Examining Enterprise Cloud Resistance By J.R. Simmons

The excellent article shared by UC experts Brent Kelly and Phil Edholm last week on No Jitter highlights the compelling case for communications suppliers to pursue monthly recurring revenue (MRR) instead of the traditional one-time sale of a perpetual license coupled with on-premises hardware. However, as a consultant, not all of our customers are as eager to move their telecommunications systems to the recurring revenue model.
 
It was not that many years ago (at least for us industry veterans) that a telephone system was a large capital investment, followed by minimal operating expenses (OpEx) for maintenance and upgrades. Furthermore, the maintenance contracts were optional and allowed competitive (third-party) vendors to flourish. Software patches were free and software upgrades were optional. Unfortunately, some of our clients’ key decision makers remember the same thing and wonder why communications system OpEx costs today are so high.

Sampling the Many Flavors of SD-WAN By J.R. Simmons

Not everyone is fully aware that software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) solutions can be designed differently. Enterprises considering SD-WAN should understand how the design impacts total costs, network reliability, application performance, and service-level promises. The good news is that your choices are no longer limited to expensive MPLS networks or unreliable Internet-based VLANs.
 
Appliance-Centric Design
The first type of SD-WAN design is the appliance-based pure overlay, which uses an on-premises router. This unit often replaces the standard site router at smaller offices or is a software feature activated in an edge router. In this design, the SD-WAN router leverages whatever WAN connections are provisioned – it’s agnostic about the uplinks. The unit will provide traffic shaping, prioritizing real-time protocols and latency sensitive data, and will seek the best performance pathway among the WAN links.

Is VoIP Putting Your Network at Risk? By Jon Arnold

For many of you, VoIP is old hat, and when it comes to innovations in communications, you're focusing on other things these days. Even UC may feel very 2013, and now you're more granular, becoming immersed in things like WebRTC, desktop video, BYOD and Big Data--along with anything that produces a tangible ROI for collaboration.

IT's job is getting harder, not easier, and with a near-impossible set of priorities to manage (juggle, really), you hardly ever get the chance to revisit things once they're up and running. This brings me to VoIP, and based on the research done for my latest white paper, I would advocate some second thoughts on that. Whether you deployed VoIP last year or many years ago, you're facing a tougher environment today regarding network security.

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What, There's Something Better Than Real Time? By Jon Arnold

Those of us from the analog world will hopefully see this question as a play on a classic line from the seminal "2000 Year Old Man" routine from Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. If you do, I'm sure you'll also see the irony right away in that our generation may be asking this question with Mel Brooks in mind, but it's really pointed at Millennials who almost certainly have never heard of the 2000 Year Old Man. I'm not sure if the joke is on them or us, but the question is timely, as it challenges a core attribute of communications technology that has defined its business value for generations.

The real-time nature of voice -- initially analog, then TDM, but now VoIP, both fixed line and mobile -- has long been the communications gold standard upon which carriers built their fortunes. We don't think much about it now, but telephony was so much better than what had come before it and, for quite some time, what followed as well. Outside the realm of science fiction, nothing is faster than real time, and like anything else, the perceived value of telephony is gauged against the alternatives. Not only is telephony real time, but the voice mode has higher utility than most other modes of communication, especially when nuance is required.

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Amazon Chime – Did AWS Buy the Wrong Company? By Jon Arnold

The recent debut of the Amazon Chime team video meeting service has drawn lots of attention and, as you may already have read about here on No Jitter, has led to a host of questions about Amazon Web Services' intentions. Here's another wrinkle that perhaps raises some more interesting questions as we all try to make sense of this shape-shifting space.

A week after the Amazon Chime announcement, I was part of a small group that attended CafeX Communications' analyst event, where a major focus was on

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Messaging, Chatbots, AI: Finding the Enterprise Opportunity By Jon Arnold

We hear a lot these days about how the digital generation prefers messaging to voice, and we're starting to hear a bit of the same regarding chatbots and artificial intelligence -- especially for applications in the consumer world. While messaging, chatbots, and AI each have a role to play for enterprise users as well, developers do face a challenge in finding the right fit in there.

A colleague and I recently presented a session on messaging, chatbots, and AI at Jeff Pulver's Spring 2017 MoNage, a conference focused on the future of the conversational Web, chatbots, and messaging. Many developers attended, and during the conference we saw great innovation, both from those that have launched successful apps and those with promising applications in development. Not surprisingly, the focus today is mostly on consumer apps, but I did find some tie-ins to contact centers and digital customer service. This is to be expected given that so much of the work today around chatbots and AI is about driving online commerce.

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Midyear Pause: 6 Weeks, 7 Events, and the State of Collaboration By Jon Arnold

Over the last six weeks, I have attended or spoken at seven industry events in the U.S. and Canada. If that doesn't cover the ground, I don't know what does. After a while, it's all a blur, and that's why I take lots of notes. With that much immersion in and around collaboration, it's a good time to pause and share three trends I think bear watching for the second half of 2017.

They are:

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Habitat Soundscaping – and Now for Something Completely Different By Jon Arnold

I'm one of several analysts recently briefed about Plantronics' recent Habitat Soundscaping launch, and I think it's fair to say I wasn't the only one who didn't know quite what to expect from the company (see related article, "'Habitat Soundscaping': You Didn't Know You Needed It'"). Given the shape-shifting, moving target we call "collaboration," I say that's a good thing. We have no shortage of offerings that can support every imaginable type of collaboration, and given how hard it is to choose from all this, Habitat Soundscaping is refreshing in a Monty Python-esque way as being "something completely different."

My intention is not to poke fun at Habitat Soundscaping, but based on just a casual glance, doing a double-take wouldn't be out of line. We're so used to hearing about the cloud's scalability, seamless integration across networks, open APIs, chatbot automation, one-touch conferencing, etc., that you'd think collaboration was completely driven by digital technology. Being known as a headset vendor, this wouldn't be its route to market, but there's plenty of room for innovation -- as shown by the many non-traditional players in this space.

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Apple Business Chat: Tough to Beat on Messaging, Mobility, Brand By Jon Arnold

Much of my current research focus has been around messaging and chatbots, both of which tie into broader trends around UC&C. Increasingly, this extends into the contact center space, and with that come companies we don't normally focus on. Apple is one of them, and with the recent release of iOS 11 and the iPhone 8, the timing is good to revisit why it's an important company to watch.

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Using 'Hackonomy' to Create Relevance for Customers By Jon Arnold

As keynote speakers are inclined to do, Bonin Bough, CEO of Benin Ventures, took the stage at the recent BroadSoft Connections conference to shake up our thinking -- and that he did.

While analysts generally don't comment much on keynote speakers, I'll do it when the content is fresh and highly applicable to a market like ours -- meaning, one that's fragmented and being disrupted in many ways -- and the messaging is provocative enough. I'd not been familiar with Bonin, but from his keynote I can tell he's clearly on top of messaging trends and is quite knowledgeable about how digital media is transforming businesses and the way they go to market.

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2018 Outlook: The Shape of Collaboration By Jon Arnold

I saw "The Shape of Water" over the holiday break, and couldn't help but see some parallels with the collaboration space as we head into 2018. The title of the film is bit of an oxymoron, much like the term "team collaboration" -- as if there's any other mode for collaborating. By nature, all forms of collaboration are team-based, and the fact this term exists says a lot about how hard describing the UCC space actually is.

Along the same lines, water is "shaped" by whatever form contains it, whether that be a land mass to form a lake, or as in the film, a bathtub or -- spoiler alert -- the bathroom itself. Likewise, collaboration will occur with -- or be shaped by -- whatever tools are available. Workers can get great collaboration results using just one application, or by using many -- with or without a platform like UC. Bottom line: There's no fixed way to collaborate, just like there's no fixed shape for water.

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EC Tutorial: 3 Big Ideas for Speech Tech By Jon Arnold

With Enterprise Connect 2018 fast approaching, you're no doubt doing a lot of planning to prioritize which meetings to schedule and which sessions to attend. You can't do it all, and this is my moment to draw your attention to the Speech Technology track, a new addition to the EC lineup.

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Is the Contact Center Going the Way of the PBX? By Jon Arnold

A lot has been written about what came from last month's Enterprise Connect 2018, and I've got a takeaway you may not have yet considered. The contact center, one focus of this conference, is very much part of the broad communications landscape, especially when considering collaboration across the enterprise, including both the office and the contact center.

Disruption is the new normal these days, with cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) invariably being the main drivers. Based on all I heard and saw at Enterprise Connect, I would contend that the short answer to the question posed in the headline is "Yes."

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Managing CX from the Inside-Out By Jon Arnold

The contact center space is changing before our eyes, and whether you think it's imploding or exploding, there's no going back to the telephony-centric callcenter we've known for so long.

Yes, the race to cloud is on, customer expectations are far more challenging now, and AI could be the savior of the whole sector. Check, check, check; we're all covering that ground in our research and consulting. For this post, I have another angle that may be less obvious, but still pertinent for coming out on the right side of things when, or if, all this disruption runs its course.

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Contact Center 2.0: More Than Just Going to the Cloud By Jon Arnold

Contact centers are facing unprecedented change, and decision-making has never been more challenging. The new technologies can be daunting and disruptive, but in many ways, they offer great opportunities to modernize in a hurry. None of this is really news for No Jitter readers, but when new research comes along to validate the state of things, it's worth looking at the data.

One such study has crossed my path recently, and the findings illustrate how complex decision-making is becoming in the current environment. RingCentral commissioned CITE Research to conduct the study, titled "Contact Center Digital Transformation," drawing insights from 500 contact center respondents in managerial and supervisor roles or higher at a wide range of enterprises by size, ranging from 50 to 10,000+ employees, in the U.S. and U.K.

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How Blockchain Could Improve Collaboration... By Jon Arnold

Blockchain events are popping up everywhere these days, and last week, I spent a day at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in my hometown of Toronto. Like most people in my orbit, I have some toes dipped in this pond, both for business opportunities and to explore potential applications for collaboration. Well, in "Spinal Tap" style, if the artificial intelligence (AI) hype cycle is at 10, then it's at 11 with blockchain, and going higher.

Whatever your concerns are about blockchain, they're probably justified, and this event really didn't clear up mine. As with any emerging, disruptive force, there are more questions than answers, but more so than any other we've seen, this is purely a product of the digital generation.

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Follow Generational Clues to Collaboration Success By Jon Arnold

As Millennials make their mark, and with Generation Z coming up quickly behind them, intergenerational research has become a thing -- and it’s something we all need to pay attention to. The implications for marketers are obvious, as the buying behaviors of digital natives are much different from older generations, and that’s where much of this type of research is focused.

Closer to our world, there’s a different set of needs to understand, namely around how digital natives use communications technology in the workplace. Compared to consumer behaviors, the research on that front is fairly thin, and even less well understood is how digital natives will behave when moving into decision-making roles for these technologies. That area should be of intense interest to collaboration vendors, as the buying criteria and the decision-making process will likely differ with this cohort from older generations.

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Speech Tech in the Enterprise: 3 Themes to Explore By Jon Arnold

Enterprise Connect 2019 is just a few weeks away, and during the conferenceI’ll be giving an update talk on the state of speech technology. Last year, I gave a speech tech 101 presentation, and this year I’m reviewing how the space has evolved since then.
 

I certainly have a lot to talk about, and this post serves as a preview of what to expect. If you’re trying to assess where and how speech technology can bring new business value to your workplace, you’ll want to hear about three themes I’ll be addressing.

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How Next-Gen Networking Impacts IT Security by Scott Murphy

Over the past few years, the stories of security breaches at large enterprises such as Sony, Target, and Home Depot have been making headlines. Many of my clients ask how this could happen to these organizations, what with their multi-million dollar IT budgets and substantial resources. The answer is both simple and complex at the same time. Allow me to explain...

These organizations are continually balancing their investment in technology and the cost of operating that technology, often on a daily basis. They try to minimize the complexity of their networks wherever possible, but unfortunately, minimizing complexity often results in decreased security; in particular, it results in a reduction of network segmentation, the act of splitting a computer network into subnetworks for the benefits of improved performance and security.

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Cloud Operations: Creating Business Agility By Scott Murphy

The trend is steady and unmistakable: Businesses are moving to the cloud. In stages, they are moving externally and internally facing services and custom and off-the-shelf applications and services. They are adopting infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), increased virtualization, microservices, and containerization for improved reliability and performance. They are using public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid clouds; but the trend has been shifting to the public cloud in the last few years at an accelerating rate.

We are seeing this trend toward cloud in the communications technology industry. Traditional on-premises communications services have been moving to the cloud for over a decade, but we are now starting to see this happen on a larger scale.

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