Avaya Collaboration Guide 2013

© 2013 Avaya Inc. All Rights Reserved.All trademarks identified by ®, ™, or SM are registered marks, trademarks, and service marks, respectively, of Avaya Inc.

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THECOLLABORATIONTRENDSTransforming Your Organization and Industry This Year

2013GUIDE

20

13 G

UID

E

AVAYA 2013 GUIDE

TABLE OFCONTENTS

Avaya 2013 Guide

Published by Avaya Inc.

211 Mt. Airy Road, Basking Ridge, NJ 07920 U.S.A.

To download copies of Avaya 2013 Guide, visit www.avaya.com

Copyright © 2013 Avaya Inc. All rights reserved.

Avaya and the Avaya logo are trademarks of Avaya, Inc. or its subsidiaries. © indicates registration in the United States of America. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Avaya Inc.

Avaya 2013 Guide

Edited by Eric Lai and Richard Solosky.

p.cm.

ISBN 978-1-62209-556-8

1. Unified Communications. 2. Videoconferencing. 3. Call Centers. 4. Networking. 5. Enterprise Mobility.

Library of Congress Class and Year: HF5734.7 R48 2013

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012923795

Printed in the United States of America

Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

avaya.com | 54 | avaya.com

Leaning Forward to Embrace InnovationKevin J. KennedyPresident and Chief Executive Officer, Avaya

Hypertext to HypervoiceMartin GeddesConsultant on Future Telecom Business Models and Technologies

Today’s 5 Biggest Communication TrendsIrwin LazarVice President and Service Director, Nemertes Research

Do Collaboration Tools Boost Workplace Communication?Dr. Charles LawAssistant Professor, Penn State University

13 Megatrends

Awareness. Simplicity. Customers.Brett ShockleySenior Vice President and General Manager,Avaya Applications and Emerging Technologies, Avaya

14

10

22

29

33

6 | avaya.com

4 Trends Transforming the Unified Communications EcosystemMichael TaylorCTO, Strategic Products and Services (SPS)

49

55 Video Collaboration

Dawn of a New Era in VideoconferencingBob Romano Vice President of Global Marketing, Radvision, an Avaya Company

56

The Rise of Video-Enabled Innovation Will Power Corporate GrowthAn excerpt from a 2012 Forrester Consulting white paper63

Videoconferencing Goes ViralMoshe Machline Vice President of Marketing, Radvision, an Avaya Company

66

The New ‘Rules’ for VideoconferencingEric Lai Editorial Director, Avaya

70

Case Study: Genius of CollaborationETH Zürich72

Case Study: Truly UnifiedCBC (Cologne Broadcasting Center)76

79 Innovator’s CornerIAUG Customer Innovation Winners

87 Mobile and Web

Bring Your Own Unified CommunicationsGary E. BarnettSenior Vice President and General Manager for Collaboration Platforms, Avaya

88

The Future is WebRTCJohn Yoakum Consulting Engineer, Avaya Harvey Waxman Vice President, Architecture, Avaya Alan Johnston Distinguished Engineer, External Standards, Avaya

91

Case Study: Adding Features, Subtracting CostsMatthews Pierce & Lloyd94

Case Study: On the Road, Always in TouchRootWorks, LLC97

101 Customer Experience

A Solid Foundation for Tomorrow’s CustomerChris McGugan Vice President and General Manager for Emerging Products & Technology, Avaya

103

8 Best Practices for Customer Experience Management TodayLaura BassettDirector of Marketing, Avaya

110

Would You Call Your Own Contact Center?Donna DawsonPsychologist

116

Case Study: Top Customer Service in All Channels3C DIALOG GmbH124

Amplifying Innovation with PartnershipsAn excerpt from ‘Leading with Connections,’ published by IBM

43

avaya.com | 7

avaya.com | 98 | avaya.com

131 Infrastructure

Optimizing Your Private Cloud for the Collaboration EraMarc Randall Senior Vice President & General Manager, Avaya Networking Parag Patel Vice President of Global Alliances, VMware

132

136

The Future of 911Mark J. Fletcher ENP, Public Safety Solutions Product Strategy, Avaya

142

Case Study: Weaving the Network of the Future Leeds Metropolitan University147

153 Market Data

Border CopGilman Stevens Director of SBC R&D and the VIPER Lab, Avaya Gina Odean National Director of Converged Solutions, NACR

5 Traits of Great Communications Service ProvidersMichael Runda Senior Vice President, Avaya and President, Avaya Client Services

140

Case Study: Avaya Virtual Networking Underpins Netherlands’ Schiphol Airport Luggage System150

Case Study: Building for the Multichannel WorldGepin Contact SpA127

Kevin J. KennedyPresident and Chief Executive Officer

In short, a wealth of new, cost-

effective solutions are available

today, can be deployed quickly, and

can begin delivering measurable

benefits almost immediately.

If people have choices and can see

a realistic path forward, they don’t

feel helpless to manage change.

In this Annual Guide, we offer what

we believe is some of the best

thinking from outside and inside

Avaya and varied observations on

the choices available to enterprises

that refuse to be victims of

circumstance. In the lead article,

for example, Brett Shockley,

Avaya’s Senior Vice President and

General Manager of Applications and Emerging Technologies,

examines the intersection and implications of collaboration,

mobility, and cloud technologies. You’ll also find perspectives

from respected research firms; insights from Avaya’s

customers, partners, and thought leaders; and even

an academic view of the behavioral psychology shaping

business collaboration (hint: Technology is necessary but

far from sufficient).

This book itself is a collaboration, evidence of what we

at Avaya call The Power of We™. I am convinced that

the most successful enterprises will be built on an open,

mobile collaboration platform—the more diversity, energy,

and creativity we bring to the conversation, the richer the

outcome will be. No one has a monopoly on insight, but

if we bring the right people together at the right time with

the right information, we can quite literally change the world.

I hope you find these perspectives valuable, and I invite you

to continue the conversation with any of us at Avaya.

Sincerely Yours,

Net Promoter Score is property of its respective trademark holders.

Introduction | 11

LEANING FORWARD

TO EMBRACE INNOVATION

There’s something about a new calendar year that stirs the blood of even the

most jaded among us. No one who knows me well would call me a wild-eyed

optimist; I’m a pragmatist at best, even on the headiest of days. Still, I feel more

buoyant about what’s possible for the enterprise than I have in a very long time.

Admittedly, the headwinds that buffeted us all in 2012 haven’t abated significantly.

The economic climate, especially in North America and Europe, is still profoundly

uncertain. Technology spending overall remains cautious, and in many parts

of the U.S. federal government, spending is still sharply constrained, sending

ripples through a wide network of partners, suppliers, and end users. Inside the

enterprise, employee mobility and geographic dispersion continue to expand,

while the “consumerization of the enterprise” is an irresistible force.

In spite of all that, I’m detecting a shift in customers’ attitude. There’s a renewed

sense of empowerment, fueled by a surge of market innovation. Instead of

feeling victimized by tight budgets, our customers see new ways to reduce

bandwidth costs, accelerate time to productivity, and enhance the user

experience. For example, midsize enterprises no longer need to devote weeks

to deploying a new UC platform—new midmarket solutions can be configured

in half an hour. In contact centers, our speech pattern recognition and natural

language chat software can improve a company’s productivity and Net Promoter

Score® in just weeks. Business-grade video scales from conference room to

desktop to smartphone, with up to 83 percent lower bandwidth requirements

and up to 71 percent lower TCO than competing solutions. In fact, low-bandwidth,

high-definition business video on your consumer mobile device can pay for

itself with the first business trip you eliminate, and the second eliminated trip

contributes directly to the bottom line.

The Transformational Edge of Better Collaboration

10 | Introduction

12 | Megatrends Megatrends | 13

“Unity is strength … when there is

teamwork and collaboration,

wonderful things can be achieved.”

—Mattie Stepanek, Poet

MEGATRENDS

Today’s real-time communications tools can be too much of a good thing. Here are 3 trends that will help you and your business regain mastery.

AWARENESS.SIMPLICITY.

CUSTOMERS.

For centuries, the speed of information flow has increased. And for all that

time, people have complained of information overload. The 17th-century

German philosopher Leibniz bemoaned the “horrible mass of books which

keeps on growing.” Technology has accelerated matters. One hundred fifty

years ago, it was considered a miracle when the Pony Express delivered a

letter from New York to San Francisco in a mere 10 days. Today, we have

numerous modes of real-time communications at our disposal. But we are

still afflicted by information fatigue and lost productivity.

Fortunately, there are trends in communications and collaboration solutions

on the horizon that may help us regain control over our working hours.

Here are three that I personally consider the most important.

1. CONTEXTUAL AWARENESS IMPROVES PRODUCTIVITY

We crave being up-to-date. Who can resist clicking on the “new mail”

icon? This need to know is not new. It’s just never been easier to sate

(temporarily). Whether it be stock prices, sports scores, friends’ activities,

or inventory levels, there is a good chance the information is ready

and waiting.

Yet, being hyperconnected is not as satisfying as it might have once been

envisioned. The connections can feel shallow, or out of sync with our

thoughts or needs.

“We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating.

And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection,” wrote

futurist Sherry Turkle in the New York Times in April 2012.

Being connected without appropriate filters can also be exhausting.

Not long ago, our biggest productivity complaint was email overload.

To solve the problem, we created other modes of communication.

But those have splintered. It’s the rare person who actually has only one

email or one social network to keep track of. Between work and personal

accounts, it isn’t uncommon for people to check 10–30 accounts in a single

day. The problem, rather than getting better, has worsened. >>By Brett Shockley,

Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Applications and Emerging Technologies, Avaya


16 | Megatrends

It is more than sources and modes,

but devices as well. Mobile devices

have made text (SMS) messaging

ubiquitous. Some applications are

desktop-only. Others are tablet-

only. And don’t forget the physical

mailbox. You can spend all of your

time checking and monitoring

conversations. Our appetite for

information and communication

has paralyzed productivity.

Too much openness turns out to

be its own cage. Urgent messages

can arrive from anywhere, requiring

diligent surveillance among all of our

communication tools since there is

no easy way to filter the interruptions.

Our tools are not working for us—

they put us to work.

A temporary degradation in

productivity was reasonable.

As Internet, VoIP, and other forms

of IP communications exploded,

each required some experimentation.

Now, it’s time to get back to business.

The menu of modes and options

isn’t going to shrink, but the focus

will shift to managing them in a

smart way. In other words, business

communications must start to

emphasize productivity over novelty.

Spam filtering saved email from

uselessness. But filtering real-time

communications is a much harder nut

to crack. Simple filters, based on caller

ID or keywords, are not sufficient. The

next big focus will be real-time filters

with contextual awareness.

Context separates Paris, France,

from Paris, Texas, and Paris Street

(in Denver). Our documents, activities,

locations, and contacts will provide

cues to determine context. Awareness

of context will make communications

far more effective. Not long ago,

secretaries applied contextual

awareness to determine when to route

calls or to take a message (though

they would’ve likely called it common

sense). In this era, new technologies

will be contextually aware, and aid us

in routing, filtering, and prioritizing.

Context hastens productivity just as a

map becomes more useful when you

know at least roughly where you are.

Context filters the relevant information

for given situations, allowing us to

quickly find the right people and

right documents as well as monitor

activities across modalities. The

technology will evaluate relationships

and contacts, conversations, and

information and event streams across

devices and locations.

2. SIMPLE IS AS SIMPLE DOES

Remember the thick manuals that

came with pagers? Or the hefty

instruction booklets that came with

fax machines? These were complex

devices as evidenced by their

complex manuals. But as our devices

become more powerful, the manuals

are shrinking and disappearing.

Consider the relatively thin pamphlet

you probably got with your latest

smartphone, tablet, or TV.

Intuitiveness and ease of use now

becomes as important—more

important—than any individual

feature ... and not just for end

users. Enterprise technology is now

following this simplified approach. It is

the key theme to many priorities and

projects underway and will continue

to be so. Today’s organizations are

much less tolerant about complexity

(and the training it requires). >>

Megatrends | 17

Business communications will also become

simpler—and more powerful—through

software that allows us to dynamically shift

between text, voice, and video. Even the

‘power phone’ of the future will be less about

the number of buttons and more about

screen size.

42% 6%48%

34% 64%

32% 63%

31% 10%58%

30% 5%66%

30% 64%

26% 11%59%

24% 9%65%

23% 16%59%

21% 10%69%

17% 6%72% 6%

For example, the wave of enterprise

virtualization was initially motivated

by the cost savings of being able

to run fewer servers. But the true

value lies in the simplification of

operations, even as powerful features

such as high availability and disaster

recovery are extended across multiple

platforms and services. It’s a far cry

from yesterday’s dedicated servers

and their dedicated cabling. Desktop

virtualization (VDI) is also simplifying

the management of PCs and mobile

devices while supporting freedom

of device and operating systems for

end users. It’s becoming the antidote

to the “bring your own device”

(BYOD) trend which has complicated

matters regarding data security and

protection in the name of employee

choice. VDI offers effective, non-

obtrusive management, encryption,

and control.

Communications infrastructure can

also benefit from simplification.

By centralizing communications

equipment and operations,

organizations reduce the number of

servers, administrators, and other

resources needed. This also simplifies

the setup and operation of remote

offices and remote and mobile

workers. And workers benefit because

there is no longer a disparity in the

features available to individual offices

or locations, nor any technical barriers

to something as simple as voicemail

across locations. Location will (and

now should) be completely invisible

to customers and colleagues.

Simplification is also behind the

rise of software. As tech investor

Marc Andreessen famously put it,

“Software is eating the world.” He

points to the industry and segment

leaders that, under the covers, are

actually software companies:

Amazon.com, Netflix, Apple’s iTunes,

Spotify, Pandora (entertainment),

Pixar, Google, and LinkedIn. Even

Wal-Mart, a real-world retailer,

uses software to win a competitive

advantage in logistics and distribution.

Hardware-based solutions are rigid.

Software-based solutions work hard

underneath to generate context that

makes things appear simple to the

end user. You can see this in television

sets, which even today feature

remotes that resemble oversized

candy bars arrayed with buttons.

The Apple TV remote, by contrast,

is mostly software. It only has a few

buttons. But by generating contextual

and intuitive on-screen menus, users

can easily navigate through a much

greater array of content with little

need for instruction.

Business communications will

also become simpler—and more

powerful—through software.

Software applications will allow

us to dynamically and easily shift

between text, voice, and video.

Desktop phones will become simpler

and more contextual. The “power

phone” of the future will be less

about the number of buttons and

more about screen size. Or you

can skip the desk phone and use

an intuitive application on a desktop

or tablet. No more esoteric

commands like “flash.”

3. THE RETURN OF CUSTOMER CONVERSATIONS

We all know customers are the

key to a successful business.

But interacting with customers is

inherently costly, ranging between

about $1.50 per automated IVR

(integrated voice response)

interaction to more than $4 per voice

call, according to 2011 estimates

published by callcentres.net. That’s

sometimes perceived as too costly.

Many organizations have streamlined

interactions, trading customer

satisfaction and experience for profits.

But competing on price is increasingly

difficult in a connected world where

customers can easily switch to an

alternative. Customer satisfaction and

loyalty become key, and great service

can build and maintain it.

Customer satisfaction used to be

difficult to measure. Today’s customers

are willing to share their opinions >>

Urgent messages can arrive from anywhere, requiring

diligent surveillance among all of our communication tools.

Our tools are not working for us—they put us to work.


1. Enterprise social media tools

2. Unified communications client

3. Unified messaging/ visual voicemail

4. Videoconferencing

5. Web conferencing

6. Shared/collaborative team spaces

7. PC-based softphones

8. Instant messaging

9. Mobile soft client extension applications

10. Audio conferencing

11. IP PBX

n Plan to use more extensively n Expect decreasing use n Plan to use at same capacity n Plan to discontinue use

Users’ Future Plans for UC&C Tools Over Next 12 Months, North America, 2012

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Base: All respondents (n=263). Source: Frost & Sullivan analysis.

22% 12% 21% 45%

14% 18% 20% 44%

14% 16% 26% 44%

14% 21% 30% 35%

13% 17% 28% 42%

13% 21% 25% 41%

13% 18% 26% 43%

12% 20% 33% 34%

12% 16% 25% 47%

11% 15% 18% 56%

10% 14% 29% 47%

and experiences more than ever

before. Unfortunately, they are sharing

this information publicly via social

networks that empower them.

The balance of communications

power has shifted to the customer.

For decades, the contact center was

identified with cost and repetition:

checking balances, changing

passwords, ordering parts, etc. Self-

service solutions are changing the

nature of contact centers. Many—if not

most—customers prefer automated

telephone or Web-based technologies

for simple tasks. When a customer

actually makes the effort to call, it

is because the self-service solutions

have failed them, and they have a

legitimate need for human interaction.

This shouldn’t be viewed as a cost or

burden, but an opportunity.

Whereas customer satisfaction was

once just a matter of retention, now it

is also a matter of reputation, growth,

and brand. Customers now have a

global and efficient voice, and the

potential exists for their opinions

and experiences to cascade virally.

Listening to and monitoring social

media is not enough, nor is it scalable.

Instead, mechanisms need to be

in place to monitor services more

quickly, before matters get out of

hand. Strong customer service backed

by agile, proactive organizations

will succeed in the social era. Social

networks remain important to

monitor, not as a means of satisfying

a customer—but as a feedback

mechanism to satisfy all customers.

In response, the contact center needs

to evolve. Rather than simply a forum

for resolution, today’s contact center

needs to be proactive, not reactive.

Real-time diagnostics and monitoring

tools allow contact center agents

to identify satisfaction issues before

they become angry tweets or

Facebook posts. Social networks

allow an organization to get

near-real-time feedback on activities

such as advertising and promotion.

This means that agents need to be

well-versed in organizational tools

and systems, and have the ability to

easily resolve a broad array of issues.

And in cases where they can’t, they

need effective and instant means of

finding the resources that can. With

products, quality is measured against

specifications. With services, quality is

measured by customer perception.

Live conversations with customers are

a great place to foster relationships

and build perceptions. Organizations

are rediscovering the value of

customer interactions: that they

are a privilege, not an obligation.

That means the agent of tomorrow

will be better trained, more

empowered, and backed with more

effective and adaptable support

systems. These agents will not be not

the “order takers” of the past, but key

organizational resources.

These three megatrends are reshaping

organizational communications.

They are powerful forces resulting

in improved productivity, commerce,

and growth. Most organizations

can benefit from addressing them

in their strategic plans. One thing

that has never changed is that

communications continues to offer

a means for businesses to gain

a competitive advantage.•

Brett Shockley is Senior Vice President and General Manager for Avaya Applications and Emerging Technologies. He is an industry veteran with more than 25 years of thought leadership in the telecommunications and contact center markets.

1. Audio conferencing

2. Instant messaging

3. Enterprise social media tools

4. Unified messaging visual voicemail

5. Videoconferencing

6. Web conferencing

7. Mobile soft client extension applications

8. Unified communications client

9. Shared/collaborative team spaces

10. IP PBX

11. PC-based softphones

n Plan to implement within next 12 months n Plan to implement within next 2–3 years n Considering, but no plans yet n Not considering

Non-Users’ Future Plans for UC&C Tools Over Next 12 Months, North America, 2012


1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

Base: All respondents (n=263). Source: Frost & Sullivan analysis.

HYPERTEXT TO

HYPERVOICE

Imagine a world where computers

enrich our voices with superhuman

powers; where voice is integrated

into our social media just as text

and images currently are; where

our voice can be used as a

communication tool at its full

capacity: simple, powerful, and

rich. This is the world of hypervoice,

where voice on the Web is as native

and natural as hypertext.

If Web 2.0 was about transcending

place, enabling us to become more

interactive and social online through

text and images, Web 3.0 will be

about enriching conversation

through the human voice.

Voice: Gift or Demand?

Our Western culture is dominated by

visual media. Nevertheless, the

human voice remains a precious and

powerful form of communication. It is

the easy and spontaneous mode in

which we account for our day, make

important statements, and express

our feelings and beliefs.

Until now, the free-form nature of

voice communication has left it

disconnected from the mainstream of

our daily digital lives. Machines are

adept at processing stored symbols,

not spoken syllables. As a result, we

have skewed our patterns of

communication to favor media that

can be easily structured and

processed by machines.

Voice captures our creativity and

so much else of our essence that

makes us different from machines.

Our most emotive and memorable

conversations are vocal. Even

Spielberg’s E.T. didn’t fax home;

instead, he found his voice.

However, there is a tension in voice

between being creative and

disorganized. Nevertheless, we want

to structure voice so it is amenable to

the tools that amplify our effort and

make it relevant to our personal and

work lives. Too often, the use of voice

becomes a demand, rather than a

gift; it seems that there is too much >>

By Martin Geddes, Consultant on Future Telecoms Business Models and Technologies

LINKING WHAT WE SAY TO WHAT WE DO

You can tag a moment in the speech

as easily as the piece of text you have

typed. Indeed, any and every digital

gesture can be tied to its moment

in the spoken context.


cost involved to create a structure,

and yet without some helpful

structure there is too little benefit.

Tempo and Timing

A conversation calls for the

participation of at least two people.

As the number of parties to a

conversation increases, so does the

cost and complexity of making that

interaction live and synchronous.

Despite our valiant efforts on

conference calls, the quality of the

interaction appears to decline with

additional participants.

Voice communication remains

patterned on telephony, with

its model of interruption. “Live”

voice is seen as the ideal, and voice

recording is presented as a managed

failure mode that is bolted on as an

afterthought. This leaves us with the

dismal experiences of dictating or

receiving voicemail messages.

Conference calls perpetuate

these problems of

rendezvous and synchronous

communications. They are over-

demanding of participants’ time,

given the customary practice of

attending the entire call. Typically,

though, many participants are barely

present to the conversation;

conference calls often run as

background noise while executives

look at their emails, giving the group

conversation the status of a sort of

corporate soap opera.

By contrast, we want voice to be

alive, to feel alive, and to allow and

encourage wide participation in

conversations. Ideally the interested

parties would be free of the

obligation to be present for the

original conversation. We want a fast

tempo, and functional engagement,

without the trouble of timing.

Inclusion and Exclusion

In the past, the mix of computers and

chatter has been unsatisfactory.

Whereas computers are adept at

manipulating stored information,

voice is by its nature live and

synchronous; we speak and await an

immediate response. Historically, as

a result of technological constraints,

voice has also been ephemeral. Now

that computers can readily make and

store records of what we say, recorded

voice as a feature allows us to

increase the number of parties to

a conversation in a way that is freed

from the time constraints of “needing

to have been there.”

Hitherto we lacked adequate means

to index, search, filter, and forward

voice conversations. This has turned

every recorded voice artifact into a

liability rather than a digital asset,

with the result that very few recorded

calls are ever listened to or create

value. Furthermore, our spoken

words are often stuttering and

provisional. Key information or

decisions take up only a small part

of the conversation. Yet, we often

take on the burdens of transcribing

the totality of a voice recording into

text, purely to record and share a few

key parts of a conversation.

Voice is Missing From Hypermedia

We have thus far failed to understand

and work with the natural dynamics

of voice communications. Indeed,

the Web was conceived without

voice being a part of it:

HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help ... A program which provides access to the hypertext world we call a browser. — T. Berners-Lee, R. Cailliau,

12 November 1990, CERN >>

In the same way that hypertext did

for text, hypervoice brings voice

into the era of the Web.


In the same way that hypertext did for

text, hypervoice brings voice into the

era of the Web. However, Web

technologies like WebRTC or VoIP

are neither necessary nor sufficient

to achieve this. It’s the content that

matters, not its delivery mechanism:

How do you organize and flow value

around voice?

Adding Voice to Our Activity Streams

Conversations are sequences of

“gesture-response,” and these moves

create an activity stream. These

gestures and responses are much

richer in their forms than merely

spoken interactions and interjections,

since we can also make parallel digital

gestures—such as pulling up Web

pages and advancing shared

presentations. We make digital

responses, such as taking notes after

someone else’s spoken comment.

Critically, these parallel activities are

separated from their voice context,

with the result that there is no cross-

relation between what is said and

what is done.

The management of our digital

artifacts does not yet extend to live

or recorded voice. Voice gestures

aren’t captured at all, or are captured

as whole recorded conversations that

have little value because they cannot

be searched, navigated, or integrated

into our workflow. And who has the

time or the impetus to plow through

an hour-long recording in real time, in

search of a crucial but tiny snippet?

To progress, we must create a unified

activity stream, and enable richer

conversations and the collaboration

that can arise from

a true integration

of voice and text.

As we organize the gestures and

responses that are our business

conversations, we believe we have

a choice of space travel versus time

travel. With “hypervoice” we

transcend that limit: We can associate

what is said with what is done using

when, not where.

How Hypervoice Works

Hypervoice turns voice into a native

Web object, rather than trying to

convert it into a text object. It works

by tying together all the gestures

and interactions made during a

conversation into a unified whole.

The basis of the linking structure

is the relative time in which gestures

and responses occur.

When you make a note during an oral

conversation, the words you type are

connected to the words that have

been spoken. Your typed note is

important, and therefore forms

relevant searchable context for the

voice. You can tag a moment in the

speech as easily as the piece of text

you have typed. Indeed, any and

every digital gesture can be tied to its

moment in the spoken context. These

hypervoice conversations can be

given fine-grained permissions for

sharing, searching and syndication,

resolving the privacy issues around

coarse-grained voice recording.

If you have an agenda for the

conversation, this provides structure;

as you advance through the agenda >>

Our recorded conversations remain impossible to index, search and use. That leaves our voice artifacts as liabilities, rather than digital assets.


28 | Megatrends

Martin Geddes is a consultant on future telecom business models and technologies. He provides speaking, advisory, training, and innovation services to telcos, equipment vendors, cloud services providers, and industry bodies. This article was adapted from a 2012 white paper written for HarQen Inc. Please download the full version at hypervoice.org.

items, the relevant people can be

included (if not already present), and

those transitions are noted in the

activity stream. Those agenda items

can also be rich objects, tying the

voice to its context. For instance, an

agenda item might be a customer

help desk request, drawn from a

ticketing system; the voice segment

on that trouble ticket can then be

directly linked to the discussion

about its resolution.

Thus, hypervoice is a natural

extension of the fundamental Web

construct of linking both to and from

the conversation object, in a manner

that is suitable for voice.

There is value to the user in creating

metadata for hypervoice, as it is a

natural byproduct of what people

do anyway, and it transforms the

voice into a digital asset. This in

turn makes voice material easy to

share, consume, and distribute, and

there is no learning curve, no barrier

to utility, no friction. By unbundling

voice from synchronous telephony

(or telephony-like unified

communications services), voice,

too, can become an “anytime,

anywhere” asynchronous medium.

Hypervoice is at the Core of Communications

Why put hypervoice as the

central plank of your collaboration

strategy? Because the conversations

that really matter are conducted

in the voice channel. No computer

in our lifetimes will ever rival a

human voice’s capacity to convey

rich and complex social and

emotional meaning.

Just as hypertext breaks and

reconnects the place metaphor for

text, hypervoice separates and links

the time elements of spoken

conversation. As has become the

case for all manner of text material,

voice will no longer be left to

languish in the limited context

of its origination.

Hypervoice allows other non-voice

metadata and digital gestures and

responses to provide the structure

around voice, as a natural byproduct

of our online behavior. By making

voice easy to navigate using these

structures, it makes voice recordings

useful for those who are not present

at the live event.

Hypervoice is like being hyper-

present. It’s “better than being

there” as it augments and enriches

our conversations.


intelligent. You can access

everything ever said, with

unbounded working memory.


organized. You retain the link

between recorded words or images

and their spoken context.

The future of voice is hypervoice.•

The need to collaborate is driving everything from social business to video.

One of the first questions we ask the IT leaders who give us their time is, “What’s

the hottest area that you’re focusing on now? What’s keeping you up at night?”

1. Mobility is always at the top of that list. When you look at budgets, about

68 percent of the companies are increasing their spending on mobility, with

an average increase of 20 percent a year. They’re spending money on data

services, they’re spending money on mobile device management platforms,

and they’re spending money on integration and getting unified communications

applications out to those mobile devices. They’re trying to enable a much more

open model where employees can bring in their iPhone, they can bring in their

Android device—whatever phone they want to use—and IT can potentially

support it. >>

TODAY’S 5 BIGGESTCOMMUNICATION

TRENDS

Mobility

Megatrends | 29

By Irwin LazarVice President and Service Director, Nemertes Research

much personal contact with others.

A social platform can give you some

of that. People are also starting to

see social as part of their overall

collaboration environment. If I’m

looking up someone’s social profile

and reading their likes and interests,

shouldn’t I be able to click on their

name, see if they’re available and

immediately send them an IM or

call them?

3. Another trend is the rise in managed and hosted services. We define that

as any kind of third party you’re

using to support IT, whether it’s

professional services for architecture

and build-out or managed services

for day-to-day operations. Almost

90 percent of companies tell us

they’re doing something hosted. And

look at the plans for growth! Forty

percent are adding more services:

lower level application integration,

mobile device management, social

integration, unified communications

integration, etc. We’re starting to see

IT trying again to position itself much

more strategically. The drivers are the

complexity of IT and finding staff.

If you haven’t really looked at managed

services carefully, our advice is: Take a

hard look. When we measure success,

we look at things like cost of IT per

employee, revenue per employee, and

IT spend per employee. Better metrics

in these areas all tend to correlate

positively with higher use of managed

services. Companies that outsource

day-to-day support operations of their

applications tend to spend less per

employee and have higher success

metrics. In this day and age, when

talent is so hard to find, being able to

leverage third-party services seems

to show some significant financial and

operational benefits.

4. With video, the focus is on giving

people at their desks the ability to

Counselors with the

Veterans Administration

are checking for symptoms

of PTSD in soldiers recently

returned from Iraq, using

easy-to-set-up desktop

videoconferencing.

Managed and Hosted Services

participate in room-based meetings.

So I don’t have to go to an office and

find a videoconferencing center, >>

Video

Megatrends | 31

That has been easily the largest

overall trend.

IT departments themselves have

slightly different priorities. Data

security is top of mind. What happens

if the person leaves the company? Can

I remotely wipe their applications? If

a device gets lost, will company data

be taken away? The second part is

integration with other applications.

How do I make someone’s single

phone number ring their mobile

phone as well as their desktop, or

enable them to quickly move calls

back and forth or participate in video

sessions? The third is kind of a gotcha.

When people start bringing in these

devices, they hammer the wireless

network in the company.

One question that does come up a lot

is, “How do we keep our employees

from playing Angry Birds?” Employees

can lose a lot of time if they start

playing games on their smartphones

and tablets. So, “Can I lock that device

down so they can’t play those games,

or can only do it on their own time?”

2. Social business is about taking how

people collaborate and communicate

through Facebook and bringing it

behind the firewall. Building a social

platform that your employees, your

partners, and your customers can all

use to collaborate and communicate.

Being able to set up groups around

projects, “Like” different things,

suggest ways of finding information

to others, form communities of

interest, etc.

The biggest driver is collaboration: improving the way people work

together. The secondary driver is this

age of telework where people work

from home and they don’t have as

Social Business

30 | Megatrends

Irwin Lazar is Vice President and Service Director at Nemertes Research, where he oversees research on unified communications, contact center, and social business. Nemertes is a leading research-advisory and strategic-consulting firm specializing in emerging technologies. This article is adapted from a 2012 presentation by Lazar sponsored by Avaya.

I can sit in an airport, in a hotel room,

or in my home office and participate

in a video call with people who are

in conference rooms. That’s the killer

app right now.

One of my favorite examples is the

Veterans Administration (VA), which

implemented videoconferencing for

soldiers returning from Iraq. Soldiers

download a high-quality, high-definition

video app on their desktop and

then have a videoconference with

a counselor to determine if they have

any PTSD (post-traumatic stress

disorder) -related issues. The counselors

can now see many more patients per

day. They can help out remote areas

that were understaffed. And they

can read body language and see the

attitude of the person with whom

they are talking.

Video is extremely attractive for

such applications. The challenge is

that a lot of the vendors go to market

with the idea that if we just make it

cheap enough and easy enough to

use, everyone will use it and it will

replace phone calls. That’s not really

what we’re seeing.

5. The final trend is SIP trunking. This often gets confused in the market. When we say SIP trunking, we’re talking about how you connect and make calls outside your company, not how you connect devices internally through SIP. What we see with SIP is that costs aren’t really the big drivers anymore. What is getting people interested in SIP is some of the things you can do with it. I can have a whole lot more control over how calls get to me. I can route them to failover centers. I can load-balance calls across facilities. I can implement SIP as part of a disaster recovery scenario. Plus, I can take advantage of SIP services in the cloud.•

SIP Trunking

32 | Megatrends

By Dr. Charles Law,Assistant Professor, Penn State University

Megatrends | 33

DO COLLABORATION TOOLS

BOOST WORKPLACE COMMUNICATION?

A REVIEW OF THE ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Anyone in the working world knows

this: Meetings are as hard to kill off as

a supervillain in a James Bond film.

Despite the mainstreaming of email

and other collaboration technologies

in the past decade, senior managers

still spend about 23 hours per week

in face-to-face meetings (Rogelberg

and colleagues, 2007). Seventy-two

percent of those managers said they

spend more time in meetings than

they did five years earlier.

The move toward globalization and

the reality of geographically separated

teams is accelerating the move

toward new forms of communication.

Recent research has shown that this

is beneficial for group task cohesion

and performance (Shin & Song,

2011). Will emerging collaboration

technologies continue to offer the

same benefits? In this paper, I’ll review

the academic research on the impact

of email, instant messaging (IM), and

video on business collaboration, and

suggest the good and bad things that

the use of virtual avatars and social

networking might bring.

Email: Convenient, but Limited

Cartwright and Kovacs (1995)

identified three advantages to email:

It is quick, it is convenient, and it is

inexpensive. However, as email has

proliferated, researchers have begun

to note its disadvantages.

1) Email is no longer cheap. According

to the Radicati Group (2007),

employees received an average of

126 emails a day in 2006, up

55 percent from 2003. Employees

were spending 26 percent of their

time managing email. That was

predicted to grow to 41 percent

of their work day in 2009. This

enormous increase in usage has

elevated the cost of supporting

email to $17 billion annually today.

2) Email wastes time. Jackson and

colleagues (2003) found that

employees are interrupted by email

about every five minutes, hurting

the productivity of both sender and

receiver (Wilson, 2002).

3) Email is not good for urgent decisions. A sender doesn’t know if

the receiver is available, nor if he or

she will read the email in a timely

manner (Luor, Wu, Lu & Tao, 2010).

4) Email is not rich. It is not real-

time, lacks verbal and non-verbal

cues, and conveys emotion badly

(Cameron & Webster, 2005). The

use of emoticons can help, though

only if they are positive, as negative

emoticons tend to be disruptive

(Luor, Wu, Lu & Tao, 2010).

5) Email increases the number of “social loafers” and “free riders.”

The former describes someone

who reduces his/her own individual

effort when working in a group

with the assumption that others will

make it up. The latter is an extreme

example of a social loafer (Karau

& Williams, 1993; Lantane and

colleagues, 1979).

Here’s how it might work in real life.

“Zestion” is a large Denver-based

telecommunication company. Sophia,

who is the marketing director of

Zestion, recently initiated a process

action team to better understand

how customers use its products. The

team included two members from the

corporate office (Sophia and Oliver),

two members from the Houston office

(Juan and Theresa), and two members

from the New York office (Theodore

and Luciana). They have three weeks

to complete their project and present

it to management.

What happens if they use only email?

Sophia and Oliver complete their

portion and email their work to the

other team members during the first

week. Juan and Theresa “reply all”

as soon as they get the email and

indicate that they will be done with

their portion soon. Juan and Theresa

work hard to finish and send their

work to everyone a couple days later.

However, neither Theodore nor

Luciana respond. Theodore was

sick and thought that Luciana had

replied to Sophia, while Luciana

was waiting for Theodore’s return

to reply. After three days, Sophia

emails asking if they had received her

initial message. Luciana immediately

becomes concerned that Sophia is

angry at their lack of communication.

She forwards the message to

Theodore, who still doesn’t respond.

Worried about the reaction from

Sophia, Luciana decides to do all

of the work herself. The result?

Poor communication, hurt feelings,

and a “free rider” (Theodore).

Although email use has been steadily

declining among university students

since 2005 (Judd, 2010), the number >>

Should organizations continue to rely on text-based, asynchronous communication when research overwhelmingly indicates that there are better options?

Source: The New Yorker.


140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

2004 2007 2011

IM-Using Workers (Millions)of email users will still grow from

2.1 billion in 2012 to 2.7 billion in 2016

(Radicati). While antiquated to some,

email clearly remains one of the most

important ways that organizational

members communicate.

Instant Messaging: Getting Closer

In 2007, more than 67 million people

used IM at work, up from only 11 million

in 2004 (Shiu & Lenhart, 2004). While

data hasn’t been recently collected,

Radicati (2007) estimated that over

120 million people would be using IM

in the workplace by 2011.

IM has several advantages. It’s real-

time. It’s richer than email. And it

lets users easily switch to even richer

mediums, such as voice or video over

the Internet (Anandarajan et al., 2010).

IM users can also know the presence

of the people with whom they are

communicating. Finally, IM can be

more cost-effective than telephone,

email, and travel (Peslak, Ceccucci

& Sendall, 2010).

What are the potential downsides?

1) Privacy. Patil and Kobsa (2004,

2005) interviewed employees

who use IM and found they were

uneasy that their IM conversations

could be saved and forwarded to

others. Those employees were also

concerned that IM logs could be

saved and retrieved at some future

time, leading to problems with

misinterpretations. Some were even

concerned that their “available”

status could be used as evidence

that they weren’t being productive.

2) Interruptions. Cameron and

Webster (2005) found that over

half of the people they interviewed

indicated that IM interrupted

their work. However, more recent

research indicates that might be

overstated. Ou and Davison (2011)

found that IM only accounted

for 5 percent of workplace

interruptions (others being

telephone calls, email, face-to-face

communication, and meetings).

3) Abandonment. Birnholtz (2010)

studied 21 IM users who had

adopted and then abandoned IM.

They believed that IM left them too

available (privacy) and that they

were often interrupted by people

with whom they did not want to

talk, or had a hard time finishing

IM conversations.

What might have happened if the

Zestion team had used IM instead of

(or in addition to) email? Sophia could

IM the “available” team members with

her and Oliver’s portion of the work,

and follow up by email with those

that were unavailable. When Luciana

receives the email, she sends an IM to

Theodore letting him know about it.

He sends a message back to Luciana

letting her know that he is sick, but

will try to be back to work in a few

days. Meanwhile, Luciana sends an

IM to Juan and Theresa in Houston

letting them know that Theodore is >>

Advantages Disadvantages

Easy-to-use Asynchronous

Almost universally adopted Disruptive

Convenient Social loafers/free riders

Easy to send/receive documents Expensive to support

The Good and Bad of Email


Richer, synchronous communication Potential privacy concerns

Cost-effective May be disruptive

Indicates “presence” Potential drop-off in usage

Interoperability

The Good and Bad of Instant Messaging


Source: Radicati Group.

sick, but that she is working on their

portion of the project.

But when Juan doesn’t answer

her initial IM, Luciana sends

several subsequent messages.

Juan perceives this as pushy and

domineering. Annoyed, he forwards

a copy of the messages to Sophia

as a record of what he considers

“harassment” by Luciana. When

Sophia tells Luciana, Luciana is angry

at the violation of privacy. So what

IM giveth, it also taketh away.

Newer technologies might assuage

these problems.

Videoconferencing: Richer and Richer

Much of the attention on

videoconferencing has focused

on its ability to decrease travel

costs. But as collaboration among

geographically separated team

members requires audio and/or

visual cues (Bekkering & Shim, 2006;

Wegge, 2006), videoconferencing

may be the primary tool to which

organizations turn. It provides a

very rich, real-time medium with

much of the intimacy of face-to-

face communication. As Alavi and

colleagues (1995) put it, “You

can see the body language of the

other meeting participants, and this

helps make you feel more connected

to them.”

No medium is perfect, of course.

Olaniran (2009) interviewed

employees at a large governmental

organization. While 88 percent

thought videoconferencing was more

“convenient” than travel, 85 percent

had problems dialing, 71 percent

believed that videoconferencing

attendees sometimes “lurked”

rather than participated, and others

worried that videoconferencing

would completely replace travel.

Still other workers view

videoconferencing as a way for their

bosses to track their participation.

Indeed, some workers do clam up

and participate less, whether due

to shyness in large group meetings

(Boutte & Jones, 1996) or, according

to Nandhakumar and Baskerville

(2006), due to senior-level managers

exerting their authority in a way that

makes it hard for subordinates to

participate or contradict senior-level

managers’ ideas. This can be

counteracted. One way, according

to Yoo and Alavi (2001), is for

participants to have a rapport

based on a pre-existing history

of teamwork. >>


Decreased travel costs May decrease task participation

Effective in information gathering, Junior employees may find it

training, brainstorming, and difficult to participate

distance collaboration

Rich communication medium Potential privacy concerns

Synchronous May result in less participation

The Good and Bad of Videoconferencing


It should be pointed out that existing

studies are based mostly around

room-based videoconferencing

environments, not newer PC or mobile

video chats. As videoconferencing

moves from the performance art

of the boardroom to the intimacy of

one-on-one conversations, it’s unclear

whether these same issues will apply.

3-D Immersive Environments

In a 3-D immersive environment,

a computer generates a space in

which participants can interact

through the use of an avatar, or

virtual representation of oneself. This

mimics face-to-face communication

(Montoya, Massey & Lockwood, 2011)

by enabling non-verbal cues like

direction of gaze and gestures

(More, Ducheneaut & Nickell, 2007).

Others like Reeves, Malone, and

O’Driscoll (2008) found that

immersive online games may promote

collaboration and communication, as

well as make work more dynamic and

engaging, and collaboration more

effective. 3-D immersive environments

may also motivate and interest users

more, as well as produce a deeper

understanding of subject matter

(Jonassen, 2004).

3-D environments seem to help high-

performing teams most, because they

are adept at using the environments

to read each others’ non-verbal

cues and gestures (Montoya et al.,

2011). They also encourage equal

participation in teams, especially high-

performing ones. Avatars aren’t able

to “free ride,” just as workers in small

teams can’t loaf off in real life.

How would this work for Zestion?

Theresa, who is shy and doesn’t

want to be on video, might feel more

comfortable as an avatar. Theodore,

who is recovering from his cold, can

participate from home and not be

concerned about the appearance of

his red nose. The power differential

with Sophia being present might

also be decreased. There are some

hurdles: training, Sophia’s fear of new

technology, and Juan’s insufficiently

powerful PC. While these problems

can be overcome, they do pose

significant issues for managers.

The Future

By 2009, computer-mediated

communication accounted for

30 to 50 percent of employee

interactions (Johnson, Bettenhausen

& Gibbons, 2009). Face-to-face

interaction is already in the minority

for many organizations and

employees, and may already be

in the minority overall today.

In addition to the technologies

discussed above, there are other

emerging tools. Take social

networking. While Facebook can

hurt worker productivity (Nucleus

Research, 2009), it—along with

the business-focused LinkedIn—

offers huge potential for business

collaboration. Similarly, mobile

collaboration and video offers the

convenience of rich, synchronous

collaboration anytime, anywhere.

As collaboration continues to go

global, organizations will increasingly

seek new technologies to ensure

that their employees can effectively

and efficiently communicate across

time and distance. While it may

be impossible to predict exactly

which technology organizations will

embrace, it is likely that the trend

toward a richer, more synchronous

communication medium will continue.

Will email and IM fade away into

obscurity anytime soon? Probably not.

But should organizations continue

to rely on text-based, asynchronous

communication when research

overwhelmingly indicates that there

are better options? Clearly, there are

better ways to communicate and

collaborate if organizations are willing

to evolve and adapt, and it is likely that

successful organizations will do so.•


Decreased need for communication Learning curve

Rich communication content Increased need for network

bandwidth, computer processing

power, and graphics cards

The Good and Bad of 3-D Immersive Environments

Dr. Charles Law is an assistant professor at Penn State University and President of SMART Consulting. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from the United States Air Force Academy and his Ph.D. in industrial/organizational psychology from Rice University.


Decrease in social loafers

and free riders

Selected References

Alavi M, Wheeler BC & Valacich JS. (1995). Using IT to reengineer business education: An exploratory investigation of collaborative telelearning. MIS Quarterly, 19, 293-312.

Anandarajan M, Zaman M, Dai Q & Arinze B (2010). Generation Y adoption of instant messaging: An examination of the impact of social usefulness and media richness on use richness. IEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 53, 132-143.

Bekkering E & Shim JP (2006). I2i trust in videoconferencing. Communication of the ACM, 49, 103-107.

Birnholtz J (2010). Adopt, adapt, abandon: Understanding why some young adults start, and then stop, using instant messaging. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 1427-1433.

Cameron AF & Webster J (2005). Unintended consequences of emerging communication technologies: Instant messaging in the workplace. Computers in Human Behavior, 21, 85-103.

Jackson T, Dawson R & Wilson D. (2003). Reducing the effect of email interruptions on employees. International Journal of Information Management, 23, 55-65.

Johnson SK, Bettenhausen K & Gibbons E (2009). Realities of working in virtual teams: Affective and attitudinal outcomes of using computer-mediated communication. Small Group Research, 40, 623-649.

Jonassen DH (Ed.) (2004). Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Luor T, Wu L, Lu H & Tao Y (2010). The effect of emoticons in simplex and complex task-oriented communication: An empirical study of instant messaging. Computers in Human Behavior, 26, 889-895.

Montoya MM, Massey AP & Lockwood NS (2011). 3-D collaborative virtual environments: Exploring the link between collaborative behaviors and team performance. Decision Sciences Journal, 42, 451-476.

Olaniran BA (2009). Organizational communication: Assessment of videoconferencing as a medium for meetings in the workplace. International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction, 5, 63-84.

Ou CXJ & Davison RM (2011). Interactive or interruptive? Instant messaging at work. Decision Support Systems, 52, 61-72.

Patil S & Kobsa A (2005). Privacy in collaboration: Managing impression. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Online Communities and Social Computing. Available from https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/papers/2005-ICOCSC-kobsa.pdf.

Reeves B, Malone TW & O’Driscoll T (2008). Leadership’s online labs. Harvard Business Review, 86, 58-66.

Rogelberg SG, Scott CS & Kello J (2007). The science and fiction of meetings. MIT Sloan Management Review, 48, 18-21.

Shin Y & Song K (2011). Role of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication time in the cohesion and performance of mixed-mode groups. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 14, 126-139.

Wegge J (2006). Communication via videoconference: Emotional and cognitive consequences of affective personality dispositions, seeing one’s own picture, and disturbing events. Human-Computer Interaction, 21, 273-318.

Wilson E (2002). Email winners and loser. Communications of the ACM, 45, 121-126.

Yoo Y & Alavi M (2001). Media and group cohesion: Relative influences on social presence, task participation, and group consensus. MIS Quarterly, 25, 371-390.

42 | Megatrends

With nearly 70 percent of CEOs aiming

to partner extensively, what will make

this a differentiating strategy?

AMPLIFYING INNOVATION WITHPARTNERSHIPS

An excerpt from ‘Leading with Connections,’ published by IBM

Megatrends | 43

Partnering is PervasiveExternal partnerships are becoming even morecritical to CEOs’ future operating strategies.

Partner extensively

2012

2008

69%

55%

Outperformers Out-PartnerFinancially successful organizationsare even more inclined to innovatewith partners.

Partner extensively for innovation

59%

46%

Underperformers Outperformers

28%more

Equipping for External CollaborationCompared to other potential areas of change, CEOsare most focused on enabling external collaboration.

Dramatically change

53%

52%

43%

41%

40%

31%

18%

15%

Partnering/collaboration with other organizations

Internal collaboration

Decision-making processes

C-suite composition, skills, and responsibilities

Management and/or organization structure

Governance models

Values of your organization

Supervisory board composition

FIGURE 1 FIGURE 2 FIGURE 3

Source: IBM research.

Source: IBM research. Source: IBM research.

Saying “So Long” to Solo Innovation

Confronted with growing complexity

at every turn, organizations are finding

it nearly impossible to be successful

when executing entirely on their own.

Consequently, only 4 percent of CEOs

plan to do everything in-house. Over

the past few years, partnering has

become increasingly prevalent. In

2008, a little over half of the CEOs

we interviewed planned to partner

extensively. Now, more than two-thirds

intend to do so. (See Figure 1.)

For some time, partnering has been

a primary way of expanding rapidly

into new geographic markets. An

electronics industry CEO from China

jokingly told us, “To go overseas, we

need to ‘borrow a ship’ first. We can’t

grow as fast as we want unless we

partner extensively.”

But that need for speed extends

to innovation as well. As a

telecommunications CEO from France

explained, “We’re partnering to bring

new innovative services to market

faster.” In fact, 53 percent of CEOs are

partnering extensively to innovate.

And in government, education, and

healthcare, more than 60 percent

are doing so. Consumer products

(40 percent), insurance (40 percent),

and media and entertainment

(44 percent) are less likely to

innovate collaboratively.

We also found that outperformers

are more inclined to innovate with

external partners. As one Hong Kong

CEO from the industrial products

industry shared, “To address our

clients’ increasingly complex needs,

we have to leverage our global

business partners.” (See Figure 2.)

Partnerships: The Next Frontier for Openness

Over the past few years, organizations

have made strides in becoming more

open and transparent with employees

and customers. But being open is

harder with partners. “We tend to see

everyone as a competitor,” admitted a

banking CEO from Vietnam. “We need

to see them as partners. We need

to find win/win solutions and share

profits. But this is a cultural shift; it’s

hard to change.”

Partnering, of course, introduces

new kinds of risk. In a world

of increased transparency and

instantly disseminated social media,

organizations are often judged by

their partners’ actions, not just their

own. The practices of any part of

a globally distributed supply chain

can tarnish even the most highly

regarded brands.

The organizational changes required

to be open and collaborative with

partners are even more extensive

than for internal openness. Intellectual

property concerns aside, the sheer

mechanics of sharing collaboration

tools and integrating data are massive.

Also, building trust is much harder. An

education industry CEO from Australia

shared, “We need to partner more, but

we have to trust that other people will

care as much as we do.”

Despite the hurdles, more organizations

are deciding to partner to expand

the range of what is possible, tap

into new sources of revenue, and

gain new competitive advantages.

Ironically, the need to be unique in

the marketplace—to differentiate—

increasingly requires organizations

to work together.

As a result, more than half of CEOs

are making extensive changes to

enable their organizations to work

with external collaborators.

A consumer products CEO from Spain

described the shift this way: “Our

innovation processes are becoming

more open, with more external

collaboration, not just in-house

collaboration.” In our earlier research,

CMOs pointed to the same fact: They

expect use of partnerships to increase

by over 50 percent in the next three

to five years. (See Figure 3.) >>


Outperformers AreBolder InnovatorsThey are far morelikely to pursueinnovation thatdisrupts entireindustries.

UnderperformersOutperformers

Creating entirelynew industries

94%more

48%more

Moving intodifferent industries

18%

35%31%

46%

FIGURE 4

Source: IBM research.

Outperformers Take on Radical Innovation With Partners

Over the past decade, CEOs have

watched digitization and other

technology trends render business

models obsolete and disrupt entire

industries. As one U.S. retail industry

CEO confided, “In our industry, the

biggest risk we face is not regulatory

mandates, as many think. It’s industry

disruption, like what happened to the

home video market.”

Understandably apprehensive, CEOs

are looking for ways to anticipate—

or create—disruptive innovation.

This is where outperformers’

tendency to partner comes into play.

When comparing outperformers

with underperformers, we saw

no significant difference in their

approaches to product and service

innovation. Both groups have similar

plans for integrating, bundling,

and tailoring products and

services and extending their

product/service portfolios.

Where they differ is in their approach

to business model innovation. While

underperformers focus more on

improving operations and redefining

their own enterprise models,

outperformers have more ambitious

innovation targets. They intend to

upset entire industries. As a group,

outperformers are 48 percent more

likely to break into other industries

and twice as inclined to invent entirely

new ones. (See Figure 4.)

Simply put, partnering gives

outperformers the edge they need

to tackle the toughest forms of

innovation. As a professional services

company CEO from India explained,

“In the industries we support,

innovation is required to address all

the disruptions in the environment—

technology, financial, etc. Extensive

collaboration will be the key.”

Taking Action

As the bar continues to rise on

what it takes to engage customers

and outperform competitors,

organizations are teaming with

external partners to tackle the

innovation challenge. However,

collaborative innovation is hard. Being

open internally is difficult enough,

but the hurdles are even greater

outside firewalls and formal chains of

command. How can CEOs help their

organizations connect with partners in

new ways that accelerate innovation?

Fundamentally Change How You Partner

As the pressure to innovate (and the

cost to do so) mounts, CEOs are

re-evaluating how they engage

partners. Boundaries between

organizations are becoming more

porous. Interactions span more

functions and are more continuous

than sporadic. Control and

governance must increasingly

be shared.

• Achieve differentiation through social innovation. Extend

communication and collaboration

tools so that peers can interact

seamlessly regardless of

organizational affiliation. Integrate

data resources to reveal unexpected,

mutually beneficial insights.

Use cloud technologies to make

it easier to work across locations

and time zones.

• Expand scope of partnerships. The majority of organizations now

engage partners in collaborative

innovation. But often that

collaboration is confined to specific

stages, like ideation; or to specific

functions such as R&D, but not

sales, marketing, or HR. Evaluate

ways to extend and connect

existing partnerships.

• Tackle the shared governance challenge. Establish ways to share

key aspects of control—such as

prioritization, decision-making,

and funding—that are traditionally

dominated by one partner.

Make Partnerships Personal

As with customers and employees,

technology now presents

opportunities for much deeper

connections with partners.

Opportunities for innovation—both

serendipitous and orchestrated—are

rising in step with interconnectedness.

• Broaden responsibility for managing partnerships. Embed relationship management

capabilities within the organization;

use centralized alliance management

functions primarily to supply

specialized skills, such as deal

structuring or compliance.

• Foster relationships at each level across partnering organizations. People make partnerships. Provide

avenues to develop personal

connections among peers at every

level, not just among top executives.

Inspire collaborative >>

“We recognize that innovation

is also happening outside of our

organization, and we need to

align with the right thought

leaders and partners.”

— Phil Molyneux, President, Sony Electronics


entrepreneurship by sharing

responsibilities across both

organizations.

• Consider the possibility of “partners” being a community of people. Connectivity is changing

the very nature of partnerships.

Don’t limit your view to organizations.

Your most valuable “partnership”

might be a group of individual

people. Social media significantly

widens the aperture to identify,

form, and connect with relevant

communities of interest.

Break Collaboration Boundaries

To address rising complexity, organizations need to look beyond traditional partners and conventional views on innovation for new inspiration and necessary capabilities.

• Explore unconventional partnerships. Study nontraditional

alliances emerging in other industries and look for parallel applications in your own. Address market shifts or create new solutions by integrating capabilities not commonly found in your own industry.

• Think like a disruptor. Intentionally stretch thinking beyond business as usual, even when business as usual is working. Question norms. Introduce new stimulation from outside—customers, academics, and partners who are not part of your normal innovation circle.

• Innovate together as a system. Some problems are simply too difficult to solve even with a cadre of partners. Approach untenable issues or grand challenges by partnering across the entire system, with competitors, governments, non-governmental organizations, and others.•

This is an excerpt from IBM’s 2012 Global Chief Executive Officer Study, “Leading Through Connections.” Download the full report at http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/en/c-suite/ceostudy2012/. Learn more about the IBM-Avaya partnership at http://www.avaya.com/usa/partners/system-integrators-service-providers/ibm/ibm or by contacting Avaya’s Alliance Directors, Bill Matson and Fred Ohm.

48 | Megatrends

When engineering firm Atkins

Global wanted to improve its

cross-continental collaboration,

it embraced desktop video. Now

Atkins engineers, project managers,

and clients separated by thousands

of miles can chat as intimately as if

they were in the same room. That’s

noticeably improved project delivery.

And Atkins was able to deploy this

cost-effectively by riding on top of,

rather than tearing out, its existing

infrastructure.

We used to be able to agree on what

comprised the core communications

stack. Nowadays, that stack is full

of new technologies such as SIP,

social media, and mobile, and new

approaches such as cloud. Integration

and interoperability, as Atkins

discovered, is paramount. And who’s

opening up the wallet is changing, too.

How should communications value-

added resellers (VARs) and system

integrators react to these trends?

Integration and Interoperability: More Important Than Ever

The term itself, unified

communications and collaboration

(UC&C), hints at the breadth of

technologies this encompasses.

UC&C VARs have traditionally sold

and deployed these separately or,

at most, focused on a few areas.

This strategy is changing for

several reasons.

Many enterprises want to enable

new UC capabilities while protecting

and adding value to their existing

infrastructure investments, according

to Frost & Sullivan. New investments

are made conservatively, in phases

such as by project, location, user

group, or business need. Naturally,

many businesses find their strategy

shifting midway through these

protracted rollouts. >>

AND HOW COMMUNICATIONS RESELLERS AND SYSTEM INTEGRATORS CAN GAIN AN EDGE

By Michael Taylor, CTO, Strategic Products and Services (SPS)

TRANSFORMING THE UNIFIEDCOMMUNICATIONS ECOSYSTEM

4 TRENDS

Megatrends | 49

As the UC&C stack gets thicker, organizations need

better diagnostic tools to prevent outages or solve them

quickly. But many organizations lack staff with expertise

in multiple systems to provide the availability and

performance they require. In addition, IT budgets remain

tight, meaning managers will need to reduce capital

and operational expenses, cut support costs, and

meet aggressive ROI goals.

Many best-of-breed products can still be deployed as

stand-alone products. However, providers are starting

to offer pre-integrated communications platforms with

multiple functions that allow customers to start with an

initial core capability and expand into other functions.

According to Gartner, this trend will increase, regardless

of whether these functions are hosted in private, public, or

hybrid cloud environments. Other vendors are supporting

industry standards to make products that are more open,

flexible, and interoperable with legacy or other third-party

systems, a requirement for customization.

The result is a splintering of the market, with the number

of organizations planning to move to an end-to-end,

single-vendor solution expected to grow 29 percent in

the next two years, predicts Frost

& Sullivan, while the number that

plans to increase their adoption

of tightly integrated multivendor

solutions expected to almost double.

This trend is likely to increase

because it simplifies deployment,

maintenance, and support, and thus

reduces the economic pressures most

organizations face. Consequently,

industry consolidation is likely, as

vendors buy up firms to broaden

their product portfolio.

Create a “Digital Edge”

According to Gartner analysts Mark P.

McDonald and Andy Rowsell-Jones,

a “digital edge” exists where digital

information combines with physical

resources in a new way to create value

and revenue. One example of a digital

edge is the multibillion-dollar App

Store economy which was created

out of apps running on smartphones

and tablets. Games like Farmville that

are played on PCs inside social media

networks are another.

The enterprise offers plenty of

potential digital edges to system

integrators and VARs. AXA

Assistance, an emergency help

provider for travelers, was able to

make its customer service more

efficient and effective by upgrading

its technology to SIP. Now its

contact center agents can provide

concierge-level support 24 hours a

day at lower cost with better internal

tracking. AXA is looking to extend

that customer service by adding SMS

and mobile apps as channels by which

its customers can get help anytime,

anywhere.

The UC&C space offers similar

opportunities for VARs and other

channel partners. As McDonald and

Rowsell-Jones advise, identify a

desired outcome—giving customers

“Tiffany service at a Target price”

—and then brainstorm what

combination of digital and physical

resources will help you achieve that

for a customer. Then go ahead and

implement that.

Forecast: Cloudy

Salesforce.com, Workday, and

Dropbox may be the poster boys for

the enterprise cloud. But there are

literally tens of thousands of other

worthy cloud vendors. Their impact

has been slower to be felt in UC&C,

as most organizations, while open to

cloud-based conferencing services,

for example, have preferred to keep

mission-critical communications

technologies such as telephony and

email on-premises. >>

Using desktop videoconfer-encing, Atkins Global engineers were able to collaborate better and deliver projects like the London 2012 Olympics faster.

The customer communications management market

is expected to grow from $720 million in 2012 to $1 billion

in 2015, according to Gartner. The highest demand will

come from insurance, financial services, telecom, utilities,

and the public sector.


n Expanding/upgrading implementationn Implemented, not expandingn Planning to implement in a year or more

n Planning to implement in the next 12 monthsn Interested but no plansn Not interestedn Don’t know

1. Email2. Business applications3. Access to corporate

directory

4. IM and presence5. Desktop telephony

features

6. Web conferencing7. Mobile IP

videoconferencing

Interest in Consumerization is Present at Most Companies

“Which of the following collaboration capabilities is your organization interested in putting on a mobile device?”

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Base: 133 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees.

Source: Forrester Consulting, January 2012.

2%

1%

2%

2%

1%

3%

31% 47% 7% 8% 4%

25% 26% 21% 8% 14%

14% 40% 13% 8% 6%

22% 34% 7% 13% 11%

8% 21% 14% 17% 14%

12% 47% 11% 22% 11%

7% 14% 12% 33% 23%

4%

17%

12%

23%

23%

7%

4%

4%

Those rules have changed, according

to Gartner analyst Dan O’Connell.

“Communication service providers,

technology vendors, systems

integrators, and applications

specialists should view the cloud

as a unified communications option,

albeit an increasingly important

option. While the transition to the

cloud will be incremental, failure to

participate in unified communications

as a service will exclude these

organizations from an increasingly

attractive part of the market.”

This transition will not be easy. The

convergence of UC functionality

means that those who once regarded

each other as partners will now see

each other as competitors. The cloud

pits old-school systems integrators

against new-school communications

service providers. The providers

that succeed will be able to anticipate

changing customer needs and

adapt their offerings, go-to-market

strategies, and business models to

suit. Forming closer ties to both

customers and vendors can help

providers anticipate market trends.

Vendors, meanwhile, will need to

listen better to both customers and

channel partners.

The cloud upends the traditional

reseller model based on selling

hardware or software licenses to

earn upfront commissions with a

subscription model. This requires

patience and deep pockets, as well

as a willingness to chase higher

volume and offer new services such

as tech support, related hardware/

software sales, and consulting. After

all, resellers are on the inside track

with both vendors and customers.

Making those ends meet in the middle

—getting the right communications

services delivered to the companies

that need them with the services

that offer tightest integration and

lowest ROI—is where resellers can

make a difference.

Rise of the CMO

The cloud’s rise has enabled the rise

of the CMO as an IT powerhouse.

The latest marketing tools are mostly

delivered as cloud services that were

cheap enough for CMOs or line of

business executives to start without

engaging the CIO. That’s grown so

much that Gartner predicts that by

2017, CMOs will be spending more

on IT than CIOs.

That may be hard to believe. But

according to Gartner, marketing has

become the growth engine for many

companies by evolving from an art

(parties, press releases, relationships)

to a numbers-driven science that

leverages big data and predictive

analytics for demand generation,

lead nurturing, campaign analysis,

social media automation, and mobile

marketing. Marketing not only knows

its customers better, but it knows

these technologies better than IT.

Now, I don’t think CMOs will

replace CIOs outright. CIOs are too

entrenched, and control too many

services and too much data. Still,

VARs need to look to CMOs and

line of business (LOB) heads as a

greenfield set of new customers.

And they need to stay abreast of

how CIOs and IT departments are

changing, due to economic

conditions, to technologies like

cloud and to vendor consolidation.•

Mike Taylor joined Strategic Products and Services in 1993. As CTO and VP for Emerging Technologies, he is responsible for identifying key technologies and preparing SPS to sell, design, support, and maintain them. SPS is a national unified communications systems integrator based in Parsippany, New Jersey. It was Avaya’s 2012 Partner of the Year.


AXA Assistance was able to make its customer service

more efficient and effective by upgrading its technology

to SIP. Now, its contact center agents can provide

concierge-level support 24 hours a day at lower cost

with better internal tracking.

54 | Video Collaboration Video Collaboration | 55

“Videoconferencing is entering the

mainstream of enterprise use at the personal

[mobile] level, not at the telepresence or

room-based system level.”

–Andrew Davis, analyst, Wainhouse Research

Turn to page 56 to learn more.

Video Collaboration

“You don’t look at all like your e-mail.”

What’s the future of video

collaboration? I can quickly sum

it up: exponential growth in the

number of people and the number

of places from where people will

be collaborating via video.

We are already at the start of a

great era in Internet-based

video collaboration. With the

consumerization of IT, the

popularity of consumer mobile

devices and apps in the last

several years has reinvigorated

the stagnant enterprise mobile

market. Similarly, the popularity of

powerful, inexpensive tablets and

smartphones, along with apps such

as FaceTime, Skype, and Google

Talk have not only made

consumer-grade video chat

available to the masses—it’s

also jump-starting demand for

high-quality enterprise video in

the workplace.

“Videoconferencing is entering the

mainstream of enterprise use at

the personal [mobile] level, not at

the telepresence or room-based

system level,” declared Andrew

Davis, an analyst with Wainhouse

Research, in late 2012.

So we’re seeing many more

schools and universities using

video to conduct distance

learning or teacher training in

a more collaborative fashion.

First responders are able to use

their smartphones to see what

is happening at the site of an

emergency. Doctors across town or

across the country can share video

and records and collaborate to help

make better treatments, all over

super-secure connections.

Two-way mediums like video benefit

from the “network effect”: The more

connected devices and endpoints

there are, the more useful it is for

everyone. That is drawing more

people to video, creating a feedback

loop. Armed with laptops and

mobile devices, these new users are

demanding that business video

be as convenient and agile as its

consumer counterparts.

Learning by Seeing

Inherently, we are visual creatures.

Yes, the corporate world offers an

incredibly rich menu of collaborative

tools, including telephone, email,

instant messaging, live or stored

presentations, even shared desktops.

All of this is good, necessary, and

powerful. But as soon as I turn on a

TV in the corner of a full meeting

room, everyone’s eyes will be

irresistibly drawn to the live screen.

According to Forrester Research,

video’s usefulness

arises out of its

ability to “replicate

face-to-face

interactions and

communications—

conversing in

real time and

seeing each

others’ reactions

no matter where

they are located

… [video] helps to put a face and mannerisms to a name and voice,

enabling remote and distributed

teams to feel more connected and

more committed to shared goals.”

Done right, video collaboration can

also save enterprises money (think

travel savings) while boosting sales

and keeping customers happy. That’s

all happening today,

But as I mentioned earlier, video

collaboration is transforming to

become both simpler and more open.

It needs to be. By the middle of next

year, the number of smartphones and

tablets in use worldwide is expected

to surpass the 1.5 billion PCs. These

devices are rockets in our pockets. By

2015, 80 percent of smartphones will

have stereo 3-D cameras and screens,

both of which enhance video chat,

according to Jon Peddie Research.

Also, corporate BYOD (“bring your

own device”) policies have become

mainstream. According to a survey

published in 2012 by CIO magazine,

more than half of companies

(52 percent) plan to encourage or

require employees to BYOD in the

next 12 to 18 months. >>

DAWn OF A neW eRA InVIDeOCOnFeRenCInGForget hard-to-set-up, stodgy video boardroom meetings. The future is In rich, convenient video chats by laptop or mobile.


By Bob Romano, Vice President of Global Marketing, Radvision, an Avaya Company


BYOD is a boon for the growth

of business video, which is why

companies should welcome, not

ignore it. no longer is it about

connecting only to those who have

pre-approved software installed on a

corporate desktop or tablet. It’s about

connecting to anyone, anywhere for

the rich communication only video

can provide.

Big Is Out

Here’s some evidence of this shift,

courtesy of IDC. In their tabulation

of the Q3 2012 market for enterprise

videoconferencing, IDC found that

sales of multi-codec immersive

telepresence (i.e., oversized room-

based videoconferencing systems)

continues to “decline rapidly,” down

35.8 percent year-over-year. Other

big-ticket video system gear—things

like gateways and firewalls—also

declined 26.8 percent. By contrast,

single-codec video systems and

personal videoconferencing systems

both grew, up 0.4 percent and

8.7 percent, respectively.

Consumer video chat is creating

a generation of workers who are now

familiar and at ease with it. Instead

of reserving a videoconferencing

room that may require broadcast

technicians to operate, these

workers want to conduct video

chats on a smaller, less formal basis.

At the same time, they expect

business-grade features like data

sharing, multiple party support, and

a reliable latency-free connection.

They’re at work, after all.

That’s why companies who want

to stay on the cutting edge of

video collaboration will also need

advanced tools for the desktop

and workgroup level, in order to

support mission-critical enterprise

tasks like sales, training, and executive

discussions. To really support rich

collaboration, what you need at

the core is a system that supports

advanced media processing,

multiple client formats, and

high-definition quality.

What else does a complete video

system for the future need to do?

It first needs to work well so that

there are no barriers to acceptance.

Second, it needs to be able to

synchronize users from different client

platforms and different connections,

so that the “network effect” can really

kick in. Third, it should be able to

incorporate all kinds of supporting

media, like presentations. Some older

systems forced users to train a

camera on a whiteboard in order

to “share” material.

Wainhouse Research did a good

job of putting together the table

stakes: “everyone from senior staff

to knowledge workers like product

marketing managers understands

that if a solution were not intuitively

obvious and highly reliable, it would

not be adopted permanently. For

sensitive sales situations or for B2B

calls, a videoconferencing solution

simply has to work, and has to work

every time.” >>

n Now

n 12 —18 months from now

Source: CIO magazine, August 2012.

Approach to “Bring Your Own Technology”


For first responders, better information like live video can mean

the difference in saving a life or getting to a building before it

burns down. For enterprises, it can mean a closer relationship

with existing customers, or a simple way to powerfully tell your

story to new prospects. either way, having the ability to share

video collaboration anytime, anywhere, with anyone, is where

the future is headed.

Future of Culture: Collaboration Via Avatar

While many in the business world are just getting comfortable

with the fact that they may “appear live” at any point in the

day, there is another interactive video tool emerging that may

solve the bad hair day problem, among others: 3-D interactive

environments, where digital avatars can interact in real time.

Such “virtual reality” environments seemed far out when

Second Life launched a decade ago. But there is actually a

large segment of the population today that is extremely

comfortable spending hours upon hours in an interactive

3D environment—except they just call it gaming.

While TV commercials for video games seem to focus on the

ability of people to blow up things, it’s easy to imagine business

video collaboration taking advantage of the rendering engines

of 3-D games to allow people to interact in real time.

Already, 3-D environments are used for training and workplace

simulation. Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin, uses

our AvayaLive™ engage to offer distance learning to students

and alumni, as well as for new teacher training. The liberal arts

school has saved money on travel—$11,400 in its International

Studies program alone—while doubling its participation in the

virtual events over in-person ones. It has also been able to make

tutoring and other similar services available to students at more

hours of the day through the 3-D environment. >>

The Power of (Many) Platforms

Consider the Bainbridge Island, Washington, police department. It had installed

a fixed camera on a police boat patrolling the Puget Sound to survey ferries and

help in any emergencies for the water-bound commuters in the Seattle area.

Then one detective discovered that he could use his Android smartphone to

connect into the desktop-based conferencing system.

“I could shoot live feeds and still photos and feed it to others in the

videoconference, and we had the same capabilities as the original

system—the ability to interact, share files and data, text, and talk via

[Voice over IP],” he told State Tech magazine.

Video collaboration has spread rapidly throughout the department. Today, it

encompasses reports from auto accidents, hazardous material spills, and even

interoffice communications.

But just having a mobile video component, one officer said, made the

department perform better: “We’ve learned that information sharing and

communication in a timely manner saves lives, so the faster we can get this

information out, the more lives we can save.”

Mobile videoconferencing allows police boats in

Washington’s Puget Sound to respond faster and

more effectively to emergencies.


Bob Romano is Vice President of Global Marketing for Radvision, an Avaya company. He has 20 years of experience in the videoconferencing industry, including at VTEL, VCON, and IBM.

According to John Arechavala, Director of IT infrastructure,

AvayaLive engage “creates exceptional value to enhance

communications and collaboration, expand access, and provide

enormous ‘green’ savings for many different functions.”

What happens when the generation raised on gaming moves

to the business world? I can already foresee an industry of

virtual-meeting experts. I predict that today’s gamers and game

developers may build the 3-D business environments of the

future—a place where “more” gets done, faster, whenever it’s

convenient for people to participate.

Conclusion: Onward and Upward

enabling personal videoconferencing doesn’t have to be a

tomorrow project. After Avaya purchased my old company,

Radvision, we rolled out our Scopia® desktop and mobile

videoconferencing system to 4,000 employees in just five

weeks. Within the first six months, more than 100,000 meetings

had been held with Scopia®, with over 310,000 attendees

participating in point-to-point and multipoint video calls.

According to a case study by Wainhouse Research, we have

also armed the salespeople with a useful tool, helped build

internal rapport, and made meetings more effective.

As video collaboration systems become easier to use, more

economical to purchase, and more a part of our overall

business culture, everyone will see the payoff—from more

personal connections with clients and faster and better internal

communications to hefty cost savings from evolving past the

old way of doing things.•

62 | Video Collaboration

FORReSTeR:

The RiSe of Video-eNabled

iNNoVaTioN Will PoWeR CoRPoRaTe

GRoWThClearer Video Communication Drives Better Decisions and More Innovation

Most businesses create an ROI plan for video adoption

that relies heavily on the predictable and quantifiable

savings from travel reductions to pay for the

investment. Other hard dollar considerations when

implementing a coordinated unified communications

plan that encompasses video include:

• Potential reduction of ongoing maintenance

costs from reduced help desk requests.

• Fewer connection failures.

• Simplified endpoint administration versus a loose

confederation of communications technologies.

Business Are Winning With Video Today

enabling employees to work from home, another office,

or even another country increases flexibility, ensuring

that your business will continue to move forward even

in trying circumstances. For example:

• A manufacturing company performed Asian

operations reviews via HD video when global travel

was dangerous during a swine flu outbreak.

• A large company acquisition continued forward

using video—including public announcements

and employee notification—during a

volcanic eruption. >>

Video Collaboration | 63

“Which business benefits has your organization realized through the investment in videoconferencing solutions?” (Select all that apply.)

Base: 21 U.S. IT and business decision- makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees that have deployed videoconferencing to all users.


Collaboration and Productivity Are Top Business Benefits Derived From Videoconferencing Solutions

• first responders whose home stations were flooded by the Mississippi

river used video to attend morning roll calls and receive updates on the

current situation.

remote Workers Can Attend Video Meetings—Delivering the right Ideas and skills

Bringing people together over video will happen more often, more cost-

effectively, and more comfortably in situations with outcomes such as these:

• In one of their first global management meetings held via video, a publisher

continued the meeting via video after attendees normally would have left to

travel to home offices and made a decision that had not been considered at

two previous management meetings due to lack of time. they decided to

launch a line of books that added to earnings that year.

• A national forestry service was traditionally unable to entice enough field

personnel to attend national strategy meetings because they felt it was

their duty to be in the field—and they preferred that work environment.

By allowing field personnel to attend via video, participation increased and

provided valuable insight for policy discussions and decision-making.

• An investment bank was able to put dealmakers from other offices in front of

clients using HD videoconferencing and close incremental deals consistently.

Video was credited with helping close several multimillion-dollar deals in the

first year the bank deployed its immersive system.

executive Directives and strategic objectives Are Clearer over Video

A key value of video to business is delivering a clear, believable, engaging

analysis and presentation of the turbulent business situation and the firm’s

tactical and strategic plans.

• A global technology firm uses multiple large video-enabled conference

facilities, as well as desktop and room-based conferencing endpoints, to

enable all employees to see and hear

about the firm’s status first from their own

Ceo—and allow employees with other

commitments to view that video later. this

drives improved employee satisfaction with

these increasingly frequent meetings and

has improved morale across the company.

• A large government entity has used

video for strategy discussion among field

executives for years and has evolved to

communicate decisions and plans to its

employee body via video. Use

has increased significantly since

including employees, leading to a

significant deployment of video

capabilities because employees

felt it was part of the fabric of

the organization.

• An internationally recognized

university wanted to expand its

graduate education program to

include a remote geography with a

high demand for its degree

programs and a population of

potential students who were unable

or unwilling to travel. Clarity of

communication and rich student

interaction are the hallmarks of this

institute’s educational experience,

which is delivered frequently using

video. According to student

feedback, the quality of the

education has increased due to the

rich interaction with the foreign

campus that had never occurred in

a traditional campus environment.

Video Delivers engaging, Human Communications and Collaboration

Drawings in primitive caves

were created to improve hunting

techniques and identify good

hunting grounds, smoke signals

were used along the Great Wall of

China to warn of invaders, and early

telephones enabled rapid emergency

communications with doctors and fire

fighters. Modern videoconferencing

is the latest technological solution

to enable communications between

people separated by great distances.

Its clarity enables collaboration and

creativity that are not possible

with text or audio-based

communications paradigms—paving

the way to more rapid and effective

innovation within businesses that

deploy video communications

capabilities and enable their

employees to use video in the

context of their daily business lives.•This is an excerpt from a 2012 Forrester Consulting white paper commissioned by Avaya and based on a survey of 133 IT and business decision-makers. Please download the full report at www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/whitepapers/VideocollaborationChallengesForrester.pdf.

Videoconferencing’s

clarity enables

collaboration and

creativity that are not

possible with text or

audio-based

communications

paradigms.


Source: Wainhouse Research, 2012.

For the South African Post Office, standard

weekly meetings got a first-class upgrade

when they moved to videoconferences.

Joining the meeting from desktops or

gathering in the auditorium or board

rooms, executives and managers hammer

out holiday schedules, new budgets, and

hiring while talking face to face. And like a

sportscaster at a football match, speakers

can share spreadsheets, schedules, resumes,

and other useful visuals to add color

and details.

The HR group, among all the agency’s

departments, has put videoconferencing

front and center, using it for recruiting new

talent and training employees.

By getting buy-in from such a visible group,

adoption and acceptance has rippled

across the agency. New employees become

comfortable with it from the get-go, and

current employees earn a first taste

during training.

The South African Post Office, without

knowing it, followed the strategies that the

Aberdeen Group has identified to make

business videoconferencing successful:

• Support multiple forms of video.

• Create a corporate-wide culture of

using video to collaborate.

• Provide universal access to video

collaboration to employees.

Take Two

Once confined to the conference room

or auditorium, video is moving to PCs

and mobile devices, making it much

more egalitarian. What had been

reserved for executive management

is now accessible to all. In this more

democratic form, videoconferencing

will go viral.

As a result, videoconferencing is

growing inside businesses at an

incredible rate. According to a 2012

survey by Frost & Sullivan, 89 percent

of North American companies plan

to use videoconferencing more

extensively or at some capacity

during the next 12 months.

There are huge benefits now that

videoconferencing is escaping the

boardroom. Sure, telepresence, with

its multiple displays, high-definition

video and sound, and collaboration

tools is highly effective for

company-wide meetings, sales

calls, and cross-department meetings.

The problem? Such boardroom-based

meetings can make employees feel

more like passive viewers than actual

participants.

Video on Every Desktop

Mobile and desktop videoconferencing

is much more personal, allowing—

requiring!—people to participate

actively. Employees can meet anytime,

anywhere—useful for one-to-one

or small group activities. The

conferences are no more disruptive

than a typical phone call, yet usually

much more productive.

People are often initially resistant,

though, so plan carefully if you want

to make clicking on a videoconference

as popular as picking up the phone.

Forrester Research analyst TJ Keitt

says that “tracking how employees

use desktop video in the pilot is

essential to gaining buy-in for

expansion of the initiative.” Also, a

well-connected early adopter like the

Human Resources department can

be a powerful agent for enabling the

spread of videoconferencing, as the

South African Post Office discovered.

Tiny Screen, Huge Benefits

BYOD has made employee

smartphones and tablets as

common as Swingline staplers. >>

plan to test

or deploy within a year.

50%16%

engage in mobile

videoconferencing.

36%

have deployed

videoconferencing-

ready tablets.

VIDEOCONFERENCING GOES VIRALVideo shines the more people use it. So move it onto the desktop and mobile devices—and watch it become a star.

Mobile Videoconferencing Goes to Work

By Moshe Machline, Vice President of Marketing, Radvision, an Avaya Company


Moshe Machline is Vice President of Marketing for Radvision, an Avaya company. He has 15 years of technology management and go-to-market experience at the IT and telecommunications industry level.

The South African Post Office uses videoconferencing

to make meetings and training more effective,

translating to better customer service at its branches.

ease their fears, and remind them

that video’s personal touch is as

close as you can get to a live,

in-person meeting.

• Gather feedback to create best

practices. Survey users each

quarter to understand how they are

using video. Use what you learn to

remind staff about certain features,

share successes, and improve

overall usage.

• Make it high-def. The gap

between room and personal

videoconferencing is fast

disappearing. Our Scopia® and

Avaya Flare® Experience apps for

PC and mobile can both support

up to 720p video.

• Be open. Don’t lose your investment

in your legacy videoconferencing

equipment. Open and interoperable

solutions allow you to merge the

new and the old.

• Protect and secure. Don’t get lazy.

Videoconferencing systems can be

hacked, allowing people to listen to

and see confidential discussions. No

system should automatically answer

incoming calls, nor operate without

a strong firewall.

With videoconferencing in place,

your business will be two to five

years ahead of the competition,

according to Melanie Turek, a Frost

& Sullivan analyst. “Forward-thinking

organizations are seeing measurable

value in advanced communications

solutions that allow for true

collaboration, leading to enhanced

thought leadership, customer

support, and productivity.”•

According to a 2012 Wainhouse

Research study, mobile

videoconferencing ranks first

in customer interest—a clear

winner ahead of managed

videoconferencing services,

integration of videoconferencing

with telephony platforms, and

even integration of Skype and

videoconferencing.

Just because you’re using a

consumer mobile device doesn’t

mean that you should limit

yourself to consumer apps like

Skype or FaceTime. Business-

grade apps provide better quality,

interconnect with existing enterprise

videoconferencing systems,

offer high security, and add rich

non-video collaboration tools

such as document sharing.

Crowdsourced Collaboration

Think of all the places your company

could use personal video to make

communication more intimate and

effective: executive meetings, distance

learning and training, customer

meetings, brainstorming sessions,

partner meetings, collaboration with

remote workers, R&D activities, and

performance reviews.

Connecting with field service workers

is an especially ripe area. Technicians

are sharing live visuals and video

chatting with operators to fix

equipment at customers’ sites, such

as electricity and gas units, cable

boxes, and gym equipment. That’s

helping them improve their ability

to fix equipment the first time, says

John Ragsdale, an analyst with

the Technology Services

Industry Association.

“It’s time [for field service

organizations] to get over their

paranoia about video and start to

bring it into their support operation,”

Ragsdale says.

In another case, medical

manufacturers are using video to

troubleshoot and fix critical health

systems. A nonworking surgical

microscope in a remote area of

Montana can be fixed by a

technician in San Jose, California,

by discussing the problem live with

whoever’s present, examining the

scope using HD video, and even

sharing fix-it tutorials.

Ensuring Success

The single best way to ensure that

personal videoconferencing takes off

is to put it in employees’ hands. It can

be that habit-forming. Here are some

other steps you can take:

• Provide training. Some employees,

especially those over 35 years old,

will instinctively find video invasive

or uncomfortable. Provide training,


videoconference. 21 percent

of American adults have used

video calling for customer client

meetings, while 16 percent have

used it during a job interview or

an employment termination.

And also contrary to Wallace,

Americans don’t seem ridden with

angst over their appearance on

camera. The opposite seems true.

For instance, 20 percent

of Americans say they would

dress MORE CASUALLY for a

work-related video call than an

in-person meeting. The

percentage of business video

slobs rises among younger,

single people.

There’s more. More than 10 percent

of American adults say that

business video chatting while in

the bathroom is A-OK, while 25

percent think the bedroom is fine.

What about a videoconference while you’re poolside, lounging in a bikini or, horrors, a Speedo? More

than 35 percent of employed—yes,

EMPLOYED—U.S. adults think

that’s kosher.

Fortunately, not everyone’s so

relaxed. Just like ‘80s female office

workers who blended power suits

and Reeboks, an increasing number

(one out of seven) of women are

donning work attire on top and casual

attire on the bottom for video calls.

Think a nice silk blouse and old,

faded sweatpants.

What are some other emerging new

“rules” of videoconferencing? Here

are a few:

• Light yourself decently. Close

those bright windows behind you

that leave your face dark and

inscrutable. That defeats the

whole purpose.

• Your video camera and screen are

rarely in the same place. So when

listening to the other person, look into the CAMERA, not at the

screen, as much as possible. That

will confirm to the other person that

you are listening intently and help

smooth the conversation.

• Some people, when they get on

camera, over-gesture or move their

hands frantically. Don’t.

• While videoconferencing, don’t check your email, watch YouTube,

smoke, eat with your mouth open,

or do other things that would be

considered rude IRL (in real life).

• Don’t wear distracting clothing.

So no Hawaiian shirts, overly

chunky jewelry, or loud sports

team jerseys. Actually, that’s a

good rule for LIFE.•

Eric Lai is Editorial Director at Avaya. When he video chats for work, he likes to pair a blue dress shirt with acid-washed jean shorts.

In his celebrated novel Infinite

Jest, the late satirist David Foster

Wallace imagined a reality where

video chatting quickly rose, then

plummeted, in popularity. Why?

Because video calling made everyone overly

self-conscious about their appearance—

about their clothes, facial features, whether

they had a piece of spinach stuck in their

teeth, etc. It became so stressful and

unpleasant that users chose to hide their

faces behind masks. Wallace may have

been a comic genius, but in this case, his

predictions are more comic than genius.

For sure, video chatting is becoming more

mainstream. Call it the “FaceTime Effect,”

after the popular iOS app. But rather than

falling again, it appears to be creating

interest in mobile and desktop video

chatting for work.

According to a summer 2012 survey

by Harris Interactive sponsored by

Avaya, 40 percent of American adults

have participated in a video call or

THE NEW ‘RULES’ FOR VIDEOCONFERENCING

Etiquette isn’t keeping Americans from video chatting. Still, read on for a few tips to smooth those work calls.

By Eric Lai, Editorial Director, Avaya


“Hold my videoconferencing calls, Gina.”


GENIUS OF cOllabOratION

a university thrives on the exchange of knowledge

and cooperation between its own members and

with other educational and research institutions. as

a result, video communication is being increasingly

implemented by prestigious institutions such as EtH

Zürich, also known as the Swiss Federal Institute of

technology. Founded in 1854, EtH Zürich students

and professors—the most famous being albert

Einstein—have won more than 20 Nobel Prizes. the

17,000-student school is consistently ranked among

the top 20 universities in the world.

committed to providing its students and staff

with the most advanced technological tools, EtH

Zürich has used videoconferencing since 2001. the

university encourages professors to deliver lectures

from home; graduate students to attend meetings

and follow presentations from wherever they are;

colleagues and research groups outside EtH Zürich

to cooperate with the university; and many more

collaboration scenarios.

Previously, EtH Zürich used a mix of video

equipment from a number of different vendors.

although the system was up and running, there were

several challenges that needed to be addressed.

For example, the solution was not interoperable

with other traditional, standards-based (H.323)

video systems; it was not scalable; and its security

mechanism regularly blocked a number of functions.

Finally, the video network was Pc-based, leaving

the 40 percent of lecturers and students using Mac

computers without video access.

tH

E M

ISS

ION

caSE StUdy

HOW ETH ZURICH—

ALBERT EINSTEIN’S ALMA MATER—

STIMULATES SCHOLARSHIP USING VIDEO

72 | Video collaboration Video collaboration | 73

UNIVERSITAT ZÜRICH ZENTRUM

Products:

Scopia® Elite

5115 MCU,

Scopia® IVIEW

Management

Suite,

Scopia®

Desktop,

Scopia® IP/

ISDN Gateway

the benefits

ETH Zürich now has a fully scalable HD desktop videoconferencing solution with the ability to grow as needed. Staff and students take part in video meetings from locations around the globe using their own computers. The Scopia Desktop firewall traversal function also enables delegates from outside the university’s network to quickly and easily join conferences. Meetings are moderated using the same user interface, while screen content, such as presentations and videos, is easily displayed or exchanged among participants using PCs, Macs, and traditional room-based video systems.

“The advantages are clear to see,” says Rechsteiner. “Collaboration and meetings across many locations have become not just easier to organize, but more effectively carried out. Productivity has increased, our people save time and gain flexibility, and we’ve significantly cut travel expenses. Lastly, thanks to Scopia’s superior interoperability, we were able to use our existing equipment as well, making the solution even more cost-effective.”

Rechsteiner also emphasizes how easy the solution is to install and operate. “Users don’t need license keys, administrator rights, or any in-depth technical knowledge. Scopia is ready to go with a click of the mouse.”

The Solution

After assessing a number of solutions, ETH Zürich made

the decision in 2010 to implement a Radvision system

including Scopia® on the back end and 300 Desktop Pro

videoconferencing licenses on the front end.

“We decided to go with Scopia® Desktop because Radvision

fulfilled all of our requirements,” adds Rechsteiner. “Radvision

was actually the only company offering a product that also ran

on Mac OS when we were evaluating the competition.”

Looking Forward

As part of its future rollout, ETH Zürich will soon be

phasing in mobile devices to meet the growing demand for

videoconferencing and telepresence applications on the move.

There are also plans to integrate Microsoft Lync.

The Scopia solution supports both platforms with Scopia®

Mobile for the iPhone and iPad as well as the Scopia® Video

Gateway for Microsoft Lync. With the Radvision solution,

ETH Zürich’s investments—both past and future—are

well protected.•

“the advantages are clear to see … collaboration and

meetings across many locations have become not just

easier to organize, but more effectively carried out.

Productivity has increased, our people save time and gain

flexibility, and we’ve significantly cut travel expenses.”

—Thomas Rechsteiner, Head of Videoconferencing Services, ETH Zürich

EtH Zürich needed a scalable, high-definition

desktop video solution that was interoperable with

H.323 and H.320 and supported both Pcs and Macs.

the system also had to be able to stand alone and

require minimal additional deployment costs.

“Our requirements were clear-cut,” explains thomas

rechsteiner, head of Videoconferencing Services

at EtH Zürich. “the solution had to be easy to use

and platform-independent, allowing everyone to

use their own computers. It also had to be scalable,

compatible with the existing infrastructure, and

equipped with a firewall transversal mechanism to

enable easy access to the system regardless

of location.”

tH

E c

Ha

ll

EN

GE

74 | Video collaboration Video collaboration | 75

truly unified

CBC (Cologne Broadcasting Center) is a member company of the rtl Germany Media Group (Mediengruppe rtl deutschland), reaching more than 30 million people a day with its television programs. CBC and its 550 employees recently migrated to Microsoft lync as the foundation of its unified communications (uC) platform. the company was on the lookout for a new feature-rich, high-performance video communication solution offering ease of integration into lync.

“the aim was to provide various locations and numerous editorial teams interlinked across the world with access to an optimal video communications system,” says ralf Offermann, who was in charge of the project at CBC.

“We were also looking to achieve a ‘continuous presence’ for conferences—meaning that all of the participants are in view at the same time, so that everyone can see everyone else in order to create a natural interaction via video.”

th

e C

ha

ll

en

Ge

Case study

The Solution

In March 2012, CBC enlisted the help of Radvision, an

Avaya Company. The infrastructure put in place includes

the Radvision Scopia® Gateway for Microsoft Lync, connecting

the H.323 video communication system to Lync 2010.

This allows any Lync user to connect any standards-based

videoconferencing system and any infrastructure appliance.

Also installed were the Scopia® Elite 5110 MCU and Scopia®

PathFinder. The latter ensures that participants from

HOW CBC, ONE OF GERMANY’S LARGEST

TV BROADCASTERS, MARRIED RADVISION

WITH MICROSOFT LYNC outside the company network have no

problem participating in conferences.

During the firewall installation,

CBC was able to call on the support

of Radvision partner ITXTRA. CBC’s

security requirements for firewall

installations were high, and

ITXTRA was able to assist with

the unique implementation.

When it came to setting up terminals

in the conference rooms, CBC

opted for the Scopia® XT5000 and

Scopia® XT1000 HD room-based

videoconferencing systems. CBC also

selected Scopia® iView as its video

management solution. iView provides

a single access point for managing all

videoconferencing devices including

Radvision and third-party endpoints,

infrastructure devices such as MCUs

and gateways, and call control

applications such as gatekeepers

and SIP agents.

Value Created

One major advantage of the Scopia

solution is that it is scalable and

vendor-agnostic. Thanks to the

comprehensive platform support

provided by the Scopia® Desktop

and Mobile applications, even

external users can join the meeting

via whatever tool works best for

them—using Microsoft Lync or

their computers, laptops,

smartphones, and tablets to

take part in videoconferences

from any location and over

virtually any network.

External participants simply click

on a link leading them directly

into the conference. The video

communications software is up and

running immediately. An intuitive

user interface and built-in intelligence

mean that conference participants

do not require any in-depth

technical knowledge.•

Products:

Scopia®

Gateway for

Microsoft Lync

Gateway,

Scopia® Elite

5110 MCU,

Scopia®

PathFinder

20 Ports,

Scopia®

XT1000,

Scopia®

XT5000,

Scopia®

Desktop,

Scopia® Mobile

The Benefits

Enables agents to proactively provide customer service in any channel

Smart routing of inquiries to right agents

Reduced costs and increased reliability


78 | Innovator’s Corner Innovator’s Corner | 79

These six visionary organizations

are leapfrogging competitors and

reaping major ROI from their unified

communications, contact centers,

and cloud deployments.

InnOvaTOR’s CORneR

2012 AVAYA CUSTOMER INNOVATION AWARD WINNERS

INN

OVA

TO

R’S

How 6 visionary organizations have deployed

unified communications, contact center,

and/or data networking solutions in

creative, ROI-producing ways.

Best Practices in Technology Innovation: Parkview Health (U.S.)

For its new 1-million-square-foot

Regional Medical Center, Parkview

deployed smart technologies that rely on an Avaya Aura®

communications platform to deliver outstanding patient care.

“The most critical business issue was to create a level of

communications among all our highly mobile caregivers that is

so quick and efficient, it basically eliminates the frustration and

downtime involved in trying to reach people and waiting for

things to happen,” explains Paul Jones, Director of Technology

Services for Parkview Health.

Besides connecting mobile devices, Parkview wanted to

integrate data from monitoring devices such as drug pumps,

heart monitors, and even smart hospital beds, providing

medical staff access to real-time biometrics.

CO

RN

ER

Jones chose Avaya because it supports his mobile vision, as

well as “a flexible and scalable open standards platform and

the industry’s most meaningful commitment to SIP, which we

believe is the leading technology going forward.”

In addition to mobile phones, Parkview has purchased

wired SIP phones from Avaya. The number of SIP endpoints

will eventually reach about 4,000.

Cost Savings, Flexibility, Scalability

The Avaya Aura communications platform supports Parkview’s

existing switches and other vendors’ PBXs with unified dial

plans and centralized voicemail.

“The Avaya Aura SIP connectivity gives us the flexibility to tie

different solutions together and do more than just ring and

tone,” Jones says. Implementing SIP also results in significant

cost savings and greater network flexibility.

Improving Collaboration, Accelerating Workflows

Parkview has about 900 employees with iPhones using

Avaya’s Mobile Activity Assistant app.

“Avaya’s Mobile Activity Assistant has solved our greatest

communications problem, which is the large number of

hops people typically had to make trying reach someone or

something that’s needed,” Jones says. “Now with Avaya’s

Mobile Activity Assistant, nurses and physicians connect

without excessive phone tag.

“When the nurses told us that they couldn’t imagine doing their

jobs without [Avaya’s Mobile Activity Assistant], we knew we

had been successful!”

Products: Avaya Aura Communication Manager, Avaya Aura Session Manager, Avaya Mobile Activity Assistant, Avaya Conferencing Standard Edition, Avaya Aura Messaging, Avaya 9608 IP Deskphones, 9601 IP Deskphones, 9621 IP Deskphones, 9641 IP Deskphones


Business Innovation Best Practice: Agoda Services Co., Ltd. (Thailand)

Ever find a great

Internet deal on a

beachside hotel in

Bali or five-star luxury

high-rise in Beijing? Chances are good

that you found it on Agoda.com. The

Bangkok-based online hotel reservations

provider employs 600 people.

Since 2011, Agoda has used Avaya Contact

Center solutions combined with the

Avaya Desktop Video Device and other unified communications

technologies to cost-effectively and efficiently connect all of its

global branch offices while scaling to accommodate triple-digit

business growth.

Agoda now handles tens of thousands of voice and email

customer contacts per day—over three times the volume of just

three years ago. Avaya’s contact center solutions now support

seven languages and will eventually accommodate 30 languages.

Additionally, Agoda, which is a division of Web travel giant

Priceline.com, doubled its number of agents in 2012—all resulting

in improved customer service and increased ROI.

Products: Avaya Aura Contact Center, Avaya Desktop Video Device

Enterprise Transformation (More Than 1,000 Employees): Deutsche Bank (Global)

Deutsche Bank is consolidating its global

telecommunications infrastructure

using Avaya’s IP telephony platform

to generate significant cost savings associated with frequent

calls between widely dispersed locations. For Deutsche Bank,

which reaps $43 billion a year in revenue, this is a way to extend

consistent voice communications services to all the bank’s

employees in their workspaces—on the main campus, at branch

offices, and at remote sites (including home offices)—as well as

integrate with mobile communications.

Started in 2009, the global program will eventually support

140,000 users across 3,100 buildings in 72 countries.

Consolidating the functions of hundreds of PBXs

(private branch exchanges) into five primary regional

servers will drive significant cost savings. Upgrading the

telephony infrastructure from legacy systems to Avaya IP and

SIP-based telephony enables Deutsche Bank to deploy a

single telephony solution globally to achieve synergies for

scale and standardization and consolidate the managed

services help desk under a single provider.

The upgrades also enable real-time collaboration applications

and features such as Avaya’s IP soft phone application

for mobility, click-to-dial, and one number service for

multiple devices—including desktop phones, softphones,

and smartphones.

Products: Avaya Aura

Enterprise Transformation (Fewer Than 1,000 Employees): Minnesota Wild (U.S.)

When the Minnesota Wild’s home arena,

the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, was

selected to host the 2011 NHL player

draft, the pressure was on to deliver a

flawless solution in less than 30 days.

“There are people who are going to rely

on this technology to execute on a deal

that could be worth millions of dollars,”

says Jim Ibister, Vice President for facility

administration for the Minnesota Wild ice

hockey team and General Manager for

the St. Paul RiverCentre.

Working closely with an Avaya Connect® Platinum Partner

based in Minnesota, Avaya delivered a communication systems

that was secure and reliable—to avoid letting any team waste

precious seconds during the draft.

“We ran with that [Avaya], and we couldn’t be more pleased,”

he says.

With that success under their belt, the Wild turned to Avaya to

upgrade their contact center, including the addition of Avaya’s

social media solutions tailored for its younger fans. This has

allowed the Wild to increase service to their fan base and


Small Business Excellence: FitFlop Ltd. (U.K.)

Avaya IP Office has helped to enable U.K.-

based shoe company FitFlop Ltd. to grow from

its early days as a startup business with six

employees in 2007 to a $140-million business

with 200 employees operating across three continents, selling

products in 52 regions.

FitFlop chose Avaya IP Office in 2009. FitFlop’s seven locations

have interlinked IP Office systems, allowing traveling executives

to use Avaya “one number” capabilities, with a single voicemail

account, to be in easy reach.

Using the presence capabilities of IP Office, a centralized

FitFlop receptionist taking calls can see, at a glance, the

location and presence status of executives who may be in the

building, at home, or at another site. Links between locations

allow calls from mobile workers to be routed across FitFlop’s

network, eliminating the roaming and toll charges FitFlop

would otherwise incur.

With the Avaya platform, FitFlop was able to turn on an

IP-based contact center that tracks and improves the quality

of customer call responses. The result? High-quality customer

service, a 15 percent reduction in long distance charges,

a more flexible workforce, zero wasted redundant IT

investment, lower roaming charges for mobile phones,

and reliable business continuity.

Products: Avaya IP Office, Power User Solution and Receptionist Solution, Avaya IP Office Customer Call Center (CCR) Reporter

The winners were announced at the IAUG (International Avaya Users Group) Global Conference in May 2012. Learn more about IAUG and its upcoming CONVERGE 2013 conference at www.iaug.org.

“By consolidating its trunk lines and standardizing on Avaya Experience Portal, Comcast has reduced its network costs by 40 percent while leaving the customer and agent experience unchanged.”

boost productivity for their sales department by using unified

communications capabilities such as click-to-chat and email

to better communicate with both Gen X and Y customers.

Meanwhile, Avaya mobility solutions help staff stay connected

on the move—more efficiently and cost-effectively—from

personnel moving around the arena to talent scouts

videoconferencing from scouting locations.

Products: Avaya Aura Solution for Midsize Enterprise, including Session Manager, Communication Manager, Presence, Social Media Manager, ACE Integration with Microsoft CRM, Avaya Aura Contact Center, Avaya 9611 and B179 IP phones, one-X® Communicator, more

Sustained Excellence: Comcast, Inc. (U.S.)

As a leading cable television and

telecommunications provider, Comcast’s

contact center agents are key front-

line customer service personnel. Following a company

restructuring, Comcast needed to update and re-align its

customer service operations to provide a more consistent

customer experience, increase efficiency, and reduce costs,

while carefully managing the training requirements a major

technology revamp could require. Using an incremental

approach, the first step consolidated trunks in two data centers

and standardized on Avaya Experience Portal.

This first phase alone allowed Comcast to reduce network

costs by 40 percent and provided a consistent front end to all

customer calls while leaving the agent experience unchanged.

Benefits continue to accrue while Comcast plans an orderly

transition of the total contact center platform to Avaya

Aura Contact Center Elite in the second phase, thus uniting

previously separate geographies onto a common

Avaya platform.

Products: Avaya Communications Manager, Aura Contact Center Elite, Experience Portal, more


86 | Mobile and Web Mobile and Web | 87

“The growth of the mobile workforce

has led to the need for workers to

communicate regardless of their

location or device.”

— Blair Pleasant, Analyst, COMMfusion

Turn to page 88.

Mobile and Web

Employees are flooding offices with smartphones and tablets. How to deal—and take advantage.

So in a post-PC era, how should your business play the game? Not by

employing a defensive mindset, i.e., fixating on ways to minimize spending.

Rather, think about how you can transform your organization with the latent

capabilities of these pocket rockets in order to reap the greatest ROI. That’s

how you play to WIN.

Take Deventer Hospital of the Netherlands. When it centralized various locations

into a brand-new hospital in 2008, Deventer also deployed a robust, scalable

network based around Avaya virtual networking gear. That not only securely

accommodated the sudden influx of iPad-toting visitors and medical staffers,

but also leveraged the iPad in two ways. First, doctors and nurses can now

be quickly reached on their mobile devices anywhere in the building. Second,

doctors and nurses can use an app on their iPads to pull up patient medical

records that aid in explaining symptoms and other health issues to patients.

Both of these help boost the quality of care in huge ways.

“Two years ago, a setup like this wouldn’t have even entered my mind,” says

Ko Takema, head of ICT at Deventer Hospital.

According to the Radicati Group, mobility is the “primary driver for innovation

and adoption in the UC market.” Powerful smartphones are “driving corporate

demand for UC solutions to support an increasingly mobile workforce,” while

features such as voicemail-to-text, fixed-mobile convergence, and mobile

presence have become “popular and reliable features” for end users.

COMMfusion analyst Blair Pleasant agrees. “The growth of the mobile workforce

has led to the need for workers to communicate regardless of their location

or device,” she says. In part due to growth in UC on tablets, Pleasant predicts

that the global market for premises-based UC-capable gear will grow from

$12.23 billion in 2011 to $20.76 billion in 2016—an impressive compound annual

growth rate (CAGR) of 17 percent.

No wonder that 57 percent of firms not using UC today are planning or

considering a mobile UC deployment, according to a 2012 Frost & Sullivan

report, while 82 percent of firms using unified communications today plan to

keep or boost their usage of mobile UC apps.

Opportunities for Transformation

An even more impressive example than Deventer Hospital is the Essa Academy,

an urban secondary school in the U.K. whose tech-centric classrooms have

returned impressive gains in student achievements and are being hailed as “one

of the biggest revolutions in learning the state education system has seen in

decades,” according to The Independent newspaper. >>

By Gary E. Barnett, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Collaboration Platforms, Avaya

BRING YOUR OWN UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS

Let’s get this out of the way: “Bring your own device” won’t save your company money. Sure, BYOD lets your IT department avoid the upfront costs and hassle of arming your employees with smartphones and tablets (that based on past track record, they probably wouldn’t have liked, anyway). But there’s still management and security software to deploy, Wi-Fi networks to upgrade, and potentially new mobile-savvy IT staffers to hire. None of that is cheap. According to Aberdeen Group, it could cost your company an extra $170 per device PER YEAR to go BYOD compared to an internal rollout.

But get over your sticker shock quickly, because you’re not going to stop the mobile invasion of the enterprise. Not when Windows, which as recently as 2005 held 96 percent of the global computing device market, now holds just one-third. iPhones, iPads, and Android devices like Samsung Galaxy S3s

together hold nearly half, according to super-analyst Mary Meeker.

Mark

et

Sh

are

of

Pe

rso

nal

Co

mp

uti

ng

Pla

tfo

rms

by O

pe

rati

ng

Syst

em

s (%

)

1975 1977 1979 1981 1983 1985 1987 1988 1991 1993 19951997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011

60%

70%

80%

90%

100%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Re-Imagination of Computing Operating Systems–iOS + Android = 45 % Share vs. 35% for Windows

Source: Asymco.com, Morgan Stanley, Gartner, corporate filings.

Global Market Share of Personal Computing Platforms by Operating System Shipments, 1975–2012E

1983Wintel – 25%

Other

Atari

AmigaCommodore

Apple (MAC OS + iOS)

Android

WinTel

TRS-80

1998–2005Wintel – 96%

2012EWintel – 35%

Global Market Share of Personal Computing Platforms by Operating System Shipments, 1975–2012

Re-Imagination of Computing Operating Systems: iOS + Android = 45% Share vs. 35% for Windows

Source: Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers.


Besides transforming its classrooms, Essa wanted to transform how its staff

communicated. Having already invested in 1,500 iPads and iPod devices for

students and teachers as well as an upgraded Wi-Fi network, Essa leaders saw

that they could upgrade to a powerful new unified communications platform

and save money.

Using Avaya Aura® as the foundation, and the Avaya one-X® Communicator and

one-X Mobile SIP for iOS apps to deliver voice over Wi-Fi to faculty devices,

Essa was able to slash its telephony costs and improve collaboration, says Essa

Director Abdul Chohan. He credits integrator Pennine Telecom for its success.

“Every staff member has their own number and can be contacted on the same

device so the need for landlines disappears,” he reports. “The beauty of it—

and when we say this people are in awe—is that staff can be contacted by a

parent directly on their iPad … It also means that we have some phenomenally

productive conversations happening. Teachers can ring each other at no cost

throughout the day.”

In addition to these softphones, Essa is rolling out Avaya’s Flare® Communicator

to all students and teachers so that they have easy “swipe-of-the-finger” access

to essential communications tools, including videoconferencing, IM, presence,

managed social media, email, and more via their mobile devices.

That’s key. High-definition mobile video may indeed prove to be the killer

app of mobile UC. See the great discussions by my colleagues writing in the

“Video” section of this book. But voice, IM, social media, and other channels

also see their value skyrocket when extended to “anytime, anywhere” devices.

So if you’re an enterprise going mobile, make sure you invest in all of your

collaboration channels. The benefits you’ll reap will astound you.•

Gary E. Barnett is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Collaboration Platforms for Avaya. He has been a CEO or CTO for over 20 years with communications companies such as Prospect Software and Aspect Communications.

Essa Academy has transformed how students and teachers collaborate using mobile Apple devices and Voice over IP apps from Avaya.

Web Server

WebRTC/HTML5Application

Browser(Running HTML5 from Web Server)

Browser(Running HTML5 from Web Server)

Control

Media

ControlWebRTCWebRTC

For a game-changing platform, WebRTC’s advantages can feel subtle.

Starting this year, WebRTC—the RTC stands for real-time communications—

builds interactive high-fidelity voice, video, and data interchange into

standard compliant Web browsers. It does this by handling all of the

grunt work necessary to enable the fast and easy creation of real-time

communications-enabled apps. >>

Real-time communications through a Web browser could disrupt telecom markets soon. But it also offers plenty of promise for innovators.

The

FUTURE is WebRTC

By (left to right) John Yoakum, Consulting Engineer;

Harvey Waxman, Vice President, Architecture; and Alan Johnston, Distinguished Engineer,

External Standards, (All Avaya)

Mobile and Web | 9190 | Mobile and Web

For instance, WebRTC makes it easy for developers

to manage, blend, and use multiple multimedia

channels, including microphone audio, camera

video, screen grabs from your app or media player,

etc. WebRTC also ensures that the audio and video

quality remains good by adapting to network

conditions. In addition, users running WebRTC can

“talk” to each other without the media going through a hosted or cloud server

first, as the media can flow directly between browsers.

While many of these things are accomplished today via current VoIP

technologies, it takes more development effort and very specific expertise. If

you are a developer building for four different Web browsers on three different

operating systems, that’s like creating 12 different applications. Not with

WebRTC, which lets you write once and run everywhere with a common, yet

application-specific user experience. As an end user, no downloads of third-

party plug-ins such as Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, or Microsoft Silverlight

are needed. In addition, all media flows and data are encrypted end-to-end.

Possibilities Are Endless

“So what?” you, the end user, might say. I already have Web-based video

sharing, online games, and video and audio conferencing applications. True.

But to create those applications needed millions of developer-hours. WebRTC,

in conjunction with HTML5, makes it MUCH easier and faster to create

communications-enabled apps. How much easier?

“When you think about that, [with] just a few JavaScript APIs and as little as 15

lines of JavaScript code in an HTML page, you can create a simple one-to-one

videoconferencing solution,” Hugh Finnan, a director of product management

for Google, said at the inaugural WebRTC Conference in November 2012. “This

has the potential to be as important to the Web as HTML was in the beginning.”

Any webpage can easily be enhanced to include interactive media, while mobile

developers can use WebRTC for apps if that is desired. Just as app stores enabled

millions of developers to create and market their own apps, the supremely

democratic WebRTC is expected to unleash the creativity of millions of Web

developers embracing real-time multimedia interactions for the first time.

The possibilities are endless. One can envision an application that lets musicians

play together in real-time via their browsers in high fidelity. Or an enterprise

could extend an existing Web-based document repository to allow for direct

voice or video interactions between users. That’s because WebRTC both

enables new ways to create rich, yet simple ways to drive user interactions AND

new ways to extend the functionality of existing systems. For example, WebRTC

makes it incredibly easy for businesses to add one-click access for voice, video,

chat, and more to their websites.

The Challenges

There are several things that could slow down WebRTC’s progress. As of this

writing, the major browser makers had not yet settled on a standard video

codec. As an emerging standard, WebRTC is obviously very young. A lot can

happen. It could fragment into several not-always-interoperable flavors, as some

VoIP technologies have done. Enterprises may find it hard to let fully encrypted

WebRTC media cross the edge of their networks until new technologies assure

such flows pose little threat. In addition, regulatory requirements—especially

in business—may provide challenges to adoption. One of the most interesting

characteristics of WebRTC is that communications industry players, including

carriers, will likely have far less control over its use and adoption than they

historically have enjoyed.

Today, many enterprises are actively engaged in deploying SIP-based solutions.

This infrastructure is not going to go away anytime soon, and in fact is likely to

grow. It is why the standards bodies that developed WebRTC have taken great

care to enable several models of interaction between WebRTC applications

and SIP environments. While many WebRTC applications will not require any

SIP infrastructure, when interactions are needed between WebRTC users

and enterprise SIP users, it’s good to know that these two worlds have been

designed to co-exist.

Avaya has already welcomed WebRTC as an opportunity. Avaya has key

members of the standards bodies creating the WebRTC standard. We also have

a number of R&D staff working on numerous projects and additional prototypes

under development in our Avaya Labs. All the opportunities that are suddenly

available to Web developers are readily available to Avaya. We are well-

positioned to create innovative uses of WebRTC while also interworking it

with SIP systems to help solve enterprise-specific WebRTC concerns.•

John Yoakum is a Consulting Engineer and champion of emerging innovation and disruptive technologies at Avaya. He has distinguished himself as an innovator and visionary with numerous patents, publications, presentations, and standards contributions over the course of his professional career at Motorola, Nortel, and Avaya.

Harvey Waxman is Vice President of Architecture at Avaya and Chair of the Senior Architecture Council that facilitates cross-product alignment and drives the architecturally aligned roadmap for Avaya. Harvey started his career with Bell Laboratories and has over 25 years of experience.

Alan Johnston is a Distinguished Engineer at Avaya and a contributing author of more than a dozen Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard specifications, including the SIP specification. Besides serving as an adjunct instructor at Washington University in St Louis, Alan has authored several best-selling technical books, including WebRTC: APIs and RTCWEB Protocols of the HTML5 Real-Time Web.

WebRTC makes it incredibly easy for businesses to add one-click access for voice, video, chat, and more to their websites.


Delaware-based Matthews Pierce & Lloyd offers a full

range of commercial debt recovery services, as well as

comprehensive accounts receivable management. Its

clients include many Fortune 500 companies.

Communications is the cornerstone of its work. “At

least 90 percent of our business is conducted over the

phone. The other 10 percent is over the Internet,” says

account executive Michael Strong. “The majority of

what we do in representing our clients is helping them

resolve disputed matters and collecting on invoices

that fall beyond terms and are past due. In these

negotiations, the greatest risk factor is time.”

Approximately four years ago, the firm

recognized that its Panasonic phone

system, purchased in 2001 and state-

of-the-art at the time, was no longer

the right solution to take them into

the future. It was very difficult and

costly to obtain service or parts to

allow for scalability on the old system.

Streamlined Communications and Collaboration

The sophisticated features of Avaya

IP Office have made it possible for

Matthews Pierce & Lloyd to streamline

and accelerate communications with

their clients and the subjects of their

collections efforts—and according

to Strong, this has given them a

competitive edge to deliver results

quickly and efficiently.

Mobility features enable one-

number access to both office and

cell phones, so that conversations

can take place no matter where an

employee is located. The presence

function enables an employee to

locate colleagues who can contribute

to a resolution, and through built-in

conferencing, several parties can be

drawn together in a discussion in a

cost-effective manner.

Strong explains, “Taken altogether, the

mobility, presence, and conferencing

features of IP Office are a real game

changer. Now what we’re able to

do is put into one phone call what

otherwise would have taken two,

three, or more calls—avoiding phone

tag and waiting to get information.”

The mobility feature is also valuable

for “anywhere, anytime” access by

clients. “We’re very excited about

having the capability to have our

office calls delivered to the cell

phone, so that we can be available

to clients at all times,” Strong says.

“Just the other day I was taking a cab

in Chicago and was able to take an

important business call right there.”

Other features have been extremely

valuable for the firm. Associates have

the ability to track and monitor calls,

and to save recorded calls within

emails on their computers. They also

utilize Whispering, which enables

management to not only monitor

and listen in on a phone call, but also

to coach a representative privately

during a call.

Cost Savings

The firm has realized significant

cost savings since deploying Avaya

IP Office. It has reduced its phone

bill from $4,000 per month to just

$300—a greater than 90 percent

reduction. Savings were achieved by

consolidating calls through a single

service provider, leveraging Avaya IP

Office’s Automatic Route Selection

capability to virtually eliminate long

distance charges. In addition, the

Avaya channel partner facilitated

SIP trunks on a pay-as-you-go basis

for the conference bridge, allowing

Matthews Pierce & Lloyd to save on >>

Case study

ADDING FEATURES, SUBTRACTING COSTSAVAYA IP OFFICE MOBILIZED THIS

FINANCIAL FIRM WHILE SLASHING

ITS PHONE BILL BY 90 PERCENT

“taken altogether, the mobility,

presence, and conferencing

features of IP Office are a real

game changer. Now what we’re

able to do is put into one phone

call what otherwise would have

taken two, three, or more calls—

avoiding phone tag and waiting

to get information.” — Michael Strong, Account Executive,

Matthews Pierce & Lloyd


the Benefits

Over $44,000 per year reduction in online and long distance costs

Approximately $100,000 saved annually through staff redeployment

Scalability and extendability make it possible for the company to have remote agents for global expansion and round-the-clock service

monthly expenses. The firm can now have large conferences

of 20-plus members without tying up their main lines.

Previously, the firm had a primary receptionist and a backup

receptionist at each of its three locations. Now, incoming

phone lines for all three locations are handled by one

receptionist at one location using Softphone, viewing and

managing calls on a computer monitor. Redeployment of staff

accounted for approximately $100,000 savings annually.

Business Growth

Strong anticipates that Matthews Pierce & Lloyd will soon

explore the advantages of having salespeople in remote

locations who can provide a sales function around the clock

and around the globe.

Strong concludes that he and his colleagues strongly

recommend IP Office because “it is very cost-efficient and

certainly worth every dollar that you invest. It is user-friendly

and cutting-edge—supplying everything that you could want

and hope for and then some.”•

Products: Avaya

IP Office 7.0,

Power User, IP

Office Preferred

Edition, Avaya

one-X® Portal

for IP Office

Case study

ON THE ROAD, ALWAYS IN TOUCH

Today’s forward-looking accounting firms have people working as much out of the office as in. They’re often with clients or between locations. These next-generation businesses—and their clients’ expectations—don’t slow down.

So says Darren Root, executive editor of CPA Practice Advisor magazine and CEO of RootWorks, LLC, an Indianapolis-based consulting firm he co-founded that tracks these emerging next-generation accounting firms. >>

THE BENEFITS OF AVAYA IP OFFICE

ADD UP FOR ACCOUNTING CONSULTING

FIRM ROOTWORkS

Mobile and Web | 9796 | Mobile and Web

“RootWorks is a national company, with facilities in

Colorado, Oklahoma, Michigan, and Indiana,” says Root.

“We travel over 100,000 miles a year giving presentations

to accounting firms nationwide. We’re a virtual company, so

we need to have virtual connectivity.”

In order to realize his vision, Root needed to make some

changes. The legacy Toshiba PBX system, originally

installed back in the ‘90s, was not designed to fulfill that

requirement. Though a step in the right direction, a hosted

VoIP telephony solution the company later installed didn’t

meet Root’s expectations.

“We experienced continual call quality issues,” he says.

“Each time they would change a router in Indianapolis, I

would sound like a chipmunk. You might imagine that when

I’m delivering webcasts and podcasts as executive editor of

CPA Practice Advisor magazine, that chipmunk status is not

what I’m after and that call quality is vital.”

A More Flexible, Powerful Alternative

This initial adventure into IP-based communications

helped Root realize exactly what he was looking for. He

explains, “We needed the benefits of the new technology

with the stability of the legacy phone system. So we went

on a hunt for what that solution might be and that, in turn,

led us to Avaya.”

Avaya IP Office gives employees the ability to handle

their business communications right on the device of their

choice: laptop, smartphone, tablet, home or office phone—

be it wired or wirelessly connected to the Internet. Its smart

directory services application helps the staff answer and

route calls to the appropriate business seamlessly, without

missing a beat.

The migration from the previous system to IP Office was

“very smooth,” according to Root. “With our previous VoIP

system, it took us about three months to get all the bugs

worked out and feel comfortable. There was a long break-in

period,” he recalls. “In our move to Avaya IP Office we were

functional and actually proficient with our system after

about two days.”

Bridging the Gap Between Geographically Dispersed Teams

Location becomes increasingly irrelevant thanks to Avaya IP

Office. Calls reach people wherever they choose to receive

The Benefits

Traveling workers are never out of touch

Communication costs reduced up to 50 percent

Designed to support social media

Employees are more efficient, productive, and satisfied

Products:

Avaya IP Office

Preferred

Edition, with

Power User and

Receptionist

Solutions, Avaya

one-X® Portal,

Avaya 9600

Series

Deskphones

them: office, home, or cell. Regardless

of the device used, voice messages will

find team members in the same way,

as will emails and instant messages.

Providing that level of mobility support

to employees is important.

Root observes, “With Avaya IP Office, it

doesn’t matter whether the members of

a team are next door, down the hall, or

across the country from one another.

To a caller, what truly matters is their

availability. It’s all about presence.”

Auditing the Auditor: Bankable Benefits

Root, a CPA himself, is quick

to acknowledge the value of

communications technology in his

profession. “I think communications is key

to an efficient and effective organization,

so I look at technology as an investment.

There is an investment required upfront

that will pay you back in sharper

communications skills, higher user

satisfaction, and increased productivity.”

Root’s initial operational cost estimates

suggested savings of up to 50 percent

over those of the legacy Toshiba system,

and he explains that the most significant benefits are in other important areas.

“There are efficiency improvements and a significant increase in user satisfaction,

but more than anything, we’ve reached a much higher level of communications

capabilities—and that, ultimately, is what our customers see.”

The goal of achieving high-level communications is at the very core of the

RootWorks message in support of its model of the next-generation accounting

firm—a firm to which Avaya IP Office has already proven its worth.•

“We travel over 100,000 miles

a year … we’re a virtual

company, so we need to have

virtual connectivity.” — Darren Root, CPA.CITP, CEO, RootWorks


100 | Customer Experience Customer Experience | 101

Contact center agents for Palm Coast

Data now Web chat with customers

and perform scheduled callbacks to

customers when they are free. That’s

doubled their productivity and also

boosted customer satisfaction.

Turn to page 112 to learn more.

CusTomEr ExPEriEnCE

For contact centers, it’s a good bet that advanced

analytics, social media, mobile devices, and

speech recognition will all be part of the future.

Time to get ready for next-generation Customer

Experience Management.

A SOLID

FOUNDATION FOR TOMORROW’S

CUSTOMER

Customer Experience | 103102 | Customer Experience

By Chris McGugan, Vice President and General Manager for Emerging Products & Technology, Avaya

“Take the contact center to the next level.” That was the mandate

the Southern Maryland Electrical Cooperative (SMECO) IT

department received from top executives. Fortunately, the

organization discovered that preparing for the future of customer

experience management was as easy as adding applications to

the platform it had been using for years.

Advances in various technologies, most notably data collection and analysis,

are bringing change to contact centers. Increasingly, data is helping all kinds of

companies provide personalized experiences. We’re greeted by name and met

with suggestions for products and services we might like at the ATM, at websites

and retail stores, and via mobile services.

Customer service promises to deliver the same level of customization,

providing fast, effective experiences with a combination of new technologies. >>

Getting Insight From AnalyticsDo you know why your customers

call? Or the main thing that frustrates

them? What’s your 20 percent

problem that drives 80 percent of

your contact center volume? You

probably already collect the data you

need to find out. But it’s hard to use

that data without an analytics engine.

How It Works

Analytics put data to work, helping you

understand and improve the customer

experience and run your contact center

more efficiently. Advanced analytics

tools can gather and integrate raw data

from multiple sources (such as CRM and

call tracking systems), find patterns, and

turn it into easy-to-understand reports.

More important, analytics now power a

range of exciting applications.

• Workforce management software

can route and record calls,

automatically assign call reasons,

manage staffing levels based on

volume, monitor agent on-screen

activity, and report on agents’

adherence to standards and

overall performance.

• Knowledge management

systems proactively provide

recommendations and

troubleshooting content to

agents while they’re engaged

with customers.

• Cross-sell marketing programs

personalize offers based on

individual customers’ accounts and

order history, helping agents

present appropriate solutions that

customers are more likely to buy.

• Training systems track agent

performance and adjust training

plans accordingly, helping

managers coach the right agents on

the right topics—boosting morale

and efficiency.

At SMECO, workforce management

software uses historical data to plan

staff levels, even scheduling for peak

traffic times, such as when storms

disrupt electrical service. Managers

have re-allocated the time they used

to spend on scheduling to training,

coaching, and mentoring activities.

SMECO also wanted to deliver a more

consistent customer experience.

Again, workforce optimization

capabilities now monitor agents’

on-screen activity, record calls, and

report on performance. The system

also reports on the agents’ adherence

to standards to measure and ensure

a consistent customer experience.

The results speak for themselves.

Over the past two years, the center

has increased its original goal of

85 percent standards adherence

to 93 percent, and is consistently

performing in the 94 percent range.

In order to improve the customer

experience, you must first understand

it. Advanced analytics is a proven

way to gain this understanding, for

the contact center and other groups

within the company.

Growing Popularity

According to a Frost & Sullivan

forecast from November 2012,

analytics is the fastest growing

segment in the EMEA contact center

market, growing by 26 percent in

2011. That means your competitors

are getting savvy—and possibly

leapfrogging you. If you’re not already

using analytics, now’s the time to

start. Contact centers without a solid

analytics engine at the core of their

platform simply won’t be able to

compete. The advantages are that big.

Joining the Discussion on Social MediaThe explosive popularity of social

media is nothing short of a cultural

phenomenon. Customers are

connecting with each other on

Facebook to talk about your products

and services. Or they’re tweeting their

opinions to the world. They can hijack

your own social marketing efforts with

their loud, angry complaints.

Companies must proactively engage

with customers through social media,

or risk bad publicity.

According to Frost & Sullivan, early-

adopter enterprises are engaging in

social networking for customer service

in three primary areas:

• Establishing online communities

or forums that foster sharing

between customers.

• Using “listening platforms,” or

applications that monitor Internet

activity and act as an early warning

system about customer service

issues that are being discussed on

social sites.

• Building contact center application

support for handling inbound and

outbound customer contacts that

come through social media, such as

Twitter messages.

Some companies are also engaging

with customers and prospects directly

via social media. For example, New

Zealand’s ASB Bank launched a virtual

branch on Facebook in 2010. During

business hours, agents will answer

questions from anyone who asks via

chat—ASB customers or not. The

experiment is delivering enough

value to the bank that it’s still open

for business more than two years

after launch.

Growing Popularity

According to a late 2011 Nielsen report,

“social networks and blogs continue to

dominate Americans’ time online, now

accounting for nearly a quarter of the

total time spent on the Internet.” Social

media (22.5 percent) dwarfs all other

categories, including games (9.8 percent)

and personal email (7.6 percent). And it’s

not just the U.S. The report found similar

results across 10 major global >>

Contact centers without

a solid analytics engine at

the core of their platform

simply won’t be able to

compete. The advantages

are that big.


one for the right purpose. The next

challenge is keeping track of all the

various experiences once you do

have them, proactively managing and

measuring all interactions across all

media and modes, including “warm

hand-offs” when customers must

switch from one agent to another.

Cross-channel integration and Web

collaboration tools allow service

organizations to not only interact

with customers in a number of ways,

but also support clients via multiple

channels simultaneously. For example,

an agent might talk to a customer on

the phone while also running online

diagnostic tools on the customer’s

device or remotely directing the

customer’s browser. Or an agent

might talk someone through filling out

an online form while both parties can

see the same screen.

Measuring multiple channels also

requires a cross-channel first contact

resolution metric. For example, let’s

say a bank notices spikes in calls

from customers trying to set up

online bill pay, with a correspondingly

low volume of customers using the

self-serve Web channel for the same

purpose. Looking at the two channels

in isolation may lead the organization

to more aggressively direct customers

online to complete the task. A cross-

channel metric could reveal that the

majority of customers calling in have

already tried to sign up online, and

failed. Upon investigation, the bank

finds that its website form is broken.

Understanding customers’ end-to-end

experience in this case would prevent

customer frustration and possible

churn, and allow the bank to discover

and fix the root cause of the problem.

Growing Popularity

In a 2010 Webtorials survey, contact

center professionals reported that

they expected non-voice interactions

(Web self-service, chat, and social

media) to increase. Frost & Sullivan

sees that telephony self-service

application platforms (primarily

IVR and voice portals) are steadily

being replaced by unified

multimedia platforms.

Additionally, Frost & Sullivan

reported in 2012 that consumers are

increasingly using mobile devices

(notebooks and smartphones) to

access Web self-service channels. The

market research firm also projected

strong growth for chat in customer

service, as well as integrating chat

with social media, mobile, and video.

The best approach to adding new

channels is to first transition your

contact center to a scalable platform

built for flexibility. Then, add one new

technology at a time, incorporating

what you learn along the way and

applying it to each new channel.

Recognizing the Voice of the CustomerSpeech analytics can help categorize

and route incoming customer

contacts, as well as gauge levels

of frustration based on certain

cues. Speech analytics technology

measures both customer interactions

and agent performance. It fills in the

gaps in standard business intelligence

systems by measuring the information

exchanged through spoken

interactions—data that hasn’t been

measurable before. >>

markets: “Social networks and blogs

are the top online destination in each

country … reaching at least 60 percent

of active Internet users.”

If that isn’t enough to convince you,

consider NM Incite’s 2012 “State of

Social Media” survey, which found that

consumer-created reviews and ratings

have become the preferred source for

information about product and service

value, price, and quality.

More of your customers are using

social media all the time, and

they’re talking about you. Join

the conversation.

Connecting on Video, Chat, and Mobile (or All Three at Once)Generation X and Y consumers have

grown up with technology, and are

comfortable using chat, SMS, video

calling, and video chat from their

desktops, phones, and mobiles.

They want to be met wherever they

happen to be.

That creates exciting new

communication options that can

improve the customer experience and

make it easier for agents to do their

work. Having multiple channels in and

of itself is not effective as a strategy,

however. When not backed up by

streamlined processes and careful

attention to channel integration, it

may end up frustrating customers.

How It Works

Next-generation unified multimedia

platforms are now available to help

run all customer contacts through a

central system: inbound and outbound

voice, text, and video, incorporating

phone, SMS, email, Web, text chat,

video chat, and social media.

The first challenge multiple channels

present is incorporating them into

a single customer service strategy

and ensuring that you’re using each

More of your customers are

using social media all the time,

and they’re talking about you.

Join the conversation.

Source: callcentres.net, 2011.


Originally sold as an add-on to quality

monitoring (QM) systems, speech recognition

has become a category all of its own. The

technology has historically been too complex

and expensive for smaller businesses, but that’s

changing fast. Frost & Sullivan predicts that

QM systems will increasingly include speech

analytics engines.

How It Works

A phonetic audio search engine scans and

analyzes spoken interactions—live and

recorded—searching for key words and

phrases, as well as the context in which

they’re spoken. It “listens” for things that

agents might not catch, such as customer

sentiment. Other speech recognition

technologies can examine written

interactions, including emails, SMS, and

chats searching for the same key words,

phrases, and context.

Speech analytics is used primarily for two

things: deciphering customer intentions

and behavior patterns and analyzing agent

performance. On the customer side, it can

provide a more complete picture of the

end-to-end experience, factoring in

multiple communication channels.

On the agent side, it helps gauge

operational efficiency and identify

those that need additional training.

For example, customers might be

calling because the company website

isn’t recognizing a discount code

they received as part of a marketing

campaign. With speech analytics,

the context of the call comes into

play, identifying “discount code”

and “website” and “broken” on a

large percentage of incoming calls.

Management gets better, faster insight

into the problem, and the company

can fix the issue that’s impacting

the call center. Additionally, speech

analytics can identify customers that

are frustrated and why, helping agents

proactively manage calls. In this way,

speech analytics can identify patterns

that help improve individual agent

performance, company processes,

and ultimately, customer experiences

and satisfaction.

Growing Popularity

A 2010 Frost & Sullivan survey found

that 20 percent of contact centers

were already using speech analytics,

and another 27 percent intended to

purchase. In 2012, the market research

firm predicted that speech would

become “the dominant user interface

for IVR [interactive voice response],

voice portal, and unified multimedia

portals for all market segments.”

Enterprising organizations can take

their customer experiences to a whole

new level, thanks to advances in big

data analytics, speech recognition,

consumer gadgets, social media,

and video and chat technology.

Customer service is becoming more

personalized and better able to

identify and solve problems fast and

efficiently. Organizations must plan

for coming changes and embrace

the future if they want to offer a

consistent and satisfying customer

experience—and stay competitive.•

Chris McGugan is Vice President and General Manager at Avaya for Emerging Products & Technologies, including Contact Centers. He has also held executive and managerial positions at Belkin, Symbol Technologies, and Cisco Systems.

of customers trust online customer forums more than

an organization’s website.

51%

of customers continuallychange how they contact an organization, depending on

where they are and what they are doing. This will grow as mobile usage grows.

60%

43%of customers prefer to dealwith organizations over theInternet, calling only when

they need support or advice.This means they are callingabout more complex and

emotive issues.

Source: Avaya and BT Research, 2011.

Consumers Use a Wide Range of Channels to Interact With Businesses

Source: Hipcricket Research, 2011.

50%

57%

80%


SafeAuto Insurance Company

is known for its humorous ads

and innovative promotions, but

when it comes to customer

service, there’s no joking

around. The company is

intensely customer-focused

and committed to delivering

a high level of service and

operational efficiencies. With

no outside agents selling or

servicing SafeAuto Insurance,

the company relies on its

multi-location contact

center for sales, claims, and

customer service.

By upgrading its Avaya Aura® Contact

Center suite, SafeAuto garnered

these results:

• Agent occupancy (utilization)

increased by 14 percent.

• Maximum caller wait time

reduced by 48 percent.

• Shorter calls, handled

more efficiently.

• Cost savings of 10–15 percent.

Acquiring new customers is

considerably more expensive than

keeping those you already have. And

satisfied customers are the ones that

stick around. According to a 2011

survey by callcentres.net, 83 percent

of respondents said they would buy

more from a company that made it

easier to do business. But customer

experience requirements are changing

rapidly these days, with social media,

analytics, and new devices and

technologies reshaping the landscape.

I’ve gathered stories from companies

that consistently receive high rankings

for the customer experience they

provide, and identified eight

best practices.

1. Build relationships.

Best-in-class companies know that it’s

not just about solving problems—it’s

about building a lasting relationship

with your customers.

At its retail stores, Apple is in the

business of making friends. Employees

actually will try to “down-sell” you on

the thing you came to buy in an effort

to get you the lower-priced, least-

complicated product that will do what

you need. Truly, we all like getting what

we want for less than we expected

to pay. Apple’s approach reportedly

results in fewer product returns, higher

sales rates on add-on services, less

frequent support issues, and extremely

low employee attrition.

Contact centers can emulate this

approach by using analytics-based

cross-sell marketing programs. These

involve using historic and real-time data

to proactively suggest to agents the

products and services that individual

customers might be interested in.

Complete the loop by rewarding agents

for selling the best-fitting solutions,

rather than the most expensive.

2. Integrate your support channels.

New consumer technologies make

delivering consistent customer support

even more important. As you add SMS,

text chat, video chat, and mobile

platform channels to your quiver,

it’s important to keep tabs on >>

8 BEST PRACTICES FOR CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMENT TODAY

Customer service is all

about answering questions

right the first time. What

sounds simple isn’t always

easy—and may require

rethinking your customer

experience strategy

and adopting valuable

new technologies.

By Laura Bassett, Director of Marketing, Avaya


spent in a classroom environment

designed to work for all learning styles,

and 35 percent is spent taking calls in

the call center with dedicated coaches.

Throughout their time with first direct,

employees receive tailored coaching

to help motivate them and develop

them as individuals. All staff must

regularly revisit training and are held

accountable for their own personal

service standards.

5. Empower and engage employees.

Create a culture where employees feel

comfortable initiating conversations

and listening to customers instead

of just answering questions as fast

as possible. It drives agent attrition

down—and customer satisfaction up.

Shoe retailer Zappos.com is a great

example. Its mission statement

declares that “Customer Service isn’t

just a Department! ... We’ve aligned

the entire organization around one

mission: to provide the best customer

service possible. Internally, we call this

our WOW philosophy.” The call center

is at company headquarters, and all

employees start their tenure at the

company with four weeks of training

as a customer service rep. Call center

employees get another three weeks

after that for a total of seven weeks.

After all that training, Zappos.com

trusts its employees to do right by

the customer. They don’t read from

scripts and they aren’t encouraged

to keep calls short. It may seem

counterintuitive, but it works. Stories

of people receiving condolence

bouquets, products for free, and

lifetime memberships in the VlP

program go viral, and make fiercely

loyal customers. >>

them all. Cross-channel integration

tools can seem overwhelming—but

the alternative is an inconsistent

user experience, which can result in

significant cost for your business.

Salmat, Australia’s largest provider

of outsourced contact centers, is

upgrading its 35 contact centers

to Avaya technology to become an

“omnichannel” customer service

provider. Salmat, which manages

more than 100 million incoming and

outgoing phone calls a year, needed

to engage with consumers whether

they are on Twitter, Facebook, SMS,

email, or phone, says Salmat CEO

Grant Harrod. “A consumer doesn’t

select necessarily the channel you

would like them to communicate with,

they select the channel they would like

communicate with you on,” he says.

And every one of these channels “has

to be absolutely consistent.”

3. Talk to your customers in real time.

According to a Frost & Sullivan 2012

report, consumers overwhelmingly

end up trying to reach a live agent

and are most satisfied after live

interactions, either on the phone

or via chat. Forcing customers into

self-service channels may keep your

costs down in the short term, but can

cost you in retention and lost sales

opportunities over the long haul when

not used for the right purpose.

Palm Coast Data handles subscriptions

and delivery for 500 magazines and

45 million subscribers. Upgrading

to Avaya Aura Contact Center has

empowered Palm Coast’s 200 on-site

contact center agents and growing

number of home-based agents with

two key new features: the ability to

Web chat with magazine subscribers

(usually two at a time) and perform

scheduled callbacks to customers

when they are free. That’s boosted the

productivity of these “blended agents”

between 86 percent and 98 percent

and increased customer satisfaction,

the company says.

4. Coach agents for performance.

Agent performance is the foundation

of good customer service in a contact

center. Coach your coaches, provide

specific feedback, and invest in next-

generation coaching tools to make sure

you get the most from your people.

Reward your best-performing agents.

Help those that struggle to do better.

A division of HSBC bank in the U.K.,

first direct does not have a physical

branch network. Customers access

services online or by fixed or mobile

app. It’s been voted number one

in customer service in a national

service for four years running. Agent

training and support is central to

the bank’s mission of “pioneering

amazing support.”

Knowing that longtime employees

provide better support in general, first

direct aims to keep employees happy,

and ongoing coaching is central to its

approach. New recruits spend six weeks

in training. 65 percent of that time is

By upgrading its contact center infrastructure, Palm Coast Data’s 200 on-site contact center agents and growing number of home-based agents can now Web chat with customers and perform scheduled callbacks. That’s boosted productivity between 86 percent and 98 percent and increased customer satisfaction.


6. Focus metrics on your customer.

What’s your measure of success?

Don’t just reward your agents for

speed. Reward them for resolving

customer issues in one contact (first

contact resolution) and for high

customer satisfaction scores.

Nordstrom department stores have

long excelled at service, and customers

go on about it. For many years, the

Nordstrom Employee Handbook

was a 5-by-8-inch gray card that

contained just 75 words spelling out the

company’s short-and-sweet philosophy:

Welcome to Nordstrom. We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules. Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

One goal: Outstanding customer

service. One rule: Use your

best judgment.

You may not be able to reduce your

contact center handbook to 75 words,

but is there room for simplification?

For focusing key performance

indicators on customers? For

respecting employees’ judgment?

7. Start at the top.

Customer experience starts with

the CEO. A best-in-class customer

experience comes from a company

focused on delivering one, from senior

management all the way to the agents

on the front line. Link every metric

to company initiatives to help agents

understand how they fit into the

big picture.

Amazon consistently receives

accolades for its best-in-class

customer service. Interestingly, it’s

often the customer experience—

personalized experience, painless

purchasing, and fast shipping—that

gets mentioned rather than how

the company resolves problems.

CEO Jeff Bezos understands that

it’s all related, and has organized

the company so that “service,” or

the contact center team you reach

if something goes wrong, is part of

the “experience” group. That’s insight

Bezos or other top brass may have

come up with on one of the two days

per year every company employee

spends working the service desk,

answering emails from customers.

In fact, like Amazon, Zappos.com

also requires all employees to work

customer service for a few days

every year. Since these two are often

in the top three in ratings for best

customer service, it seems like there’s

something to it.

8. Deliver actionable data to decision-makers.

To ensure that the entire company

is on the same page, share contact

center and customer satisfaction

reports with the entire company.

After all, customer satisfaction should

be everyone’s number one goal. Yet

callcentres.net found in 2011 that

while 95 percent of companies collect

customer feedback, only 10 percent

deploy it to improve service.

At SafeAuto Insurance Company,

customer service data spreads

far beyond the contact center.

The marketing group uses it to

map customer demographics. The

company’s investigation unit uses it

for research. Senior management has

its own set of dashboard reports that

provide regular updates on enterprise

operations at a high level, with the

ability to drill down to specific details.

While technology changes, and

new generations bring different

perspectives to the market, the

foundation of customer experience

management stays the same. If you

want to provide standout service, it

must be the top priority at every level

of the company. It must be the focus

of every initiative. And it must be the

goal of every employee.•

Laura Bassett is Director of Marketing for Customer Experience and Emerging Technologies at Avaya. She has more than 19 years of experience in applications consulting, development, and delivery.

Companies need to become

‘omnichannel’ providers, able

to engage customers in their

preferred new ways.

Source: callcentres.net research, 2011.

16%50%

56%


WOULD YOU CALL YOUR OWN CONTACT CENTER? The 9 hurdles that contact centers place in front of their customers—and how to overcome them.By Donna Dawson, Psychologist


According to recent research, the number of calls to call

centers is growing at a rate of 20 percent every year.

This surge is partly due to the growing number of tasks

covered by call centers, both customer-facing and internal

to a company, such as help desks. The surge is also due to

customers calling on the move from mobile phones.

There has also been a sharp increase in customers giving up on their calls—

from 5 percent in 2003 to just over 13 percent in 2010. That rises when

customers have to pick their way through multiple options and messages.

The resolution rate for their calls is only about 50 percent—maybe as high

as 70 percent if a more senior level of help is involved in the call, but still

well behind the call center industry’s own target of an 85 percent

resolution rate.

Getting help from a call center is like being an Olympic hurdler on the last

lap before the finish line. Those are both technical hurdles and operator

hurdles. First, let’s look at the technical hurdles.

Technical Hurdle 1: The Complicated Menu

A menu may come with multiple layers and a selection of four or more

choices per layer. This can be made worse by a poorly performing voice

recognition system. Time is wasted listening to your options, and stress

builds. Stress builds even more if you hear the options incorrectly or don’t

hit the right numbers. Stress builds even higher when you find that you

have not gotten through to an operator for all your obedience and

efforts—but have only reached another level of button pushing. And this is

just the beginning.

Technical Hurdle 2: Being Kept on Hold

Being kept on hold was the number one reason for rage in Britain in an

anger survey that I conducted a few years ago for a major bank. A

customer longs to hear a human voice to explain his complicated problem

to—but instead he gets canned music or a time-wasting plug or ad. In a

2010 study by Which? magazine, it was revealed that a well-known British

phone company took 14 minutes to answer a call about their broadband

services, while a major bank and a major energy company took more than

10 minutes to answer theirs.

According to one call center customer, “I have become so frustrated with the

performance of a certain big bank, and particularly with their call centers, that I

am closing all of my accounts with them.”

Another customer says, “I’d much rather get an engaged tone. If someone isn’t

available to take my call, why frustrate me by trying to waste my time and

money being held in a queue. As for automated services, if I phone someone

it’s because I want to speak to someone.”

What is the call center customer feeling at this point? Lonely, frustrated,

impatient, and angry. What is he or she thinking? That “the company doesn’t

really care about me.”

Technical Hurdle 3: Being Charged for the Call

Many call centers have quietly switched over from free to non-free numbers.

A well-known low-cost airline charges one pound (U.S. $1.60) a minute after

hours and on weekends—even if you’ve been made to wait or been cut off.

“It’s not so bad if the call is free,” said one customer, “but when you have to

pay for it, the story changes, especially when the line has a minimum rate

call charge.”

Here’s another irate mobile phone customer: “I tried four times tonight to get

through … another 40 pence down the tubes. This is a ridiculous way to deal

with customers, or is it a way to raise additional revenue?”

We don’t deserve customers if we treat them like this—especially when there

are automated systems that can log your caller ID and then automatically call

back once an operator is free.

Technical Hurdle 4: The Muzak

It’s not just being kept on hold—it is to what we are forced to listen. On

average, callers hang up after listening to just 65 seconds of canned music.

So if customers have to face the music, let’s get the selection right, please. >>


NOW WE COmE TO ThE OpERATOR hURDLEs. Operator Hurdle 1: Putting Your Call Center Abroad

An overseas call center may be fine for routine inquiries. It may, if you’re

lucky, even be efficient and cost-effective.

But remember how customers see it: “The company is willing to delegate

my relationship with them to a third party.” They sense that the company

has done this for one reason and one reason only: to save money, not to

provide better customer service.

Operator Hurdle 2: The Language Problem

Many offshore operators speak excellent English and can both understand

what is being said and make themselves understood. However, many still

cannot. One call center customer had such a problem with the language

barrier that he resorted to communicating via MSN Messenger.

It isn’t just the understanding of English but the intonation, diction, and

speed of talking that can also be issues. Which can be tricky if you’re trying

to arrange the transfer or payment of a certain sum of money and you

have to keep repeating back the numbers just to ensure that they’ve got

them right.

Operator Hurdle 3: Patronizing the Customer

In order to avoid language or cultural issues, operators often stick to a

script, which can make them sound sing-songy, stilted, overly formal,

overly deferential, patronizing, and just plain unreal. If an operator is

stumped by a question, the result is a long silence and then a repetition of

the last line of their script. As one customer put it, “If they don’t know the

answer, that’s okay. They should just admit it or find someone who does.

But they never do.”

One American call center customer re-routed to India didn’t mind

the foreign accent but was “driven ballistic” by what he called the

disingenuousness of the operators introducing themselves as “Mike,”

“Steve,” “Brian,” and “Walter.” “Friend, I know you’re from India. That’s

okay. Just don’t BS me about it,” he said to them.

A call center customer from Scotland was even more blunt. “I simply

don’t give my business to any organization that has offshored its call

center ... When you consider time delays in the call and the fact that they

can’t understand my Ayrshire accent, it all becomes pointless and

extremely irritating.”

Operator Hurdle 4: Getting Cut Off

The customer is left wondering if this is merely a technical error or if it was

deliberate. One caller realized that every time he was cut off it was just

before 12:30 p.m. He worked out this was probably the operator’s general

lunch break. It has also been rumored that call center operators cut people

off deliberately if they accidentally input the wrong information or—it gets

worse—if they think that you are about to cancel your subscription.

Operator Hurdle 5: Badly Logged Calls

The customer calls back to check his status, only to be told that there is no

record of his previous calls. So he has to start all over again. All calls should

be recorded—not only to be acted on, but in order to create a history of

calls for reference. So why aren’t operators doing this regularly? >>

What we never want to hear is,

“I’m sorry you feel that way,”

implying that it is just our

feelings that are out of control.

Listen, operator, my feelings are

a part of the problem, so sort

the problem out for me, please.

source: Hipcricket Research, 2011.


The Elephant in the Room

87 percent of U.K. call center workers complain of work-related stress. The

average amount of training for a call center worker fell to 21 days in 2010.

One quarter of call center staff leave every year. Call center operators also

complain about repetitive stressful work, restrictive work practices (such

as how much time they’re allowed to spend on bathroom breaks), a

dehumanizing work atmosphere, too-close scrutiny by management,

rude customers, and low pay rates.

All of these are issues for another speech by another speaker, but they

needed to be raised here because operators are human, too. And it is the

human interaction that the customer longs for and so wants to get right.

In an ideal world, all call center operators would have something of the

psychologist about them. They would stay cheerful while I whine, and then

say something like, “I’m sorry that you’re experiencing this problem but I’m

going to do my best to sort it out for you, and if I can’t I’ll find someone who

can.” What we never want to hear is, “I’m sorry you feel that way,” implying

that it is just our feelings that are out of control. Listen, operator, my feelings

are a part of the problem, so sort the problem out for me, please.

For the customer, the operator represents the company. Whether the

operator works for the company directly or not, they need to pretend that

they do and act accordingly. That can mean actually thanking customers

for a complaint as it allows you to hear about the problem and to do

something to resolve it.

So how can the operator remove the hurdles on the track to make the

customer experience a smooth run to the finish line?

1. Come to the phone armed with options.

This exudes an intoxicating sense of power and

control and gives the customer a sense of

control as well.

2. Give the customer your full name, including surname. Do you know

how many Marys, Steves, or Alis there can be in a call center? If the

customer may need to ring you back, they’ll need your full name. Also

give out IDs and extension numbers.

3. promise to do something quickly. Time is of the essence for us all. A

rapid response proves that you are serious about your promises and

provides the highest level of customer satisfaction and retention.

4. Ask the customer what it would take to meet their needs or

requests. Based on that, explain what you are going to do.

5. Ask if you don’t understand anything and if there is anything that

the customer doesn’t understand. You could even say, “If I do so

and so, will that meet your needs?” Then do it. Words like “but” or

“however” should not be part of an operator’s vocabulary. “I’m taking

personal responsibility for this” should be.

6. Ensure that your call centers and branches or departments actually

talk to each other so that an operator can do what he or she

promises. There is nothing worse than a branch or department

referring a customer to a call center which either isn’t aware of how

to deal with the problem or, worse, doesn’t care. It will be the fastest

way for your customers to label your call centers inefficient.

As one expert says, you can make call centers perform anywhere if you have

the right processes and good management in place. Indeed, “I have seen

this situation from both sides, as a customer and once as a call center

worker,” one customer told me. “My personal view is that companies simply

don’t spend enough money on keeping customers happy once they have

them, and far too much money on trying to get them in the first place.”•

(Note: This piece is adapted from a podcast by U.K. psychologist Donna Dawson

which originally appeared in 2012 in The Point, the customer magazine of

communications solutions and service provider Datapoint. Listen to the full

podcast at www.Datapoint.com.)

About Datapoint

Datapoint specializes in enterprise unified communications and multichannel contact center technology solutions, including contact optimization. From offices in London, Dublin, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Munich, Paris, and Utrecht, Datapoint serves 550 clients in 41 countries, supporting 5,000 sites in those territories. It is a founding member of the Intelligent Communications Alliance (ICA). Visit us at www.Datapoint.com.


As one of the leading contact centers for small and medium-

sized businesses in Germany, 3C DIALOG GmbH and its

350 employees respond to around 400,000 customer

queries each month on behalf of different media businesses,

energy service providers, property management companies,

and trading firms—by email, text message, fax, Web chat,

Facebook, or Twitter, as well as by phone.

“Social networks now complement the classic

communication channels: letter, fax, and phone.

The importance of multichannel in customer contact

management will increase rapidly in the future,”

believes Walter Benedikt, Managing Director of

3C DIALOG GmbH.

Blending Communications Channels

The Cologne-based service provider created the

requirements for this in the autumn of 2011 with the

Avaya Aura® Contact Center SIP solution. This platform—implemented jointly

with an Avaya business partner—increases employee productivity and service

quality, reduces overall business costs, and facilitates communication across

multiple media types.

The proportion of written communication received by 3C DIALOG is still around

20 percent today. Inquiries of this kind generally arrive by email or fax, but

communication via Twitter, Facebook, etc. is consistently increasing. “The key is

to integrate as many communications channels as possible on one platform. This

is possible with Avaya Aura Contact Center,” praises Benedikt.

For example: An end customer loses the operating instructions for an electrical

device, calls Customer Service, and requests a replacement. The platform allows

the agent to respond in a flexible manner. He sends the customer the required

document by email as they speak, and the caller can check at once whether his

problem has been resolved.

While the Avaya customer experience management solution improves the

handling of multichannel contacts, it can also be linked seamlessly to databases

and corporate applications using open Web services. This allows 3C DIALOG

agents to answer written and telephone inquiries faster and better today—as

necessary information is just a click away and can also be sent in real time.

Greater Flexibility for Agents

Naturally, the new solution is received extremely well by the customer service

agents. Thanks to the standardized application interface, they can process voice,

Web chat, email, fax, text, and other interactions simultaneously, seamlessly, and

much more productively.

“If the number of calls decreases, the employees can also use short idle times

to answer email inquiries,” explains Benedikt. The system also automatically

uses different variables to determine which employees are more suited to

answer individual telephone calls, emails or faxes. For example, Turkish inquiries

are channeled directly to agents with corresponding language skills, and

unanswered queries are always returned to the agent who originally handled

them. The platform also suggests automatic text responses so that agents can

respond quickly and professionally. >>

Case study

TOP CUSTOMER SERVICE IN ALL CHANNELSHOW 3C DIALOG, ONE OF GERMANY’S

LARGEST CONTACT CENTERS, GOES

FROM FAX TO FACEBOOK

“If questions or

comments about us

and our customers

pop up in social

networks, we are

informed immediately

and can respond

accordingly.”

— Walter Benedikt, Managing Director, 3C DIALOG GmbH

Customer experience | 125124 | Customer experience

the Benefits

Enables agents to proactively provide customer service in any channel

Smart routing of inquiries to right agents

Reduced costs and increased reliability

Increased Customer Satisfaction

Using Avaya‘s Social Media Manager, 3C DIALOG has made

the leap to proactive contact management. Social Media

Manager browses interactions in social networks, filters out

spam and irrelevant contributions using intelligent software

engines, and reports the remaining posts to specially

trained social media agents. “If you respond promptly to

contributions in social networks, you can turn a negative-

minded contributor into a satisfied one and respond

positively,” says Benedikt.

Ultimately, problems and requests are addressed before the

customer even formally asks for help. 3C DIALOG benefits

from the new solution. “It allows us to maintain an overview

of all processes in our contact center at all times,” says

Benedikt. The service provider can then adhere to service-

level agreements more easily and also document adherence

plausibly for its customers—whether contact is made by

telephone or in writing. At the same time, the detailed

analyses help to manage the utilization of personnel in the

contact center.

Virtualization Reduces Costs and Concerns

The Avaya Aura Contact Center can run on industry-

standard server platforms. “This saves space and energy

and decreases overall business costs and breakdown risks,

reducing costs and concerns,” stresses Wolfgang Siegel,

consultant with the Avaya business partner.

3C DIALOG’s Benedikt believes that his contact center

is ideally equipped to meet future requirements. “With

the Avaya Aura Contact Center, we meet the increased

service expectations of our customers across all channels,

improve our employees’ performance, and continue to

position ourselves among the competition as an innovative

service provider.”•

Products:

Scopia® Elite

5115 MCU,

Scopia® IVIEW

Management

Suite,

Scopia®

Desktop,

Scopia® IP/ISDN

Gateway

Case study

BUILDING FOR THE MULTICHANNEL WORLDdePLOyING aVaya auRa® sLasHed

GePIN CONtaCt’s COsts aNd PRePaRed

It FOR tHe FutuRe


The Solution

Italy’s Gepin Contact provides outsourcing services for

private customers and government. Operating with four

different contact center in four different locations, and using

two distinct platforms handling over 100,000 contacts a

day, Gepin had created a complex and difficult-to-manage

technological infrastructure.

“After consideration, we decided to concentrate resources

and investments on a single technology, to boost efficiency

and curb costs,” says Fabrizio Mandolini, Innovation and IT

Services Director at the Gepin Group.

After an in-depth analysis, Gepin chose to adopt Avaya

technology with Avaya Aura® Contact Center as its

foundation. Assisted by business partners, Avaya was

able to offer what was clearly the most open and

flexible solution. The infrastructure and the possibility of

developing multichannel and collaboration capabilities were

indispensable for planning future outsourcing activities.

Avaya did not simply offer its technological excellence; the

Gepin team also had the opportunity to visit the Executive

Briefing Centre in Guildford, England, to observe the

platform’s video functions at work.

“Choosing the Avaya solution,” explains Mandolini,

“was mainly strategic: For us it meant ensuring that we

could respond to current market trends and future needs.

The solidity of the platform and its sustainable cost were

two of the most important factors that tipped the scales in

favor of Avaya.”

Consolidating to Reduce Costs

“In the space of a few months,” explains Mandolini, “Avaya

and its partners implemented an infrastructure that could

manage 100,000 contacts a day in multichannel mode,

providing a platform to address future needs around social

The Benefits

The ultimate beneficiary of the updated technology is the end user—which, in the case of Gepin, is always of the highest importance, as the Group’s customers are mostly leading Italian government organizations.

“The key to success to deliver a next-generation outsourcing business is in optimizing services,” concludes Mandolini. “Customers need to cut costs, but requests to contact centers for increased services are on the rise. The day will come when the customer must be able to self-serve, but companies should not risk trapping him or her in a system that doesn’t allow the customer to talk to anyone.”

It is no coincidence that, AvayaLive™ Engage is among the most concrete possibilities offered by Avaya technology. AvayaLive Engage develops the concept of avatars within multichannel contact center infrastructures, offering the customer the experience of tangible contact with a virtual agent—a step into the future that is now within Gepin’s reach.

Products: Avaya

Communication

Server, Avaya

Aura® Contact

Center,

Avaya Aura®

Session

Manager, Avaya

Aura® System

Manager, Avaya

Aura®

Experience

Portal, Avaya

Voice Portal,

Avaya Media

Gateway 1000E

“The solidity of the platform and its sustainable cost were two

of the factors that tipped the scales in favor of Avaya.”

—Fabrizio Mandolini, Innovation and IT Services Director, Gepin Group

media, video, and mobile devices—while chat, email, fax, instant messaging, and

advanced self-service options were available from day one.”

“This state-of-the-art technology was implemented without sacrificing

security and reliability, seeing that the architecture was redundant at both a

geographical and local level,” Mandolini continues. “Last, but by no means least,

the financial performance is proving to be impressive. Thanks to the new system,

we have seen a 15 percent reduction in costs due to the virtualization of services

and savings of 45 percent over five years in purchase and maintenance costs.

The latter were cut thanks to the use of open technologies.”

Multichannel Communication is the Future

Where Gepin’s needs and Avaya’s vision are fully aligned is the focused delivery

of a multimedia solution. In addition to the management of more traditional

channels, such as email and fax, Gepin has incorporated a multichannel

approach including social media to manage a breadth of customer interactions

within one solution.

“Avaya showed that it not only has excellent technological solutions, but also

a clear vision of the future,” says Mandolini. “The company’s multinational

dimension definitely helped our Group to define the company’s role over the

coming years. Despite the significant size of the job, a close relationship was

established with the Avaya technicians—the two companies were immediately

on first-name terms, and they followed us step by step, together with the

partners, during both the implementation and the problem-solving phase.”

“Above all, they helped us think in terms of the new organization, which is

indispensable for offering advanced services.”•

• 15 percent reduction in operating costs thanks to virtualization

• Managing a volume of 100,000 contacts and 500 agents per day

• Designed to support social media

• Savings of 45 percent on purchase and maintenance costs over 5 years

re

su

lTs


130 | Infrastructure Infrastructure | 131

62 percent of U.S. enterprises deploying

private clouds had security and

compliance problems, while 52 percent

had trouble integrating cloud

with their existing software.

Turn to page 132 to learn how to deploy

cloud while avoiding those issues.

InfraStrUctUre

Collaboration in the cloud is a

genius idea. Massively scalable and

low-cost infrastructure is just what

businesses need to bring seamless

communication back to a mobile,

global workforce. But the way

that cloud has taken hold in most

enterprises, via software-as-a-service

(SaaS), may be too fast and loose for

some of today’s enterprise data, which

is highly regulated and thus must be

highly secured.

Private clouds are growing in

popularity as a result. A private

cloud provides scalability while

slashing IT costs and complexity,

all without compromising security.

For many organizations, it offers

the best blend of public and

private network.

As organizations plan their private

cloud deployment, they should be

aware of the typical issues that

they may face. According to a

June 2012 Forrester survey of U.S. IT

decision-makers that had deployed

private clouds at their enterprise,

62 percent encountered problems

with security and compliance, while

52 percent faced trouble integrating

the cloud with existing tools and apps.

Meeting service-level agreements

with customers and end users was

a problem for nearly four out of 10

users, while nearly a third of IT

buyers faced problems with software

licensing or creating self-service

access for users. The likelihood

of these issues arising increases

if your organization is running

high-bandwidth applications such

as video collaboration.

As with most IT-related challenges,

the key to making your deployment as

smooth as possible is to arm yourself

in advance. Once you know the likely

causes of troubles, you can forge a

strategy to mitigate or avoid them.

What follows are best practices

to combat each of these potential

complications.

Issue: Increased security and

compliance risk.

Strategy: Holistic evaluation of your

security policies.

Over time, security policies tend

to stack up. It’s a lot easier to add

new policies on top of old than it is

to go back and eliminate ones that

are no longer needed. To combat this,

many organizations have made it a

best practice to re-evaluate all policies

every year. The purpose is to identify

and cull older policies that could be an

impediment to agility and growth.

When adding a private cloud, a

security review is more important

than ever. Get rid of policies that do >>

OptImIzIng yOur prIvate clOud fOr the cOllabOratIOn eraA private cloud is a great choice to

host collaboration solutions—if you plan

upfront. Here’s how not to get bit by

security, integration, performance, or

other common challenges.

When adding a private cloud,

a security review is more

important than ever. get rid of

policies that do not add value

to the business and conflict

with cloud use.

By Marc Randall, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Networking

and Parag Patel, Vice President of Global Alliances, VMware


What Challenges Have You Experienced When Moving Workloads Into the Private Cloud?

Base: 29 U.S. IT decision-makers at organizations with 2,000 or more employees.

Base: 66 U.S. IT decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees.

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Avaya, June 2012.

Employees prefer not to be on presence/video

Other

Don’t know

None; we don’t have any barriers or challenges

UC solutions aren’t capable of providing the benefits we expected

UC adoption is low, and we’re not sure why

Training to date has been poor or incomplete

Lack of seamless integration across mobile networks and devices

Employees don’t have necessary smartphones to support mobile UC

Many employees aren’t on the system yet

There are implementation problems/bugs

Not sure of benefits; we can’t/aren’t measuring them

Most employees haven’t been trained yet

Mobile networks aren’t suitable for our UC (cost, coverage, reliability)

We don’t think our employees need a mobile solution

not add value to the business and

conflict with cloud use. If new policies

need to be added, make sure they

are fully automated and non-intrusive

so as not to impede employee

collaboration and workflows—

regardless of cloud use.

Issue: Integration challenges.

Strategy: Prepare and train IT staff

for intervention.

Few technologies stand alone in

today’s data center. Collaboration

tools, in particular, can involve a

matrix of protocols and codecs that

can make interoperability challenging.

Moreover, most organizations will

be using a mix of outsourced

software services in combination

with internally hosted services,

and these will need to connect and

interact with one another. As cloud

technology matures, standards will

emerge to make this task easier. But

for the time being, you may need to

manually intervene. The sooner you

prepare and train your IT staff for this

hurdle, the more efficient you will be

in responding to demands.

Issue: Unpredictable performance.

Strategy: Protect mission-critical

workloads.

The point of cloud is to push up

utilization rates to achieve greater

efficiency. But adding heavy,

unpredictable network traffic such

as video can put SLAs (service-level

agreements) and mission-critical

workloads in danger.

Protect mission-critical workloads

from performance degradation by

isolating new rollouts. This way

you can test the performance of

applications that are new to

your cloud without jeopardizing

mission-critical workloads. You

can add more applications to this

environment over time, once you

have a performance baseline.

Issue: Licensing that isn’t designed for

the cloud.

Strategy: Delay deployment or isolate

to one physical server.

Not every application is built for

the cloud; applications that require

dedicated hardware are usually

licensed by the number of physical

servers used. Many software vendors

have been slow to modify their

licensing to make it affordable to run

in the cloud, where multiple physical

servers share the workload of many

virtual machines. Moving these

applications to the cloud can turn out

to be costly.

To avoid a costly licensing hike,

identify cloud-unfriendly licenses early

on in your planning. Talk to vendors

to see if they will renegotiate your

license terms. If not, you’ll have two

options. First, it may make sense to

defer cloud deployment for these

applications, concentrating instead

on software that works well atop an

abstracted middleware layer or

that observes dynamic resource

consumption patterns. Alternatively,

you can attempt to isolate the

workload, dedicating the specific VMs

(virtual machines) on one physical

server to the application.

Clearing the Haze

Greater collaboration is a huge gift

to your workers. Greater security and

control over your applications are key

for IT. A private cloud aligns these

objectives together, making it possible

for you to scale back SaaS use and still

deliver the services your employees

need to innovate and succeed.

While provisioning a private cloud

is not always simple, the challenges

are predictable. With the proper

attention and planning you can

flag your trouble areas early, and

get down to the business of delivering

efficient, affordable collaboration

and other software services to your

eager workforce.•

Marc Randall is Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Networking. He has held senior executive positions at several networking vendors.

Parag Patel is Vice President for Global Strategic Alliances for VMware, managing VMware’s partner ecosystem. Avaya and VMware collaborate on a number of products, including Avaya Aura® on VMware, and Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey virtualized server platforms. Visit Avaya.com to learn more.

greater collaboration is a huge gift to your workers.

greater security and control over your applications are key for It.

a private cloud aligns them all together.


BORDER COPUnified communications creates

huge security holes that your regular

firewall can’t even begin to sew up.

But a combination of smart policies

and the right hardware can make

sure your company is safe.

By Gilman Stevens, Director of SBC R&D and the VIPER Lab, Avaya

and Gina Odean, National Director of Converged Solutions, NACR

Your desk phone at work may seem

no more dangerous than your coffee

mug or stapler. But appearances

can be deceiving. Unlike yesterday’s

“dumbphone,” today’s VoIP-enabled

phones combine the features of a

computer and a network router in one.

The power and accessibility of these

phones can be turned against them.

Researchers at Avaya’s VIPER Lab and

NACR have found that an unprotected

IP phone gateway will be found

and broken into by hackers located

anywhere in the world within a week.

Our research shows you can expect

hackers to use your corporate network

to rack up about $2,000 worth of

fraudulent calls in just 8 hours—or

half the time between the end of one

workday and the start of the next one.

That’s not just theory; it’s reality.

Enterprise customers hit by “toll fraud”

tell VIPER Lab experts that they lost

on average between $10,000 and

$20,000 per month. One company

lost $200,000 in a single month due

to unauthorized international calls,

usually to premium 1-900 numbers

such as phone sex lines that charge

hefty per-minute fees and from which

the hackers directly or indirectly earn

a cut.

Today’s unified communications (UC)

networks mean that VoIP and SIP

traffic runs over the same networks as

your corporate data. That means that

if you don’t take steps to secure your

VoIP/SIP networks, you can make the

latter vulnerable to malware and the

hackers who create them. For example,

using a VoIP phone in a company

lobby or public area, a hacker with the

right skills and knowledge of open-

source tools can gain entrance into

the corporate data network. Exploiting

all-too-common weak passwords, the

hacker can gain access to confidential

company information and customer

information in a matter of several hours.

Even More Threats

Again, all of this can be avoided if

enterprises take common-sense steps

to secure their VoIP/SIP networks

(detailed below). But fail to do so

and you expose other potential gaps.

Just as hackers have extorted online

retailers by threatening to disrupt

their Web servers using mass denial

of service (DoS) attacks, hackers can

extort businesses by threatening to

launch worker-crippling DoS attacks

against UC networks. Or they can

easily steal corporate information,

either by eavesdropping on

unencrypted VoIP conversations

or by breaking into corporate servers

as demonstrated by VIPER Lab

researchers above.

The number of potentially unprotected

pathways into your network is also

growing, for two reasons: 1) the rise

of telecommuting and home-based

workers (and their often-insecure

home Wi-Fi networks), and 2) the

explosion in employees using tablets and

smartphones at work, especially >>


personally owned mobile devices.

To satisfy workers, companies are

extending their VoIP and UC networks

out to these endpoints. But in their

rush, even healthcare and financial

services organizations that operate

under heavy security and privacy rules

such as PCI DSS or HIPAA are often

failing to create or enforce strong

security policies protecting these

remote outposts.

For example, a company may deploy

a VoIP phone to a home office worker

without forcing him or her to change

the default “1234” access password.

In that state, a hacker can easily take

control of your phone, either to

break into your main corporate

network or use it for social

engineering purposes. For example,

the hacker could change your caller

ID to “IT Support” and use it to start

calling employees and asking for their

login and password details.

Gaining Peace of Mind

There are steps you can take with your

VoIP software to cut down on risks.

For instance, make it standard policy

to encrypt all VoIP calls, whether they

are between employees in the office

(and thus behind your enterprise

firewall) or if they are from workers’

mobile and home office phones

outside your network DMZ. Avaya

Aura® Communication Manager lets

you turn encryption on or off for

such calls. The peace of mind you’ll

enjoy will outweigh any potential hit

on performance.

Companies are also starting to

ensure that their annual independent

security audits include testing of

how vulnerable their VoIP and SIP

networks are. We are seeing financial

firms, airlines, and other global service

companies starting to include this in

their network assessments. Very soon,

this will become mainstream.

The real panacea for your UC security

woes is something called a session

border controller (SBC). Like a traffic

cop for your IP voice and video

traffic, a properly configured SBC

can enhance the performance of your

VoIP/SIP network while protecting you

from disaster.

Avaya offers just such an SBC.

Moreover, that SBC is bolstered by

proactive research from the VIPER

Lab that enables threats to be

anticipated and locked down years

before they are discovered. And it

comes in versions suitable for both

Fortune 500 firms and

smaller companies.

Ah! you say, but my carrier or SIP

trunking service provider says it uses

an SBC. Isn’t that enough to protect

me? Actually, no. The main job of a

service provider’s SBC is to protect its

network from potentially malevolent

traffic coming via YOUR leased lines.

Protecting your enterprise from things

like potential toll fraud is a secondary

concern. That means that if a hacker

successfully sniffs out your company’s

VoIP network, he or she could likely

successfully make thousands of short

calls that rack up as much as $1,000

in toll bills in a few seconds. While

a service provider’s SBC is unlikely

to block such calls, an enterprise-

controlled SBC can easily be set to

do so.

Also, enabling your service provider’s

SBC to protect your enterprise SIP/

VoIP network requires you to open up

and share your full internal topology

with your service provider. Not only

is that counterintuitive, but it would

require an extraordinary amount of

trust in your service provider. It would

be like a homeowner giving ADT a

map to all of the valuables in their

home, including the code to their safe,

in the hope that it would make their

home safer from thieves.

The final analysis: Any enterprise

that wants to protect its UC network

needs to take all of the steps above,

including deploying its own SBC. It is

as much of a must-have as a network

firewall for any company connected to

the Internet.• Gil Stevens is Director of Avaya’s Session Border Controller product R&D team and the VIPER (VoIP Exploit Research) Lab. He has nearly three decades of telecom network experience with a passion for software quality and network security.

Gina Odean is National Director of Convergence at NACR, leads a team of highly certified Convergence Engineers who serve its customer base locally and globally. NACR is one of the largest Avaya channel partners worldwide and nine-time Avaya Business Partner of the Year. It is also the 2012 Avaya U.S. Services Partner of the year and a leading global integrator of business communications solutions and services.

Encrypt all VoIP calls,

whether they are behind your

enterprise firewall or if they

are from workers’ mobile and

home office phones outside

your network DMZ. The peace

of mind you’ll enjoy will

outweigh any potential hit

on performance.


TraiTs of GreatCommuniCationsserviCe Providers5a checklist for what

businesses should expect

from their providers.

portfolio of offers spanning the

entire continuum of issues that

clients face. Breadth is key to

providing you and the customer a

future-proof roadmap, as well as

the ability to tackle the issues that

inevitably pop up. A useful analogy

is a person who comes into the

emergency room complaining of

chest pains. Instead of immediately

calling in a heart surgeon, the

hospital staff performs advanced

diagnostic workups to pinpoint the

source of the chest pain and then

quickly and effectively proceeds to

the treatment that provides the best

possible outcome for the patient.

The same approach applies in

communications support and

management. In our experience,

not many can do this.

•Drinkingtheirownchampagne.

How much would you trust a

communications service provider

that only works with you via email

or telephone? Wouldn’t you expect

them to effectively use rich forms of

communication and collaboration in

their daily business? For instance,

video can strengthen customer ties

by helping clients and the service

provider get to know one another

better. It can also be used to resolve

issues. For example, on-site

cameras can be used to diagnose

physical hardware issues without a

technician needing to be

dispatched to the site. Or take

avatars and 3-D immersive

environments. Leveraging search

technology and artificial

intelligence, avatars can assist

clients in finding known solutions to

problems. Clients can then rank the

solutions, service agents can review

them, and the best ones can be

detailed in articles made available

to other clients.•

•Singlepointofcontact. Technology

stacks are gettingthicker and more

often include elements from

different suppliers. Think of BYOD

and video as rapidly emerging

examples. It will be increasingly

important—and challenging—that

clients have a singlepointof

contactfor problem diagnosis and

resolution. Service providers will

need either to develop the ability to

work across platforms and vendors

or to cede the role to someone else.

•“Knowme.” Few things are more

frustrating for clients needing

support than having to repeatedly

describe a problem to different

people. Instead, they want a

provider to understand their

environment, know what they have

installed, recall the last questions

they asked, and be ready to make

the upgrades they want in the

future. When you reach that level

of customerintimacy—the ability,

when a client says “know me,” to

respond, “yes, we do”—then

support becomes more

consultative. The best providers

will become trusted advisors.

•Fast,accurateproblem-solving.

As technologies become more

complex, problems are more likely

to be systemwide rather than in a

single component. They can emerge

from the network, an application, an

end user, or a configuration file—

and from any vendor’s product.

Because of this, a product specialist

often can’t resolve a problem alone,

but may need to involve a broad

team of system architects and other

specialists who have application or

multivendor knowledge

and capabilities.

•Breadthofservice.This includes

service-level agreements covering

the entire gamut of vendors and a

By Michael Runda, Senior Vice President, Avaya and President of Avaya Client Services

Michael Runda is Senior Vice President at Avaya and President of Avaya Client Services. He has led support for a variety of high-tech firms, including Intuit, Symantec, and Oracle.

Few things are more

frustrating for clients

needing support

than having

to repeatedly

describe a problem

to different people …

the refrain is

growing stronger:

“Know me.”

140|Infrastructure Infrastructure|141

The FuTure oF 911

More than 40 years old, the 911 network in the U.S. needs

an overhaul for the mobile and internet age. Fortunately,

a plan is in the works.

Prior to AT&T’s choice of 911 as

a universal emergency number,

there were separate numbers for

the police, fire department, and

ambulance services. Compounding

the difficulty for citizens, these

numbers also varied by city or state.

Besides being a single nationwide

number, what made 911 so special

was its selective routing design. This

provided the ability to route specific

telephone lines to specific 911 centers

based on the caller’s address, as

provisioned at the phone company

central office.

For its first 12 years, 911 networks

were slowly deployed across the U.S.

In the early ‘80s, automatic number

identification (ANI) was added to

911. Similar to caller ID, ANI identified

the caller’s telephone number

to operators at a 911 call center,

initially on a separate screen. This

provided information needed to call

back the caller in case the line was

disconnected.

The next step was the addition

of location information. This was

accomplished by the 911 center

using the caller’s ANI to query

the address stored in the carrier’s

database of subscribers. This

address, typically the caller’s billing

address, was then shown on the

dispatcher’s computer screen.

Going Mobile

As 911 systems became more

complex, the addresses on

file became correlated to map

coordinates as well as additional data

sources, such as the geospatial XY

coordinates that are available from

cellular network carriers. This was

critical. With the arrival of cellphones

in the late ‘80s, phone numbers

stopped being specific locations on >>

The very first telephone call was, arguably, an emergency

call. “Mr. Watson—Come here! I want you,” Alexander Graham

Bell said into the transmitter on March 10, 1876, after spilling

battery acid on himself—or so the story goes. Then there

was a 92-year gap until February 16, 1968, when the Alabama

Telephone Company processed the first 911 call, beating out

AT&T. A week later, Nome, Alaska, deployed a similar network.

And thus the evolution of emergency communications as we

know it today began in the U.S.By Mark J. Fletcher, ENP, Public Safety Solutions Product Strategy, Avaya


networks, which they can then

provide to 911 call centers across the

United States and Canada

on demand.

Each VPC is 100 percent dependent

upon the enterprise to provide it with

accurate information. Fortunately,

the intelligent networks deployed in

most enterprise offices today do a

good job of tracking the location of

employees and their devices. They

accomplish this by segmenting users

into three different groups—heavy

travelers, remote teleworkers, and

in-office employees. Each of these

groups is tracked by segmenting IP

addresses, tracking virtual LANs, and

other industry standard discovery

techniques. All of that real-time data

is correlated by the enterprise and

then uploaded to the VPC as location

data to be presented to the PSAP.

Even better would be if enterprises

published real-time location data

on their employees to a DMZ (i.e.,

semi-open) portion of their networks

from which agencies or public safety

data aggregators such as Smart911

could then download and deliver

data to the PSAP. A rising number

of 911 call centers are adding data

from Smart911, which holds the safety

profiles (health records, allergies,

drug risks) of a fast-increasing

number of consumers. That way,

emergency responders can have all of

this useful data when responding to

an emergency. >>

the planet, and began to represent

individuals on the go. It was at

this point that the logic used to

locate callers in a 911 network

started to crumble.

To correct the problem, and

remain within the capabilities of

the existing network, pseudo-ANI

numbers (p-ANI) were introduced

as “shell records” in the ANI

database. These records initially

represented the location of the

cellular tower to which the caller

was connected. Phase II built on

this architecture by pulling location

data from the cellular network.

When a mobile phone dialed 911,

a pseudo-ANI was allocated to

that call event, and while the caller

was talking to the dispatcher,

the mobile network would use a

combination of radio triangulation

and GPS coordinates to establish

a location for the mobile phone.

The X and Y coordinates would

then be stored in the pseudo-ANI

record. Public safety dispatchers

would then be able to query the

carrier and the cellular location

information associated with the call

would be provided.

Virtually Speaking

Mobile technology had decidedly

crept into our consumer lives.

But inside businesses, most users

were still hardwired to their desks

inside large office buildings. Voice

over IP (VoIP) and Wi-Fi were still

just fantasies. Once companies

started using these technologies

in the late ‘90s, they also faced the

location tracking problem and had

to start figuring out how to enable

their employees’ locations to be

discoverable and identifiable to 911

networks and PSAPs (Public Safety

Access Points, i.e., 911 call centers).

This geolocation problem became

compounded as virtual private

networks (VPNs) encompassing

both data and voice became

popular and large numbers of

employees started working from

home. An employee at home

in Nebraska logging into her

corporate data center in Seattle

who calls 911 from her work phone

might show up as a Seattle—

not Nebraska—caller and thus

be automatically routed to a

dispatcher in Washington—or not

be connected at all.

Today’s E911 network handles

more than 240 million calls per

year, according to the National

Emergency Number Association

(NENA). So while it’s effective,

its archaic architecture of routing

callers based on telephone

numbers gets outmoded the more

that technology advances in this

mobile, virtual age.

Fortunately, stopgap solutions

emerged. The first were Voice over

IP positioning centers (VPCs).

These networks are able to collect

and store employee location data

uploaded to them by corporate

Today’s E911 network handles more than 240 million calls

per year. But its archaic architecture of routing callers

based on telephone numbers gets outmoded the more that

technology advances.


Next-Generation 911

So what’s lacking? Primarily, that E911 remains an analog, voice-only-

based network. That means all of the data that we’d like emergency

dispatchers to have available must either be transmitted separately

over the Internet, which has its own issues (latency, security, etc.), or

downloaded from data sources that are often not accurate or up-to-date.

The ultimate fix for this is a new, next-generation 911 network. Its

foundation is a modern, secure IP-based network called the Emergency

Services IP network (ESInet). This would be an intelligent highway

for data to flow directly between all relevant parties: callers, carriers,

emergency dispatchers, etc.

By essentially creating a public safety-specific, redundant private

network unifying voice and data, the ESInet will cut out the middleman

(Internet) and provide a direct, more reliable route for this key 911 data

to get to emergency service providers at the same time callers are on

the phone.

After years of debate, the professional association most closely

associated with 911, NENA, released in June 2011 a document making the

ESInet the foundation of its proposed next-generation i3 network. All of

the major parties are building to that standard today and collaborating

on tests. Europe has also ratified the proposal around its next-generation

emergency network, called NG112 LTD (Long Term Definition), which

uses a technical foundation very similar to the NENA i3 standard as well

as an ESInet framework.

The FCC, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Executive

Office of the President (EOP) have all committed to funding and building

the ESInet in the U.S. But it will take both time and additional funding

to deliver this end-state vision. Yet, the problem exists, and needs a

solution, today.•

The FCC, Department of Homeland Security, and the

Executive Office of the President have all committed to

building the next generation of 911. But it will take both

time and funding to deliver on this vision.

Mark J. Fletcher, ENP manages product strategy for Avaya’s Public Safety Solutions. “Fletch” also represents Avaya at the FCC Emergency Access Advisory Committee and the DHS National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, and is heavily involved with the National Emergency Number Association (NENA). Follow him on Twitter at @Fletch911.

146 | Infrastructure

CASE STUDy

Leeds Metropolitan University is one of the

25 largest universities in the U.K., serving the

needs of over 25,000 students. The University’s

IT team has done much to keep its network in

line with the sector’s pace of change. Over the

past 10 years, it has built a modern and reliable

core network using multilink trunk technology

from Avaya. The team has also introduced

greater flexibility and availability through

virtualization and has established a second

data center to improve resilience across the

University’s two campuses.

“We now have a very stable core network that has really

moved us on in terms of flexibility and resilience,” Phil Taylor,

Communications Consultant at Leeds Metropolitan University,

explains. “From there we’ve been able to overlay crucial new

services such as CCTV, VoIP, retail systems, and also staff and

student data services.”

“Although we were very pleased with the advances we’d

made, it was clear we were going to need to do more,” says

Taylor. Demand for wireless, video, distance learning, and many

WEAVING THE NETWORK OF THE FUTUREAVAYA’S VENA ENTERPRISE FABRIC MAKES LEEDS METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY MORE RELIABLE, AGILE

Infrastructure | 147

Improving Business Continuity

Leeds Metropolitan is now tackling these

challenges through the introduction of

Avaya VENA Enterprise Fabric capability,

a solution based on the Shortest Path

Bridging (SPB) standard—a new IEEE Ethernet protocol

that Avaya is pioneering within its Virtual Enterprise

Network Architecture.

The driver was the University identifying a number of potential

disaster scenarios—including the loss of its primary data

center—that could affect the continuity and availability of key

services such as email.

The Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture solves

this kind of problem by enabling a network fabric within and

between data centers and campuses.

“We now have intersite resilience for our email service and

we anticipate being able to save costs by removing some

dedicated private links from service,” says Taylor. In addition,

the Leeds Metropolitan team can now quickly take a server or

move it to another other data center.

Delivering Measurable Results

“Since the migration our intercampus failover has been

reduced to 15 milliseconds,” Taylor says. “This means VoIP calls

remain active, sessions don’t time out and email services don’t

go down.”

The implementation of the Avaya

VENA Enterprise Fabric capability

also proved to be a smooth and

seamless process, partly because

SPB was a software upgrade to the

Avaya ESRS8600 switches used by

Leeds Metropolitan.

“Put simply, the Avaya solution has

enabled us to do more with our

network while at the same time

making it simpler to maintain and

operate,” he says.

Creating the “Can Do” Department

According to Taylor, the introduction

of the Avaya VENA Enterprise Fabric

capability has also brought about a

change in culture and mindset within

his department. Administrators can

quickly deploy new services wherever

they are required without being

constrained by the physical topology.

“The knock-on effect is that the

conversations we are having are

already more positive,” he says.

“We’re in a much better position

to say, ‘Yes, we can do that’.”

A Platform for the Future

“The advantage of Avaya VENA is

that you only have to build the core

once and don’t have to revisit it with

redesign or reconfiguration when your

requirements change,” says Taylor.

“With some of the other solutions

we evaluated, we could see that we

were going to have to spend the same

amount again down the line whenever

a reconfiguration was needed.”

As such, Taylor is also confident that

his team will be able to adapt easily

to future demands driven by user

adoption of new technologies and

learning practices.

“We have a team within the University

that is currently investigating new

teaching methods using a variety of

devices, including mobile learning,”

he says. “With Avaya VENA, we are

now in a much better position to

adapt to any new demands on our

infrastructure, and to help continue

establishing Leeds Metropolitan as a

university that delivers excellence and

innovation in its IT services.”•

Products:

Avaya

Ethernet

Routing

Switch 8600,

Avaya VENA

Enterprise

Fabric

capabilitythe Benefits

Improves availability of key services

Helps IT team to meet business demands more easily

Provides a stable and flexible platform for future network changes and growth

“Put simply, the avaya solution has enabled us to do

more with our network while at the same time

making it simpler to maintain and operate.”

— Phil Taylor, Communications Consultant, Leeds Metropolitan University


AVAYA VIRTUAL NETWORKING

UNDERPINS NETHERLANDS’

SCHIPHOL AIRPORT LUGGAGE SYSTEM

Case study“Performance, reliability, and availability —those are the three criteria

that matter most for a network. that’s particularly true at schiphol

airport, where we build our network around custom applications

that are critical to the success of our customers, who work hard to

improve the flying experience of millions of passengers every day.

avaya’s network has dealt with everything we’ve thrown at it and

managed to meet our criteria, time after time.”

— Ras Lalmy, Managing Director, Schiphol Telematics

Schiphol Amsterdam Airport is Europe’s

fourth-busiest airport, handling about 50 million

passengers and 1.5 million tons of freight per year.

It is often ranked among the world’s best airports

by the Skytrax passenger survey.

Producing that sort of quality 24 hours a day, seven days a

week imposes high demands on the infrastructure and services,

including Schiphol’s network. The network services form

the foundation of all kinds of services that Schiphol Airport

delivers to its customers. Flight check-in, luggage handling,

and flight information is available on all screens around the

airport. Transactions from the airport’s retailers also run over

the network infrastructure.

To prepare for future growth, Schiphol Airport recently introduced a new

luggage handling system that will allow it to manage up to 40 percent more

luggage capacity than today using higher levels of automation and more

intelligent routing. With the new system able to process over 8,000 bags per

hour, an outage would severely impact airlines and their passengers.

As a result, Schiphol Telematics, the telecom operator

at the airport, turned to Avaya to provide a rock-solid

data network with active resiliency for this critical new

system, which is expected to handle up to 70 million

bags a year.

Schiphol Telematics, Avaya, and channel partner Vosko Networking designed

and deployed a network solution using the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch

(ERS) 8600 and Avaya ERS 4500. The ERS 8600 is a core network system

specifically designed to address the reliability, efficiency, and scalability

requirements of critical business networks. It offers one and 10 Gigabit

Ethernet (GbE) support, and uses Avaya VENA Switch Clustering to deliver

true end-to-end reliability and provides Schiphol Airport with always-on access

to their luggage handling system. Avaya ERS 4500 switches were used at the

edge of the network to provide high performance Ethernet connectivity that is

secure, resilient, and energy-efficient.

“Schiphol is a technology-driven organization, so we must ensure that our

infrastructure is ready,” says Ras Lalmy, Managing Director, Schiphol Telematics.

“Avaya’s Fabric Connect capability, because it’s based on Shortest Path

Bridging, brings us huge benefits in terms of topology independence, network

simplification, and network virtualization. We can truly collapse multiple

networks on one single virtualized network for Layer 2 and Layer 3 traffic.

There are also advantages in terms of network scale.”

Schiphol Airport’s new luggage handling system has been in operation for

several months now and the new network has performed impeccably. It provides

the airport with both the flexibility they want and the reliability they need to

support this critical application. >>


Products: avaya ethernet Routing switch (eRs) 8800,

eRs 4500, avaya VeNa switch Clustering, sPB

“We are very pleased with the partnership between

Schiphol Telematics, Avaya, and Vosko Networking,” says

Elgon Eikeboom, Manager for Network Management at

Schiphol Telematics. “The reason we have selected these

partners is because the airport is a very complex environment

and we need very specific technology and skills to support

this environment.”

“Performance, reliability, and availability—those are the three

criteria that matter most for a network. That’s particularly

true at Schiphol Airport, where we build our network around

custom applications that are critical to the success of our

customers, who work hard to improve the flying experience of

millions of passengers every day,” Lalmy says. “Avaya’s network

has dealt with everything we’ve thrown at it and managed to

meet our criteria, time after time.”•

the Benefits

Supports luggage system that is now 40 percent more productive

Simplifies and scales the network

Boosts reliability of 24/7 system

152 | Infrastructure Market Data | 153

What are the 7 biggest

business benefits from investing in

Customer Experience Management?

Turn to page 159 to find out.

MARKET DATA

154 | Market Data Market Data | 155

“How far has your organization gone with its videoconferencing implementation?”

The Majority of Businesses (95 Percent) Have Some Interest

in Video, Yet Only 16 Percent Have Fully Deployed

We have fully deployedit to all users

We are not investing in videoconferencing

We’re still in theevaluation andplanning stages

We have limited the pilot to

select end users within IT onlyWe have piloted it

to select end users

We have put it into limited production

for select users

Base: 133 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees.


“How far has your organization gone with its mobility implementation?”

Some Organizations Have Fully Deployed Mobility,

but the Majority Are Planning & Piloting

Base: 133 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees (percentages do not total 100 because of rounding).


We have fully deployedit to all users

We are notinvesting in mobility

We’re still in theevaluation andplanning stages

We have limited the pilot to

select end users within IT only

We have piloted itto select end users

We have put it into limited production

for select users


1. Lack of seamless integration across mobile networks and devices

2. Employees don’t have necessary smartphones to support mobile UC

3. Many employees aren’t on the system yet

4. There are implementation problems/bugs

5. Not sure of benefits; we can’t/aren’t measuring them

6. Most employees haven’t been trained yet

7. Mobile networks aren’t suitable for our UC (cost, coverage, reliability)

8. We don’t think our employees need a mobile solution

9. Employees prefer not to be on presence/video

10. Training to date has been poor or incomplete

11. UC adoption is low, and we’re not sure why

12. UC solutions aren’t capable of providing the benefits we expected

13. None; we don’t have any barriers or challenges

14. Don’t know

15. Other

Global Installed Base of Desktop PCs + Notebook PCs vs. Smartphones + Tablets, 2009–2015 (Estimate)

Global Smartphone + Tablet Installed Base Should Exceed

PC Installed Base in Q2, 2013

Note: Notebook PCs include Netbooks. Assumes the following lifecycles; Desktop PCs, 5 years; Notebook PCs, 4 years; Smartphones, 2 years; Tablets, 2.5 years.

Source: Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield & Byers.

“What barriers or challenges, if any, does your firm face in deploying mobile unified communications (UC) solutions?”

Lack of Integration, Devices, and Access Are Holding Back

Firms Looking at Mobile Communications

Base: 230 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees who are piloting or have adopted UC solutions.

Source: Forrester Consulting, January 2012

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

n Desktop PCs

n Notebook PCs

n Smartphones

n Tablets

Q2: 13E: Projected InflectionPoint Smartphones + Tablet Installed Base >

Total PCs Installed Base

Glo

bal In

stalle

d B

ase

(M

illio

ns)

3,000

2,500

2,000

1,500

1,000

500

0

2009 2010 2011 2012E 2013E 2014E 2015E


1. Ease of integration of contact center applications with communication applications

2. Ability to overlay onto existing products to avoid rip and replace of installed systems

3. Ability to support redundancy to achieve the desired level of core infrastucture availability

4. Scalability and performance across all deployment sizes

5. Open, standards-based architecture and interface

n Most important

n Second most important

n Third most important

1. Improved agent productivity

2. Improved customer satisfaction ratings

3. Reduced customer service costs

4. Improved collaboration with the broader organization

5. Improved business process agility

6. Increased revenue

7. Increased agent retention rates

“When choosing new technologies to implement in customer service, what are the three most important priorities from an IT perspective?”

Top IT Priorities

Base: 99 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 50 or more contact centers globally.

Source: Forrester Consulting, April 2012.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

“What business benefits have you realized from your technology investments?

Customer Service Technologies Play a Vital Role

in Customer Experience Management Strategies

Base: 89 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 50 or more contact centers globally.

Source: Forrester Consulting, April 2012.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

“ You mentioned mobile technologies are of high or critical priority to your IT organization. What are the drivers for investing in mobility?”

Companies Invest in Mobility to Improve

Productivity & Increase Collaboration

1. Improving workforce productivity

2. Increasing collaboration between employees

3. Increasing collaboration with customers

4. Improving collaboration with remote workers

5. Enhancing the customer experience

6. Improving quality of products and/or processes

7. Other

Base: 91 U.S. IT and business decision-makers at organizations with 1,000 or more employees (multiple responses accepted).


Question: Consumers were asked if they had an experience with a customer service center that caused them to move their business, how likely would they be to tell friends, family, or colleagues about the experience.

Base: USA n=500.

Source: callcentres.net.

n Extremely unlikely n Somewhat likely n Extremely likely

n Unlikely n Neither likely nor unlikely n Likely

n Somewhat unlikely

Social Media is the New “Word of Mouth”

of customers say they are likely to tell their network about a poor customer service center experience that caused them to move their business.

90%

Current workforce population, 2012 Future workforce population, 2017

Base: All respondents (n=880).

Source: Frost & Sullivan analysis.

n Remote

n Mobile

n Traditional, in-office

View of Workforce Distribution, United States, 2012 and 2017


1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

7% 25%21% 46%

90%10%

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