together and share information so that users could easily “escalate” to a more robust offering, whenever the need arose. Going from messaging, to voice, to content sharing, to visual communications—all these are aspects of the same process. I often speak and write about the factors that make UC the only technology that has been “launching” for (by my count) 21 years. There are many reasons for how dragged out all of this has become; central among them are outdated, silo-based management at user organizations, as well as intentional obfuscation and technology incompatibilities caused by manufacturers. As we approach the year 2020—marking 22 years of this “launch”—it’s fair to look at where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re going. That’s the theme of this issue of IT/AV Report. With regard to terminology, this industr y has experienced more marketing obfuscation than you’d see in the movie “Wag the Dog” (highly recommended viewing, by the way). In the last 20 years, we’ve seen analysts and experts throwing around new terminology for collaboration in a manner akin to an explosion at a baloney factor y. First, there are UC, unified communications and collaboration (UC&C or UCC), unified collaboration, universal communications (UvC) and the unified communication initiative (UCI). Then, there are the dozens of “email-killer apps” and “permanent solutions to the email problem” that we didn’t know we had. We’ve seen the rise of persistent collaboration rooms (launching with brands and names like CoSpace, Circuit, Slack, Square, Spark, etc.)—generally, first referred to as workstream communications (WC, not to be confused with the loo) and then as workstream communication and collaboration (WCC, definitely not the loo). Now, they’re somewhat universally referred to as Team-Chat platforms. (For the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick with the original UC&C here for ever ything.) Throughout all the changes in terminology, the biggest obstacle to achieving successful UC&C has always been the inappropriate technology-first focus, as compared to having a people-first approach. The only way to achieve successful UC&C at an organization is to work with the users, understand their actual needs and develop a strategic plan based upon that information; only then can you go shopping for a catalog of solutions that is usually a unique blend of offerings. Selling “the paint that’s on the shelves” without this analysis only helps the manufacturers and ser vice providers. Any solution that locks the user into one way of doing things only helps that solution’s creator; it doesn’t help the users. This issue of IT/AV Report will look at UC&C 2020 from many angles. David Maldow attempts to explain what a “workflow” is; Darrin Caddes shares his vision of how beautiful technology design can and should support human collaboration; Simon Dudley explains why this is really the year of UC; Joe Manuele walks us through digital disruption, then and now; Catelyn Orsini makes sure we don’t forget about the importance of voice; Ir win (continued on page 40) David Danto has more than three decades’ experience providing problem-solving leadership/ innovation in media and UC technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds. He now works as the Director of UC Strategy and Research for Poly, and he’s the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology.
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IT/AV Report
Editorial Director Dan Ferrisi dferrisi@testa.com Editor David Danto ddanto@testa.com Associate Editor Anthony Vargas avargas@testa.com Assistant Editor Amanda Mullen amullen@testa.com Technical Council Joseph Bocchiaro III, PhD, CStd, CTS-D, CTS-I, ISF-C The Sextant Group, Inc. David Danto Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Communications Alliance Douglas Kleeger, CTS-D, DMC-E/S, XTP-E, KCD David Lee Jr., PhD Lee Communication Inc. Peter Mapp, PhD, FASA, FAES Peter Mapp Associates Pete Putman, CTS ROAM Consulting LLC Art Director Janice Pupelis Digital Art Director Fred Gumm Production Manager Steve Thorakos Sales Assistant/Ad Traffic Jeannemarie Graziano jgraziano@testa.com Advertising Manager Robert L. Iraggi riraggi@testa.com Classifieds classifiedsales@testa.com Circulation circulation@testa.com Operations Manager Robin Hazan rhazan@testa.com Associate Publisher John Carr jcarr@testa.com President/Publisher Vincent P. Testa Editorial and Sales Office
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videoconferencing
A Brief History Of The Future Of Videoconferencing
Our personal and professional lives are about to change.
By Joe Manuele
The year was 1997. I was an Account Manager for Cisco Systems, working out of our Toronto, Ontario, Canada office, selling infrastructure to internet ser vice providers (ISPs), phone companies and cable companies. Business was good—ver y good! That’s because ever y one of my accounts needed something called a “router” to connect to the internet. Ironically enough, Cisco’s biggest channel partner in the region was Bell Canada, a 100-plus-year-old regional bell operating company (RBOC), which invited Cisco to present to a group of 300 executives. We, of course, obliged, tapping Cisco CTO Ed Kozel to lead the discussion. Ever y Cisco field rep revered Ed. He was responsible for not only setting our strategy, but also leading our ver y aggressive merger-andacquisition (M&A) activity. Ed gave us more product to sell than our customers even realized they needed—telecom
equipment like Ethernet switches and integrated ser vices digital network (ISDN) modems. Ed flew cross-countr y from sunny Silicon Valley to a chilly Toronto. With much excitement in the air, he took the stage prepared to tell the warm, polite Canadian audience what the future would hold. Ed spoke eloquently of how the internet would change ever ything. We nodded approvingly, clutching our Tim Horton’s coffee cups. Then, all hell broke loose. Ed dropped a bombshell on Bell Canada’s executive team, proclaiming that longdistance phone calls would disappear as a revenue stream and that, in the near future, voice would ride for free on this glorious data highway we were helping ever yone to build. The articulation of that inconvenient truth was the first time I witnessed the effect of digital disruption. And it was the first time I realized that we weren’t
just creating new revenue streams— we were also destroying old ones. For Bell Canada executives in 1997, some of whom were close to retirement, it wasn’t a message they wanted to hear when 90 percent of revenue came from voice ser vices. Despite the shock and awe of Kozel’s bombshell, Bell Canada did react positively to this new reality. It built out a national fiber network, investing billions in broadband infrastructure and next-generation mobile. By contrast, companies like MCI, which relied heavily on long-distance voice minutes as a primar y source of revenue, were dead in the water. So, what does all this have to do with videoconferencing? Well, as it turns out, quite a bit. If we take a step back, our first ability to have more than two groups of people communicate was facilitated by something called the “Audio Tele Conference” ser vice, launched by AT&T at the
Joe Manuele is the CEO of Highfive. He has more than 25 years’ IT and communications experience in the enterprise and global carrier markets, gained at organizations such as Avaya, Cisco and Actelis Networks.
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videoconferencing 8
1964 New York World’s Fair. In the early 1980s, a chap named Roy Weber, who worked for Bell Labs at the time, invented what came to be known as the 1-800 number, and audio conferencing became a staple of how businesses communicated around the world. For more than a generation, the only way for companies to reach out to multiple groups of people in real time—both inside and outside their organization— was via Roy’s 1-800 voice bridges. It wasn’t until March 2007, when Cisco purchased a publicly traded company called WebEx, that companies could not only speak to each other, but also share their screens to view documents and PowerPoint presentations. Although WebEx was founded in 1995, Cisco’s global reach and partner network took the ser vice to another level, and, I would argue, legitimized the desktop conferencing market. Now that should have been the end of the 1-800 number, right? Well, not so fast. Most web-conferencing tools 10-plus years ago had voice-over-IP (VoIP) capabilities, but they lacked the reliability of good, old-fashioned public switched telephone networks (PSTNs). Reselling and bundling 1-800 ser vices with web-conferencing tools gave a boost to voice ser vice providers. Although costs got lower, volume outpaced the pricing declines, and it was a pretty decent business to be in for the last 10 years or so. But, as all great digital-disruption stories turn out, Kozel was right. Voice conferencing is now free or included in software bundles, while revenue for audioconferencing companies is declining in the double digits. We can thank betterquality VoIP ser vices riding over larger, dedicated pipes, as well as the advent of hyper-scale cloud computing (more on that later). During this time, adding videoconferencing capabilities to the millions of rooms that businesses owned (to allow their employees to assemble and meet) became a separate problem that tech giants attempted to solve. What IT/AV Report
emerged were two ver y different approaches, both of which still exist today. The first approach is to buy hardware, software and professional ser vices from one vendor that provides an immersive experience for end users. The second approach has software vendors opening up application programming interfaces (APIs) to hardware vendors, letting them create virtual rooms for their respective conferencing solutions. Both approaches have created a $12-plusbillion annual market that is growing at a 10-percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). Yet, the industr y has only video-enabled roughly 10 percent of the 50 million conference rooms that exist, according to industr y analyst IDC. Both approaches also have created a robust, relatively healthy AV-integration business that is growing. In both approaches, we’ve seen some important trends that have helped facilitate the growth. The bandwidth required to provide high-definition video has gone down considerably; broadband costs have decreased significantly; and, of course, video equipment has become far more affordable. Several problems remain to be addressed, however. Deployment of room-based videoconferencing is still too complex and expensive, and the user experience is not nearly as intuitive as it should be. Additionally, we’re still building and deploying systems that only work with a single videoconference solution. So, where does the industr y go from here? If you allow me my “Ed Kozel moment,” let’s start with my own digital-
disruption statement: Desktop videoconferencing will be free in the ver y near future! The combination of Web Real-Time Communication (WebR TC) technology (the open-stack protocol that Google made available to ever yone eight years ago), coupled with the ability to host video ser vices on hyper-scale cloud, has made it dramatically more affordable to offer desktop videoconferencing. The desktop is effectively ruled by Microsoft and Google, with most businesses standardizing on G Suite or Microsoft Office 365, and both offer WebRTC clients (at no extra charge) that keep getting better. I’d argue that WebRTC will see video embedded in all enterprise applications—like contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) and Unified-Communicationsas-a-Ser vice (UCaaS) solutions. Although the trend is currently to partner and license other vendors’ software, many are developing their own WebRTC video solutions embedded in their stacks. Since we’re gazing into my Ed Kozel cr ystal ball, here are some other trends for which to watch: • Facial recognition will enable a series of productivity enhancements. When a room is video-enabled, the camera is able to authenticate users and meetings will launch automatically. Users can set environmental room settings, such as temperature and lighting, based on preferences stored in preset profiles. • The underlying meeting technology will no longer matter. If you’re a Webex shop, but you get an invite from a client who uses Zoom, the in-room hardware can connect you. Most hardware vendors are developing a Switzerland-like approach, aiming to connect natively or via session initiation protocol (SIP) to the major desktop software vendors. • Once a meeting has concluded, there will be a treasure trove of business intelligence (BI) data that can be used to help improve how we collaborate. For example, “Tom, there
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were six people in the last meeting you attended, which lasted 55 minutes. You spoke for 44 of those minutes and interrupted Jane three times when she tried to contribute. Please allow others to share their views!” I’m not sure if most of us are ready for that kind of real-time feedback, but I’m sure Jane is! • Video will replace voice as the main way for humans to communicate. If you have teenagers, you’ve already experienced this phenomenon. Gen Z uses texting and apps like FaceTime when they want to have a conversation. If you ever want to freak out your kids, call their cell phones. I usually get, “Hey, what’s up, Dad? Is everything OK?” when I call my kids. With the advent of efficient protocols like WebRTC, more powerful mobile devices and the promise of gigabit bandwidth to our devices over 5G, video will eventually surpass voice as our primar y communication channel. • Speaking of 5G, the speed being
promised at the edge and delivered with almost no latency will finally enable applications like telemedicine. Imagine sitting in a video-enabled, 5Gpowered kiosk at your local pharmacy and connecting to a doctor who can see you’re flushed; who has access to your temperature, blood pressure and other vitals; and who can communicate with you. The doctor’s diagnosis is that you have the flu. A signed prescription prints out, which you can fill right on the spot. Access to specialists in remote locations will no longer be a challenge. 4K and 8K video will allow doctors to diagnose patients remotely. • My final prediction is how ubiquitous 4K video, coupled with artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition, will radically change the way we view education. Soon, educators will teach four or five classes simultaneously from a single location. Using the same advances in AI, BI and facial recognition, educators will be able to monitor student attendance, gauge student interaction and track student progress.
They will read and grade exams by using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The upshot is, the most qualified educators will be put in front of more students than is currently possible. What’s perhaps most impressive about these predictions is how close we really are to seeing these technologies affect our professional and personal lives. The beauty of human ingenuity is that, once we deliver WebR TC-enabled video platforms running on hyper-scale cloud, delivered over fiber or 5G-powered bandwidth, the possibilities are endless. I hope we’ll be smart about how we engage and leverage these new technologies. Will they deepen our engagement and personal connections, making the world a smaller, more intimate place? Or, conversely, will the specter of all that personally identifiable information (PII) and Big Brother’s access to it make our security concerns increase? Only time will tell. Honestly, I’d like to hear from Ed right about now. I bet he’d know the answer.
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sound
No UC And Collaboration Without Good Audio The laws of physics break for no one.
By Michael Sinclair As a 40-plus-year veteran of the sound industr y, when I’m asked to reflect on the importance of good audio, specifically microphone performance as part of a videoconferencing system, it leads me to wonder why it’s even a question at all. Quite often, audio quality is the primar y indicator of connection quality, with video processing and network issues all being expressed as “audio problems.” In reality, they are not audio-related issues, although adjustments to the audio system can often mask or suppress those connection problems. Good microphone design and placement can mitigate problems with bad audio signal, but only within the boundaries of the physics of sound that govern the design of all microphones. Although it is true to say that current advances in processor power and design open up new and faster avenues of sound manipulation, the underlying constraints nevertheless remain. At the beginning of unified communications (UC), when video and audio were combined to develop what we now call videoconferencing, the emphasis was always on the picture. Invariably, comments were made about “dropped frames” and “video tiling,” whereas audio was rarely mentioned unless there was the catastrophic “echo” or a complete loss of sound. In reality, the audio part of the process was infinitely The $100,000 boardroom has become the $100 million audiovisual extravaganza, boasting a broadcast-style control room, behind glass, that’s in full view of the conference participants.
Since the mid-1970s, Michael Sinclair has been working in all facets of the audio industry. Beginning with concert audio and touring sound systems, he has grown to become the go-to person in pro-audio design and DSP programming for many of the major corporate conference spaces. He and his company, Audio Inc., are sought after for skills in many environments, including live music production, corporate boardrooms and multi-purpose rooms, network audio and live television production.
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sound 12
more difficult to achieve, owing to the slow development of the ability to control return echo from the far end and the lack of speed in the connection between the two points. Slowly, as the technology became more readily available and the developers began to understand the issues, acoustic echo control became better and better. As audio, video and connectivity technology all improved, more manufacturers began to release devices to support the conferencing market. As a consequence, the complexity of the installed systems began to increase substantially. To wit, people began asking, “If I can use one box for eight microphones, then surely I can use four boxes to enable 32 microphones, right?” What originally was a complex room with eight microphones on a conference table has now become a 600-seat conference auditorium with 200 or more inputs. The $100,000 boardroom has become the $100 million audiovisual extravaganza, boasting a broadcast-style control room, behind glass, that’s in full view of the conference participants. Concurrent with this, it did not escape the notice of enterprise CFOs that they could have an equally satisfying, completely free FaceTime chat with their kids on their cell phones. The real question then became this: “Does the room sound $100 million better than my cell phone does?” We’ve all seen the results of transmission delay and latency in video. Just look at most live-TV news reports in which two people are tr ying to have a conversation in locations many miles from each other. One person asks a question and the video shows the delay in the person hearing the question at the other end, and then responding. Equally jarring are instances in which video and audio have different arrival times; often, this appears as bad lip syncing of audio and video. This problem exists in conferencing, and it’s often dependent on the quality of the connection and the quality of the endpoint. It’s compounded by the probability of multiple far ends, each of which has var ying audio and video arrival times. Tr y explaining to a CEO why his or her $100 million conferencing system’s audio does not match IT/AV Report
with the lip movement in the video. Good luck with that! We expend a great deal of effort testing to tr y to find an average delay time to help compensate for this non-audio issue. Our findings show that, psychologically, matching the voice with the lip movement improves speech intelligibility. One day soon, someone will show me a way to automate this process that can measure and account for all the variables. Hopefully, someone is working on that problem! We have all learned over time—especially through familiarity with our cell-phone technology—to discount minor glitches in audio and video. We’ll dismiss them as connection problems, and we’ll even resort to reinitiating a call to see if things improve. However, in a big, expensive conference room, there’s far less tolerance for connection issues. This typically results in opening a ser vice call/ticket, even before redialing a call is attempted. The problems are frequently related to an issue at one of the many far ends; for example, one person reports he or she cannot hear well, even though ever y other far end is just fine. This is not, and it never will be, an issue that can be resolved by adjusting the transmission side of the audio. Speaking of mobile phones, their typically lesser-quality audio—especially with calls from noisy environments—has contributed to decreased audio performance in conferences. That being said, two ways that cellphone sound has improved are (a) by using headsets and (b) by using sophisticated, in-car infotainment systems with cabin microphones and speakers. Many of the problems with audio can be linked directly to microphone type and placement. Originally, small conference-room systems had microphones on the table in front of the person talking. Simple speakerphones were positioned on the desk in front of the user. Lectern microphones were located directly in front of the presenter, and each person on the dais had a microphone placed directly in front of him or her. All these had the advantage of microphones being placed a short distance from the source of the
sound—the talker’s mouth. Regrettably, minor improvements in microphone technology are now constantly being oversold by manufacturers’ marketing departments—in many cases, directly to architects and business owners—resulting in the unreasonable expectation that technology can correct for the “annoying” physics of sound. When we’re told by an architect that we cannot place microphones on the table or on the ceiling in front of the conference participants—indeed, that the only acceptable location is on the ceiling behind the heads of these people—one has to wonder what the architect is thinking. AV consultants are in a difficult position because saying “no” to an architect puts further work from that firm in jeopardy; unfortunately, that can leave no one to argue the case for properly placed microphones. (The architect, of course, points to the marketing materials that say there are microphones on the market that can work in those locations.) Let’s examine that hype. I, personally, have listened to and measured the results of these claims of bending and/or altering the laws of physics. I can honestly say that the obvious point remains true: The farther away you place the microphone from the person talking, the less effective the resulting audio will be. Even though it is quite obvious to ever yone in the audio business, it might be news to some manufacturers and consultants that, when people talk, the sound comes out of their mouths and not the backs of their heads. We shouldn’t have an expectation that a microphone can pick up sound clearly from that position. I can attest to this personally. During live demonstrations at trade shows and during various video presentations I’ve viewed, I’ve listened to microphones that supposedly track people speaking around a room. I’ve been told by manufacturers that the voice quality is the same when you talk directly at these devices as when you face away from them; it never is, though. The problem is that people who don’t take the time to test for themselves believe the claims about the products. This has become so
bad that architects and designers are dictating compromised positioning options on the assumption that we can just use technology to make it work. Why make it difficult when it doesn’t have to be? One would think that beamforming microphones somehow were newly developed technology; that’s not the case, however. I was shown an early example of the technology installed in an auditorium at Bell Labs in Holmdel NJ in the mid-1990s. It was placed over the center of the stage, and it was used to focus pickup toward individuals in the audience who had a question. I saw another example in the late ’90s on a microphone, designed by an Austrian company, mounted on the rear view mirror of a high-end Mercedes car. It was meant to focus the microphone toward the vehicle occupant who was talking—a four-seat conference room on wheels! Yes, there are excellent examples of beamforming and tracking microphones on the market today; however,
none of the good ones is inexpensive. The unfortunate result of putting this type of product in the wrong hands is an unreasonable expectation of its abilities. I have not found one of these devices that can set itself up; all of them require ver y specific positioning and commissioning. Despite this, we now find room designers who are designating “Technology Zones” and telling us how and where we can position microphones. Of course, we’ve tried to comply with those requests to keep relationships; unfortunately, as we continue to do this, the requests become even more challenging. Excellent UC audio is now compromised not only by the technology limitations detailed earlier, but also by the overreach of the design or the difficulty of the commissioning process— all just to look “modern” or “slick.” The entire industr y must be mindful not to allow difficult situations to occur just because someone acting as an AV designer—someone who has no audio background—has decided things must
be done this way. It’s not all bad news, though. Some small telecom companies and their products have been purchased by strong, audio-centered companies; meanwhile, some other firms have taken the time to hire engineers to transform their clever ideas into real audio products. Yes, we do have more sophisticated microphones in our toolbox to resolve difficult problems—and this helps ever yone. Echo-cancelling and noise-cancelling algorithms are getting better and better as digital signal processing (DSP) and core-based controllers get more and more powerful. The outlook is ver y good. It’s an exciting time to be in the audio business. There are so many excellent products available, many of which sound better than ever before. Embrace the moment, but don’t for one minute lose sight of the physics of sound. Be empowered to say that there’s an alternate or better way to get good sound to the far end of a conference call. You will find doing so is well worth the effort.
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design
Human-Friendly Design
Moving from collaboration to meaningful connection. By Darrin Caddes
We can’t design solely for our own generational needs and expectations; instead, we have to consider the needs and expectations of millennials, gen Zers and the now-being-hatched generation alpha.
Have you ever wondered why people never put a photograph of their workspace on the desktop of their computer, or why they never use a spreadsheet as the home screen on their smartphone? Probably not. For most—if not all—of us, I’m sure those notions seem quite ridiculous. If you’re in the vast majority of people who personalize those screens, my guess is that you use images that evoke an emotional connection within you—images that either inspire you or give you the “warm and fuzzies” inside. Almost always, these personalized screens tend to carr y images of our vacations, hobbies, special interests, pets or family members, or perhaps just beauti-
ful imager y. In addition, the vast majority of the time, these images, regardless of the subject matter, are captured outdoors. So, how is all this relevant to the future of unified communications (UC) and the role that design will play in defining its future? Well, consider the relationship between the user and the device, as well as the role that devices play in facilitating human collaboration. If designers know where to look for them, there are clues that will enable us to move beyond the need for simple collaboration and delve into the potential for fostering deep, meaningful human connections. As I’m sure we’re all aware, enterprise environments are changing and
changing rapidly. As real-estate costs continue to increase globally, work environments are becoming more densely populated; with that, there are some unique challenges for the efficiency of work and the UC ecosystem. Noise management and personal privacy are issues that have to be considered both by the architects who design these spaces and by the designers of UC products and ser vices that ultimately help connect us all. Prevalent trends we’re seeing in the evolving enterprise environment include more open-plan workspaces, more hoteling spaces, fewer traditional large conference rooms, and more lounge and huddle spaces. This is all part of an effort to provide flexibility
Darrin Caddes has served as VP of Corporate Design for Poly (formerly Plantronics) since 2004. In that time, he has built a worldclass design team, and he’s responsible for industrial design, packaging design, ergonomics, user research and user experience. He has been the recipient of numerous international design and innovation awards, and he’s had his work on display at the Pinakothek der Moderne, Germany’s largest museum dedicated to modern art and design.
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design
Enterprises are bringing in more natural light and introducing nature-centered elements such as raw wood finishes, images hung on walls and plenty of plant life, including “living walls.”
and activate nearly ever y square foot on the campus, thereby ensuring usage efficiency and facilitating collaboration in a wide variety of conditions. This not only helps ensure that spaces are being used efficiently, but also helps accommodate a wider range of personal preferences for occupants as regards how they like to connect and collaborate. We’re also seeing increased attention to design quality and execution in relation to the environments themselves. The days of bad lighting, cube furniture, and cold, drab colors and finishes are thankfully going away. Not only does this help make working conditions more pleasant and enjoyable, but it also is broadly recognized as a necessar y tool for employee satisfaction and retention. The effort that is going into redesigning workspaces is reaching well beyond better furniture, lighting and color choices, however; indeed, it’s extending into bringing in more natural light and introducing naturecentered elements such as raw wood finishes, images hung on walls and plenty of plant life, including “living walls.” (These are large installations of greener y or plant life integrated directly as part of the architecture.) These often come with some expense and maintenance responsibility; nevertheless, the positive impact on an environment is so great that they’re becoming almost common-
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place in contemporar y interior work environments and public spaces. Apart from the physical environment, something else that has to be considered when designing for the next generation of UC solutions is the changing makeup of the human population. Currently, teams of baby boomers, gen Xers and millennials are defining the UC conditions of tomorrow. But, the reality is, we can’t design solely for our own generational needs and expectations; instead, we
We’re seeing increased attention to design quality and execution in relation to enterprise environments. The days of bad lighting, cube furniture, and cold, drab colors and finishes are going away.
have to consider the needs and expectations of millennials, gen Zers and the nowbeing-hatched generation alpha. Most all of them will grow up never knowing of a world without smartphones. Compromised global environmental conditions and dwindling natural resources will be an ongoing challenge for these generations. And, over the course of their lifetimes, they will see a world in which every square meter of Earth’s surface will offer cloud connectivity. Their relationship to technology and their expectations as regards ease of use and simple, compelling, intuitive user interfaces (UIs) will continue to be considered table stakes for manufacturers and developers alike. In addition, these audiences expect a certain amount of allure and an aspect of entertainment in their hardware and UI experiences. Like a bird showing its tailfeathers to attract a mate, our products and services will have to go well beyond fulfilling a specific function; they’ll have to romance and entertain our customers, too.
For far too long, we have been living in a world of black boxes that in no way attempt to integrate aesthetically into the environments for which they were designed. The next generation of UC devices must be designed to live in harmony with our evolving enterprise conditions; if this is done well, the devices should complement, enhance and even beautify the environments they occupy. If these are our expectations for simple tables, chairs or lamps, then they should be our expectations for our communication interfaces and hardware. Following this path will require a paradigm shift in the way we designers approach our work. We have to think less appliance and more lifestyle accessory. We have to break the chains of black ABS plastic boxes with the addition of a few complementar y shiny bits to finish them off. We have to draw deeper from color and material pallets that offer the same comforting and seductive qualities we’ve come to expect
from contemporar y furniture, architecture, automobiles and other lifestyle accessories. UI solutions can no longer serve purely as a mechanism for displaying information and navigating from one condition to another. Such an approach will be perceived as soulless and uninteresting to our customers; such products will quickly fall by the wayside in favor of offerings that can capture end users’ hearts and imaginations. We have to infuse our products with qualities that help establish a strong emotional connection between the device, the UI and the end user. Highly intuitive interfaces and seamless connections will quickly become table stakes for all UC solutions going for ward. Devices whose manufacturers care enough to invest in developing solutions that are aesthetically seductive, that offer some form of entertainment value and that prove to be intellectually engaging will dominate the industr y. This is the challenge. This is our goal. We must not only calm the
dynamic and increasingly turbulent waters of the UC environment, but also capture the hearts and minds of our customers by delivering product solutions that facilitate meeting their needs and—more profoundly—improve their overall quality of life. I’m not going to lie about this being a daunting task. But I have to tell you that not only is it possible, it’s actually happening at this ver y moment. So, do yourself a favor and take a moment to pause and gaze out over a field or ocean, looking onto the distant horizon. Look to the skies through a dense patch of trees or to the ground at a simple grain of sand. There is a whole universe of inspiration and possibility to be found in the simplest of places, if only we are willing to look. We can truly change the way the world works and enable people to connect on a much more personal and meaningful level, provided that we’re courageous enough to act on those flashes of inspiration.
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opinion
The Perfect Storm Why 2020 truly is the year of videoconferencing.
By Simon Dudley There’s an old joke that goes like this: Next year will be the year of nuclear fusion, and it always will be. Like nuclear fusion, videoconferencing has been just about to have its breakout year for the last two decades or so. But, unlike fusion power, I honestly think it’s actually going to happen for videoconferencing in 2020. So, the obvious question is, “Why now? Why not all those other years?” As with almost anything else worth knowing, there’s no single answer. A combination of factors have all come together to produce this perfect storm of opportunity. So, let’s have a look at the details of this perfect storm and analyze why, in my opinion, we’re finally going to get somewhere with this technology solution.
The Internet
Internet bandwidths across the developed world are now sufficiently robust to run high-quality video traffic. It was only a few years ago that even voice-over-IP (VoIP) struggled on poorer networks. Today, most of us describe our internet both when we’re at home and when we travel as being “fine.” Most of us don’t even look at the numbers. The ser vice is good enough in the developed world.
Cloud Solutions
It might be difficult to remember, but, even five years ago, the majority of corporate users of video communications technology owned their own infrastructure. Well, not anymore. The growth of cloud offerings has been staggering. For example, consider the following: • Microsoft Teams is the fastest-
growing solution in Microsoft’s histor y. It has more than 13 million daily users, and it looks like its real growth has only just started. • Google Cloud is growing at an extraordinar y rate. • Zoom had revenues of a little more than $50 million in 2016; by contrast, for this year, revenues are predicted to be close to $600 million. So, between Microsoft, Google and Zoom, huge numbers of people are being equipped with cloud-based video-communications technology. What’s more, a ver y significant portion of the cloud-based solutions on the market today don’t charge for their ser vices.
Competition
Nothing drives a market like competition, and the competition among the cloud providers is continually increasing. Zoom recently had an initial public offering (IPO) for $16 billion, and, at the time of this writing, it had a valuation more than $23 billion. That might not rival Microsoft’s $1 trillion valuation, but both are committed to extreme growth in this space. That will help drive innovation, marketing, selling and, ultimately, adoption.
Of course, apart from the big three—Microsoft, Google and Zoom— the market continues to grow with players like Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting, BlueJeans Network, StarLeaf and a host of others, all of which are jockeying for position.
Ubiquity
Videoconferencing has suffered from a perennial problem: If you invested in the technology, but the person to whom you wanted to talk had not, then you wasted your money. As a result, lots of people waited until others chose to invest. This circular argument effectively meant no one wanted to be first; as a result, no one invested. This is no longer true, however. Solutions like Microsoft Teams are already equipped with video, and Zoom and many, many others offer free clients. As a result, the idea that you have to wait is no longer applicable.
Flygskam
Recently, an environmental activist and Nobel shortlist candidate, Greta Thunberg, has helped popularize the Swedish word “flygskam,” whose literal translation is “flight shame.” This is the concept according to which people
Equally at home in strategy, marketing, product marketing, sales or engineering, Simon Dudley has a background that allows him to see the bigger picture. He has insights into, and an understanding of, how all the disciplines work together, rather than being boxed into any one position. He has launched numerous products, negotiated many contracts and influenced many strategic decisions. He is currently the Head of Analyst Relations and Sales Enablement at Logitech UC.
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should understand and be ashamed of how much they fly, rather than treating it as a status symbol. This idea might not have spread to North America yet, but there is increasing evidence that, in Europe, flights are down and longdistance train travel is up. I think this sort of an understanding—that flying is bad for the environment, while also being bad for the person having to fly—is becoming more prevalent. Personally, I’ve found it much easier to say no to flying since the beginning of this year, when my son arrived. Instead, I join events or meetings via videoconferencing. I even helped launch a new product in Japan the other day from my home in Texas—and I didn’t even have to wear long pants!
Economics
The cost of videoconferencing technology has dropped precipitously over the last few years. The multihundred-thousand-dollar investments in infrastructure have ceased for all but a tiny percentage of companies, and the
days of $10,000 to $50,000 dedicated hardware devices in meeting rooms are slowing down significantly. The dedicated-device hardware business does continue to grow, but at a significantly slower rate than USB-attached videoconferencing. The new wave of peripherals work with off-the-shelf, Intel-based PCs that run Windows applications. These solutions are much easier to install and maintain, they have known security profiles and they can be installed anywhere.
Conclusions
So, like any other huge technological shift, it’s not one thing changing that will make videoconferencing and unified communications (UC) suddenly have its moment in the sun; rather, a collection of disparate elements have coalesced, thereby changing the world. We live in a world in which we’re all being asked to do more with less—to be more productive, rather than simply working harder. We are also becoming painfully aware of humanity’s effect on the planet and our own contribution to
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that effect. I would argue that, from a technological perspective, videoconferencing is effectively a solved problem. What we have to do next is demonstrate, to an ever-larger community, the power of the technology to save money and time (not to mention ourselves and our planet). The reason I’m so excited is this: We’re now at the point at which not investing in the technology is becoming a major business disadvantage. Business can no longer afford to ignore these solutions. They must invest, or they’ll lose out. I personally have believed in this technology since 1992, when I first saw the opportunity it presented to bring my own family closer together across the world. Today, hundreds of millions of families use this technology to chat ever y day. In another 10 years, videoconferencing will be as intertwined in our business lives as email is. So, will 2020 be “the year of videoconferencing and UC”? Ver y likely so… but for real this time.
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workflow
The New, Modern Workflow How does it change collaboration?
By David Maldow
Technology shifts are easy to identify and quantify. Whether we look at sales figures for hardware collaboration products or usage stats from cloud-ser vice vendors, we know what technology our information workers are adopting and using. Workflow changes themselves, although a bit more nebulous, are just as real. In fact, we have recently seen a metashift by which the ver y relationship between workflow and technology has completely reversed itself. Specifically, workflow used to be technology driven; now, technology is workflow driven. This might not sound like a big change, but it’s actually enormous (and that’s the reason David Danto asked that I pen this detailed explanation). In the past, collaboration technology was expensive and complicated. For example, just making a simple video call was treated like an event because of the cost and complexity. We couldn’t meet over video when and where we
wanted; instead, we had to physically go to the video meeting room. Another example to which we can all relate is sharing content. We couldn’t always bring our content—on our devices, in our chosen format—and share it in a meeting room. We had to convert to whatever the meeting room projector would accept.
Workflow First, Technology Second
Today, that boat will no longer float. Collaboration technology is so powerful, flexible and customizable that we expect—indeed, we demand—that the technology supports our workflow, rather than the other way around. We don’t make our workers go to a special room to use video; instead, we provide video on their desktops and mobile devices, wherever and whenever they want. We no longer make our workers transfer/convert files to share in a meeting room; instead, we support wireless share from practically any
business or consumer device. Call us spoiled, call us entitled, call us whatever you want. Modern workers will not accept changing the way we work to accommodate technology. And that’s a good thing because you want your working teams to focus on their immediate projects and tasks, not on learning how to use collaboration technology. Supporting your teams’ chosen workflows with appropriate tech, rather than forcing team members to change their workflows in order to use the newest collaboration fad, seems like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, for a long time, we were doing it the wrong way (due to the limitations of the technology at the time). The good news is, today’s collaboration technology is flexible and reliable enough to support just about any team workflow. We no longer force a “one-size-fits-all” meeting room collaboration design into ever y meeting room. We start by inter viewing the
David Maldow has been covering the visual collaboration industry and related technologies for more than a decade. His background includes five years at Wainhouse Research, where he managed the Video Test Lab and evaluated many of the leading solutions at the time. He has authored hundreds of articles and thought pieces for LDV and other publications, including Telepresence Options, where he was Managing Partner. He often speaks at industry events and webinars, as well as hosting the LDV Video Podcast.
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working teams whose members use the room and then design around their needs. This people-first/roomsecond approach results in more productive meetings, better team collaboration, quicker results and more satisfied team members.
The Shift: Individual Workers To Team Workers
But what, exactly, is this new modern workflow that we are bending over backward to support? It is a connected, team-based workflow that mirrors some of the changes we are seeing in society at large. Decades ago, individual work product was the big business driver. What we called “teamwork” was just management doing a good job of dividing tasks among individual workers. The “big team meeting” wasn’t an actual working session; instead, it was a mere status session in which people reported on their tasks before returning to their cubicles. Today’s generation of workers is composed of team workers. They have been constantly connected to their peers in a way that the pre-internet generation could never understand. Their online lives are anything but “cubicled.” Facebook is 15 years old. We’re used to being public, sharing and working in groups in our online lives, and we expect it in our work lives. We have constant, immediate access to our personal contacts via apps and the internet, and we expect the same level of connection with our peers at work. The other side of the coin is that, now, we expect a greater degree of freedom in how, when and where we work. We want to be constantly connected to our team, but we don’t want to commute to the office every day. (Indeed, we don’t even necessarily want to walk down the hall to the meeting room.) The focus is on getting results on the immediate project, not clocking 40 hours a week at the desk. One interesting result of these demands has been the growth and acceptance of the asynchronous-chat conversation. In the past, email was for asynchronous conversations. www.ITAVReport.com
I send you a question, and, a day or two later, I get a response. Chat apps, on the other hand, were for immediate conversations. We felt a compulsion to respond to all chat messages immediately. It was rude to “leave someone on read.” This had to change to support teams on flextime. Many workers prefer using chat over sending email to communicate with team members. It’s less formal, it feels more natural and it keeps important project messages from getting mixed up with junk emails. But,
Collaboration technology
workers want to be connected, but we don’t have to be face-to-face with our team members 24/7. We want access, but not that much access. When it’s time to get teamwork done quickly, nothing (other than meeting in person) beats a video meeting. We have to be able to jump on video at a moment’s notice, but we aren’t comfortable sitting in a video meeting all day. We are comfortable, however, sitting on chat all day. Chat gives us the freedom to address team matters when we wish (due to the acceptance of asynchronous chat), but we can set it aside to focus on individual work when necessar y.
is so powerful, flexible and customizable that we expect— indeed, we demand—that the technology supports our workflow, rather than the other way around. to support our new “free” work style, we had to change the social norm and accept asynchronous chat. Some people debate whether the Team Chat phenomenon will be the new way teams work or whether we’ll go back to the more traditional, person-to-person unified communications (UC) chat model. Nearly ever yone seems to agree, however, that offloading team communications from email to chat is a game changer. Project communications are all in one place and much more searchable, whereas your email inbox becomes significantly decluttered and potentially makes you more quickly responsive to external contacts.
The Typical Flow
Although the entire point of the modern workflow is that all teams are different and there is no one-size-fitsall way to collaborate, we are seeing some general trends among today’s working teams. One example is the “chat-to-video” escalation. Today’s
Social Norms
Due to the social norms surrounding chat and video, many working teams find themselves “living” in their chat apps and simply saying, “Hey let’s jump on a video meeting” when they want to dig in and get some work done. That is the basic dynamic, but there are dozens of questions that must be answered, based on your team’s preferences, to fill in the gaps. What kind of chat app? How are the channels set up? Which video ser vice? How does it connect to the chat? How does it connect to your meeting room? How are files shared? All these questions (and many others) should be answered. But the answers should not be based on what the technology can do; rather, they should be based on how your team wants to work. The result is that the workplace is mirroring the greater cultural shift toward living in online communities. We expect to be connected to our friends, share content with them, and easily meet with them via chat, audio or video, using extremely user-friendly apps on our mobile devices. We expect the same level of connection for our working teams. One final point is that all of this should be embraced. This new modern workflow isn’t just about giving workers more freedom so they are happier; it also results in greater productivity, which improves your bottom line. It’s the ultimate win/win. Fall 2019
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metrics
The Evolution Of UC Metrics For 2020 And Beyond
We’ve now entered the Business Value Era. By Irwin Lazar
The metrics that IT and business leaders use to evaluate the success of their technology investments are rapidly changing. Whereas they once focused on performance management, the key measure of success is now derived by measuring the business value of investment. This evolution of metrics can be broken down into three distinct eras: • The Performance Era (pre-2016): In this era, metrics were simply defined by the question, “Does it work?” IT and business leaders measured success by looking at metrics such as outages, mean time to repair, data loss, jitter, mean opinion score and other factors, all of them directly related to the real-world performance of the technology. If helpdesk tickets and user complaints were kept to a minimum, then the deployment was deemed a success. • The Utilization Era (2016 to 2019): In this era, performance wasn’t enough. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) began asking the question, “Is anyone using the applications and systems that we provide?” Here, IT leaders were increasingly tasked with not only measuring adoption and utilization, but also undertaking marketing, training and other user-awareness activities to increase technology adoption. Implicitly assumed in this era was that, if people were using the provided apps, the organization was successful.
• The Business Value Era (2020 and beyond): In this era, we measure the impact of technology rather simply, asking, “What’s the impact on the bottom line?” What’s most important in this era is to know how the implementation of new technologies results in measurable business value—for example, reducing costs, increasing revenue or improving efficiencies that make an organization more agile. It’s important to note that no era completely replaces the previous one; instead, each new era represents growth atop the metrics of the previous era. That is to say, the focus on utilization did not replace the need to measure performance, just as measurements of business value do not eliminate the requirement to understand adoption and usage patterns. Each successive era just represents a new set of metrics. The primar y driver behind this evolution is the changing role of IT. For organizations to succeed in an environment of rapid technological change—an environment in which businesses must embrace disruptive change in order to sur vive—IT can no longer be a passive ser vice center that simply provides a set of applications for business use. Instead, to support digital-transformation initiatives, IT must function as a business partner that is charged with enabling organizations to take advantage of emerging technology to
Digital Digital Transformation Transformation Strategy Strategy 75%
33%
have an enterprise-wide digital transformation strategy
23%
met Nemertes’ Digital Transformation Success classification
Courtesy Nemertes Research.
have, or are planning, a digital transformation strategy
Irwin Lazar develops and manages research projects, conducts and analyzes primary research, and advises enterprise and ven© 2019 Nemertes Research dor clients on technology strategy, adoption and business metrics. Lazar is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the digital workplace, and he has covered enterprise communications and collaboration as an industry analyst for more than 20 years.
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deliver measurable business gain. Nemertes’ research notes that approximately 75 percent of organizations now have, or are actively planning, digital-transformation initiatives. The challenge for IT in this new era is to identify and measure investments’ business value. Nemertes’ “Workplace Collaboration: Research Study 2019-20” is based on data gathered from more than 600 end-user organizations in Asia, Europe and North America. According to the study, just 22.6 percent of participants measure some sort of business-value gain related to their investments in collaboration technologies like unified communications (UC), team-collaboration apps (e.g., Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, Slack), or meeting/videoconferencing ser vices like Amazon Chime, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, Google Hangouts and Zoom. Organizations that have identified business value typically have done so by measuring gains in repeatable business processes. For example, one research participant in the construction vertical noted that, by provisioning videoconferencing to remote worksites, the organization was able to reduce the average time it took to review, process and
In this era, we measure the impact of technology rather simply, asking, ‘What’s the impact on the bottom line?’ What’s most important in this era is to know how the implementation of new technologies results in measurable business value.
approve work-order changes by more than 30 percent. That resulted in a measurable savings in terms of time and travel. Measuring business value typically requires organizations to do the following: • Measure before and after spend: Return-on-investment (ROI) evaluations are usually a key part of determining whether to invest in a new technology, but rarely have we seen organizations measure the actual afterdeployment ROI to see if their initial calculations were correct. If IT leaders want to be able to identify the actual result their investments bring to the bottom line, they must determine a means of gathering before and after data. It should cover factors like licensing costs, network costs, staffing changes, and the cost of investing in monitoring and management tools. • Determine potential new revenue opportunities: Investing in technologies that improve collaboration, especially when they extend to the customer, often can lead to revenue gains that deliver positive ROI. For example, a research participant told us that, by enabling sales teams to use videoconferencing with prospects, they increased close rates by nearly
metrics
23% Have Measured Success From Workplace Collaboration Projects 23% Have Measured Success From Workplace Collaboration
Courtesy Nemertes Research.
Projects
© 2019 Nemertes Research
Small (<250) Midsize (251-2,500) Large (>2,500)
2
© 2019 Nemertes Research
2
Table 1.
25 percent. In this example, video improved the sales experience for the customer, and it enabled the organization to differentiate itself from competitors that were still relying on phone calls for sales meetings. • Identify process improvements: Arguably, this is the most difficult business benefit to measure; however, it’s often the one with the highest potential gain from investments in new collaboration capabilities. Here, we see that efficiency gains are often tied to repeated business activities; as such, they will vary greatly from one company to the next. One example we’ve identified is shortening the on-boarding of new hires by using video-based distance learning and team-collaboration apps to track the steps that new hires must complete as part of their initial training process. Another organization reported a 25-percent improvement in typical process times related to product development after the deployment of a video-enabled meeting platform that integrated with the organization’s team-collaboration application. For those who are successfully able to measure the business value of new collaboration in-
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Successfully measuring the business value of technology investments requires an evolution in the way that IT and businesses view success metrics, along with an evolution in their measurement tools.
vestments, the ROI yielded is often significant. Table 1 above shows the average savings for those who measured improvements, categorized by organization size. Successfully measuring the business value of technology investments requires an evolution in the way that IT and businesses view success metrics, along with an evolution in their measurement tools. Although this new Business Value Era doesn’t replace the need to ensure acceptable performance and the need to measure adoption and utilization, it does require that IT leaders work hand-inhand with lines of business to understand the current collaboration challenges, the opportunities that emerging technologies afford to transform business processes, and the ways that new technologies can reduce operational costs and/or lead to new revenue opportunities. IT leaders, to increase their value to their respective organizations, should lead the transition to judging the success of technology investments by means of the measurable impact new capabilities have on the bottom line.
voice
The Expanded Role Of Voice In Real-Time Collaborations The common denominator of personal interaction is clear, intelligible audio.
By Catelyn Orsini
When you answer the phone to talk with a colleague or client, a great deal of rich conversational information is communicated. It’s not just the words that are said; it’s also in the active listening and responses.
Last week, I met my SVP in person for the first time after joining my new company two months ago. I shook her hand and introduced myself. She said, “Yes, we’ve met.” Delicately, I said, “Well, no, but we did chat on the phone before I joined.” She replied, “That counts. We’ve met.” With myriad ways to “connect” online—from liking tweets, to watching keynotes on YouTube, to attending webinars—it’s fair to ask just what counts as a meaningful personal connection. Some might argue that, without video, the experience is significantly downgraded; however, in this global, hyperconnected corporate world, one-to-one voice calling remains one of the most personal kinds of encounters. It’s the “I
Catelyn Orsini has more than a decade of experience designing and building outstanding consumer wearable audio devices at Poly (formerly Plantronics), Apple and, most recently, Cisco Systems. She has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in acoustics. She loves the ocean, and she’s passionate about connecting people to the world around them through voice, music and everything audio. www.ITAVReport.com
Fall 2019
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With all the rich interpersonal information, apart from the words being spoken, being transmitted through voice, it’s no surprise that many companies offer algorithms to determine who is talking, the sentiment with which words are spoken, and even how the person is feeling while he or she is speaking.
know, you know, we know” part of a real-time voice call that is so difficult to reproduce over a chat platform or through social media. It’s the pause, the laugh and the sigh that are so much harder to capture in text form, regardless of how many emojis are used ;). Voice is expanding beyond connecting people, moving toward providing essential data to up-level the collaboration experience.
Voice As The Backbone Of Communication
With all the hoopla around chatmessaging platforms and asynchronous communications, it’s easy to see why voice has fallen from being top-of-mind for the UC industr y. The phone-call experience has been pretty much the same for the last 100 years: We pick up a phone, dial a number, the far end rings and the intended recipient decides to answer (or not). If you’re like most people, you might be hesitant to answer for fear of spam calls; however, when you do intentionally answer the phone to talk with a colleague or loved one, a great deal of rich conversational information is communicated. It’s not just the words that are said; it’s also in the active listening and responses. Voice is the backbone of realtime collaboration because it allows people to think, reason and selfreflect together. Recall the last time you were on a business call with poor or no audio. The meeting halts, devices or apps are rebooted, and attendees dial back in. Some topics…some business-critical negotiations…some decisions for which emotions have to be heard and responded to will always have to be
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handled using the voice. There is no doubt that technological advances have increased the ubiquity and mobility of voice communication. In the last two decades, advances in audio processing like microphone beam forming and noise suppression (which separate and eliminate background noise from the speech signal) have made it possible to take calls from nearly anywhere. New features, leveraging machine learning (ML), can identify the type of background noise—for example, keyboard strokes or barking dogs— and suggest that the end user mute. This same audio technology, combined with advances in power consumption and wireless protocols, has led to an explosion of wearable devices, such as watches and headsets, which come in all shapes and sizes. Whereas mobile devices created a computer-in-your-pocket world, the popularity of headsets has created an intimate audio I/O interface in the ear. Features like adaptive active noise cancellation, which employs integrated microphones to listen to the ambient sound and uses algorithms to cancel out unwanted signals, allow customization of your audio environment so you can ignore those voices around you when want to focus. As we collectively continue to push the limits of remote working by dialing into that global “all-hands call” with colleagues who are halfway around the world—while we’re driving, riding a train or making dinner at home—the desire to be in complete control of the audio will continue to grow. We’ve all had that one Bluetooth accessory—be it a car entertainment
system, headset or some other audio device—that hijacks the sound from our mobile device whenever we get near it. Or maybe you’ve been stuck on mute because your unified communications (UC) client routed your call through the native dialer app and you have multiple layers of user interfaces (UIs) to navigate between. We routinely navigate a multitude of voice-communication platforms and endpoints that are only growing in complexity; yet, we, as individuals, can only consume a single audio channel at a time. Local communication of devices—for example, the ultrasonic signal sent from a mobile phone to a room system (that generates a simple prompt to move the call)—is an example of how contextual information can make it easier for the end user. Surfacing the control of the audio more directly to the end user is critical to building confidence and reducing frustration.
Voice As A Multi-Layered Data Stream
The speech-recognition problem is considered by most to be “solved,” given that the word-error rate of machines is now on par with human comprehension. Even capturing far-field speech across a noisy room is commonplace. The question now is this: What do we want to do with all that data? We are accustomed to a distinction between our written output—for example, documents and emails that are distilled and edited to contain relevant information, savable for future use—and our ephemeral spoken conversations, which are filled with extraneous words and utterances. The promise of real-time meetingtranscription ser vices is to capture ever y word we say or hear, whether in person or on a call. Consider for a moment all the information we transmit with our voice day after day, year after year. Imagine the kinds of benefits we could draw from that enormous data set. The more obvious cases, such as spending less time taking notes and sending out action items, have clear utility. An analysis of what was top-of-mind last week or last month—or perhaps insight into how engaged I was when talking
to certain people, or about certain topics, or in cer tain types of meetings—is intriguing. However, more for ward-looking applications, such as a searchable voice-communication corpus, are more dif ficult to comprehend. With all the rich interpersonal information, apart from the words being spoken, being transmitted through voice, it’s no surprise that many companies offer algorithms to determine who is talking, the sentiment with which words are spoken, and even how the person is feeling while he or she is speaking. Already, in the callcenter space, call analytics have been deployed to monitor the conversation between agent and caller to identify if there is overtalk (or shouting, or irritation, or happiness) between them. This information can alert the supervisor to step in, give the agent a break or offer more training. The burgeoning emotional artificial intelligence (AI) space can combine this voice data with other signals, such as facial expression and heart rate, to provide personalization of the tech-
nology with which we interact daily. The idea is that, when our human emotions can be transmitted to and understood by our technology, our devices can better be adapted for our body, our mood and, ultimately, our goals. One example of this empathetic technology might be sensing my engagement and understanding of a meeting and adjusting the audio parameters to emphasize the voice frequencies for better intelligibility. Additionally, sending this engagement level to the far-end participants could be useful in helping them adjust their messaging and content, just as they would intuitively if the participants were live as opposed to being remote.
Voice As A Useful Interface
To turn on the lights in my living room, I flip the switch. If the light does not turn on, I assume the bulb has burned out or the circuit is blown. When, instead, I say from across the room, “<wakeword>, turn on the light” and the light does not turn on, I yell, “<WAKEWORD>,
TURN ON THE LIGHT!” Given the choice, most people would choose the physical switch because it’s simple to use and easy to debug. Adding a voice UI that increases complexity, while delivering no obvious gain to the end user, is problematic. If the scenario above was, instead, that I wanted to turn on my living room lights remotely from my office, then the complexity-versus-utility balance might tilt toward voice—although not, perhaps, for the obvious reason. Most voice-first devices require a cloud connection to support the compute needed for understanding intents and executing actions. When the end user wants to accomplish something through the cloud, he or she now has an alternative to the screens and apps of computers: the voice. Pulling backend intelligence to the wearable device that is too small for a visual UI has the potential to create a no-brainer use case for voice, as long as the interaction is simpler than pulling out your mobile device, unlocking it and navigating to the (continued on page 40)
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Fall 2019
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opinion
The Changing View Of UC&C Separating service providers and endpoint providers. By David Danto As I wrote in this issue’s introduction, we’ve been calling this unified communications (UC) thing by many different names over the past 20-plus years:
‘Unified communications (UC), unified communication and collaboration (UC&C or UCC), unified collaboration, universal communications (UvC) and the unified communication initiative (UCI). Then, there are the dozens of “email-killer apps” and “permanent solutions to the email problem” that we didn’t know we had. We’ve seen the rise of persistent collaboration rooms (launching with brands and names like CoSpace, Circuit, Slack, Square, Spark, etc.)—generally, first referred to as workstream communications (WC, not to be confused with the loo) and then as workstream communication and collaboration (WCC, definitely not the loo). Now, they’re somewhat universally referred to as Team-Chat platforms.’ Obviously, there is and has been a lot of confusion—not just in collaboration technology and platforms, but also in how we view and discuss them. It’s difficult to have an apples-to-
apples discussion about the providers and options in the space when all the terms and ser vices are nowhere close to being interchangeable. Partly for that reason, and partly because of the rapid pace of change to UC as a Ser vice (UCaaS) in general, the analysts at Gartner have decided that their Magic Quadrant for UC will be retired. They said the market has “matured,” and, as such, they will “refocus” their energies into a “Market Guide” going for ward. When it’s the expert analysts in the space telling you that even they can no longer make quantifiable comparisons between the vendors and ser vice providers, then you know the level of confusion is at its peak. Mature or not, the current market situation still leaves users with a lot of legitimate questions. The biggest ones are as follows: 1. What should end-user organizations do to develop excellent, futureproof collaboration strategies? 2. How should they look at the market and compare the providers in it? Thankfully, the answer to the first question hasn’t changed. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, the only process that works 100 percent of the time is “…to work with the users, understand their actual needs and develop a strategic plan based upon that information; only then can you go shopping for a [blended] catalog of solutions.” That’s as logical as making a shopping list before you go shopping. Because not ever yone in your house loves the pomegranate yogurt as much as you do (oddly enough), and the size-four black dress doesn’t fit ever yone the same way (with the potential bad results ranging from too small or too large to just plain inappropriate). That then brings us to the second question, which is an interesting one to examine. I believe—as many others do—that the world of UCaaS is in fact becoming the norm. Cloud-based collaboration is becoming a commodity. The providers in the space are moving toward a world in which, if end users want to collaborate with someone, it shouldn’t matter which UCaaS provider they are using. I believe (as we postulate in this issue’s “Viewpoint”) that it’s worth analogizing to the mobile telephony market to make things in unified communication and collaboration (UC&C) easier to understand. In that comparison, it doesn’t matter if I use AT&T and my friend uses T-Mobile; regardless, we can call each other using a simple, standard process. Sometimes, that involves dialing a number, and, sometimes, it’s just verbally asking Siri or Google to call my friend. Any necessar y gateways or interop ser vices are invisible to the user. So, let’s extrapolate this successful model to the UCaaS/UC&C world. Whereas some users might choose Zoom for ser vices and some might choose BlueJeans (or any of the others), those choices shouldn’t make a difference when it comes to calling. A user’s ser vice-provider decision (in a perfect world, at least) should be solely based upon cost, promotions, support, reliability, etc. The fact that I might have chosen one provider, whereas my friend chose another, should not affect our ability simply to call one another. Of course, that’s not how the collaboration world works—at least, not yet. If you choose to buy your ser vices from a provider that offers a complete collaboration suite, you’ll generally get good performance when staying within that suite. Unfortunately, for the most part, it’s still a crapshoot when you’re invited to a meeting platform outside your norm (a situation that happens in most user organizations multiple times ever y single day).
David Danto has more than three decades’ experience providing problem-solving leadership/innovation in media and unified communications technologies for various firms in the corporate, broadcasting and academic worlds. He now works as the Director of UC Strategy and Research for Poly, and he’s the IMCCA’s Director of Emerging Technology.
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For non-native platforms, you can always just click on that non-native link from your friend’s invitation on your desktop and open a browser onto the provider’s site. The question, of course, is whether that will work. Sometimes, you’ll find that your native app/suite has a stranglehold on your camera and headset/speaker. You might have to close your native app to release the resources—a “solution” that doesn’t always work, either. There also might be firewall, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and other restrictions at play that have been cleared for your native ser vice, but haven’t been for theirs. In the huddle room/conference room, it’s even worse. Maybe you can punch in a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and a series of numbers to join your friend’s meeting. Maybe you’ll find that you have to purchase a gateway ser vice to interconnect your preferred platform to your friend’s. And maybe you’ll find the suite you purchased comes with devices that simply won’t connect to a competitor’s UCaaS platform, at all, no matter what. In any of those cases, you’d likely have to engage some sort of IT administrator support to make the call, thereby killing whatever productivity the collaboration was intended to enhance. All these are fantastic reasons not to buy your endpoints from your provider and not to buy endpoints locked into only one choice of providers. So, in our near-future UCaaS world—one in which you’ve correctly selected your cloud-ser vices provider solely based on the value of those ser vices—how should you compare the various endpoints on the market that will connect you to your (and other, competing) ser vices? I would suggest, in order to ser ve our industr y, we have to widen our definition of endpoints and compare them against an ideal set of parameters. Endpoints, I would like to propose, are ever ything that connects the digital world (UCaaS) to the analog world (our eyes and ears). Providers of these endpoints should be judged and ranked based upon the following criteria: • Completeness of portfolio: Does your endpoint provider offer headsets for mobility, in-office headsets, in-ear/ on-ear/over-ear UC headsets with superb noise cancellation, acoustical-environmental treatment (that is also compatible with your headsets), web cameras for desktop and huddle-room use, all-in-one USB peripherals with cameras and audio, telephony sets, executive appliances, and room codec appliances with cameras and audio? Do the endpoints natively work with future-ready voice-control systems? • Ability to manage: Does your endpoint provider of fer quality, enterprise-grade management tools? What www.ITAVReport.com
percentage of the endpoints are fully remotely manageable? Is it the entire por tfolio? Has the provider created this platform to optimize your experience of management and monitoring, or has the process been unloaded onto a third-party platform? • Compatibility and agility: Does your endpoint provider’s portfolio work with all available UCaaS platforms? Do the endpoints in the portfolio have the ability to switch between UCaaS providers rapidly during the course of a business day? Is doing so a simple end-user function of placing the next call on the desired ser vice, or do you have to contact an administrator to change the endpoint’s personality and settings? How many UCaaS platforms are natively compatible with your endpoints? How many require a gateway ser vice that carries separate costs? (continued on page 40)
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opinion
From The Eye Of The Law Ignorant agreements: The risk of complacent acceptance. By Josh Srago, CTS
If someone were to ask me what two stories from the summer of 2019 could have the most significant lasting impact on unified communications (UC) in 2020, as well as technology companies and the relationships they have with their users in general, I would say they would be (a) the discover y of one firm placing a web ser ver on Mac hardware and (b) the resurgence of FaceApp. What’s most interesting about these two stories is they raise exactly the same problem!
The 30,000-Foot Recap
For those who don’t recall the events that occurred, Zoom, the most dominant force in software-based videoconferencing in the marketplace today, was found early this spring to have a security vulnerability on Mac hardware. Essentially, in order to create the ease of use whereby a user could click a meeting-invite link and immediately join, Zoom included a web ser ver as part of the download of the software. If the user failed to disable the video setting according to which the camera is automatically on, hackers could target that web ser ver located on the Mac and gain access to the user’s camera. Zoom issued a patch to resolve it fairly quickly, and Apple sent out two separate operating
system updates to resolve the issue. FaceApp, meanwhile, is a socialmedia trend whereby people can manipulate photos or videos by aging themselves digitally or altering other aspects of their appearance, and then share the pictures across all their social-media accounts.
The Problem
In each case, a user is downloading something from a provider. With Zoom, the user is looking to connect for a videoconferencing call, and he or she downloads the Zoom software. With FaceApp, the user downloads the app for personal enjoyment and fun. Each download acts as agreement to a contract between the individuals downloading and the companies that make the product. As soon as you hit that download button, you have taken responsibility for the product’s conditions and you have accepted the terms that were set forth in the company’s end-user license agreement. (Typically, the smaller fine print tells you all the rights you’ve given up and the license you’ve gained access to.) And, yes, that still applies, even if there wasn’t a popup asking you to read something and click “I agree,” so long as the information about the terms and conditions was readily available to you at the time
that you downloaded. The problem we face is that no one ever reads those agreements. They are long. They are full of legal jargon. You just wanted to use the product. In some cases—for example, joining a videoconference—you didn’t have a choice because you had to be in that meeting. We like the instant gratification of downloading a new app that we get to play with so we can be in on the fun that the rest of the world (at least, according to our social-media feeds) is enjoying. But, in doing so, we lose a lot.
Privacy & Access
These agreements contain some pretty important things. At the forefront—in particular, with products like FaceApp—is privacy. When you download the product, what are you actually giving the company access to on your device? Does the agreement just allow the company to access the photos that you take while using the app? Does it allow the company to access your full photo librar y? What about the camera? The microphone? Your contacts? Your account on another ser vice? Your connections on that other ser vice? The interconnected nature of these applications could result in the app
Josh Srago, CTS, an award-winning AV professional with experience as a consultant, integrator, manufacturer and end user, is currently attending law school at Santa Clara University with plans to return to the audiovisual industry and aid with the quickly changing legal and regulatory landscape of technology. Any article he writes that includes statutory or legal analysis does not constitute legal advice.
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having a significant reach not just into your information, but also into the information of those to whom you’re connected. Additionally, it is critical to understand what the company is doing with that information once it has access to it. Is the company sharing your information with other companies? Can you opt out of that sharing? Do third-party companies have to ask for your permission to do things with your data? This is the data-snowballing effect that we now face. Once a company has access to your information, along with the ability to share it with others, you quite possibly lose all control over your own information and what that information is being used for.
Individual Rights
Wait a minute…. No matter where you live in the US, if you own an Apple device and you choose to engage in a lawsuit against Apple on the basis of that purchase, it can only be pursued in California? Beyond just authorizing access to your data, these end-user license agreements also contain choice-of-venue clauses in the event of a lawsuit. The companies selling these products can dictate that, by agreeing to use their product or ser vice, your only legal venue to pursue an action against them will be in the state of their choosing
world. And, to some extent, that’s true. (typically, the state in which they’re But that doesn’t mean you should headquartered). ignore them. And did you know that companies Audiovisual integration and consultcan dictate which state’s laws will be ing are, at their core, middleman serapplicable in any claim against them? vices. Each company recommends, and This would be the choice-of-law can re-sell, products that are developed clause. As a hypothetical, let’s say by manufacturers. Some integrators you live in Maine. Let’s say you want even offer their own software solutions to sue Big Data Corp., which is lothese days. Understanding what’s in cated in California. You’ve purchased the company’s product and its end-user license ONCE A COMPANY HAS ACCESS TO YOUR INFORMATION agreement conAND THE ABILITY TO SHARE IT, YOU QUITE POSSIBLY tains terms that you can only file LOSE ALL CONTROL OVER YOUR OWN INFORMATION. a claim against the company in these products’ license agreements is the state of California—but, when now part of the role that audiovisual you do, the laws of Delaware will professionals must play as advisors to apply. Assuming that Big Data Corp. their clients. incorporated its business in Delaware A real-world example of this is a (as many companies do because of company that came to the consulting favorable business laws there), then firm I work for in order to show off its you have agreed to a contract stating new product. The company was ver y that you will only sue them in Caliexcited to brag about the engineering fornia, but those courts will interpret accomplishments and the flexibility of Delaware contract law. the device. It wanted to emphasize how amazing the product was with the conSo What? Why Does It Matter? nected app that was now offered for End-user license agreements are any user who wished to use it. We took ubiquitous when it comes to the an iOS device and an Android device products we purchase, and even the and looked up the app on each to see ones we use for free. Many people what was being done. have adopted the defeatist attitude In the iOS store, no end-user license that accepting these terms is just (continued on page 40) the cost of doing business in today’s
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Fall 2019
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viewpoint
The Future Of UC&C
Which model of service is the best one? By Carol Zelkin
When AT&T was a monopoly and created the Bell System, it was the only game in town. All telephony that followed stayed within the dialing schema and standards that it created. Then, videoconferencing came along. Compatibility and interoperability were never in question until the collaboration tools were no longer developed by a monopoly. Video has now gone past Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) and past telepresence exchanges, and it can now achieve really excellent-quality collaboration over the public internet. But, odds are, you still can’t make a call from a “Brand C” system to a “Brand M” system without paying extra for an interoperability engine or service. Of course, each brand has its rationalizations for why its exclusivity is really a good thing. In the mobile telephony world, however, the players have now been divided into service providers and equipment providers for quite some time. Service providers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.) compete on price, coverage, service and reliability factors, but, for the most part, they couldn’t care less what equipment you use. They work with all of them. Equipment providers (Apple, Samsung, etc.) compete on features, form, battery life and hardware quality, but, for the most part, they couldn’t care less which service provider you use. They work with all of them. And, in this reality of separated services and equipment, there are no gateways or exchanges to ensure interoperability—at least, none visible to the end user. Every service can connect to every other one. So, as we look to unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) in 2020, which model of service is the best one for real-time voice, video and data collaboration? Should firms buy all their services and all their hardware from the same manufacturer (or from a manufacturer within their approved ecosystem)? Or, should service providers/platforms and separate hardware providers offer agnostic and interoperable endpoints and services? We asked a number of integrators, service providers, end users and manufacturers about where they felt the industry was going; their answers are presented here. Thankfully, as long as you have eyes, you won’t require any interoperability gateways to understand how they feel!
INTEGRATOR JP Ward Sales & Marketing Director InvolveVC www.involve.vc I have heard analysts tell us that we video service providers should aspire to be like the mobile phone model. Only…that’s not a great experience, is it? There is a balancing act between learning from the history of our great industry and considering the wants/
needs of the incoming generation. The real question here is about interoperability. Is it dead? Well, it’s dying. Historically, we have tried interoperability and standards, and it didn’t go so well, did it? During the H.320/H.323 eras,
all service providers had test and concierge functionality in their portfolio—because customers needed it. I still remember hotdesking from our own network operations center (NOC) and casually observing activities. The most memorable of these were numerous test calls on a daily basis. What next, then? I like to observe how my young, 12-year-old daughter consumes technology. Voice calls are still OK (apparently), but she doesn’t ever dial me from the
actual phone application. Instead, she always, without fail, calls me from an app on her mobile, and she uses that one app for voice, video and messaging. Why? Because regardless of iOS or Android, she can communicate with everyone and the interface is clever and easy to use. She likes it. However, I bet that, if I compare notes with another parent whose child has a different group of friends, the application platform might be different. Using my fuzzy and aging crystal ball, I
In her role as the IMCCA’s Executive Director, Carol Zelkin is responsible for the alliance’s industry relations, strategic planning and business development. Her strong background in telecommunications as an Executive Board Member and two-year President of the International Teleconferencing Association (ITCA) positioned her to play a key role in the industry. Zelkin was also a CoFounder of Optel, one of the first manufacturers of electronic whiteboards for the distance-learning industry in the 1980s.
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can see a future built on platforms. Just like our kids use one preferred platform, our colleagues will collaborate and meet via one platform. It might be Teams (any of the varieties) or any other reliable platform. The downside to all this is the room
experience. If one brand of Teams is my personal preference, but I receive an invite from a partner to meet via a different platform, with no interoperability, then we’re kind of stuffed, right? So, does this mean we’re headed to a bring-your-owndevice (BYOD) world?
That is probably my biggest concern here. Although the user interface (UI) is good, the far-end experience can often be inferior. In recent weeks, however, I have enjoyed the meeting experience with agnostic displays that have general compute built
in, a good HD camera and whichever software is required. Boom! It works a treat. I see the need for manufacturers to improve their artificial intelligence (AI), but, from first release to where we are now, it has shown progress. That will likely be the brilliant future!
or stationed in a large conference room. Today, we see people on video calls in the middle of the supermarket, in restaurants and in airport lounges. If we’re connected to the internet, we can collaborate with our colleagues, peers, clients and partners anywhere, anytime, from any device. Organizations have to be increasingly aware that they don’t operate in isolation. Not only are they reliant on their employees remaining collaboratively connected to boost productivity and profits, but, in addition, their ability to collaborate with suppliers and partners seamlessly is pivotal to success. As businesses start to use more applications to enable new processes and drive efficiencies, the challenge of integrating legacy and disparate UC&C platforms and ensuring that the data is shared effortlessly between the systems must
become a key focus. The challenge for IT organizations remains the same: It’s difficult to find all the skills in-house to support this multi-vendor environment. It becomes essential to find a partner who can facilitate and manage the integration of systems from multiple vendors. Getting the deployment of a modern collaboration solution right is critical not only to ensuring that employees are able to work together, but also to breaking down those disparate technology silos. Organizations are recognizing that investment in the employee experience will deliver an enhanced customer experience. Freeing people to work in the way that best suits them increases their ability to innovate and create value for the organization. Ultimately, that leads to an empowered workforce.
INTEGRATOR Mitchell Hershkowitz VP/GM, Digital Workplace Dimension Data/NTT https://hello.global.ntt Legacy telecommunications systems provided a service to an individual based on an address and a device. Organizations provided phone service to an employee at his or her desk via the phone that was stationed there. Local carriers sold telephony services to residents of a house or an apartment tied to an address and a phone that the person plugged into the wall in one of the rooms. Your mobility was tied to the length of the cable plugged into the phone jack. Similarly, the early versions of videoconferencing were based on the concept of an individual, or group of individuals, sitting in front of an endpoint that had a dedicated connection to the network. You were limited to videoconferences with other people who had endpoints in the same network or with the same service provider. Again, there was no www.ITAVReport.com
mobile solution, as the device either sat on a desk in an office or hung on the wall in a conference room. With the rising adoption of cell phones in the mid-’90s and the number of mobile cellular subscriptions ultimately surpassing fixed telephone subscriptions in 2000, end users began making demands about how they wanted to receive these communication services. End users wanted to bring their own devices into the workplace as they desired—anywhere, anytime, any device— and bring parity to the voice services in their personal and professional lives. The introduction of FaceTime in 2010 with the iPhone 4 added video services to end users’ demands for their devices in the workplace. A video call or meeting no longer required the end user to be tethered to a desk
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SERVICE PROVIDER Robb Woods Senior Client Principal BlueJeans Network www.bluejeans.com At our firm, we’re big fans of customer choice. Choose whatever meets your needs, whether it’s interoperable, best-ofbreed solutions, or a pre-integrated suite of software services and hardware. The advantage of best of breed is clear: Interoperable, standards-based services offer organizations the flexibility to select the right service and the right equipment to meet their users’ needs today, without fear of lock-in tomorrow. What meets today’s needs might not meet tomorrow’s needs. So, for videoconferencing, why not have a world that interoperates, much as the telecommunications world has
evolved to do? Plus, equipment vendors can do what they do well, which is to innovate the endpoints, whereas service vendors can innovate the capabilities of their services. That being said, some organizations prefer to consolidate their communications vendors down to just one; often, that’s because of perceived cost advantages. Our perspective is to proceed with caution. Why? There are several reasons. First, one must ask, can one vendor truly cover all the use cases in your organization? Typically, suites provide “good-enough” functionality for the most common use cases, but
they don’t necessarily excel in integrations with functional or vertical business applications, nor do they excel in more specific videoconferencing use cases like town-hall events, learning and training, or external collaboration. Second, you are relying on the “suite” vendor to continue the pace of innovation across all areas of its portfolio. By contrast, interoperable, best-of-breed vendors are highly focused on delivering rapid innovations in their specific domains in the communications ecosystem. Third, you might be opening up your organization to operational risk if your sole vendor experiences outages,
security breaches, etc. If you consolidate your audio, video, chat, etc., into one tool, then, if said tool goes down, you don’t have a backup tool for communications. Finally, by investing in an ecosystem—and by demanding your vendors support open, standards-based interoperability—you are beholden to no single vendor and you can readily switch, if necessary. If you’ve gone all in with a single vendor, and that company later chooses to raise prices or abandon its current strategy (or if a better technology comes along), you have more significant switching costs.
decision-making and builds better-performing teams. The future of communications is video. When you’re looking at the future of your UC stack, do you want to work with a legacy provider that was built on the
foundation of voice, or do you want a modern solution that was built video-first? For video to be a catalyst for positive cultural change, it must be simple, reliable and nondisruptive to your
SERVICE PROVIDER Janelle Raney Head of Product Marketing Zoom Video Communications www.zoom.us We hear it all the time, and we have for years: Unified communications (UC) has not lived up to its promise. Traditional UC built on the foundation of voice has failed, and no one vendor has offered a truly unified experience
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that works seamlessly together. Fast-forward to today, and video is the most critical component of the UC stack for agile organizations, as it improves trust, leads to better understanding, speeds up
existing workflows. Video should be an enhancement to your workflows. It should be available wherever you are, whatever you’re using. It should be a veil that you never think about, but whose benefits you notice. Across the enterprise, very rarely is there a “one-sizefits-all” solution that optimizes conferenceroom AV needs across all meeting spaces. The hardware should first and foremost help optimize the audio and visual experience for the physical space. When it makes
sense to standardize, such as in repetitive huddle-room environments, I believe one should do so. When it comes to bespoke use cases and large spaces, one has to make sure one has the AV equipment that best fits the need. With an openhardware ecosystem, the innovation of the core meeting experience can be left to software, independent of hardware, thereby allowing organizations to reap the benefits of agile and rapid release cycles. Whether you have
SERVICE PROVIDER Karl Hantho President US Pexip www.pexip.com This “Viewpoint” raises a great question, and, as is usually the case, there is no one right answer. Most manufacturers will continue to develop solutions that deliver their best user experience when functioning within their own ecosystem. This approach allows those manufacturers to accelerate their development and innovation cycles to respond the needs of their customers, and we have seen this trend with the three leading UC providers: Cisco, Microsoft and Google. For instance, Cisco provides excellent audio and video quality for its www.ITAVReport.com
dedicated devices, Microsoft for its supported Microsoft Teams Rooms and Surface Hub 2, and Google for its supported Hangouts Meet kits and the Jamboard. As a result, the customer experience is fully optimized for both the hardware and software from that vendor, and customers have a stronger commitment to that provider. Conversely, we see tremendous value in a mixed UC&C environment. There are many innovative solutions, which address more specific UC&C applications, and which can be less costly to acquire and implement, while also providing greater
legacy hardware, offthe-shelf hardware, an appliance kit or touchscreens, all your rooms have to enable one click to join/ start a meeting and one click for wireless screen sharing. IT must have one dashboard to manage rooms, software and firmware updates, and alerts. You must have a service that scales and works for all your internal and external video meetings—even joining meetings from other providers in any given conference room. And you should have access to in-
novative features, such as people counting in rooms, digital signage and scheduling capabilities. That being said, consider your entire communications stack of voice, meetings, chat and room systems and how they will work together for a frictionless experience. Reap the benefits of serviceattached solutions and interoperability, but keep in mind that, to drive seamless video adoption, organizations should standardize on the most important aspect: the user experience.
flexibility than the single-manufacturer approach does. We hear customers all over the world saying it would be crazy to invest heavily in conference-room systems that can only connect to one specific meeting service. And, with some analysts estimating there are more than 40 million rooms that have to be videoenabled, the stakes are high. In addition, we hear many organizations express their desire to ensure that modern collaboration tools work with their existing videoconferencing systems. Ultimately, organizations should choose a video solution that is inclusive and that enables them to meet with anyone—internally or externally. With the ever-increasing connectedness of the modern
workplace, users need easy and full participation from third parties outside the enterprise. To that end, interoperability and gateway services operating in the background will continue to be critical optimization components of a rich collaboration experience in the modern workplace. Ultimately, today’s large enterprises require solutions that offer high-quality audio and video communications on the hardware itself, in addition to flexible software that enables them to meet with anyone. Although there are benefits to both approaches, organizations should consider how inclusive their solution is and whether it will meet their workers’ internal and external communication needs. Fall 2019
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END USER Mike Duda Technology firm employee IMCCA board member Ideally, all enterprises would be able to call one another using videoconferencing and web conferencing the same way we do on phones, without costly interop services being in the middle. The main issue that prevents that is varying security requirements from enterprise to enterprise. As a
result, a lot of UC infrastructure—especially for enterprises, like banking, that are more conservative—still resides on-premise, with gateways or bridges to link them to the outside world. These bridges isolate the ports using the rich-media feed and make the security folks happy when an outside call has to be curated.
There would be a great deal of benefit to having a set of standards that allows all systems (regardless of which enterprise they are linked with) to communicate seamlessly via the same protocol—without the need for external bridges. That protocol would have to be subject to a thorough security assessment from every
enterprise that chooses to adopt it. I see a lot of security teams’ reviews in this concept’s future, but, if it were built and adopted, the return on investment (ROI) could be monumental. Such a model would clearly enable faster, more seamless collaboration between enterprises throughout the world.
out there will enable collaboration to become a consistent and reliable experience, and one with fewer resources required to make it work. This drives utilization and, within our company, creates happy clients. Many of our calls outside our firewall are with customers; this typically means some type of interop solution. These meetings can really embarrass an operations team…or worse. Do you really want to be held responsible because a call failed with a significant account, just
because that customer happens to use a different platform? Our operations team spends time with all new clients’ IT teams to set up test calls to ensure we can successfully connect when meetings happen. This requires resources on both sides. So, from my perspective, we should strive to remove backend complexity and the additional manpower that is required to make calls connect due to varying industry standards. And, please, let me call in using FaceTime from my Android….
END USER Mark Brown MMS IMAC & Support Senior Engineer Swiss Re www.swissre.com Standardization of hardware/providers/ platforms within an enterprise is so much more than having a simple method of connecting calls. It is critical for delivering a service to our clients. I feel strongly that, within an enterprise, hardware, firmware, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), etc., should be as consistent as possible. However, outside the (fire)walls of an enterprise, standardization is sorely missing. Industry standards are paramount, whatever the industry is. If Company X buys one type of plat-
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form, it should not mean it is overly complicated to conduct business with Company Y just because it has a different platform. Or maybe Company Y has a mixed environment. So, how do we connect with a client of this type, which is in a different room with a different system? This “Viewpoint” asks if service providers or platforms should promote a common language for connectivity. The answer is yes— please standardize! Allow me to state what I feel is obvious: Having fewer protocols
END USER Gary Anselme Financial-services firm employee and IMCCA board member I think we’re in an era in which service and hardware providers are competing for your attention on desktop and mobile devices. They would like to keep you in their ecosystem and implement as many features and capabilities into their platform as possible. That way, you, as an end user, won’t leave. This isn’t a bad ap-
proach. However, not all end users have the same platform. This is why I think making solutions agnostic and interoperable serves the greater good. End-user organizations are getting smarter about the UC space. They are evaluating internal sentiment and creating metrics reports. They are using that data
MANUFACTURER Jimmy Vaughan National Technical Director – UC Solutions Crestron www.crestron.com It’s hard to ignore the history and evolution of telephony. However, as we evolve from videoconferencing to UC, video calling is only one slice of the overall solution. Today, in many organizations, the platform has to do a lot more than just audio/video calling. You might require features like presence, instant messaging (IM) or chat, and document sharing and collaboration, just to name a few. In my opinion, the mobile industry is a lot closer to how the UC industry began, and how it might progress. The mobile industry www.ITAVReport.com
had many different players, but it was Apple and Samsung that ended up dominating the industry with a “phone” that is now the gold-standard mobile-communications device. How many people would have predicted that the mainstream popularity and usage of the Blackberry would have decreased so dramatically, given its enormous market share in the early 2000s? The “phone” feature is just one of many on the mobile hardware platform today. Now, our devices are not just phones, but also replacements for
to determine the best tools for their users, and, at the same time, to drive change in the form of “digital transformation” within their organizations. Using this data, they are able to partner with manufacturers to improve products and services, as well as to create new processes and successful outcomes.
End users might like one specific feature and/ or capability from one vendor and something else from another. If the vendors were able to interoperate, rather than forcing us onto one platform, or making us pay extra for an interoperability service, it would be beneficial to the end users whose business they want to retain.
our cameras and other standalone technologies; instead, apps live on our mobile devices. As a result, mobile phones are now closer to computers than phones. Additionally, it seems that, each day, these devices become more powerful, capable and inclusive than anyone could have previously imagined. And missteps, of course, might happen. Companies might miss what comes out on top, as is evident by Bill Gates’ recent revelation that Microsoft dropped the ball on mobile, which could have tremendously increased Microsoft’s grasp on the world’s technology. The ultimate takeaway is, if you build something that is narrow in scope and that cannot evolve, you are increasing risk and potentially alienating your
customer base. People want technology that works and grows with them as their needs change. Working with a single manufacturer and service provider limits your options; in such a case, you live and die by that manufacturer’s offerings, with no ability to pivot. With the importance of collaboration in the workplace and with the continual change we’ve seen in this space, we believe the future holds the ability to deliver a native software experience across different platforms with a single, flexible hardware solution that is scalable. One word of caution: When it comes to hardware, software and the user experience, what you might think the future holds might not even be close to what it looks like once we actually get there. Fall 2019
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MANUFACTURER John Restrick CTO, Webex Devices Cisco www.cisco.com Buying services and equipment from a single vendor can give a company significant advantages in integration, support and security. The real world is a messy place, though. When companies plan to focus on a single vendor, it is important to evaluate the vendor on its openness. Companies should pick a vendor with a comprehensive strategy to handle interoperability and integration. Moving to a single vendor is hard. First, most companies have an existing deployment of hardware and services that will require interoperability and integration. A
flash cut is rarely an option. For example, if a company changes its room videoconferencing strategy, it does not want to throw out its current investment immediately. Second, even after successfully depreciating and sun-setting previous products, change keeps happening. The company might buy, be bought by or merge with another company that made different choices, meaning the process would have to be repeated. Third, just as a company decided at one point to change to use a single vendor, it might decide to adopt a new vendor in the future due to the changing technology landscape, or because of business
MANUFACTURER Tim Root VP of Product Management Poly www.poly.com The modern video communications industry is changing at a pace that makes the adoption of smartphones look slow. There is a collision of markets underway, with the epicenter of the explosion being video communications. Since the beginning of this
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industry, video was an island in the world of telephony equipment/ services, used mostly by large enterprises. Many firms utilized a parallel strategy for video, consisting of infrastructure/ management/endpoint all in parallel, supporting video experiences (typi-
or commercial needs. A platform without strong interoperability and integration capabilities creates lock-in. Transitioning to a new vendor would be slow, difficult and costly. Openness does not make these transitions free, but it does make them much easier. Companies also have to communicate with their customers, vendors and partners, without requiring them to choose the same vendor that they did. Modern meeting services make this much easier by allowing anyone with a link to the meeting to join from a PC or smartphone. This still leaves the issue of creating an excellent meeting experience when rooms are involved. As long as their room systems have the capability to communicate using standard protocolsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;like session initiation protocol (SIP)
or H.323â&#x20AC;&#x201D;they should be able to join most meeting services without having to purchase a separate interop service. Although these examples focus on video, the points above are helpful in thinking about IT deployments more broadly. This is not to underplay the value that close integration of equipment and services from a single vendor brings; just remember that future needs, deployments and investments will naturally evolve. The aim may be a single solution, but the reality will often be transition. Companies will also find a particular workload or niche important enough that they will choose best of breed for that piece of the solution. To keep up with fastchanging technologies and business environments, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s critical to have a strategy that enables you to integrate other solutions.
cally in a small number of dedicated rooms within the company). My, but what a decade or so can do! Web conferencing started driving hosted-communication services for inter- and intra-company meetings. Solutions like Webex and GoToMeeting started driving millions of minutes of meetings, typically focused on audio and presentations. The technology to make these meetings work started to expand and video was added, but only as a desktop-fo-
cused add-on. Not many users would turn on the camera. The on-premise video leaders started to notice that the audioonly market was being pressured by this new, richer experience. By the mid-2000s, more than a few were offering UC solutions for their enterprise customer base that included IM, audio, video, content-sharing, presence, etc. These richer platforms started to change the way that internal employees used (continued on page 41)
Product information is supplied by manufacturers and/or distributors.
Extron’s DTP2 T 202 FB Transmitter
Extron has introduced the DTP2 T 202 FB, a 2‑input transmitter that sends DisplayPort or HDMI, audio and control up to 330' over a shielded Catx cable to a DTP-enabled product. Its form factor provides a flexible floorbox mounting solution that is compatible with offerings from OBO Bettermann, MK by Honeywell, Electraplan and PUK. The DTP2 T 202 FB supports video resolutions up to 4K/60 at 4:4:4 chroma sampling, and it complies with HDCP 2.2. Analog stereo audio embedding, assignment of the stereo analog audio input, EDID Minder technology and automatic switching between inputs allow easy operation in unmanaged locations. The DTP2 T 202 FB enables discreet placement in a floorbox under a lectern, table or wherever necessary to meet application requirements. The DTP2 T 202 FB is compatible with all DTP Systems products, and it can be configured to send video and embedded audio, plus bidirectional RS232 and IR signals, to an HDBaseT-enabled display. Extron Electronics www.extron.com
connections
Compiled by editorial staff
Yamaha UC’s Collaboration Kit
The Yamaha Collaboration Kit, currently available only in North America, combines Yamaha’s ESB-1080 Enterprise Sound Bar and Huddly IQ AI-powered conference camera, which is tailored to deliver a high-quality video-collaboration experience. Yamaha’s ESB-1080 provides an immersive feeling, offering clear, dynamic, full-range speaker output for conference rooms. The sound bar’s 2 built-in subs and bass-reflex port deliver clear, dynamic, full-range sound in conjunction with 2 dome tweeters and 2 woofers. Its conference-mode preset is specialized for installation in conference-room spaces that have enterprise-demanded functions for easy administration. The compact and elegant design, automatic sound optimization and versatile mounting options suit the solution for various enterprise needs and designs. The Yamaha ESB-1080 is available as a sound solution for any enterprise room to provide or expand speaker output, or as part of a bundled solution with the Huddly IQ AI-powered conference camera. Yamaha Unified Communications uc.yamaha.com
Arista’s E-Vocal Duo AoIP Group
Arista has introduced its E-Vocal Duo audio-over-IP product group. The E-Vocal Duo ARS-0200-A00 2-channel analog audio-to-Dante interface makes it easy to connect one’s legacy audio gear to a Dante-networked audio system. Opposite in function to the E-Vocal Duo ARS-0200-A00, the E-Vocal Duo ARS-0002-A00 converts a Dante stream into 2 channels of analog audio signal. Arista’s E-Vocal Duo ARS-0002-A01 allows 2 audio-signal outputs of lip-sync delay of up to 170ms/ch (fs = 48kHz) to synchronize the audio stream to the video stream. The delay control switch can add delay in the range of 0ms to 170ms by 32 increments. The E-Vocal Duo ARS-0002-A01 uses XLR analog outputs. Arista’s E-Vocal Duo products also feature compliance with AES67, the ability to use high-resolution 24-bit analog to digital conversion, and the ability to be powered via PoE or 5VDC via a micro USB connector. Arista Corp. www.aristaproav.com
Atlona’s OmniStream 111 Wallplate
Atlona’s OmniStream 111 Wallplate (AT-OMNI-111-WP) is a single-channel networked AV encoder for HDMI 2.0 sources up to 4K@60Hz and HDR. It supports embedded audio and RS232 or IR control pass-through. The Decora-style wallplate form factor integrates interchangeable black-and-white wallplates and faceplates. The OmniStream 111 WP is designed for high-performance, flexible distribution of AV over standard, off-the-shelf gigabit Ethernet switches. This networked AV encoder features advanced VC-2 visually lossless video-compression technology with user-selectable video-quality-optimization engines designed for computer-generated imaging or motion video content. The wallplate achieves extremely low, sub-frame latency when paired with OmniStream decoders, it’s HDCP 2.2 compliant, and it’s suitable for the latest ultra-HD and HDR sources. Atlona www.atlona.com
www.ITAVReport.com
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UC&C: UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS AND COLLABORATION 2020 (continued from page 4) well.) This issue contains all that and Lazar details the importance of evolvmore, including our recurring columns ing metrics; Michael Sinclair stands up from Josh Srago, CTS, on the fine print for good audio; and Carol Zelkin of the of user agreements, as well as from Interactive Multimedia & Collaborative Ira M. Weinstein, who admits his UC Communications Alliance (IMCCA) addiction. coordinates a “Viewpoint” that asks Feel free to let me know your what the UC&C ser vice model will look like going for ward. (I, meanwhile, write thoughts on UC&C 2020. Email me at ddanto@testa.com, or through Poly or up my opinion on that future model, as
the IMCCA. Alternately, send me an instant message on Skype for Business; ping me on Cisco Webex Teams or Microsoft Teams; call me on video on Zoom or BlueJeans or RealConnect or Google Hangouts Meet (or FaceTime, if you must); or drop me a personal message on Twitter or LinkedIn. Unified, indeed….
VOICE: THE EXPANDED ROLE OF VOICE IN REAL-TIME COLLABORATIONS (continued from page 27) right button in the correct app. enabled devices in your home, you Conversational learnings, such as might find it increasingly difficult to intent structure and multi-turn interacwake up only the intended device. Techtions, from voice-first devices in the nology is out there that’s working to home can easily be transferred to the handle this challenge by connecting all office. However, there are new chalthose voice-enabled devices to a central lenges to be addressed (without even hub. When the wakeword is detected, bringing up the cloud-security issue all the devices send a measure of loudoften raised at the prospect). One way ness and location so the central hub can to make users aware of voice-capable compute a confidence score to tell the devices and overcome the hurdle of hub that the light by the door is most discoverability is proactive prompting. likely the one you meant to turn on. But With proximity technology that can what happens when you take this into determine the user’s location, in comthe workplace and every desk, laptop, bination with calendar information, an phone and headset in your open office intelligent meeting assistant can ask an supports the same set of wakewords? end user if he or she would like to join Without expanding and enhancing the the meeting when that individual enters existing infrastructure of information a meeting room. It’s natural for the end about the end user, their devices and user to respond to a voice prompt with other contextual information, these comhis or her voice. plexities will be difficult to overcome. As you acquire more and more voiceThe tradeoff between utility and the
amount of data collected is a common theme in technology; voice UIs are no exception. Moving from shouting commands at appliances to having a meaningful conversation with a machine feels a long way off. Humans are wired to make connections with others through their tone, their pitch and the phrases they choose. We naturally express abstract concepts and tell stories with our voice. It’s natural to want our technology to understand us with little to no effort on our part, but we have to reconcile that desire with how much information we’re willing to share. With the collaboration industry focused on video and chat, the value of voice should not be overlooked. The common denominator of personal interaction is clear and intelligible audio. Connecting with voice counts. If we’ve talked over the phone, we’ve met.
OPINION: THE CHANGING VIEW OF UC&C (continued from page 29) • Return on investment (ROI): How does your endpoint provider portfolio’s total cost of ownership (TCO) compare with others? What are the costs of components, ongoing licensing and support contracts? So, yes, I agree that blending the UCaaS providers with the endpoint providers in formal analyses yielded muddied-up results that are no longer relevant. In my opinion, however, the answer isn’t giving up on metrics; rather, it’s separating them into two different comparison processes. It’s clear to me that separating endpoints from the UCaaS ser vices makes sense. Once separated, as I’ve tried to show, quite a few measurable metrics are still worthy of detailed charting from all the analyst firms. If a given UCaaS provider is also still providing endpoints, those two pieces of the puzzle should be separated and evalu-
OPINION: FROM THE EYE OF THE LAW (continued from page 31) agreement was posted. There was no notice for the terms of use. This was less dangerous for the users, but it was extremely dangerous for the manufacturer. If that app happened to have any vulnerabilities that resulted in a device’s failure, there were no terms set forth as to how liability would proceed. In the Android store, the end-user license agreement for the product allowed the company access to the contacts of the user, the internal and any external hard drive of the device, and more. The app wasn’t one for a contentsharing collaboration company; it was for a product that was purely for the receipt of information from a centralized broadcasting solution. Why would the company require access to the contacts list? Why would the company require the ability to access content on both internal and external hard drives? This seemed to be forcing the user to
IT/AV Report
ated against the relevant categor y’s own criteria. After all, a review of an iPhone doesn’t suddenly change if you switch from using it on AT&T to using it on T-Mobile. The iPhone is correctly judged based upon its features and capabilities (including that specific ability to switch from AT&T to T-Mobile), whereas the carriers are correctly judged based on calling plans, ser vice and reliability. Finally, if you’re an end user and the UCaaS equivalent of one of those mobile carriers tries to sell you endpoints that can only call other endpoints on their own network—or that require either expensive gateways or administrator intervention to make off-network calls—you should reject that premise, just as you would with your mobile phone. Don’t let anyone tell you that a lack of simple interoperability is a norm you have to accept.
give up data needlessly. Under questioning, it became readily apparent that the manufacturer had hired an outside developer and that the developer just hadn’t turned off the access to those requests. And that’s why it matters. Each
agreement we enter—whether for that trendy new app or for the most common UC software platform—has terms and conditions. We must take it upon ourselves to be educated about the risks of making any recommendation to a client. If a client is uncomfortable
making itself susceptible to such risks, then we must have alternative means to give the client the desired functionality. Risk isn’t just about a device being hacked; risk also encompasses the usage data, as well as our rights and limitations as users of a product.
VIEWPOINT: THE FUTURE OF UC&C: WHICH MODEL OF SERVICE IS THE BEST? (continued from page 38) The last area affected by the transitheir desktop solutions. By the begintion was the conference room. These ning of 2010, the market was rich spaces initially tried to make the tranwith products that could support UC sition to lower-cost implementations features at scale. by using PC peripherals designed for The user equipment solutions were personal audio and video communicaalso ramping up during this decade. tions. Over whelmed by the larger Smartphones now came with two environments, they failed to provide a cameras; tablets were taking over the usable solution. It took a few years, but market; and laptops all came with a purpose-built conference-room periphbuilt-in camera. The networks were erals finally hit the market, enabling also maturing to the point that video an explosion of newly named “huddle was no longer the burden it had been rooms.” Low-cost, USB-connectable in the past. IT teams had run their tridevices with new, 120-degree field of als and determined that scale for both view cameras allowed IT managers to audio and video media streams was build smaller rooms at a lower price achievable—both at the desktop and point than their previous conferencevia new, inexpensive, high-speed serroom designs entailed. vices for home offices. The work-fromThese new rooms created a new home model was finally like being in market. The cost of video moved from the office, and most companies began hundreds of thousands to a few thouto encourage it en masse. sand with hosted UC solutions. The All these variables created a new prior web-conferencing players, along world of devices. The headset, for with a bunch of new ones, have now example, became a standard peripheral started to change the landscape from for anyone with a desk job. The need on-prem solutions to in-the-cloud UC for both privacy and high-quality audio solutions that can provide complete when on a desktop application “call” was solutions to any-sized organization. critical to the efficiency of each worker.
The stor y is far from over, but a future is emerging. Most collaboration users today complain that they want ever ything just to work. Yes, there are still dominant players in the space and, yes, UC calls on systems that are certified or provided by a single ser vice provider have a greater likelihood of “just working”—but that’s just for today. Clearly, if an organization buys a product that can only work with one ser vice, and it has to take a call from another ser vice (the rapidly growing norm in today’s market), “just working” will go out the window. At some point soon, less-expensive room hardware and devices will likely enable calls from any provider—without the need for an expensive gateway ser vice—just as mobile telephones do today. At that time, it is likely that enterprises will leverage a cloud UC ser vice provider for their platform(s) and separately leverage their hardware and peripherals providers to ensure that these remain agnostic and can support a call from anyone, using any ser vice, at any time.
OPINION: THE LAST WORD: WILL UC FINALLY WORK FOR ME? (continued from page 42) an expedited call-launching method than about a truly integrated experience. So, what is a user to do? Be flexible. Install yet another app. Buy more memory for your laptop. Learn another user interface (UI). Pay another service fee. That’s why I use five to 10 UC tools each week. And that’s how I became a UC addict. What am I hoping to see in 2020 and beyond? A UC mindset that goes beyond the backend plumbing of basic connectivity, reliability and usability and that, instead, focuses on the poor soul using the tools. The vendors have done their part. They offer amazing tools that provide exceptional collaboration and communication experiences. Now we, as an industr y, have to do our part. What does this mean? It means bringing the value
time. Years. What will make it happen? Users— millions of users pushing their vendors to pull back the curtain and open their systems. We’ve seen some limited progress in this area in recent quarters. And many of the vendors to which I’ve spoken are amenable to a more open approach—at least, to some extent. But, so far, we’ve only scratched the surface. The time has come for true platform agnosticism. For now, all we can do is install more and more amazingly powerful apps. Oh…and we can join Unified Communications Anonymous. Sorr y that I can’t tell you more right now, but three of my UC clients are blinking. That’s what I get for ignoring those apps for so long….
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to the people. Don’t cut cost anymore— add value. Don’t make things more accessible—make things more integrated. Let me stay on a single set of tools and an ecosystem that works for me (and my company), without keeping others, who are on different tools, out of the conversation. Picture this: I come into work and log into my machine. Up comes my UC app, and, within that single app, I see inbound messages (emails, IMs, voicemails, video mails, etc.) from colleagues, partners, vendors, customers and prospects. As an industr y, we’re network agnostic. And, within the same platform, we’re becoming medium-agnostic. Now the time has come for us to become platform/ser vice agnostic. How will this happen? Slowly, over
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opinion
The Last Word Will UC finally work for me? By Ira M. Weinstein “My name is Ira Weinstein, and I’m a unified communications (UC) addict. It’s been less than five minutes since my last communication session, and I currently have five UC apps open on my mobile.” Yes—that’s what I’d say at my weekly Unified Communications Anonymous meeting. If an organization like that actually existed, I expect we’d need a venue the size of Wembley Stadium in each major city just to house the attendees. (I can’t even imagine how many cookies we’d need….) Obviously, I jest. Or do I? To be clear, I am a major UC fan. I live and breathe a vast and everincreasing array of UC tools. I am on video many hours a day. I share content in my sleep (almost). The widespread availability, reliability and usability of personal (and group) videoconferencing have changed how I work and how I live. But, at some point, I found myself changing my workflow around my UC tools. And I’ve watched many companies release advancement after advancement focused on making UC tools (a) cheaper, (b) more reliable, (c) more accessible and (d) easier to use. But these are mostly bread-and-butter type announcements. Surely, nobody would complain if his or her UC ser vice became even less expensive. But is that what we really need? The UC vendors and providers have already reduced prices and total cost of ownership (TCO) by leaps and bounds in recent years. Is price even an issue anymore? And who wouldn’t want their communication tools to be even more reliable? Has anyone ever said, “I think our telephony system should fail ever y few weeks so we can remember what
it’s like to be unreachable”? Once again, as an industr y, we’ve mostly won this battle. Today’s UC tools, as a whole, have proven themselves to be amazingly reliable. So, what about accessibility? I’d say we’ve hit that one out of the park, as well. Give me 15 minutes and reasonable broadband, and I could be up and running with five different UC platforms. Perhaps I’d need a bit more time to integrate each one into my other backend systems, but you get the point. Finally, let’s talk ease of use. With limited exceptions, today’s tools are easy enough for people with little or no training to use. Install the app. Log in. Start communicating. But here’s where the problem comes in: Because today’s UC tools are so cost-effective, reliable, accessible and easy to use, it’s become all too tempting to sign up for and use many tools at the same time. For what it’s worth, UC is not the only area in which this is happening. In our office, we use both Windows PCs and Macs. We use both Microsoft and Google platforms. And so on and so forth. At home, I have satellite TV and not one, not two, but three (or is it four?) different over-the-top paid video ser vices. But these products, ser vices and systems are mostly consumption tools. When I read my email, the person who sent me a message doesn’t know or care whether I’m an Office 365 or a G-Suite user. The email makes it through no matter what. And whether I watch “Game of Thrones” or “Sons of Anarchy” on Blu-ray (yes, I still buy physical media sometimes), through DirecTV ondemand, via Hulu or by another means is my business. Unfortunately, UC is different—at least, today it is. When I make the choice to use product A or ser vice B, I am essentially forcing others to use that same tool (or a compatible tool) if they want to communicate with me. In fairness, some of the UC platforms do interoperate, at least to some degree. But usually that interoperability focuses on audio/video calling, and, often, it’s more about (continued on page 41)
Ira M. Weinstein is Founder and Managing Partner at Recon Research, an independent research, advisory and consulting firm focused on enterprise communications. He is an expert on communication solutions, audiovisual systems, and UC products and services. During his 25-plus years in the industry, he has authored hundreds of articles and reports on the companies, products, services, trends and happenings in these markets. He is also a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences, sales kickof fs and other forums.
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