Unified Communications Group Team Blog : Unified Communications

Educational Institutions Make Smart Decisions with Unified Communications

UCG — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 01:56:00 GMT

Each month, we look at different organizations across various industries to see how unified communications is transforming their businesses. This month we highlight academic institutions, from school districts to colleges and universities, and how these educational establishments are using Microsoft’s UC software to change the ways they communicate and collaborate.

The University of Kentucky

With over 44,000 faculty and students, the University of Kentucky (UK) is the state’s primary public institute of higher education. UK offers over 200 degree programs to students at its main campus in Lexington, and through distance learning programs.

Like any bustling business with thousands of employees in hundreds of departments working from dozens of locations, the University needed a solution to facilitate easier, real-time communication for its staff and students.

The UK implemented Office Communications Server 2007 to meet the challenge. With presence, instant messaging, and audio, video, and Web conferencing integrated into its core administrative, IT and educational applications, the university streamlined communications across the learning community. Just a few of the results include:

· Improved productivity and an estimated 15 minutes saved per day per user

· Reduced travel costs associated with meetings throughout the university system

For additional details on the University of Kentucky’s use of Office Communications Server 2007, see this Microsoft case study: University Adopts Unified Communications to Improve Education, Streamline Operations.

Gartner Research also recently completed a case study that reveals how the University of Kentucky benefits from Microsoft’s unified communications solutions. Read more here: Case Study: University of Kentucky Uses Unified Communications to Enhance Communication and Cut Costs. (Gartner Inc., Jay Lassman, March, 2009)

Other educational organizations across the globe are choosing Microsoft Unified Communications too. Check out these Microsoft Case Studies for more details:

· Manteca Unified School District: School District Standardizes IT Environment, Saves More Than $100,000 in Costs

· Mercer University: University Reduces Costs and Creates New Opportunities with Unified Communications

· Lemon Grove School District: School District Extends PBX System with Unified Communications Solution

· Eötvös Loránd University, Faculty of Informatics: State-of-The-Art Communication in Third-Level Education

A collection of case studies can be found at the Microsoft Case Study website: www.microsoft.com/casestudies.

R2 Arrives

UCG — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:16:00 GMT

Just over a year since OCS 2007 launched, R2 made its debut today. Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division, hosted the launch event before a studio audience and thousands of Web participants from around the world. Several customers joined the launch to share their experiences with UC and using OCS to cut costs and boost productivity. .

Some of the impressive customer highlights include:

· Sprint & Intel talk to Microsoft about their unified communications deployments, why software makes a difference, and how they’re using OCS to help cut costs.

· Swisscom is reducing the time to generate customer proposals by up to 20%, lowering the company’s costs of developing proposals and improving its responsiveness to customer requests.

· Lionbridge, a company with 4600 users, expects to save $1.3M in audio, web and video conferencing costs with Communications Server 2007 R2.

· Shell has over 150,000 employees on Communications Server IM and is already at over 8,000 users on Communications Server VOIP, with a plan to roll out much broader, and expects to retire over 200 PBXs over the next few years.

· BFU is the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention, a private foundation that provides safety advice to local authorities, institutions, and individuals. With OCS 2007 R2, the 130 person organization expects to cut travel costs by CHF4,800 (U.S.$4,000) per month and cut IT administration costs by CHF1,000 (U.S.$860) per month by replacing e-phone servers with the Attendant Console.

· Tieto is one of Europe’s largest service providers. With OCS 2007 R2, this 17,000 person organization expects to cut travel costs by 15%.

· RealPage is a software vendor for multi-property management applications. With OCS 2007 R2, they are saving 3 million annually in travel expenses and more than $200,000 annually in customer support costs. They also expect OCS to improve their customer acquisition, reducing costs by $60,000.

In addition, partners turned out in spades for the launch. More than 30 partners announced new products and services, including more than 10 new phones and audio/video conferencing devices. Read a summary of all the partner news here.

One of the things you’re not going to hear much about from today’s launch is perhaps the coolest. Schlumberger, a leading oil and gas service company, builds a reservoir modeling software called Petrel. Using the developer platform in OCS, Schlumberger has designed communications into the very fabric of Petrel. Their thought leadership will allow customers to collaborate within the context of their modeling work – tapping into experts across the globe with the click of a mouse.

What Schlumberger has done represents an exciting new direction for UC, where every application can have communications embedded within it just as SharePoint and Office do today. But, there’s more that’s possible with OCS R2. With the new developer tools, corporate developers and ISVs can build intelligent applications that enable seamless communications and collaboration – and really drive business results. This is going to bring a new wave of communications-ready applications.

You can view the launch, see more customer case studies, and access loads of content at www.ocsr2launch.com.

Justin Fenton, Senior Product Manager for UC

IBM’s Email Strategy Takes Another Sharp Turn

UCG — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 17:03:00 GMT

Last week, in more pre-Lotusphere PR, IBM announced their intent to acquire Outblaze’s email technology and make it part of Bluehouse, IBM’s cloud-based social computing and collaboration offering, which is now in beta.

This is a fascinating acquisition. Why acquire Outblaze when Lotus Notes is the #2 business email solution in the market? What will happen to the hosted Notes messaging solution IBM announced last fall? Why not scale Lotus Notes to a deliver a multi-tenant or Web-accessible offering? Why make customers choose between Notes for on-premises email or Outblaze/LotusLive Notes for cloud-based email? Couldn’t IBM convince enough users to get on hosted notes so they had to buy some consumer grade users to test scalability?

When I talk to customers, they tell me they do not want a technology ultimatum – a hard choice between a roadmap in the cloud or on-premises. Customers require the flexibility to use both and move between both modes of delivery, and that’s why our approach with Exchange Server and Exchange Online is catching on. Will IBM’s new email strategy give customers that flexibility? Only time will tell.

As in the days of Workplace, IBM’s email strategy seems once again murky.

Brandon Hoff

Exchange Technical Product Manager

LotusFear?

UCG — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Last Wednesday, IBM kicked off their pre-Lotusphere PR barrage by claiming momentum for Lotus Notes. Throwing out a half-dozen stats, IBM seemingly mounted an unassailable argument for the resurgence of the once-thought-dead Notes, except for one thing – most of it was false.

Case in point, early versions of the IBM release quote Gartner stats about market share, but by Friday, IBM had doctored the release to remove the Gartner stats. Maybe this article in Computerworld (Au contraire: Exchange's lead over Notes is actually 'getting bigger and bigger,' says Gartner <http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic

&articleId=9126118&intsrc=news_ts_head> ) had something to do with it?

David Scult, Microsoft’s GM for field and partner marketing, does a great job setting the facts straight here <http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/jan09/01-16QAcult.mspx>. Among my favorite highlights from David:

· In response to IBM’s claim that Notes is in half of the Fortune 100 – “Lotus Notes was once in at least 67 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, so in that context, 50 percent now isn’t terribly impressive.”

· And according to a Ferris Research survey <http://www.ferris.com/?p=318858> of 917 organizations worldwide, Exchange has a 65 percent share of the messaging market, while Notes/Domino has a 10 percent share. Ferris’s findings are consistent with Gartner’s lead e-mail analyst, Matt Cain, who publicly stated <http://www.serverwatch.com/trends/article.php/3682041> last year, “We forecast that Microsoft will get 70 percent of the commercial e-mail market by 2010.”

Even the Lotus Notes community has compiled a list of companies that are switching to Exchange from Notes, citing customers including ExxonMobil, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and Novartis. <http://dominoorexchange.pbwiki.com/>. (Note: you need a password to access this wiki.)

If you really dig into IBM’s numbers, you’ll find that they have started quoting “licensed” Notes users. A licensed user with no timeframe is exactly that – a user that either is, or was, licensed on Lotus Notes. Is that a useful market figure, quoting licenses sold in 1994? Using the same approach, IBM could also tout 100+ million ‘licensed’ 123 users.

But the real question this IBM FUD raises is this: why is IBM so desperate to prove that Notes is not slowly dying? Why is IBM so scared? My guess is:

· IBM is steadily losing market share based on more than 10 million people abandoning Lotus Notes for Exchange and SharePoint. The momentum is increasing as more than 2 million began the switch in the last 6 months.

· This transition is hastened by economic urgency to cut costs and the availability of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online <http://www.microsoft.com/online> , to which IBM has no answer (IBM’s current ‘hosted Notes’ offering is only for orgs from 1k to 10k users, and is not multi-tenant <http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=162564&refg_rss> cloud-computing, and press reports indicate that IBM is even losing market share to cloud-based consumer email applications).

· In the end, the loss of Notes means it is harder for IBM to sell Sametime, Connections, or Quickr.

· And, if you’re IBM, the more critical issue is that IBM Global Services, which accounts for huge portions of IBM’s profit, looses the opportunity to charge IBM customers consulting and integration fees to make its disparate technologies work together.

Marian Anderson said “fear is a disease that eats away at logic”, and sadly, that seems to apply even to respected market leaders such as IBM. We saw the first signs of fear and desperation last Wednesday, and it was not becoming of a respectable company such as IBM.

I look forward to seeing what else IBM has coming this week, and I hope they will hold the bar a bit higher for their PR. Whether they do or not, we will be on this blog offering our perspective on the news.

Julia White

Director of Exchange Marketing

Microsoft

Telecom Customers Onboard with Microsoft Unified Communications!

UCG — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 02:15:00 GMT

After being on the market for a year now, we continue to see widespread customer adoption of Microsoft’s unified communications platform. To highlight these customers, every month the Unified Communications blog will spotlight a specific industry and show how they are benefiting from Microsoft’s software-based approach to unified communications.

This month, we are looking at the telecom industry. Top telecom companies across the globe are experiencing cost savings, time savings and improved productivity with customers, or their own employees, since implementing Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Check out some of the case studies below for more details on what each of these telecom companies is doing and how they are benefiting from unified communications. Highlights include:

Portugal Telecom employees saved over 15 hours a month in productivity gains after deploying Office Communications Server.
Irish telecom, eircom estimates time savings of 30 minutes per day per employee using presence technology equates to 1.48 million dollar savings for organization.
By conducting meetings with Microsoft’s unified communications products, webcall GmbH saw a 20% reduction in business travel for meetings.
Global Crossing has seen “immediate and dramatic savings in long distance and audio conferencing costs” since implementing Office Communications Server 2007.

Plan to check back regularly to see what business problems other industries are solving with software-powered unified communications. Enjoy!

Case Studies

The Portugal Telecom Group: “Global Service Provider Employees Save 15 Hours a Month with Seamless Communication”
eircom Telecom Company Calls on Integrated Collaboration Solution to Optimize Productivity
France Telecom:“France Telecom Strengthens Its Unified Communications with Integrated Solution”
Global Crossing: “Global Crossing Cuts Costs, Unifies Communications with Integrated Solution”
MTS Allstream: “Software Developer Uses Solution to Simplify Communications and Cut Travel Costs”
webcall GmbH: “IP Telephony Company Staff Each Save 30 Minutes a Day with Unified Communications”
Geomant “Implementation of Unified Communications Powered by Microsoft at Geomant”
Avtex: “Company Expects Web Conferencing Solution to Save Nearly $70,000 Annually”
Bell Canada: “Communications Provider Expects to Improve Productivity, Reduce Costs with VoIP Solution”

To check out additional case studies, please visit www.microsoft.com/casestudies

Ten Predictions for UC in 2009

UCG — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 01:34:00 GMT

Two years ago, most people had never heard of unified communications. Today, as the combination of cost savings and productivity improvements that UC solutions can deliver has become clear, adoption of UC technologies and approaches has moved to the top of the list of IT priorities for many companies. Forrester Research recently found that more than four out of five enterprises in North America and Europe were deploying or piloting UC solutions.

As dramatic as this change has been, UC adoption is likely to be a process. It is no simple task for organizations to integrate email, IM, conferencing and voice on the desktop and mobile phone; embed communications within applications; and transition outdated PBX systems to software-powered voice solutions. However, it is said that humans overestimate what can be achieved in three years and underestimate what is achieved in 10 years; we believe this principle will apply to how UC will be broadly adopted.

Still, there will be significant advances in the year ahead. Here are the 10 big shifts I expect to see in 2009:

1. UC gets unified
The term "unified communications" has long been muddled and miss-used, and the problem is made worse by vendors who slap a "unified" label on products that are anything but. As the category matures, I predict UC will get unified. Analysts and associations will begin to hold vendors accountable for delivering true unified communications, which includes--at a minimum--a single identity with presence at the core, a single inbox, unified management, developer tools, and a unified user experience across voice, conferencing, instant messaging, and email.

2. UC gets softer
The past year has seen a remarkable amount of industry consolidation as network PBX vendors have acquired software companies that bring the expertise and assets they need to stay competitive. Although the realities of the current economic environment will slow the pace of consolidation, the rapid move away from hardware-based systems toward software-based platforms will accelerate in the new year.

3. UC goes everywhere
Increasingly, work is not confined to a single place. People need access to their workplace communications tools, wherever they happen to be and on whatever device they happen to be using. UC will increasingly span across the PC, browser, and mobile phone for truly integrated voice calling, email, IM, conferencing and presence on the go. Expect more of the UC features on your desktop to show up in your browser and on your mobile phone.

4. UC applications spread
The next wave of UC will bring communications capabilities directly into business applications of all kinds. With UC-enabled applications, communicating becomes a natural and intuitive part of the workflow integrated at the desktop, mobile phone or browser. Expect UC-enabled applications to spread into a wide array of industries and markets.

5. Unified conferencing emerges
In 2009, the distinction between audio conferencing, video conferencing, and Web conferencing will begin to fade and "unified conferencing" will emerge as a new standard. As audio, video, and Web conferencing merge into a single system, price points will fall to a level where comprehensive, unified conferencing is available to everyone in an organization.

6. Voice mail finds the inbox
While unified messaging has been available for years, its adoption in businesses has been limited, but that is about to change. Over the next three years, many corporations will reach the end of their voice mail maintenance contracts. Rather than renewing, look for businesses to move to unified email and voice mail systems as a proven way to reduce maintenance costs while increasing efficiencies. You can expect mainstream adoption of unified messaging over the next three years as a result.

7. UC goes to the cloud
The ability to use on-premises software with cloud-based services is changing the way IT departments deploy and manage their systems. Companies will begin to take advantage of this flexibility in UC as vendors offer increasingly capable UC suites in the cloud alongside on-premises software. The result will enable companies to focus their IT resources where they will deliver the greatest competitive advantage to their business while outsourcing other IT capabilities to a service provider, often at significant cost savings.

8. Consumer experiences begin to drive UC requirements
UC capabilities are becoming a regular part of people's daily lives, and these experiences--whether with presence through Live Messenger, desktop VoIP with Skype, visual voice mail with the iPhone, or mobile email with a Windows Mobile phone--are transforming expectations of corporate IT. Organizations will need to modernize their systems to deliver UC to their people in order to stay competitive and attract the best new employees.

9. Organizations evolve for UC
Delivering UC applications poses formidable challenges to the way many businesses are organized today, with separate fiefdoms for IT, telephony and sometimes networking. Given its cross-discipline nature, UC will drive internal organizational shifts that bring together disparate technology teams into centralized, unified groups that are better able to capitalize on the transformational capabilities UC can deliver.

10. UC adoption takes off
As IT budgets tighten in response to the current uncertain economic climate, UC looks more attractive than ever. The reason? UC provides immediate ROI by reducing travel costs, extending the life of existing investments, and improving productivity and collaboration. UC is one IT program that offers an immediate and clear case for businesses seeking to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of their people while controlling costs.

Many companies will find themselves at a communications crossroads in the next year. Do they invest in hardware-bound systems or make the move to software-based UC? Do they choose to put their applications in the cloud or on-premises--or do they choose the best of both? Do they hold tight to the legacy approach or invest now for savings and competitive advantage in the long run? Each organization will find its own right answer to these questions. The year ahead will be full of challenges and opportunities for us all, but it is undeniable that it is an exciting and interesting time to be in UC.

Gurdeep Singh Pall

Corporate Vice President

Welcome Back

UCG — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:05:00 GMT

Hello, and welcome back to the Unified Communications blog.

While this site has been quiet for a while now, we felt it was time a good time to revitalize the discussion for the New Year. It is a little over one year since we launched Microsoft’s UC platform, and in that year the UC market has been utterly transformed.

Back then, UC was regularly considered to be an extension of your network hardware, and VoIP was seen as the starting point for the UC conversion. Today, even network hardware vendors are aggressively pursuing a software path, a distributed partner-centric model has emerged, and presence is increasingly regarded as the 21^st century dial tone and the heart of UC. Interest in UC has gone from nascent to full-blown, with Forrester reporting that 83% of enterprises in North American and Europe are piloting or deploying UC. Supporting this assessment are our own customer surveys, which found that “UC” replaced “VoIP” as the #1 item on the IT department’s hit list over the last year. And, the true sign of any hot market, every communications vendor is now using (and sometimes abusing) the lingo; from hardware lineups that carry a ubiquitous “unified” prefix, to UM systems marketed as UC, the vendor lexicon is abuzz with “unified”.

Why the dramatic change?

Today, economic uncertainty is accelerating adoption and interest in UC, one of the safest bets for businesses seeking to reduce costs and boost collaboration. And, as organizations seek to manage capital outlays, the ability to extend the life of existing PBX investments and consolidate software infrastructure is driving further interest in Microsoft and our partners’ UC solutions.

But, the transformation is rooted at a much more foundational level – the global economy. Business is more global and mobile than ever before. As a result, communication and collaboration demands have increased at an utterly astounding rate, and people consume more information in more places than ever before. At the same time, businesses – and the people who drive them – are struggling to keep pace with new requirements and technologies while improving the bottom line. Communications is the fuel of the new economy, and we are swimming in it. Some are drowning in it.

At the same time, technology advances are driving an industry shift from rigid network-bound systems to more flexible software-powered systems that work across any network. Just as the closed mainframe monoliths were transformed by the PC, software is transforming the closed corporate telephony monoliths. Software innovation can now unify communications on the front end (at the PC, mobile phone and browser) and on the back end (in the data center or cloud) and give people and organizations better communications solutions with more flexibility and control at a lower total cost. UC software is a lifeline for people downing in information overload – as well as those IT professionals trying to deliver and maintain half a dozen communications stovepipes, each with its own directory, client, and set of administration tools. This is one reason why the rise of UC has been so rapid.

At Microsoft, we are embracing this transformation to provide a simpler communications experience within the applications people know and use every day, such as Office and SharePoint – or other line of business applications – from anywhere.

Going forward you will hear more from me and others in the Microsoft UC group. We’ll share our thoughts on the industry, new developments and milestones around our UC portfolio and partners, our perspective on current UC trends and topics, and updates on the business. Or, we may just post on the latest UC news that catches our attention. But we also want this blog to be a forum for dialog with others in the UC ecosystem, so please let us know what’s on your mind.

Stay tuned, it’s an exciting and interesting time for UC. I’m looking forward to the conversation.

Clint Patterson

Director of Communications

Software: The medium to greater business value with communications

UCG — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 03:13:00 GMT

We frequently talk about the communications industry being at a crossroads, and when I look at the lineup of keynote speakers at next week’s VoiceCon 2007 – all software companies – it’s apparent where we are headed.

But what does it mean that voice communications is becoming software based?

Given the brief history of computing it is easy to appreciate an analog that many of us have personally observed. I recall nostalgically the days of the dedicated Brother word processors – they kind of looked like typewriters but were digital and had the LCD displays. Technology had provided us with a better replacement for typewriters. Personal computers and word processing software took that basic input application and added a whole lot of value on top of it – people could store, view, edit multiple documents, share, put rights management, add pictures, and even search across all documents. Thus software, in its many forms has enabled powerful revolutions like the paper-less office, user generated content (blogs, wikis), and more. The value proposition has expanded from the original efficient input of information to information at your fingertips and the potential for further transformation is even greater today. In this case software innovation created the value – of course it allowed you to still type as you did on your typewriter but it did so much more. It would be hard to imagine a world without software and personal computers and how they power people’s lives, businesses, our society.

Now let’s come back to communications: Telephony systems are like typewriters – we need them, we use them, they serve us diligently. VoIP basically allowed legacy Telephony systems to be transformed into dedicated Word Processors – single function, providing a few more capabilities than their predecessors, not integrated into the rest of the tools an information worker and businesses need. Here again, software is ready to transform communications into a world where a whole lot of innovation and value is unleashed. Long held notions like only voice mode, presence-less or blind dialing, separate directories, no integration with everyday applications and business tools, are ready to be shattered thru the software transformation. The value will shift from talking to someone at a different location to communications fueling business productivity holistically.

I hope the picture of what software brings to communications is getting clearer. A question one might ask is: what about the network? Isn’t communications a network thing as claimed by some vendors?

First of all it is important to highlight the value of the network. The network enables packets to get from point A to point B. It is the plumbing that enables connectivity between applications running between endpoints. The network is a very, very important utility. But it is just that. Business value is created thru software that runs on the endpoints. An analogy might help here too: when billions of people use the internet everyday – what is bringing them there? Is it the software applications like MySpace, Windows Live Messenger, and YouTube or is it the fascination with the network?

I look forward to discussing this further with you next week in San Francisco. See you there.

- Gurdeep Singh Pall
Corporate Vice President – Unified Communications Group