VoIP Telephones

Cisco Cius is Implemented at Gas Station of the Future in Brazil

2012-01-24T16:47:00.000-05:00

Cisco Cius at Gas Station of the Future in Brazil

Cisco Cius Screen for Gas Station of the Future

BRAZIL, SAO PAULO, January 20, 2012 - Cisco Cius, an enterprise mobile collaboration device in a tablet form-factor, is part of the Petrobras Gas Station of the Future technology portfolio launched by Petrobras Distribuidora, a subsidiary of Petrobras, and Intel, last month in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to the rich, integrated unified communications and collaboration features already provided on the Cius, Cisco has customized a number of applications for the project, allowing gas station visitors to benefit from a much greater level of engagement with the station and to understand and purchase services available to them.

The first Petrobras Gas Station of the Future is a collection of the latest interactive technologies, capable of providing a customized experience when refueling, shopping and enjoying other retail services at the gas stations. The Gas Station of the Future is unique in Brazil for its energy efficiency and environmental sustainability.

Consumers can approach a Cius in a kiosk of the gas station and talk to specialists from Petrobras Distribuidora, in real-time via mobile TelePresence. This allows the customer to obtain information on maintenance activities offered by the gas station, such as oil changes. Cius also offers users voice access to the Petrobras Distribuidora customer service center, permits use of the company loyalty card, allows users to obtain information on the store product catalog and monthly promotions, provides access to maps of specific addresses in the city and other services.

"The Cius platform offers mobility and a number of features simultaneously. I'm sure that this device will be a success in all Gas Stations of the Future," said Nelson Costa Cardoso, executive manager of Information Technology, Petrobras Distribuidora.

The Gas Station of the Future project demonstrates the role of technology in increasing service interactivity to create a new experience for consumers. By including mobile devices like the Cisco Cius in this project, Petrobras Distribuidora is consolidating its reputation as a Brazilian pioneer, mirroring other global market leaders which have adopted this type of equipment to provide their customers with faster, more secure and better quality services," said Rodrigo Abreu, CEO, Cisco in Brazil.

Ultraportable and weighing just 520 g, the Cius includes a host of Cisco collaboration applications on a highly secure mobile platform. In addition to full TelePresence interoperability, Cisco Cius also offers streaming HD video, conferencing with several participants, e-mail access, instant messaging, Internet browsing and the ability to produce, edit and share content stored locally or in the cloud.

Based on an Android operating system with enterprise-grade security from Cisco, Cius is an open communication and collaboration platform whose form factor and applications were designed to provide corporate users with more secure real-time connections and the ability to access and share content they need from any network location. A major point of differentiation of the device is the centralized corporate management platform, ensuring that the services used are more consistent and secure while offering a more flexible method of technology management.

In addition to the Cius, the Cisco project for the Gas Station of the Future also includes the entire data center and network infrastructure, needed to provide users with differentiated, robust and high quality services. The project also provides the gas station with sustainable environmental management.

"This gas station has put together some integrated and interactive technologies. Other solutions are being evaluating for testing here, where they are evaluated as a gas station-concept, working as a showroom of new technologies", explained Cardoso.

Petrobras Distribuidora

The largest company on the Brazilian market for distribution of oil and biofuel derivatives, Petrobras Distribuidora currently has over 7000 branded service stations throughout the country as well as around 10,000 clients in industries such as aviation, asphalt, chemical products, energy and transportation solutions, selling a wide range of products and services. For more information, visit www.br.com.br.

Follow Petrobras Distribuidora on Twitter at @postospetrobras.

About Cisco Systems

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is a global leader in networks transforming the way that people connect, communicate and collaborate. For further information on Cisco, visit http://www.cisco.com. For news about Cisco, visit http://newsroom.cisco.com.

Polycom Announces Cloud Strategy to Enable Service Providers to Fast-Track Delivery of Video-as-a-Service

2012-01-24T16:42:00.003-05:00

Polycom® RealPresence™ Cloud, Powered by RealPresence™ Platform, Provides Service Providers a Fully Managed Wholesale Video Collaboration Service to Accelerate Time-to-Market With Subscription-Based Offerings

PLEASANTON, CA–(Marketwire – Jan 18, 2012) – Polycom, Inc. (NASDAQ: PLCM), the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC), today detailed its strategy to enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. As part of today’s announcement, Polycom is unveiling Polycom® RealPresence™ Cloud, a wholesale, carrier-ready offering to enable service providers to quickly bring to market VaaS offerings. RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed specifically for service providers to equip them with the carrier-grade infrastructure, endpoints, and services they need to offer businesses of all sizes subscription-based solutions for video collaboration. The new offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among SMBs (small to medium sized businesses) and enterprises who want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution.

Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions compress the time-to-market and time-to-revenue for service providers to deliver VaaS solutions. Powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform, the most complete and interoperable solution for universal video collaboration, RealPresence Cloud provides the carrier-grade scalability, reliability, availability, and security required for service providers to offer VaaS to SMBs and enterprises. RealPresence Cloud solutions encompass a fully managed multipoint video service that supports a multitude of connectivity options between standards-based room, mobile, PC, and Web-based endpoints, as well as Microsoft® Lync™ 2010, IBM Sametime®, and endpoints supporting the non-standard TIP protocol. Service providers can leverage Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions to offer their customers a true business-to-business VaaS solution without having to fully integrate and support the core infrastructure on-premises. This solution leverages the Polycom RealPresence Network (formerly the Halo®/HVEN network acquired from HP in 2011) to allow service providers to fast-track their capability to deliver video from the cloud.

Polycom RealPresence Platform Powers Video Clouds from China Unicom and Airtel

Polycom will continue to work closely with service providers to develop VaaS offerings for a range of business and delivery models from on-premises to hosted to managed services. Several carriers around the world are currently using the RealPresence Platform as the enabler for VaaS solutions. For example, China Unicom has created one of the largest video clouds in the world, powered by the RealPresence Platform, which enables the delivery of VaaS to more than 10,000 business and government organizations throughout China. The RealPresence Platform provides the scalability, reliability, and interoperability that enable China Unicom’s video cloud to interconnect approximately 100,000 endpoints (and growing) from 10 different vendors. Another example, Airtel, a leading service provider in India, is also using the RealPresence Platform to deliver VaaS solutions to SMBs and enterprises throughout India. These solutions provide a differentiated offering for both companies and are helping to drive further adoption of video collaboration throughout China and India.

Wainhouse Research predicts the five-year compound annual growth rate for the hosted and managed UC market worldwide is forecast to be 30.7 percent with revenues of approximately $5 billion in 20151, further expanding Polycom’s total addressable market. Polycom’s cloud strategy builds on the company’s goal to make video collaboration ubiquitous and is a key proof point of Polycom’s recently announced software strategy.

“Polycom RealPresence Cloud is a key component to our vision of making video collaboration ubiquitous. Service providers are critical partners to drive video collaboration growth through VaaS offerings, which will dramatically lower the up-front investment for SMBs and enterprises, enabling them to reap the benefits of video collaboration,” said Andy Miller, President and CEO, Polycom. “We want to make it as easy as possible for service providers to augment their existing offerings with video collaboration solutions. To that end, we’re removing the barriers to entry with our wholesale cloud offerings and other delivery options that meet service provider requirements related to investment, management, and operations, thereby enabling our partners to get to market faster and generate new revenue more quickly. Our go-to-market objective is clear: we will be an enabler of cloud services, partnering with service providers and, in-time, solutions providers, and unlike competitors, we will not compete with service providers or offer a retail service direct to end users.”

“As the demand for video collaboration continues to grow, cloud-delivered video offerings will be a key contributor to this growth. Many SMBs and enterprises will find Video-as-a-Service offerings attractive due to their flexibility, scalability and cost savings,” said Rich Costello, IDC senior research analyst. “Polycom’s cloud strategy is compelling, as it provides an accelerated path to market for cloud-delivered video, and gives services providers the robust infrastructure, scalability, and interoperability needed to deploy wide-scale video clouds and deliver compelling VaaS solutions to customers.”

“Video Infrastructure as a Service dramatically reduces the cost of supporting multi-party conferencing. It will become a prerequisite for the support of pervasive video in the enterprise, for example in unified communications deployments,” according to Scott Morrison, managing vice president, Gartner, Inc.

Polycom Vision: Make Video Collaboration Ubiquitous through Multiple Routes to New and Expanding Markets

Polycom believes that the most effective and productive way to collaborate is by seeing people face-to-face. Video collaboration brings people face-to-face to increase productivity and, in addition, provides a great solution for business continuity as there are many obstacles that prevent people from physically being together: weather conditions, natural disasters, epidemics, and a range of unpredictable conditions and events that simply prevent people from meeting in-person. Polycom’s goal is to make it possible for everyone to use face-to-face video collaboration as their preferred method of communicating — easily, reliably, and securely — no matter where they are and regardless of network, carrier, protocol, application, or device. The company is making that possible through multiple routes to market:

Cloud-based delivery of Video-as-a-Service solution from service providers – With enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure and services rapidly growing, and the technology and standards maturing, the “video cloud” is set to explode in 2012. Polycom RealPresence Cloud will enable service providers to quickly bring to market VaaS offerings and should help drive new and differentiated business models, along with significant incremental video collaboration usage across SMBs and enterprises.

Software delivery to mobile devices – Today, more than a seventh of the human population teleworks2, and most are remote or mobile at least some of the time. Polycom’s mobility solution is Polycom® RealPresence™ Mobile, a free-to-download software solution that extends the enterprise-grade video collaboration capabilities of the Polycom RealPresence Platform beyond the conference room, office, and firewall to mobile tablets, enabling video usage anywhere.

On-premises delivery – The Polycom RealPresence Platform integrates with hundreds of business, UC, and social networking applications, as well as core networking and security infrastructure, to meet today’s enterprise and service provider on-premises video collaboration needs and to flexibly support expansion to mobile and social applications and private cloud delivery.

Web-based delivery to social apps – Social apps, now moving rapidly into business, are another new high-growth market for video collaboration: By 2015, the number of people participating in web-based video chats is forecast to grow 14-fold to more than 140 million, and they are expected to make 11 billion video chat calls that year.3 Polycom® RealPresence™ Social solutions take video collaboration one more step away from premises-based systems and specialized endpoints, even beyond mobile devices, to enable Web access to video collaboration, independently of the device.

Embedded delivery on industry-leading devices (laptops, desktops, tablets) – Polycom video collaboration software will be embedded in industry leading devices, enabling users to quickly launch Polycom RealPresence video collaboration solutions right from their favorite devices.

Open Standards and Interoperability: Polycom® RealPresence™ Video and OVCC™

The ability to achieve video ubiquity also requires open standards and interoperability, which does not lie within the power of any one customer, equipment manufacturer, service provider, or standards body to solve. It takes a concerted effort by the industry to solve this problem. Polycom’s approach is to use open standards to orchestrate interoperability across all of the elements in a communications environment, including multiple solutions, vendors, networks, and connection protocols. This approach is three-part: platform and endpoints plus ecosystem.

The Polycom RealPresence Platform provides an open standards-based foundation for integrating the diverse UC applications and infrastructure in most enterprise environments — from video endpoints to mobile devices to UC communications infrastructure from Microsoft, IBM, BroadSoft, Juniper, and Siemens, to name a few. In the interest of driving video ubiquity, the RealPresence Platform also interoperates with some proprietary systems, such as Cisco Telepresence products that use the TIP protocol. In addition, the RealPresence Platform, which powers Polycom RealPresence Cloud solutions, delivers the industry’s only true carrier-grade reliability and scale, supporting up to 75,000 device registrations and 25,000 concurrent sessions.

In addition to the infrastructure foundation and interoperability hub provided by the RealPresence Platform, Polycom is also active in helping develop the commercial and technical solutions necessary to ensure interoperability across a global partner ecosystem. In June 2011, Polycom partnered with leading global telecommunications solution and service providers from around the world to unleash broader visual communications adoption by enabling interoperability and global business-to-business (B2B) connectivity for telepresence and video conferencing. The Open Visual Communications Consortium™ (OVCC™) organization was incorporated in August 2011, of which Polycom was a founding member. Currently, there are 16 OVCC members whose mission is to develop and support a ubiquitous video marketplace by establishing secure, quality-assured, and video-capable interconnections between service providers. Service enablement across the OVCC organization is expected to become commercially available in mid-2012.

“We believe that video as a service from the cloud will be a true game-changer. Delivering video as a service will make it possible for anyone to connect and collaborate face-to-face with anyone as easily as we text or tweet today,” said Andrew McFadzen, President, OVCC. “Making this happen, however, requires that the UC and telco industries come together to solve the underlying interoperability challenges of delivering video across the assets of multiple carriers and video networks. Polycom, along with many of the leading telecommunications solution and service providers, has been working to address this and the result will be the opening of an open video cloud in 2012.”

Availability

Polycom RealPresence Cloud offerings are available now with limited availability for qualified service providers.

Classic Bad Technology Predictions

2012-01-24T16:41:00.000-05:00

By Mark J. Fletcher, ENP | 21 Jan 2012

For the most part I think that we can all agree that it's generally a bad idea to say something can't or won't be done. In addition to inciting the multitude of industrious thinkers that exist today to think even harder, technology is changing at such a rapid pace that almost anything is possible in the future.

I thought that I would put together a list of some common bad predictions that were made in the recent past, and maybe not so recent past, to remind everyone that anything is possible, and when it comes to anything" being something related to public safety that will save lives, there is even more "possibility". With that, I offer you Fletch's list of top 5 bad technology predictions:

5
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
(Some have estimated that there are upwards of one and 2 billion computers in the world today.)

4
"The Americans have made use of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." - Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.
(You mean have somebody write a note, and then deliver it for them?)

3
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" - Opponents of David Sarnoff in response to his request for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
(They should have tweeted their views and opinions, or put them in a podcast, not publish them in the paper.)

2
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
Western Union internal memo, 1876.
(No value to you, but to 6 billion other people apparently.)

1
"Unless you are under 30 years old, you will not have to be concerned about next generation 911 in your career." - Participant at the Great E911 Debate, Newport Rhode Island, 2011.
(Hey, I'm 50! And I'm worried about it now! NG911 is here today.)

As I mentioned last week, there's been far too much complexity around E 911 for the enterprise. IT administrators don't necessarily understand it, and quite often they fall back on the simple approach of "what is the law?" But don't get too wrapped up in what "the law says" in any particular state. You need to think about what level of service you need to provide to your employees under your care, using your telephone system.

Too often I see too many companies over rotating on their E 911 solution in the enterprise. They've never had anything before, they realize they got a huge problem now, and they put in an architecture that "sounds" like it's the best, or most precise. Another common mistake is to provide a required hosted E 911 solution for remote VPN users, or work-at-home employees who have an IP device, and then, without any further thought, roll out that same solution throughout the entire enterprise, not just externally where it's needed, but internally where it may not.

Understanding E 911 in the enterprise, and defining the problem and resolution, usually doesn't mean buying a particular box from 911 vendor XYZ Incorporated and plugging it in. E 911 is a process that requires potential system integration, maybe some database work, and a formalized standard operating procedure that covers moves adds and changes, new employee provisioning, and the removal of stale records as employees move on.

Just like there's no magic Accounting box that will automatically and autonomously prepare your financial statements with no input from your bookkeeper, there is no magic E 911 box that will automatically and autonomously manage your E 911 parameters in the public ALI databases, and quite frankly, the real amount of management that's required is that level may just surprise you.

I like to break E 911 in the enterprise down to three primary decision points:

Localized On-site Notification to Internal Staff
Assigned internal first responders should be aware that any E 911 call took place, and wherein the building the caller was located. This is not data that we are pushing to the PS/ALI database. It's internal information for use by our own internal employees that will assist public safety in locating the caller in need.

Support for Nomadic Behavior on my PBX, AND on my Network
Administrators, and the PBX itself, need to understand where users are, when they move, as well is when they enter or leave the environment, in the case of WLAN devices.

Support for Remote VPN Workers on my PBX, but NOT on my Network
As we flatten and consolidate the network, and allow employees to ubiquitously work from wherever they gain an Internet connection, we need to be cognizant about how we provide E 911 services using new a new native technology designed specifically for that class of user.

Unfortunately, enterprise 911 is teaming with "snake oil salesman" that drone on about cases of misfortune and million-dollar lawsuits. Sure, some of that is valid, but most of that stems from ill-fated procedures that have never been vetted or even audited for local compliance.

A new form of engagement, is the E 911 Risk Assessment Audit. It includes a site visit, discussion with your staff to determine specific requirements, as well as a review of the configuration on your PBX.

A good risk assessment audit can't be done over the phone, nor can you click a few questions on a webpage to get the magic answer. It's going to take a professional who understands E 911 compliance a face-to-face meeting to help you determine what you're going to need. And remember, if they just come in and throw dirt on the floor, they're probably going to try to sell you vacuum cleaner.

Connect and Collaborate Anywhere...with "Avaya Flare"

2012-01-24T16:38:00.002-05:00

By Bryan Katz | 24 Jan 2012

With today's announcement of Avaya's Flare® Communicator for Apple iPad* Tablets, Avaya continues to bring enterprise communications to your fingertips.

Here's some insight into Avaya's plans authored by the UC Clients Portfolio Lead at Avaya, Praveen Mamnani (email pmamnani@avaya.com)

===================

It's early Monday morning and you're getting ready to leave for a business trip. You grab coffee while checking the weekend's emails on your iPAD tablet. Suddenly, the "15-minute reminder" pops up to review customer escalation report...with your boss. The next 10 minutes might proceed something like this:

"Oh great,".you think. "My team lead in India didn't email the update over the weekend." You scramble to start up your laptop and get on your work VPN so you see if it came in overnight. "What a pain! I don't have the team lead's phone number in my iPhone contacts, and I don't know if he or anyone else from the India team is still online who can talk right now so I could conference in with my boss."

Of course, your laptop's VPN client is not connecting and the boss is calling now.

"Sorry, Mike," you say. "I don't have that information here. "I'll have to get back to you on that."

Sound familiar? You're not alone. Business professionals everywhere are increasingly mobile, overloaded with information and pressured with deadlines. With a global work force always on the move, the ability to reach and collaborate with your co-workers, partners or customers anytime, anywhere, has become more critical than ever before. In an effort to manage these challenges, corporations are shifting to mobile communications and adopting Unified Communication systems more rapidly than expected to try and manage the mobile/virtual workforce challenge.

According to a survey commissioned by BroadSoft, 62 percent of IT leaders are expanding their enterprise's UC capabilities, with instant messaging, web collaboration and videoconferencing identified as the top UC services IT managers are looking to support on mobile devices over the next three years. In addition, as the "consumerization" of IT accelerates, end users expect simple, intuitive, rapid and ubiquitous access to applications from their mobile devices enabling them to collaborate as if they were sitting in the office.

Avaya has been delivering enterprise mobile solutions since early 2000, first with EC500 (extension to cellular), then Avaya one-X® Mobile portfolio with clients on iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

Today, we're enabling our customers to further embrace a Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) strategy with the launch of the Avaya "Flare® Communicator for iPAD. Flare Communicator is light weight version of the full Flare® Experience delivering an intuitive, easy to use, fun interface, enabling an employee to collaborate instantly and continuously with coworkers, supervisors, customers and partners from ANYWHERE. With the Flare Communicator for IPAD, you have the flexibility to carry your business communications anywhere for faster collaboration and better business results.

So let's revisit the earlier scenario using Avaya Flare Communicator for iPAD.

You grab coffee while checking weekend's email on your iPAD. Get the meeting reminder screen pop; launch Flare and roll the contact cards with your finger and notice your team lead is online. Drag his card into the Flare spotlight and launch an IM session. Get report update. Proactively add boss to the conversation by bringing him in another spotlight. Discuss, determine course of action. End call. Finish coffee.

No more time spent searching your contacts or booting up the laptop to locate and IM or call coworkers while the clock is ticking. A swipe of the finger on the touch optimized Flare experience enables you to simply flip through your personal or business contact cards, drag-n-drop people from your global work force in the "spotlight" and make smarter decision on the spot.

Last month, during a business trip From Denver to the East coast on a flight that had Wi-Fi access, I decided to push the limits. I told the Flare development team I would be doing some special tests from my office to see if I could collaborate with a new feature called "Flare in the Air". They were puzzled. When I called into the meeting, they saw me in the spotlight but didn't realize my voice was coming from 30,000 feet over Nebraska. During the call inflight, I exchanged IMs with developers and received another call from my 5 year old son. Within seconds I escaped to another Flare spotlight and we were both happy to hear each other's voice.

Want to join me in the spotlight? Get the application from the Apple app store today. Your IT administrator needs to provision a Flare Communicator for iPad license and SIP extension on the Avaya Aura system. Try it out and contact me (email pmamnani@avaya.com) with your views and reviews about what's good, what needs improvement and what you think should be next. We'll be aggressively adding new features so your feedback and comments will be greatly appreciated.

Now when you get your Flare Communicator I recommend you use this "Flare in the Air" feature with care. You may annoy that guy next to you if he's trying to catch a nap before landing. Try not to get into any "Alec Baldwin gets kicked off the plane with iPAD" situations.

*iPAD is a is a registered trademark of Apple Inc

Another reason for Cisco to pound its chest

2012-01-20T11:59:00.000-05:00

UCS blade server system reaches 10,000 customers

By Jim Duffy on Thu, 01/19/12 - 7:35pm.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to toot its own horn, Cisco is celebrating a milestone... and not in its traditional stronghold of switching and routing. In just over two years, Cisco has landed over 10,000 customers for its Unified Computing System (UCS) blade server platform, the controversial product that alienated longtime partners HP and IBM.

Not bad for a router company that entered the data center server business two years ago amid much skepticism of its chances for success. Especially with stalwarts like HP, IBM, Dell and Sun - now Oracle - entrenched in data centers for decades.

And now all competing with their ex-partner, the new kid on the block - or rack.

UCS combines X86 blade or rack mount servers with virtualization, switching and storage access to offer a "unified computing" platform for consolidating data center functionality and reducing footprint and cabling, and cost. Cisco says it uses one-half the components and requires less cabling and power/cooling than legacy servers. Cisco also says a unified computing and virtualization strategy in the data center - like that proposed by UCS - can save over 30 billion kilowatt hours of energy per year.

Two of the key attributes of UCS are extended memory and service profiles. Extended memory, a patented Cisco development, is designed to support applications with large data sets and allow servers to support more virtual machines. Service profiles are defined per VM and stay with the VM as it moves, which helps automate provisioning of IT services per VM or application from days to minutes, Cisco says.

UCS began shipping in July 2009 and is now on an annualized order run rate of $1.1 billion, Cisco says. The system set 54 "world records" in industry performance benchmarks, the company claims, and received a dozen industry awards for innovation. It also captured the No. 3 market share spot in X86 blade servers worldwide in Q1, 2011, and No. 2 in the US, according to IDC.

Cisco Systems, Inc. : Cisco TelePresence Enables Physician Consultations in Pharmacies

2012-01-20T11:44:00.000-05:00

January 19, 2012 | Hogan Keyser http://www.telepresenceoptions.com

Installation of Cisco TelePresence in 200 Swiss pharmacies
Easy physician consultations on live video link
Greater efficiency and quality of healthcare delivery

Wallisellen, Switzerland, January 18, 2012 via 4-Traders.com -- Cisco and Swisscom are equipping 200 pharmacies in Switzerland with Cisco TelePresence(R) video communication systems. Launched recently under the name netCare, this two-year pilot project will help enable the provision of advanced telemedicine services. With netCare, patients can receive a formal and documented initial consultation (triage) with a physician over a video link at a pharmacy. "We are delighted to be able to offer this unique, pioneering HealthPresence project based on Cisco TelePresence technology," says Christian Martin, general manager of Cisco Switzerland.

Virtual consultations in almost real-life quality

The Cisco TelePresence system connects pharmacy consulting rooms with physicians at MEDGATE, Switzerland's center for telemedicine. At each end of the link there is an EX90 system equipped with a microphone, a camera and a 24-inch full-HD display. The physician and patient can see and hear each other as if they were sitting in the same room. For the patient, the experience is like visiting the physician in-persons; for the physician, it is easy to make a visual assessment of the patient's problems. The system has a touch screen for simple operation.

The TelePresence system can be expanded by incorporating additional components if necessary. For instance, diagnostic devices and an additional monitor can be connected to measure a patient's heart rate, blood pressure and temperature. The system also supports multiple languages.

Maximum security, confidential and efficient

Information is shared between the patient and the physician over a highly secure high-speed link. "Cisco TelePresence offers optimized secure data transmission that fully protects users' confidentiality," explains Christian Martin. In addition, to safeguard patient privacy, medical examinations take place in a separate consultation room, and physicians and pharmacists are bound by an obligation of confidentiality.

The project was initiated by pharmaSuisse, Switzerland's association of pharmacists, in association with MEDGATE and the medical and accident insurer Helsana. "This collaboration between pharmacists, physicians and insurers is playing a key role in helping to boost the efficiency and quality of basic healthcare delivery," says Dominique Jordan, president of pharmaSuisse.

About Cisco

Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate. More information about Cisco can be found at http://www.cisco.com. For ongoing news, please go tohttp://newsroom.cisco.com. Cisco equipment in Switzerland is provided by Cisco International Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cisco Systems, Inc.

Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. A listing of Cisco's trademarks can be found atwww.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company.

Polycom Cloud-Based VaaS Platform Aimed at SMBs

2012-01-20T11:30:00.001-05:00

By: Nathan Eddy eweek.com

The solution leverages the RealPresence Network, formerly the Halo/HVEN network acquired from HP in 2011.

Unified communications (UC) provider Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) detailed its strategy to enable service providers to offer cloud-delivered, Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) solutions to its customers. The company also unveiled RealPresence Cloud, a wholesale offering designed to enable service providers to bring to market VaaS offerings. RealPresence Cloud solutions are designed for service providers to equip them with the infrastructure, endpoints, and services they need to offer businesses subscription-based solutions for video collaboration.

The offering for service providers is designed to accelerate the penetration and adoption of Polycom video collaboration solutions among small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) and enterprises who want either a hybrid solution of both premises-based video collaboration solutions and video on demand, or a pure VaaS solution.

Powered by the Polycom RealPresence platform, RealPresence Cloud solutions encompass a managed multipoint video service that supports a multitude of connectivity options between standards-based room, mobile, PC, and Web-based endpoints, as well as Microsoft Lync 2010, IBM Sametime, and endpoints supporting the non-standard TIP protocol. Service providers can leverage RealPresence Cloud solutions to offer their customers a VaaS solution without having to fully integrate and support the core infrastructure on-premises.

Several carriers around the world are currently using the RealPresence Platform as the enabler for VaaS solutions. For example, China Unicom has created a video cloud, powered by the RealPresence Platform, which enables the delivery of VaaS to more than 10,000 business and government organizations throughout China. China Unicom’s video cloud interconnects approximately 100,000 endpoints from 10 different vendors. Another example, Airtel, a service provider in India, is also using the RealPresence Platform to deliver VaaS solutions to SMBs and enterprises throughout India.
Wainhouse Research predicts the five-year compound annual growth rate for the hosted and managed UC market worldwide is forecast to be 30.7 percent with revenues of approximately $5 billion in 2015. Polycom’s cloud strategy builds on the company’s goal to make video collaboration ubiquitous and is a key tennant of Polycom’s recently announced software strategy.

The RealPresence platform provides an open standards-based foundation for integrating UC applications and infrastructure in enterprise environments—from video endpoints to mobile devices to UC communications infrastructure from Microsoft, IBM, BroadSoft, Juniper, and Siemens. In the interest of driving video ubiquity, the RealPresence Platform also interoperates with some proprietary systems, such as Cisco Telepresence products that use the TIP protocol. In addition, the RealPresence platform, which powers the company’s cloud solutions, supports up to 75,000 device registrations and 25,000 concurrent sessions.

In June 2011, Polycom partnered with leading global telecommunications solution and service providers from around the world to unleash broader visual communications adoption by enabling interoperability and global business-to-business (B2B) connectivity for telepresence and video conferencing. The Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) organization was incorporated in August 2011, of which Polycom was a founding member.

Polycom Offers Wholesale Video-As-A-Service

2012-01-18T16:48:00.000-05:00

By Robert Mullins InformationWeek

Videoconferencing system vendor Polycom is announcing Wednesday that it will launch a cloud-based video-as-a-service offering to service providers and other strategic partners on a wholesale basis only.

In addition, Polycom is announcing that its video conferencing technology will be natively integrated into IBM's Sametime unified communications (UC) offering; the Lotus Notes desktop client for managing business applications; and IBM Connections, the company's business social media platform. The announcements are being made at IBM Lotusphere 2012, a company conference held this week in Orlando, Fla.

The video-as-a-service wholesale offering--the Polycom RealPresence Cloud--will be built on the RealPresence platform, Polycom's software infrastructure for video collaboration, and can be hosted by the service provider on the Polycom RealPresence Network, which is based on what was the HP Halo/H-Ven Network that Polycom acquired from HP in 2011 for $89 million. The RealPresence Cloud also can run on the service provider's network, John Antanaitis, Polycom's vice president of product marketing, explained.

"We're offering a wholesale solution today to those qualified service providers so that they can take that and offer it retail to the end user community," Antanaitas said. "We will not compete with our go-to-market partners." However, Polycom still will offer an on-premise video conferencing solution to enterprise customers that might compete with that of other service providers. It also will continue to sell videoconferencing infrastructure such as end points and other hardware, including, potentially, to subscribers to the cloud service, a Polycom spokeswoman said.

Antanaitas said Polycom's strategy with the new cloud service and other offerings is to provide "videobiquity." He pointed to industry figures on the sales of tablet computers and smartphones with video conferencing capability as evidence of the videobiquity trend, plus the fact that younger people already are comfortable collaborating with others via video and would want to continue to use video in the workplace.

The number of tablet computers--most of them video-enabled--sold in 2011 was expected to hit 64 million globally, according to the research firm Gartner, which Antanaitas said would be more than 50 percent above an earlier projection for the year of just 40 million units. By 2015, tablet sales will reach about 325 million annually for an installed base of 900 million. Simultaneously, 1 billion video-enabled smartphones will be shipping by 2015. Meanwhile, wireless carriers will continue to invest in greater network speeds and capacity as they transition to 3G and 4G networks, he said.

Polycom CEO Andy Miller, who spoke at Lotusphere, has said he sees videoconferencing gaining traction in 2012.

Besides the RealPresence Cloud announcement, Polycom also announced at Lotusphere tighter integration with IBM UC technology. The integration of Polycom RealPresence with IBM Sametime means that users can quickly initiate a high-definition video or audio call from within their e-mail or social business application. "You don't need to open a separate application to add video," said Antanaitas. Users of Lotus Notes can click on a box in an e-mail and add a video session to a meeting invitation.

Last year, Polycom also introduced a new room video telepresence system, the CX7000, with native integration with Microsoft Lync, a competitor to IBM in the UC space.

Polycom to Integrate IBM Sametime

2012-01-18T16:42:00.001-05:00

By: Zacks Equity Research

Polycom, Inc. (PLCM) recently entered into a strategic partnership with IBM (IBM) to incorporate its popular RealPresence video solutions technology with IBM’s interactive application called IBM Sametime and IBM Connections.

Polycom’s RealPresence video technology that host video conferences for enterprise clients are quite similar to IBM Sametime application, which facilitates Web conferencing and group chat within an organization. Hence, the integration of Sametime application with RealPresence technology will upgrade Polycom’s product feature.

The new integrated technology that supports High Definition (HD) quality video calling can be accessed through different touch points like web, email, IM clients and other social media sites, hence providing enhanced solutions to different organizations to improve its work efficiency.

The advanced technology will cater to different needs of the enterprise by means of conducting virtual meetings from different touch points like email, WiFi and 3G/4G network. It will also be beneficial for the healthcare industry where doctors will be able to provide medical assistance to patients living in remote areas, thereby improving the service qualities of healthcare industries. Furthermore, the whole system is highly secure and reliable and is delivered directly from the cloud or integrated within the devices.

Polycom is well positioned financially to pursue its future ventures. Increased demand for video-conferencing services mainly from India and China, coupled with overall improvement of marketing and sales service, will boost the company’s market share.

The company is currently making inroads in the retail consumer market by developing video conferencing application for smartphones and tablets, which we believe will create huge growth opportunities for the company going forward. We, thus, maintain our long-term Outperform recommendation for Polycom, Inc.

Currently, Polycom, Inc. has a Zacks #3 Rank, implying a short-term Hold rating.

Based in Pleasanton, CA, Polycom Inc. is a leading provider of video and audio conferencing equipment and related network infrastructure.

Avaya debuts UC app for Android, promises iPhone app in 1Q

2012-01-18T16:39:00.001-05:00

Avaya, playing catch-up with several other vendors, has rolled out a mobile UC app for Android devices, enabling SMEs to access a set of unified communications capabilities. The company said it plans to release an iPhone app in early 2012.

The app for Avaya's IP Office 8.0, one-X Mobile Preferred for IP Office, allows users full conference management through their mobile device, including the ability to invite, view, mute and drop participants during a conference call.

The app lets users display their availability and show specific times of availability based on a user's Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Outlook calendar.

The app also includes instant messaging, a geopresence display that lets users display their location and visual voicemail.

One-X Mobile Preferred for IP Office builds on Avaya's existing Essential Mobility solution for IP Office, which extends voice capabilities such as one number access and call control. Already available on Symbian, Windows Mobile and iPhones, Essential Mobility will be available for Android and Blackberry devices in first quarter of 2012.

Avaya is the latest in a string of vendors to announce mobile platforms for their technologies, especially to Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s iPad and iPhone and to a variety of devices running oin Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s Android OS.

Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM), Radvision (Nasdaq; RVSN), ShoreTel (Nasdaq: SHOR), Vidyo and others already have apps on the market for Apple and Android.

The mobile segment is seen as a potential boon market as 37 percent of the world's workforce, about 1.3 million people, is expected to be mobile by 2015, new research finds.

For more:
- see this release

“ShoreTel investing for growth” says UK boss

2012-01-18T16:36:00.001-05:00

By Will Garside, Channel Pro

New pan-European distie on the cards for ShoreTel with plans to double channel

Although ranked sixth in the overall enterprise voice market share, UC vendor ShoreTel(NASDAQ:SHOR) claims it is profitable, agile and ready to offer VARs a viable competitor to entrenched market leaders Cisco(NASDAQ:CSCO) and Avaya.

According to ShoreTel's UK MD, Adrian Hipkiss (pictured), the UK arm is making money and ploughing it straight back into the channel and is keen to invest in joint activities. The firm hopes to double the size of its channel over the next year. “We are not going to do anything that will cause a red flag for our channel or [potential] customers,” explains Hipkiss.

The firm currently has around a 100 active partners in a three tier channel served by distributors ScanSource, Avnet and Cohort. Hipkiss confirms it is also looking for a pan-European distributor to complement the existing set-up, but stated there are no plans to drop any existing distie.

ShoreTel offers IP phone systems with integrated unified communications. The distributed architecture offers self contained appliances that can scale as a cluster to provide more capacity and to add redundancy. Although primary an on-site sale, several UK partners are offering the systems as a hosted service.

Hipkiss’ comments dovetail a new survey from analyst Aberdeen Group, which claims the firm’s technology is the easiest to set-up with customers experiencing a 67 percent savings in internal implementation cost per phone when compared to Avaya Aura Communication Manager. The survey of 236 different businesses also found that in terms of system administration, ShoreTe’s system cost 77 percent less to manage than Cisco's Unified Communications Manager.

Hipkiss joined ShoreTel in October 2011 following long stints at Vodafone, Cable & Wireless and as an account director at Avaya. In his view, 2012 is likely to be a tough year for enterprise communication vendors who have that failed to innovate in line with the expectation of a more knowledgeable partner and customer community.

In the frame are firms like Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE:ALU), which saw most of its divisions drop revenue during the third quarter of 2011 with its wireline and network application divisions seeing sales decrease by more than 20 percent.

Customers are prepared to look for something new, claims Hipkiss: “[The channel] needs to really understand what is in for the end customer,” he says, pointing out cases where customers upgrading from rival products two versions back can find that an entire ShoreTel equivalent is often less than the incumbent’s upgraded license costs.

ShoreTel Reinforces Commitment to Resellers with Program and Systems Enhancements

2012-01-18T16:34:00.000-05:00

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ShoreTel Inc. (NASDAQ:SHOR), the leading provider of brilliantly simpleIP phone systems with fully integrated unified communications (UC), today announced Certification Central, a new learning management training system associated with ShoreTel University; an updated reseller dashboard, a critical partner relationship management tool; and a revitalized store for resellers, for quick and easy access to print-on-demand ShoreTel collateral and other demand creation tools – all available internationally. Mirroring the brilliant simplicity of its Champion Partner Program, ShoreTel strives to provide resellers with easy-to-use tools that support a successful business relationship, while delivering some of the best product and service margins in the industry.

These updates made to the Champion Partner Program are specifically for the benefit of the reseller community. ShoreTel relies on an outstanding network of channel reseller partners to deliver end-to-end solutions that produce a competitive advantage for customers. To learn more about becoming a ShoreTel certified reseller, visithttp://www.shoretel.com/partners/resellers.

ShoreTel University Certification Central

ShoreTel’s new Learning Management System, now known as Certification Central, has been revamped to provide easy-to-manage tracking of courses, certificates and calendars to provide a higher level of service to the reseller. These changes have made managing certification requirements for ShoreTel’s brilliantly simple Champion Partner Program even easier.

ShoreTel’s ongoing dedication to training enables resellers and customers to learn via the method that best fits an organization’s individual needs – whether that’s classroom, Web or self-paced training. Every certification class is available in person and online – giving both resellers and customers access to training-on-demand or in-person. Additionally, training “labs” can be accessed remotely, so participants can experience real-life scenarios without needing their own equipment.

Champion Partner Dashboard for Resellers

The enhanced reseller dashboard continues the company’s tradition of making it easy for resellers to do business with ShoreTel and provides comprehensive benefits not found with most other vendors. The dashboard is a one-stop-shop for reseller partners to instantly take a pulse on their business. Summarizing a reseller’s current status and key partner metrics, the all-in-one dashboard reflects the requirements achieved for the present Champion Partner tier and highlights any gaps. The dashboard also provides daily updates for resellers to view and analyze their total ShoreTel business, customer satisfaction, TAC utilization, certified resources and details of their customer support contracts.

Reseller Store Updates

Accessible from the website dedicated to resellers and their customized dashboard, resellers can easily co-brand collateral – such as brochures, reference guides, solution briefs and product specification sheets – in just a few simple steps. Customization is completely free to resellers and can be locally printed and delivered by ShoreTel’s vendor, for ultimate ease and convenience. It’s a one-stop-shop to building a successful demand creation activity — whether lunch-and-learn, trade show or customer appreciation event.

More at www.shoretel.com

Nortel/Avaya BCM 50 and BCM 450 lives on…it is not dead yet!!

2012-01-16T15:10:00.004-05:00

The irony is ‘ it isn’t over till it’s over”. In our opinion and some of our customers this is very good news. Avaya has decided to extend the March 1 deadline of the end-of-sale of the BCM product line (bcm50 and BCM450) lives on. Avaya announced yesterday Jan 10, 2012 that it intends to extend the sale of the BCM 50 and BCM450 until October 1, 2012.

At this point in time, the product is still slated for support until March 1, 2018 at which time Avaya will not continue the life of the BCM product line and all its support. The current BCM system is BCM 50 and BCM 450 version 6.0 and customers should consider upgrading their older versions to release 6.0 or look at upgrading to the Avaya IP Office 8.0.

But we are not surprised there are many companies are considering their options and many company that are very happy with their BCM system and are willing to keep them running till they can. This announcement will allow customer the ability breathe easier for now. Greated that some of the Avaya dealers that are strictly focused on IPO are not going to be happy with this diction but this is good for the all customers should win avaya some points out there. Personally from our customers view point there is nothing wrong with this News and that is way we fell this is good new.

Contrary to all the press and industry gossip Avaya still has demand for this product. The BCM platform is a good and instable solution that delivered a variety of digital and IP features and functionality in a cost-effective manner.

TRC is committed to support our customers as well as the AVAYA/Nortel BCM 50 and The BCM 400 and BCM 450 and the Avaya IP Office.

Criminal fraud trial of three ex-Nortel executives begins

2012-01-11T15:38:00.001-05:00

By Michael Lewis, Business Reporter, http://www.thestar.com

One of the most spectacular flameouts in corporate history will be on the docket this week when pre-trial motions begin into criminal charges against former executives at Nortel Networks Corp.

Justice Frank Marrocco is scheduled to preside Thursday over motions, including those by the defence, in an open-court hearing at the Superior Court of Justice of Ontario. A trial before the justice is to begin in Toronto on Jan.16.

The RCMP charges allege that the defendants, including ex-Nortel chief executive Frank Dunn, engineered an elaborate accounting fraud to mask falling Nortel sales after the technology stock bubble popped in the spring of 2000.

Prosecutors say the scheme cost the Toronto company’s shareholders billions and contributed to the demise of the once-high flying Bell Canada equipment arm, with Nortel now being wound up under creditor protection.

“It’s the biggest (financial scandal) in Canada, one of the biggest in the world,” Rotman School of Management financial analysis professor Ramy Elitzur told the Star in 2008.

The criminal matter is to commence nearly four years after the RCMP charged Dunn, former chief financial officer Douglas Beatty and former controller Michael Gollogly with seven counts each.

Charges include two counts of fraud affecting a public market, two counts of falsifying books and documents and three counts of issuing a materially wrong prospectus.

If convicted, the maximum sentences are 14 years for fraud affecting markets, five years for falsifying accounts and 10 years for filing a false prospectus. Nortel fired the three executives “for cause” in 2004.

“We are confident that the evidence will demonstrate that Mr. Dunn acted honestly and diligently in the interests of Nortel’s shareholders and employees at all times, and that he will be acquitted of these charges,” Dunn’s lawyer, David Porter, of Toronto law firm McCarthy Tétrault, said in a statement after the charges were announced. He declined comment Friday.

The long interval between the filing of charges and the trial reflects the volume of evidence assembled by Nortel, which says it was not targeted by investigators and is co-operating with authorities.

In 2009, the Crown said it had already delivered more than four million documents to the defendants, while the RCMP says it took more than 50 people sorting through electronic data to assemble the case.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2007 filed civil charges against former Nortel executives including Dunn, Beatty, Gollogly and a former vice-president of corporate reporting, MaryAnne Pahapill.

The SEC alleges the former Nortel executives concocted a scheme to improperly book sales and manipulate cash reserves in an effort to bump up Nortel financial results to meet Wall Street expectations and trigger bonus payouts.

“The fraudulent conduct at issue here was egregious and long-running,” said Linda Thomsen, director of the commission’s Division of Enforcement.

“The action sends a strong message that officers of U.S.-filing foreign corporations will be held to the same standards of accountability that are required of all participants in the U.S. financial markets.”

Nortel emerged in the late 1990s as a world leader in the optical networking technology used by countless telephony and dot-com ventures.

It went on an unprecedented buying spree, using its stock, which peaked at $124.50, to acquire a series of in-process research companies that culminated in record-breaking goodwill charges against Nortel.

When the dot-coms, fuelled by abundant venture capital, failed to deliver sales and profits, the speculative stock bubble burst, sending the tech-weighted Nasdaq index into a tailspin that wiped more than $300 billion from investors’ portfolios.

Nortel’s Internet and telephone networking companies slashed orders and Nortel’s share price and profits plunged.

The company responded with sweeping leadership changes, shed more than 60,000 employees and retreated to its core business.

Nortel appeared to return to profitability under Dunn until March 2004, when the company said it would delay filing audited financial statements for the preceding year.

That warning turned out to be a prelude to a series of financial restatements that led to an Ontario Securities Commission settlement with the company that saw Nortel pay $1 million and prompted a criminal investigation by the RCMP.

UC Has to Plan For the World That Is

2012-01-03T16:24:00.000-05:00

By Michael F. Finneran http://www.ucstrategies.com

The political season is upon us, and I’m always struck by the contrast between the world our politicians are talking about and the one we live in. The candidates seem to cling to this persistent delusion that we are still living in the 1950s. In those halcyon days, the US was the only developed economy not decimated by the Second World War, the GIs were back home and starting families, and the population held the deep-seated belief that we could lick the world – hey, we just had! The US embarked a growth phase that spurred a rise in the standard of living the likes of which we’ll likely never see again.

Our politicians are now taking the stage to call for a return to the days when our economy produced those “good middle class jobs” that came with security, pensions, and health care benefits. While we’d all like to see that future for our kids, I’m afraid that type of existence is going to be the exception rather than the rule. Sure if you’re coming out of Wharton or Stamford at the top of your class in a field with strong growth prospects, you can still pretty much write your own ticket. However, that is not the prospect most young people are going to face.

When I work with clients, the last thing they want to hear is we want to add full-time employees (“FTEs” for short) because that means commitment and benefits costs. Large companies now routinely maintain “extended” workforces using temporary workers who they pay on 1099s (i.e. no withholding) and for whom they provide no benefits. Not that I can blame them however, I run my own business and I know how expensive health insurance and other traditional benefits really are.

Hence the dilemma our recent college grads are encountering. When I got out of college there were plenty of entry-level office jobs with benefits (even for English majors!), and most of us made our way painlessly into the workforce. Of course, those of us who wound up in IT (or “MIS” as we called it back then) spent the rest of our careers “automating” those jobs out of existence or coming up with tricks like low-cost VoIP services so we could send them overseas. I do feel partially responsible for the difficulties my son’s generation is now facing.

I for one do not hold that the American economy is on its last legs or that Americans are pampered or lazy. If anything, we’re the exact opposite, and that is seen even more strongly in our recent immigrants. Rather, we are witnessing is a major transition to a new type of economy where more workers will have to take greater responsibility for themselves rather than depending on a big company to do it for them.

A “career” for many will increasingly involve working part time for a number of different companies and developing an expanding set of skills as you go. That also means learning to save for those months when all of your opportunities tank simultaneously, remembering to budget for things like health insurance, retirement savings, vacation time, and for continuous retraining to ensure you to have skills that are relevant to the needs of the market.

I don’t hear any of our politicians talking about that type of workforce, but that’s exactly what I’m encountering. Even though I started in the “big company” motif (ITT and AT&T), I’ve managed to run a fairly successful consulting practice for over 30-years, and have managed to keep pushing my expertise in areas that I saw as growing. Well, I did take a bet on ISDN some years back, but fortunately it was one of a few things I was pursing at the time and most of the others paid off.

The big question is, “What will this mean to UC?” This new workforce and this new type of work will absolutely require the types of flexible communication and collaboration tools that UC puts on the table. Probably the most obvious requirement will be federation. In an environment where “many of the people who work here don’t work here,” they will all need access to the same set of tools and capabilities to get the job done. The question is will those tools be the big company variety pushed by the Cisco’s and Microsoft’s, or more consumer-oriented versions from Skype, Facebook, and Google?

Clearly we have already seen the move toward comsumerization in the mobility space, and now the big company types are bringing these tools into the large enterprise. It also means that part of the skill set this new workforce will require is the expertise in using WebEx (or Lync, or SharePoint, or whatever) effectively.

Management skills will have to adapt as well. A command-and-control mentality will simply mean that the best available people find their way to other opportunities that allow them to grow and prosper without having some ogre breathing down their necks. “Management”, at least management of skilled resources, will be a matter of agreeing on objectives, deliverables and timeframes, and then getting out of the way unless further assistance is sought. These UC tools, particularly those that foster communications and collaboration will be key, as will mobility elements that allow talented people to do the best job in the most flexible manner.

For “people of a certain age” this type of reordering of work is a scary prospect. However, to prosper in this new environment people are going to have to change their expectations and learn to thrive in it. Getting nostalgic about the past is not going to bring it back, and frankly there was a lot about the 1950s that wasn’t that much fun. So as you listen to the politicians wax eloquent about “good jobs for hard working Americans,” try to keep reality in focus. I love “It’s a Wonderful World” as much as the next guy, and it remains a wonderful though changing world – it’s just not starring Jimmy Stewart!

Happy New Year

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of 2011

2012-01-03T16:22:00.001-05:00

It's that time of the year for both a look back at 2011 and a look ahead at 2012. Here's my personal list of the Telecommunications Industry's Good, Bad and Ugly:

The Good

Unified Communications has finally hit critical mass this year. As evidence, 2011 marked the one year anniversary for Microsoft Lync, scoring some significant customer wins. Avaya, Cisco, Shoretel, IBM and other vendors are seeing the conversation change from "if" to "when" Unified Communications is adopted in businesses. UC and it's transformational change in communications has made a significant impact here at AudioCodes and created some great business opportunities across the equipment maker and software supplier ecosystem. While at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we saw a fantastic commitment to Lync from Microsoft and strong interest from the partner community.

SIP Trunking has also started to gain real traction in the market this last year. Through most of 2009 and 2010, we did a lot of talking and education on SIP Trunking, but the market penetration was pretty slim. In 2011 we finally started to see real progress in SIP Trunking implementations and successful customer case studies.

The Bad

Rebuilding Silos - Avaya's decision to implement licensing fees for Session Manager "sessions" that connect to non-Avaya devices has put a serious damper on the concept of "open SIP" solutions and effectively killed future growth of their DevConnect program. The licensing fee puts third party devices at a serious pricing disadvantage vs. Avaya sold devices - essentially creating a closed platform based on SIP (an open protocol). We kiddingly call the change "The Avaya DevDisconnect" program. It worries me that other vendors will take the same path - choosing to create significant hurdles that would prevent integration of other third-party devices on their communications applications. Such a move seems like a 180 degree turn around, heading back to the vertical silos of the last decade.

In a possibly related change, Avaya also pulled the plug on the SIPcenter, squelching a regular and informative venue for information about SIP products and technologies - I hope someone steps forward and fills the gap.

The Ugly

I was once again reminded what life would be like without market competition in a personal billingdispute with DirecTV this summer. I'm sure you don't want to hear the details, but let's just leave it at "I'll never do business with DirecTV again". With limited options for television service in rural locations, I can only imagine what would happen if there was no market pressure from competitive satellite provider DishNetwork. Similarly, I was glad to see that the Justice Department put the brakes on the merger of AT&T and Tmobile - choice and competition is good and the only leverage consumers have over near-monopolies.

A Look Ahead at 2012:

Unified Communications and Peering/Federation - now that UC has hit critical mass, there is significant productivity and cost savings motivation to implement peering or federation between businesses. The rewards of HD calls, IM, presence and desktop sharing far outweigh the complexity of implementation. UC Federation has a social "viral" effect that will push businesses to make the jump to UC or be left out. The productivity change is dramatic, very similar to the broad adoption of inter-company email back in the early 1990's (which was often scorned as too risky and expensive). Can you imagine doing business without email? I lived it - it was not fun.

Cloud Communications - watch for one of the big on-line retailers to launch their cloud-based communications suites - targeted at the SMB/SME markets. A huge boon for the small business owner - a few clicks on a web site will get full UC-enabled communications without the data center infrastructure needed by large businesses and enterprises.

Decline of the Desk Phone - you've heard me flip-flop on this issue a couple times, but until I personally pulled the plug myself this year, I didn't believe people could live without a dedicated desktop device. After our Lync upgrade and a new DECT wireless headset, I gave my desk phone a good six months to prove that it deserved the square foot of desk space. At the end of the six months I could count the number of times I used it on one hand. Back in the box it went.

Economic Recovery - this time for real. The housing collapse has taken it's toll, the Euro markets will get untangled, and with one less war to fight, we can start to focus on our domestic economic health. Watch for a tempered, but moderate improvement in the markets, jobs and opinion polls. This will surely make the 2012 presidential race a close one - a race too close to call this early.

With that, I'd like to also share my appreciation for those of you that take the time to read and respond to "The SIP INVITE". I look forward to another year and hope you have a safe and happy New Year.

Source: http://blog.tmcnet.com/sip-invite/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-2011.html

Collaboration in High Performance Organizations

2012-01-03T16:18:00.001-05:00

By Bob Preston http://collaborationbenefits.blogspot.com

It is fair to say that voice, video conference, content sharing, and telepresence collaboration solutions can be utilized throughout any organization for a variety of purposes, even as recently show on the Simpsons! (note Polycom SoundStation conference phone on the table). Furthermore, the way in which such tools are used (the application in a business process) can be quite different depending on the functional department or line of business (LOB) in which collaboration solutions are being implemented. In working with customers and partners through my position at Polycom I see several key areas in which collaboration is utilized to improve productivity and efficiencies within high performance organizations.

Corporate Communications

Whether it is a CEO giving a State of the Company address, a sales manager announcing quarterly incentive results or an HR director sharing the latest benefit enrollment package, collaboration solutions help break down the distance barrier by allowing the free flow of information. Important company announcements and information can be distributed more frequently and on demand to anywhere in the world. HD voice solutions make audio communications crisp and clear. Video communications and telepresence can enhance voice-only calls by providing a visual connection with the audience. Planning time and costs are reduced, comprehension is increased and information dissemination is easily coordinated. Live streaming and recording options can ensure an even more widespread communications reach.

Distance Learning and Training

The innovative use of collaboration solutions as training vehicles allow information dissemination to dispersed audiences regardless of location, thereby enabling employees, channel partners, franchises and suppliers to benefit from a quality learning environment without geographical boundaries. A virtual training classroom allows organizations large and small to quickly and easily share the latest corporate strategies, product information or market intelligence. Sessions can be archived and replayed by video streaming for on demand learning so students or new hires can attend courses at their convenience. Costs are decreased, relationships are strengthened, and geographical boundaries become insignificant.

Project Management

Any type of project – marketing launches, IT implementation, product roll outs or sales seminars – require steps that involve a high degree of collaboration between teammates. From material preparation to schedule coordination to implementation, collaboration solutions provide a more streamlined process for project management. In a new product launch, for example, steps might include product definition, design and testing, product release and life cycle management. Through the use of voice, video, content sharing and telepresence collaboration solutions, marketing teams and engineers worldwide can collaborate on product ideas... engineers can hold calls daily to expedite product design as effectively as in-person meetings... launch plan coordination is simplified and product information updates can be disseminated to the field instantly with increased comprehension on the receiving end.

Interviewing and RecruitingMy favorite application for collaboration tools and solutions is in the process of hiring and building a team. I have personally recruited, interviewed, and hired a number of my staff members by video conference without ever leaving the convenience of my office or putting the new recruits on a plane to HQ. Hiring the right candidate for the job is key in any organization but geographical boundaries, time-constraints and travel-cost limitations can impact the ability to find the most qualified candidates and get them hired quickly. The hiring process in most organizations takes on average three months as finding the right candidate for the job is a complex matter. Just think about the steps: job requisition development, posting, resume search and referrals, initial qualification interviews, face-to-face interviews, follow-up interviews with individuals in different locations, reference checks and then the delicate negotiation and acceptance phase. Collaboration tools shorten the interview process, reduce travel costs, eliminate geographic barriers and simplify scheduling, while maintaining critical face time.

By integrating voice, video, content, and telepresence collaboration solutions into business processes and work flows, all types of organizations can reduce costs, enhance organizational efficiency, improve employee quality of life and satisfaction, and improve company productivity. Efficient work flows + improved communications = competitive advantage.

Enable the Avaya Collaborative Cloud for your Enterprise

2012-01-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

By Jon Alperin | 2 Jan 2012

Most enterprises are looking at ways to reduce cost and improve time-to-service. Most are also looking for ways to improve the operational efficiency of the data center. Wouldn't it be nice if you could deploy a new application across multiple data centers in an instant? Wouldn't it be nice if we could allow IT the ability to simply say "yes' when there is a new application or service needing to be deployed on the network?

The 2012 Avaya Technology Forum (February 6-9, 2012, Orlando, FL) will answer these questions, show you how to simplify your network, and showcase the brightest and the best technologies Avaya has to offer. The 3-day event features subject matter experts from Avaya providing insight on solutions that will move enterprises into the next generation of collaboration by building the Cloud-grade network infrastructure. Come join us for Avaya presentations, demonstrations from key DevConnect technology partners, and insight from industry analyst perspectives.

Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) is our exciting new virtualization strategy for the next generation enterprise data networks. It is the infrastructure that will allow enterprises to build the private cloud and an architecture that is easily extensible from the data center to the campus and beyond. We believe that enterprise customers will see an immediate benefit by creating a virtualized data center backbone, making operations more efficient and allowing a better and tighter integration between application and network virtualization.

The Avaya Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture is empowered by its ability to integrate multiple different types of networks running across the virtual services fabric. These virtual service networks could be anything from business applications to unified communications, next generation collaboration, storage computing or some disruptive technology that doesn't yet exist but will have to be dealt with in the future.

These virtual networks can be created in seconds with single touch provisioning. We are able to build, create and configure the network core one time, and never have to touch it again. This reduces the human error factor, and makes it very easy and very quick from a time-to-service standpoint.

The next generation of network virtualization will make networks much more dynamic than they are today; you will create the infrastructure once and simply enable networks at the edge without the need to continually make modifications to core. These virtual service networks can be transparently extended within a data center or between data centers.

A critical factor in Avaya's VENA is the manner in which the network will migrate from where it is today into this truly dynamic infrastructure of the future. The Virtual Services Fabric can be enabled in parallel with all other protocols presently in use on the network. No need to change physical connections, no need to change existing configurations. You can migrate existing services into the fabric at your pace in the most non-disruptive manner possible.

With the Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture, Avaya is improving network uptime by delivering the infrastructure that creates the private cloud and nearly eliminate user-error network outages. We are reducing the time to service with simple one touch provisioning and we are improving the data center efficiency with a tighter integration between applications and network virtualization. We are reliably connecting users and content, with the lowest Total Cost of Ownership in the industry.

Bottom line... With an Avaya data network, every dollar you spend helps you get more IT work done.

Videoconferencing In 2012: Gaining Speed

2011-12-29T15:11:00.003-05:00

Unified communications will become essential to business, thanks to gains in business continuity and productivity it brings.

By Robert Mullins Informationweek

Videoconferencing is great for getting people in different time zones to communicate in real time, often on short notice to save the time and expense involved in travel. However, as unified communications, including videoconferencing, grows, businesses will find other value in the technology, too.

"The value of unified communications will move from ROI to business continuity and productivity. It's no longer about the ROI of videoconferencing versus travel. The business still has to run," said Andy Miller, CEO of Polycom, speaking to reporters and industry analysts in San Francisco recently.

To be sure, the return on investment is proven by the fact that people don't have to buy an airplane ticket and spend a day traveling just to meet someone in person. Travel avoidance also reduces the corporate carbon footprint. But, Miller said, videoconferencing on systems such as Polycom's means business is not interrupted by SARS outbreaks, post-9/11 airport security, or volcanic ash clouds.

"There is this increasing awareness that companies need to have emergency backup plans in terms of how they can contact their employees and maintain their operations in the event of weather or other disasters," said Bob O'Donnell, a VP at research firm IDC.

[ In this age of IT consumerization, dedicated, centrally managed enterprise voice infrastructure is inconsequential. Learn more about UC In The Smartphone Era. ]

O'Donnell also cited the volcanic eruption in Iceland last year, in which ash drifted over Western Europe, grounding flights, as an example of a sudden turn of events that interrupts business. He also cited the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the tornado that devastated Joplin, Mo., this year as other examples.

"Something like video communications allows people to maintain a very close tie with colleagues and other coworkers, so that's recognized as having a real value to people," he said.

IDC forecasts revenue from unified communications and collaboration technology to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 18.3% to $44 billion by 2015, up from $19 billion in 2010.

Biotechnology firm Genentech is a big user of videoconferencing, especially following its acquisition by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche in 2008, where it went from being a company of 12,000 employees to a company of 86,000 employees.

"People don't want to get on a plane anymore," said David Smith, an infrastructure engineer for Genentech in North America.

Today, Roche, with Genentech, has 600 videoconference rooms, 80% of which are high-definition-ready, and the company issued 17,000 Apple iPad 2s to employees to enable videoconferencing when workers are mobile, Smith said. Rooms are typically busiest between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, so that workers in California can videoconference with colleagues who are at the end of their workday in Switzerland.

While videoconferencing and other use of UC tools will continue to grow, O'Donnell says there are still issues of interoperability that will have to be addressed so that systems from Polycom, Cisco Systems, LifeSize, ShoreTel--or infrastructure vendors such as Vidyo--can communicate with each other. There is some use of common standards, and Polycom often touts its lead role in the Open Visual Communications Consortium, a standards body. But interconnecting systems often requires the services of someone from the IT department to make it work, and the idea behind improving the user experience with unified communications is that it's so simple that anyone can set up a videoconference without bothering the IT staff.

Avaya IP Office Release 8.0 Overvew

2011-12-23T12:54:00.002-05:00

Avaya IP Office 8.0 has full backwards compatibility with Nortel BCM and includes a robust set of tools for administration (Manager), call tracking (SMDR), system monitoring and diagnostics (System Status Application). It has an ability for users to manage their own calls is supplied through a simple GUI (Phone Manager). Phone Manager functionality can be enhanced through simple licensing and to support IP softphones. Avaya IP Office Version 8.0 will also help extend the deskphone/desktop UC feature set out to the mobile environment while you are on the go. IP Office Release 8.0 has advanced IP-based features such as built-in ACD, built-in conference bridges, and the systems are very modular and scalable. It also has web-based UC features - presence, IM, conferencing, federated contact lists, voicemail and more that can be integrated into Outlook Express.

Learn more about Avaya IP Office 8

Videoconferencing goes down market

2011-12-22T13:32:00.000-05:00

21 December 2011Videoconferencing is expanding into cloud-based services and inexpensive endpoints such as PCs. Tim Kridel explores whether that trend is a problem or an opportunity for AV integrators.

Every revolution has its martyrs. Avoiding that fate often requires giving up longheld beliefs and changing with the times. The videoconferencing market is a case in point. With the arrival of apps – such as Polycom’s Telepresence m500 – that turn smartphones and tablets into endpoints, the declining cost of large displays and the proliferation of desktop solutions, videoconferencing no longer is something that’s the exclusive domain of executives in boardrooms.

“The cost of videoconferencing at the endpoint has just fallen off the scale,” says Dominic Dodd, a Frost & Sullivan principal analyst who tracks the unified communications (UC) and collaboration markets.

“It used to be around $200 for a software package like Polycom PBX or a Cisco/Tandberg Movi software client. [It’s gone] down to virtually nothing once the video software client is bundled in with the UC client on the desktop.”

The declining cost of endpoint hardware and software – including videoconferencing solutions that let enterprises re-use their existing PCs – is affecting the infrastructure side of the market, too. Not every organisation can afford to spend five or six figures on infrastructure such as bridges, especially not small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), which have been largely under-served in the videoconferencing space. Those up-front costs help create an opportunity for cloud-based videoconferencing services, where a third party hosts the infrastructure in exchange for a monthly fee. In the process, cloud services are opening the videoconferencing market – not just to more users, but also to more non-AV companies, such as IT integrators.

“We see companies very interested in adding AV communication solutions to their current IP networks,” says Victoria Myers, director of operations and cofounder of Myers Network Solutions, which provides IT services in the San Francisco Bay area.

“Previously the sticking point was the big-gulp up-front cost of the infrastructure. With cloud-based, product-agnostic solutions, a number of our clients – financial advisors, higher education, consulting services and companies with regional offices – are jumping to add AV communication solutions.”

Is anybody really using them?

Despite the growing number of vendors offering cloud-based and desktop-centric videoconferencing solutions, there’s ample scepticism about exactly how widely they’re being deployed.

“I accept that vendors are launching products into this space, but we are not seeing customers buying them,” says Ian Vickerage, managing director of Imago Group, a European distributor.

“That’s without mentioning the many failed attempts with videophones. So far – and I hope this changes – these are products looking for an application, in my opinion.”

“The vendors are pushing them, and there are some folks that are probably making the wholesale change,” counters Scott Christianson, owner of Kaleidoscope Videoconferencing, a U.S.-based integrator.

Limited deployments

However, what Christianson is seeing more of is a mixture of solutions. “They might integrate their videoconferencing (room and desktop) and VoIP systems via SIP for conferencing, but use OCS for chat,” he says.

“I think that a lot of the market is really in play. I think that if Google wanted to make a play for this business, you could have a viable cloud-based solution. If you use Google Plus or iGoogle, you already have integrated presence information, chat, voice communications, video communications, email, document sharing and probably other features.”

Some vendors and service providers acknowledge that adoption isn’t as widespread as the current product selection might suggest. “There’s not a lot of awareness yet because cloud services for videoconferencing are new, so it is a pretty significant barrier,” says Mariette Johnson Wharton, vice president of marketing at Vidtel, a U.S.-based provider of cloud-based videoconferencing services.

Raising awareness

"We see the need for solutions like this high, although the demand is a step behind as many SMBs don’t realise that there are cost-effective, high-quality solutions available to them," says Frank Picarello, COO at CMIT Solutions, a U.S.-based provider of managed IT services.

“Companies like CMIT [are] educating the SMBs on not only the advantageous price points and related technology, but also the business benefits in creating a visual collaboration environment."

Some vendors say another barrier to adoption is that enterprises often don't see a clear return on investment for desktop video calling and videoconferencing, regardless of whether it’s facilitated by the cloud or with premises-based infrastructure.

“It's only now starting to get interesting," says Bob Romano, Radvision vice president of enterprise marketing, who says he's been pushing desktop video for years.

"I think that’s because of the UC platforms [adding video], by the way, not because of the videoconferencing industry.”

The rise of cloud-based services

Slow as it might be, videoconferencing’s march down market already has implications for AV integrators. At first blush, declining endpoint costs might appear to be a major negative, especially in terms of margins. But cheaper endpoints also could expand the market for videoconferencing hardware and services. For example, relatively inexpensive endpoints could encourage large enterprises to expand their videoconferencing systems beyond conference rooms and executive offices.

That in turn could encourage them to spend more money on bridges and other infrastructure, or on cloud-based videoconferencing services. Many AV integrators have spent the past several years adding IT skills as more AV devices and services move onto IP networks. So those integrators also could make money by selling IT services such as network surveys and upgrades to enterprises that are expanding their videoconferencing systems.

At the very least, the ability to design and support videoconferencing over LANs, MANs and WANs is a must-have for AV integrators that don't want to lose business to IT integrators or even enterprise IT departments.

Meanwhile, cloud-based services offer AV integrators another revenue opportunity. For example, Vidtel is looking to use AV integrators – currently in North America but soon Europe, too – as sales channels for its MeetMe Video Conferencing Service. Another example is Cisco’s TelePresence Callway, which Cisco will host but rely on integrators and other partners to sell. For both integrators and their clients, part of cloud’s appeal is that it can streamline design and installation.

“A cloud-based solution like LifeSize Connections allows a small vendor like me to implement very large projects very quickly for new customers,” says Kaleidoscope’s Christianson.

“Say that I have a customer that wants 30 endpoints deployed around the U.S. and 120 desktop systems for his mobile workforce and wants them all to be able to conference via a schedule or ad hoc as they like. In a traditional installation, this would take a lot of planning, a lot of work to get the infrastructure up and running, a lot of bandwidth or need to co-locate some central equipment and a lot of time and training.

“With LifeSize Connections, I can have the mobile systems up and running immediately, using the firewall traversal, the MCU, presence server and IM client that are build into the service. The endpoints can be added as soon as I can get a tech on-site. And in this case, the entire deployment would be done by techs that just need to know how to hook up a codec and make a call.”

A scant few cloud-based services also are attractive for their ability to make a hodge-podge of platforms, services and endpoints work together. For example, Vidtel’s MeetMe Video Conferencing Service works not only with room-based systems and executive-suite desktop platforms from Cisco, LifeSize and Polycom, but also with Google Talk and Skype, including on tablets and smartphones.

MeetMe’s flexibility is designed to cater to the underserved SMB market, where it’s not uncommon to find those companies using Skype for video calling because that’s all they have the money, IT skills or both to implement. Cloud-based services could help integrators crack that market by attacking the pain points of complexity and affordability.

“What we hear from a lot of the AV integrators is that there’s only a certain number of companies that have an addressable market where they’re willing to spend a quarter of a million dollars or more,” says Scott Wharton, CEO of Vidtel.

“You hear a lot of people saying, ‘I wish I could have something better than Skype, but I can’t afford it.’ And even if they could afford it as equipment prices come down, it’s still too complicated.” Cloud services could be equally attractive at the other end of the market, among enterprises that already own pro-grade videoconferencing endpoints and infrastructure.

For example, Vidtel says MeetMe addresses interoperability problems between different vendor platforms, making them more practical for videoconferencing sessions where some participants are outside of the company and using another system. The service also makes it easier for those enterprises to conduct videoconferences with employees in the field who are using tablets, smartphones or laptops.

All of that newfound flexibility and interoperability could be a plus for AV integrators if it helps clients make a business case for spending more than they otherwise would have. Reselling or building cloud-based services might be the only way for integrators to make money if desktop solutions grow from the exception to the rule. Even if PC- and tablet-based solutions didn't exist, the upper half of the hardware and software field still would be declining in price and margins.

"Overall, I think that margins on hardware are drying up, and you have to be offering some service," says Kaleidoscope’s Christianson. "I have been spending a lot of time in the past two months starting an infrastructure-as-a-service company called VTCStream.com, in which we rent space on devices that will stream and record videoconferencing.

"It might cost $40,000 to get one of these devices up and running, and a small law firm with four videoconference units and a desire to record three events a month can't justify it. But they can justify $350 a month for my service. It is selling well so far, and we are doing a lot of work with other resellers to allow them to resell our services."

Despite all of their potential benefits for integrators and enterprises alike, cloud and other down-market solutions don’t spell the end for expensive, roombased systems or big, immersive executive-desktop products. A law firm, for example, might still shell out for those kinds of solutions. “But they’ll probably say, ‘I don’t want to have to put in the MCU, gateways, firewall traversal servers and everything else,’" says Radvision's Romano. “They’ll buy that from the cloud.

"I think that a lot of the savvy AV integrators that have been reselling videoconferencing are looking at this and saying, ‘Maybe I can stand up a service here,’ because a lot of the AV guys are providing managed services now. So it’s not that hard for them to say, ‘I could probably put up a hosted service and be able to provide some of these conferencing services to the customer.’ I think they still play in the game."

Avaya Night in Canada - IP Office 8.0 Update

2011-12-19T16:37:00.001-05:00

By: JON ARNOLD

I was invited to attend an update here in Toronto yesterday on Avaya's IP Office, which inluded a preview for Release 8.0, scheduled to launch on December 12. Lots of Avaya folks on hand, along with the sponsors, Smart IP. They're one of Avaya's top 10 Canadian reseller partners, and having started out as a Nortel shop, they know the territory pretty well.

Oh - Canadians will clue into the title of this post right away - more on that later.

This was a pitch event to prospective IP Office customers, and being the only analyst, it gave me a pretty interesting perspective on how the story is told and how the value proposition is communicated. Release 8.0 is targeted at the SME market, and serves up to 384 lines. So, there will be some small business here, but it's really mid-sized customers, meaning that they'll have some IT competence. In other words, this is strictly about premise-based systems - there was absolutely no mention here of cloud, hosted or virtual solutions.

If you didn't pay close attention, you would think the focus was 100% about telecom. In many ways it was, as most of the presentation materials covered the feature set of the phones, and how Release 8.0 has full backwards compatibility with Nortel BCM. Fair enough - that's a very important message to communicate, given the huge installed base of Nortel in Canada, and the need for Avaya to retain that business as they transition away from BCM. To that point, a key takeaway was an EOS date of March 1, 2012 (end of support)for Norstar/BCM - at that point, only Avaya products will be supported.

Getting beyond that, yes, there was talk about SIP trunking and unified communications, but not in a huge way. It was good to hear about advanced IP-based features such as built-in ACD, built-in conference bridges, and how modular and scalable the systems are. All good, but most of the talk was about how the BCM features are fully migrated to the Avaya phones. This is really important for long-time Nortel users, who don't have to think about the codes they use for routine things like call transfer, call forwarding, last number redial, DND, etc. They'll use the same codes with Avaya, which translates into faster/easier adoption, lower install costs and less need for retraining. I'd say they've done a great job here, and that speaks to the broader, more strategic message they have about investment protection for this migration.

Wearing my UC hat, this seems a bit dull, but it's a clear reminder that telephones still matter big time, and the phone system is still very much the heart and soul of most communications systems - certainly among this customer set. Most VARs still have telecom as the core offering, but we all know how things are changing.

This brings me to the fun stuff - one-X, and what 8.0 supports at the desktop and for mobility. Now we're getting closer to UC, and Smart IP has the right idea to help move their customers along with Avaya as a solution for both today and tomorrow. I'll be short here, but basically, one-X has an Outlook plug-in that brings all the web-based UC features - presence, IM, conferencing, federated contact lists, voicemail, etc. - into that interface. Avaya knows this is where end users spend most of their on-screen time, so this way they don't have to leave the Outlook page to do all these things. It's a great ease-of-use example, and speaks to the end user experience as a key value driver.

The other interesting one-X update is mobility integration. It's only available on the higher-end IP Office solutions, but it does all the things you'd expect when extending the deskphone/desktop UC feature set out to the mobile environment. This definitely plays well for a UC solution, but what really stood out for me is their choice of devices supported by one-X. They're launching with Android first, and that's what the demo was based on. Early next year, iPhone will added, but no firm plan is in place yet for RIM. Wow. I think that speak volumes, not just about mobility, but how handset trends are driving things. Two years ago, it would have been RIM and only RIM - and now, they're not even on the table. Incredible.

It was also nice to see them talk about DevConnect and their partner ecosystem who have developed a range of vertical applications - fax servers, appointment reminders, enhanced IVR, call reporting, call recording, CRM integration, etc. This isn't a leading value driver for IP Office, but it really helps prime customers to think beyond everyday telecom.

I could go on, but on the whole, I think Avaya is on the right track with 8.0, especially for the Nortel base. You also need to keep the audience in mind. You can only throw so many ideas out there, but the sale will ultimately be based on how comfortable the customer is in transitioning Nortel BCM over to Avaya IP Office. Collaboration was discussed a bit, and I don't think video was mentioned - same for Aura, social media or Flare - but that's totally fine. These things will come - and can only come once the customer buys into the IP Office story - and of course, Smart IP's competence to get them there.

Ok, now the title of this post starts to make sense. This is Joe Bowen - the voice of the Toronto Maple Leafs. He was very engaging and funny - thought he was great. Joe speaks from the heart and what I enjoyed most were his feelings about how hockey and its culture are rooted in the character that makes Canada special. I've played and avidly followed the game long enough to know where he's coming from. I may not be a Leafs fan, but I found it a bit ironic to hear Joe extol the Canadian virtues that make hockey great, yet here we were listening to how Avaya is transitioning customers away from Nortel, Canada's greatest tech icon. Ouch.

Here we are - Avaya Night in Canada - cool, huh? Gondola seats - can't get up any higher than this at the ACC. Thanks Avaya and Smart IP!

Love seeing these Cup banners right in your face sitting up so high. Oh, y'know, there once was a time when this happened regularly around here (I'll keep my reigning-Cup-champs-Bruins gloating to myself), but I think the wait will go on for a while yet...

Originally posted on Jon Arnold's Analyst 2.0 Blog

Avaya says 'Every enterprise has a comm solution from us'

2011-12-16T16:20:00.002-05:00

BANGALORE, INDA: Avaya, a provider of enterprise communications systems, is one of the key players in the unified communications, contact centers, and related services segment.

The company has largely been focusing on the burgeoning SME sector to grow its business and has succeeded in its attempt by winning thousands of customers across the country.

In an interaction with CIOL, Adil Doctor, Avaya's director, SMB Sales (India), talks about its business, future plans and growth strategy.

1. What are Avaya's solutions for SMEs?

Doctor: Avaya is one of the major players that provide software as well as hardware solutions to leading businesses and organizations around the world. Enterprises of all sizes depend on Avaya for state-of-the-art communications that improve efficiency, aid collaboration, customer service and enhance competitiveness.

We have IP Office, PARTNER Advanced Communications System (ACS) and Software Communication System for the SMEs from across the globe.

Built ground up specifically for SMEs, IP Office delivers the communications capabilities big businesses are used to, with the elegant simplicity and ease of use small businesses consider a must have. This phone system helps growing enterprises differentiate themselves from competitors through enhanced employee productivity, lower costs, and improved customer service.

We have three versions of IP Office – Essential Edition, Preferred Edition and Advanced Edition – to meet the distinct needs of SMEs.

Essential Edition helps businesses to keep costs down and still get the key communications capabilities, while Preferred Edition enables to gain 10 times the voice messaging capacity of Essential Edition and handle dozens of calls simultaneously.

The Advanced Edition helps maximize productivity and efficiencies in customer service.

The PARTNER ACS is a small business phone system that provides the simplicity of traditional telephony with the advanced functionality of IP telephony. It supports five incoming lines and nine extensions with a maximum configuration of 21 lines and 44 extensions, or 31 lines and eight extensions.

It offers options that include caller ID, distinctive ringing, send all calls, speed dialing, and five-party conferencing. In addition to these productivity tools, the system also has a wide range of cost-control features. This platform is a converged small business phone system that is designed to help meet the complex business needs facing small enterprises today.

Then comes the Avaya Software Communication System that enables SMEs to deliver powerful unified communications applications to improve employee productivity, collaboration, and mobility – all while reducing communications costs.

Its functions include unified messaging, meet me conferencing, video conferencing, presence, IM, advanced softphones, personal auto attendant, find me/follow me capabilities, application integration with Microsoft and IBM, and more. Employees can control and customize their apps with just a few easy clicks.

CIOL: What are the different Unified Software Applications you offer to SMEs?

Doctor: We are a leader in the Unified Communications (UC) space in India. We have the following solutions which give an easy-to-use communication solution to the enterprises across the world.

Avaya Aura Conferencing: Avaya AuraConferencing enables real-time conferencing and collaboration, and eliminates the fees associated with externally provided conferencing.

Avaya one-X Communicator: This rich Unified Communications client provides users with simple, intuitive access to everyday communications tools.

Avaya one-X Mobile: This softphone client lets mobile users quickly connect to the right people, at the right time, through a broad choice of mobile devices.

Meeting Exchange: This in-house collaboration solution combines audio conferencing capabilities from Avaya with market-leading collaboration tools and video.

Mobility and End User Clients: This family of Avaya communications applications and collaboration tools gives users intuitive access to everyday communications that can help increase productivity.

Unified Messaging: The Avaya Unified Messaging platform provides call answering, voice messaging, and speech capabilities.

web.alive: Avaya web.alive is an online, 3D, immersive collaboration environment that lets you communicate with others as though you were face-to-face.

Source: CIOL Bureau

Avaya named Official Telecom Equipment Supplier for 2014 Olympic Games

2011-12-13T11:05:00.000-05:00

SOCHI, RUSSIA–(Marketwire – Nov 30, 2011) – Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, has been named by the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee as the official supplier of telecom equipment for the 2014 Olympic Games. The agreement was signed earlier today at the annual Sochi 2014 Marketing Club meeting headed by Dmitry Chernyshenko, President of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee, and David Johnson, Sponsorship & Key Event Executive Director, Avaya.

As the Official Supplier of Network Equipment to the Sochi 2014 Winter Games, Avaya will be a part of the overall Games technology solutions group. Avaya will provide network, collaboration and communications equipment and work with other technology partners to provide athletes, dignitaries and fans worldwide a full communications experience around the Olympic Games.

“During preparation for the Sochi Winter Games we will rely upon innovations and the use of advanced high-tech and innovative approaches. The partnership with Avaya is an excellent example. The development of state-of-the-art telecommunication solutions is one of the key challenges in the Games preparation. Avaya’s experience, scale and technology innovations assure us that this work will be performed according to the highest quality standards.” Dmitry Chernyshenko, President of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee

Avaya will provide the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee with all technology solutions and communication equipment required to create a single Games telecommunication infrastructure which will integrate the competition venues, press centers and the Olympic Village. The solution includes data transfer equipment, including switches, routers and information security systems, as well as communication equipment, such as telephone and contact center systems. Avaya experts will design and test the systems together with other Sochi 2014 technology partners.

“We are happy that the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee has included Avaya in the 2014 Games Vendor list. We are eager to use our experience, innovations and expertise to assist in the organization and management of this world-class Olympic event. We proved our capabilities and delivered the first converged ‘All IP’ network in Olympic Games history in Vancouver 2010, and now we will expand on this accomplishment to bring a new era of collaboration and innovation to the Olympic Games in 2014,” Joel Hackney, Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Marketing, and President, Field Operations, Avaya.

More at www.avaya.com

Survey: SME execs say business falls short in customer communications Read more: Survey: SME execs say business falls short in customer communication

2011-12-08T16:44:00.000-05:00

SMEs are struggling to respond in a timely fashion to the needs of customers, despite an overwhelming belief that communicating with customers quickly is one of the most important factors in developing business, according to a new study.

The research, a 700-person survey of senior managers in SME's across the United Kingdom and Germany by Avaya, found 68 percent see responsiveness as critical to their businesses success and 66 percent seeing communications as necessary to building customer relationship.

Despite that, more than four-in-five respondents cited dissatisfaction with their company's customer service, and more than half said they needed to improve general communications with their clients.

Avaya said the survey shows most SMEs are still struggling to build a cogent communications strategy.

Some 84 percent of respondents said they would support flexible scheduling for their employees, and more than half said that flexibility was a string recruiting and retention tool, both germane to developing solid customer service.

"It's interesting to see that such a vast majority (OF SMES) are prioritizing responsiveness, customer service and relationships above all else," said Michael Bayer, president of Avaya's EMEA division. "Yet, the findings also uncover the need for new ways of working and communicating to fill the gap between good intentions and reality. It's critical that businesses have the tools and solutions to communicate with and serve customers effectively."

For more:
- see this TelecomReseller UC Networks article

The ghost of Nortel continues to haunt Canada's tech sector

2011-12-05T16:34:00.001-05:00

By BARRIE MCKENNA | Columnist profile

Next month marks a grim anniversary in the annals of Canadian business.

Nortel Networks, the former flagship of the country’s high-tech industry, filed for bankruptcy protection on Jan. 14, 2009.

Three years on, the company’s spectacular flameout remains a potent symbol of the country’s failed innovation potential.

Generous tax credits and a government that embraced Nortel’s products weren’t enough to save the company.

Nortel is now dismembered. Its brainpower and intellectual property is spread around the world.

But the damage is still being felt – on employment, research activity and the vitality of Canada’s tech industry.

Canadian companies are still spending less on research and development than they did in 2007. The R&D budgets of the country’s 100 leading research spenders shrank by a combined $1-billion in 2010 from its 2009 level, dragged down by Nortel’s disappearance, according to Research Infosource Inc. It marked the fifth-straight year of declining R&D spending in this annual survey.

Nortel’s influence stretched far beyond the company’s own operations.

In 2007, the high-tech industry employed more than 70,000 people in the Ottawa area, once the hub of Nortel’s global operations. Today, there are fewer than 44,000, a drop of nearly 40 per cent.

A significant cluster of technology companies remains in the nation’s capital, many doing cutting-edge work. But they’re typically small, and increasingly foreign-owned – subsidiaries of larger players in a global industry.

The gutted shell of Nortel is winding its way through the bankruptcy process. In the summer, the company auctioned off a portfolio of 6,000 patents to Apple, Microsoft, Research In Motion and others for $4.5-billion in cash, marking the sale of its last significant batch of assets. The patents, many developed in Canada with generous government tax credits, covered everything from 4G wireless networks, Internet and voice technology to optical equipment and semiconductors.

What remains is a pile of cash left from the sale of these assets, tax losses and, interestingly, roughly $1-billion worth of unused R&D tax credits. With Nortel losing money before its collapse, the tax credits proved worthless.

Some of those tax credits, along with the loss carry-forwards, may eventually be used to offset taxes payable on the gains from asset sales. That could mean more money for creditors, including thousands of Nortel pensioners and former employees.

It’s a small consolation for the country, which has pumped billions into R&D, but continues to struggle with lagging innovation and productivity. Canadian companies aren’t investing enough in R&D. They’re developing too few of their own products and services. And they’re investing too little on productivity-enhancing technology.

Part of Ottawa’s response to the Nortel bankruptcy was the creation of a federal task force to review government R&D incentives. Headed by Open Text Corp. chairman Tom Jenkins, the task force recently recommended scaling back the $3.5-billion-a-year Scientific Research and Experimental Development tax credit program, putting more money into direct support for companies and making better use of government purchases to spur innovation.

That may be only part of the solution.

Canada must figure out a way to foster a new generation of Nortels, while nurturing existing tech companies.

Some experts say the answer lies in better incentives – not just for the companies who do R&D – but also for the businesses that turn their research into successful Canadian-made goods and services. Len Farber, the former director general of tax policy at the Finance Department, argues that a key policy lesson of the Nortel saga is ensuring R&D produces clear economic benefits for Canada. That may involve providing greater incentives, including additional income-tax breaks for companies that convert their R&D into successful Canadian-made products, argued Mr. Farber, now a senior adviser at law firm Norton Rose in Ottawa.

“We’re incurring a large tax expenditure, but we’re not getting as much benefit as we could,” he acknowledged.

The solution may also be better incentives for investors to put their money into the kind of venture capital that sustains innovative companies. And more competition in domestic telecom markets couldn’t hurt.

Canada has paid a steep price for the death of Nortel. It can’t afford another.

Polycom Provides Broadest Range of UC Solutions Interoperable With Microsoft(R) Lync(TM), Including Polycom(R) HD Video and Voice(TM) Solutions

2011-12-05T16:29:00.001-05:00

From Polycom(R) CX7000 -- the First Room Video Collaboration Solution Custom-Built for Full Integration With Microsoft Lync -- to Multi-Purpose Phones, Expanded Integration and Interoperability With Lync Helps Create Seamless UC Experiences for Employees, Partners, and Customers

PLEASANTON, CA, Dec 05, 2011 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Polycom, Inc. the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC), today announced that it has expanded interoperability with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) to additional Polycom SIP-based wired and wireless voice products. Polycom also announced the availability to order the Polycom(R) CX7000, the first room video collaboration solution custom-built for full integration with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM), the UC platform that unites voice communications, IM, and audio, video, and Web conferencing. The Polycom CX7000 is the first video collaboration solution to be qualified by Microsoft as "optimized for Microsoft(R) Lync(TM)." In addition, Polycom is testing Polycom(R) RealPresence(TM) Immersive room systems for Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) interoperability. The announcements made today offer customers a broad set of choices -- more than 40 systems -- to enhance their Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) environments to make collaborating by video, voice, or content-sharing easier, from the board room to the desktop or on-the-go. On Tuesday, December 6, Polycom will co-host a webinar with Microsoft to discuss collaboration trends in the enterprise and show how Sprint has made their business more productive and effective with UC solutions from Polycom and Microsoft working together.

"We are excited to expand our strategic relationship with Microsoft by extending our broad solution portfolio with interoperability for Microsoft(R) Lync(R). Polycom's strategic relationship with Microsoft enables customers across the globe to multiply the return on solution investments they have in place today and will need in the future," said Sue Hayden, executive vice president, Strategic Alliances, Polycom. "By directly interoperating with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) across a comprehensive range of HD video and voice solutions, Polycom delivers a true UC experience that enables users to be much more productive and collaborative."

Connecting Microsoft and Polycom solutions for IM/presence, web conferencing, video, voice, content-sharing, and other UC applications into an interoperable environment enables users to quickly find each other, launch video and voice calls easily and intuitively within Microsoft(R) Lync(TM), and share content via Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) to Polycom HD video systems.

Polycom CX7000 The Polycom(R) CX7000 unified group video collaboration system -- the latest addition to the company's groundbreaking Polycom CX line -- takes the Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) experience customers are familiar with on their PCs and recreates it in the conference room to provide a higher level of business collaboration and productivity with enhanced simplicity for end users. The solution offers all of the Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) features customers want (presence, IM, online meetings, content collaboration) coupled with Polycom's industry-leading room video collaboration solutions in a single plug-and-play system. With especially tight integration between the Polycom and Microsoft solutions, customers get an intuitive interface, a simplified UC experience, and a seamless HD video experience. Users are able to click on a calendar event to instantaneously join meetings and, with simple conference leader controls, users can easily see presence and drag-and-drop participants into the call for more productive and efficient meetings.

"The Polycom CX7000 delivers a competitive advantage for us, helping to drive company-wide gains in productivity, efficiency, and innovation," said JJ Brantingham, partner and CIO at Sebesta Blomberg & Associates, a national leader in providing full-service consulting and engineering services, and a Polycom CX7000 beta customer. "The Polycom CX7000 solution simplifies the UC experience and offers seamless HD video. The group document collaboration feature allows multiple people on the team to make edits to a single, shared document while on video, regardless of which office they are in, ensuring we are all literally on the same page."

Polycom's extended interoperability with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) spans four key areas(1):

                  --  Standards-based Polycom wireless telephones.Polycom(R) KIRK(R)             Wireless DECT and Polycom(R) SpectraLink(R) Wi-Fi  solutions are             the first wireless phones to display and share call and directory             information via Microsoft(R) Lync(TM). Polycom SpectraLink WiFi             also features presence and instant message information. Offering the             first on-premises wireless solution for Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) in             healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality, Polycom wireless             phones are mission critical to improve productivity and speed up             workflows, from the emergency room to the factory floor.         --  Standards-based Polycom desktop and conference phones. Select             Polycom(R) SoundPoint(R) IP desktop, Polycom(R)             SoundStation(R) IP conference, and Polycom(R) VVX(R) business             media phones can now deliver rich, clear, HD voice and seamless             functionality with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM), so customers of Polycom             voice devices can seamlessly upgrade to get more value out of their             existing investment.         --  Polycom RealPresence Immersive. Polycom is currently testing the first             immersive video solution for direct connection to a Microsoft(R)             Lync(TM) server to offer presence-based dialing and HD video in             Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) calls. With this release, Microsoft(R)             Lync(TM) users can find Polycom(R) RealPresence(TM) Experience             (RPX(TM)) and Polycom(R) Open Telepresence Experience(TM)             (OTX(TM)) immersive systems, check their availability, and then make             a direct video call.         --  Enhanced support for video deployments. Polycom is also testing             support for the bandwidth management policies of the Microsoft(R)             Lync(TM) interoperable communications solution across all Polycom             video solutions, as well as the Polycom(R) RealPresence(TM)             Platform, the most comprehensive software infrastructure for universal             video collaboration. By supporting Microsoft(R) Lync(TM)             bandwidth management policies across an entire spectrum of video             solutions, Polycom enables network administrators to confidently             design and deploy Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) video networks and             Polycom video solutions knowing that they can be managed under a             single policy to avoid oversubscription or call degradation and help             ensure critical applications remain unaffected. This means a better             overall experience for users and administrators alike, leading to             wider adoption of efficient, cost-saving video collaboration to help             connect people in additional ways, virtually anytime, anywhere.

"Polycom's innovative solutions -- such as the CX7000, custom-built for full integration with Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) -- are an ideal complement to Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) environments and help to deliver on the promise of truly unified communications," said Kirk Gregersen, general manager, Microsoft(R) Lync(TM). "Polycom and Microsoft are furthering the adoption of video collaboration and Microsoft(R) Lync(TM) by delivering comprehensive UC solutions that help enable a rich video collaboration experience and improved meeting productivity."

Polycom was recently named the recipient of the 2011 Microsoft Unified Communication Innovation Partner of the Year award for the company's leadership in delivering innovations that provide powerful, enterprise-grade UC and visual collaboration solutions for customers.

Pricing and Availability The Polycom CX7000 system is currently available for ordering starting at US$9,999 through Polycom authorized solution providers, direct market resellers, systems integrators, service providers, and distributors and will be shipping by year end. The Polycom KIRK Wireless DECT solution is currently available starting at US$1,195. For all other Microsoft-optimized solutions, please contact your Polycom sales representative or reseller for pricing and no cost software upgrades for those with existing solutions under a service contract. For more information, visit: www.polycom.com/microsoft or call 1 800 POLYCOM.

About Polycom Polycom is the global leader in standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions for telepresence, video, and voice powered by the Polycom RealPresence Platform. The RealPresence Platform interoperates with the broadest range of business, mobile, and social applications and devices. More than 400,000 organizations trust Polycom solutions to collaborate and meet face-to-face from any location for more productive and effective engagement with colleagues, partners, customers, and prospects. Polycom, together with its broad partner ecosystem, provides customers with the best TCO, scalability, and security -- on-premises, hosted, or cloud delivered. Visit www.polycom.com or connect with Polycom on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

(1) Depending on the product line, customers only need to update server or handset software.

NOTE: The product plans, specifications, and descriptions herein are provided for information only and subject to change without notice, and are provided without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Polycom reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time. Products and related specifications referenced herein are not guaranteed and will be delivered on a when and if available basis.

Copyright 2011 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM(R), the Polycom "Triangles" logo, and the names and marks associated with Polycom's products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Editor's note: Polycom and Microsoft executives will host a webcast featuring a Sprint executive discussing the power of collaboration to transform business on Tuesday, December 6 at 11:00 am ET. To register, please click here.

                  Contact:         Ellen Topp         Polycom, Inc.         +1 925 924 5865         ellen.topp@polycom.com

SOURCE: Polycom, Inc.

Streamcore Solutions Now Rated "Avaya Compliant"

2011-12-05T16:26:00.000-05:00

Streamcore Products Proven Compatible with Avaya Unified Communications Solutions

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 05, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Streamcore, the provider of WAN 2.0 assurance solutions to enable reliable delivery of business-critical Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) over any cloud, today announced that its StreamGroomer products are compliant with unified communications (UC) products from Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration systems, software and services.

Streamcore solutions provide enterprises with innovative monitoring, supervision, reporting and advanced performance control for real-time communications such as VoIP and room-based or desktop videoconferencing. Streamcore products can improve network performance and ensure the success of UC implementations. The company's StreamGroomers have been compliance-tested by Avaya for compatibility with Avaya Aura(R) Communication Manager R6.0.1 and Avaya Aura(R) Session Manager R6.1, 96xx SIP Deskphones, Avaya Desktop Video Device and Avaya one-X(R) Communicator.

"We are pleased to announce Streamcore's compliance with Avaya Unified Communications products," said Frederic Hediard, vice president of product strategy. "Together, Streamcore and Avaya products can help ensure high quality real-time communication and collaboration applications for end-users that deliver value to the bottom line."

Streamcore is a Gold member of the Avaya DevConnect program--an initiative to develop, market and sell innovative third-party products that interoperate with Avaya technology and extend the value of an enterprise's investment in its network. As a Gold member of the program, Streamcore was eligible to submit products for testing by the Avaya Solution Interoperability and Test Lab to verify compliance.

"Streamcore's DevConnect compliance testing enables customers to add Streamcore's best-in-class network performance to enhance capabilities to their existing Avaya infrastructure with confidence," said Eric Rossman, vice president, developer relations, Avaya. "Streamcore products, when used in conjunction with Avaya systems, can speed the deployment of new UC applications such as desktop video while reducing network complexity and implementation costs."

About Streamcore

Streamcore provides WAN 2.0 assurance solutions that enable reliable delivery of business-critical Unified Communications & Collaboration (UCC) and interactive applications over any cloud. Streamcore allows customers to apply practical business-based policies to successfully manage performance of real-time video, VoIP, collaboration and critical applications, whether delivered over traditional private networks or through innovative cloud-based models. Streamcore's WAN 2.0 assurance is provided through unparalleled network-aware visibility and performance control capabilities, with a differentiated business-oriented approach to match enterprise business operations requirements and policies. Streamcore serves global enterprises, telecom service providers and government agencies that require stringent performance assurance for their cornerstone applications. To learn more, visit www.streamcore.com

About Avaya

Avaya is a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, providing unified communications, contact centers, networking and related services to companies of all sizes around the world. For more information please visit www.avaya.com . For more information on the Avaya DevConnect program, visit www.avaya.com/devconnect .

SOURCE: Streamcore

                 Media:          Streamcore          Mary Hecht-Kissell, +1 (919) 846-4949          mary.hecht-kissell@streamcore.com

Bankrupting of Avaya? It ain't over until the fat lady sings

2011-12-05T15:05:00.004-05:00

This is a interesting article that has lots of points that I'm sure keep a lot of people at Avaya up at night. As the market changes, we all have to change with it or wither away.

We believe that the author's writing of Avaya's obituary too early though. There has been 70 new products in the last 18 months, preparations for Option 2, recent strategic purchases of new technology (Eg konftel, Sipera) and debt restructuring to take advantage of recent Capital market opportunities. Avaya did this to take advantage of lower interest rates and push the maturity out to more manageable repayments closing 2017. Both of these actions would be blocked if the lenders didn’t feel comfortable with Avaya’s financial outlook.

Its definitely not time to put the nails in the coffin yet! Don't count Avaya out yet!

Here is the article:

"Avaya’s history can be traced back over a century to the acquisition of Western Electric by American Bell Telephone Company in 1881, the predecessor to AT&T. In 1984, after the US government forced the breakup of AT&T, the equipment business was renamed AT&T Technologies, and 1996, spun off again as Lucent Technologies. In 2000, Lucent spun off to its shareholders its Business Communications unit, naming the new company Avaya. On October 1, 2000, Avaya began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as an independent, public company. In 2007, Avaya was taken private by two private equity companies, TPG Capital and Silver Lake Partners, in a $8.3 billion leveraged buyout (LBO) at the height of an economic boom fueled by a bubble in residential housing. In 2009, Avaya purchased Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business (NES) for nearly $1 billion, bolting on approximately $2 billion in incremental revenue and giving it access to Nortel’s data hardware business, patents, and a trove of new technology.

Today Avaya, with over $5 billion in worldwide revenue is a behemoth in the business telecommunications world. It is the leading global provider of next-generation business collaboration and communication solutions according to an advertisement placed at the beginning of a recent filing with the SEC. It claims to do business with 85% of the Fortune 500 companies and has operations around the globe with over 400,000 customers at 1 million locations. Along with its direct sales force, Avaya has a large and sophisticated global supply chain that is run by 10,200 indirect channel partners allowing it to deliver technology solutions anywhere there’s a business need.

Even with its global footprint and clout in the industry, make no mistake about it, Avaya is in serious financial trouble. It faces competitive threats on all fronts from new, cloud-based, communication technologies and has a leveraged, insolvent balance sheet leaving it vulnerable and exposed to macroeconomic risk. In addition, it has consumed most of its operating income to service the required interest payments. Its 2010 net loss of $874 million ($936M counting accrued dividends on its preferred stock) earned it the dubious honor as the company with the 15th largest loss in the Fortune 500. Through nine months in fiscal year 2011, Avaya has already racked up net losses of $764 million dollars and is on pace to top last year’s poor performance.

Avaya Business Partner Network

Mention the name Avaya to almost any of its US channel partners, from small PBX VARs to executives at one of its largest distributors and they instantaneously beam with pride. Ask about its current financial position and most tend to give off an initial chuckle, then mention something about Avaya being a big company and finish the sentence with the fact they have “no concerns”. Most view the brand with a reverence reserved only for a select few things in life and feel honored to be associated with a relatively large manufacturer in the fragmented world of telecom hardware equipment makers. With ease, they can tick off a few generalized facts overheard at the annual dealer conference in Las Vegas or from a promotional brochure or other company advertisement. Probing deeper for specifics, most will quickly mention that Avaya was “purchased by sophisticated owners…” adding only that, “...they know what they’re doing.” Ask about the company’s recent financial results and they will quickly demur to the fact that Avaya is private and any information on their financial results is simply speculative and not based in fact.

The failure to understand Avaya’s current financial performance and the potential long-reaching effects it could have, whether by omission, naivety, or simply blind faith, by its channel partners is both shocking and concerning. It is also one of the cornerstones to the thesis that most PBX VARs won’t be around a few short years from now. Regardless of what is truly driving its partners failure to grasp reality, the simple fact is: Avaya has and continues to publish information to the public detailing its financial results, risk factors, and business outlook in a straightforward, direct manner to the SEC every year since being spun-off from Lucent in 2000. More recently, Avaya filed an S-1 prospectus with the SEC detailing the current state of the business in an effort to take the company public once again and sell its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. (Link: AVAYA S-1)

At the very least, I would encourage all Avaya Business Partners to read though this document (it’s 376 pages printed), going deeper of course than first 4 pages of advertisements and spend some time understanding the company from an objective point of view and developing your own questions to ask Avaya’s Regional or Executive managers next time you have the opportunity.

Background

The audience for this paper is all technology business owners and the key management running companies focused on providing voice and data solutions to business clients. In my last paper (see: Death of the telecom VAR), I detailed some of the major concerns involved with the continuing viability of the on-premise PBX and more specifically, how that will impact many of the resellers in US that can’t adapt to the changing trends in the marketplace. Following its publication, there were numerous follow-on discussions that ensued and in many cases, the conversation quickly turned from the dealers to the manufacturers and their financial health. Avaya is the largest pure-play producer of PBX systems for small, medium and enterprise businesses in the US so it made sense to use them as the example; however, much of the same conversation and syntax could probably be applied to any one of the major telecom PBX manufacturers focused in this dying space of the market.

Canary in a Coal Mine

Listening recently to passionate dissertations by business owners on why they will continue to sell PBX systems to businesses forever reminded me of something I found a few months ago while looking though a closet in my house that I use to store old mementos and other artifacts from my past that I want to keep safe and reference- maybe even show my kids on day. In there, I ran across some pictures I had taken, framed and proudly kept from a college photography class I had enrolled in around 2000 or 2001. These images of inanimate objects, were shot on 35mm film and transformed in a small darkroom, through the progression of the class, from a tiny film strip to large, glossy pictures that could be framed and hung on a wall. At the time, I remember being entranced with the “technology” that could take these tiny pictures on a film strip, barely viewable, and make them life-size and able to be viewed by all. I knew instinctively that photography would always have a place in society as a way to capture and preserve life’s finest moments and 35mm would be the medium to do it. The University clearly knew this too and backed up their vision with payroll dollars, real estate and college credit for taking and processing pictures on 35mm cameras. Another company, Eastman Kodak, also saw a bright future for photography as well. At the time, Eastman Kodak had a 100+ year storied history, produced $13 billion in global revenue and was the largest photo supplier in the world. It clearly dominated the landscape in film and film processing. Everyone knew that photography was the way of the future. What could possibly displace it? If I had only been more focused on finance rather than visiting the local taverns at the time, I surely would have bought some shares of Kodak stock or maybe even opened a 1-hour photo store in my hometown. Everyone- the University, the largest film company in the world and myself - was confident photography, as it was, would not change and you can be sure no one saw any risk or major displacement to Kodak on the horizon. And we were all dead wrong.

Eastman Kodak

The founding roots of the Eastman Company (renamed Eastman Kodak in 1892) began in 1880 by George Eastman who had invented the world’s first, non-professional camera and had patented the name Kodak in 1888. This new camera, capable of capturing round 2 ½ inch diameter pictures on a roll of 100 exposures, was an instant sensation as well as a game changer. Overnight, the amateur photography industry was born with an advertising phrase coined by Eastman, “you press the button, we do the rest.”

Through much of its history, Kodak was known as an innovator. It introduced the first pocket camera in 1895, invented the first 35mm color film called Kodachrome in 1936 and created many of the chemicals and processes needed to take film from a mere negative to a full-sized picture. It had a team of scientists on staff and invested heavily each year into research and development of new technologies.

But along the way, something happened that destroyed this once great company. While some would speculate hubris of senior management led to its demise, others point to Kodak underestimating the impact of digital photography and still others blamed the deteriorating financial position of the company as it progressed through the last decade. While no one single factor can probably be wholly blamed, the fact is, Kodak has lost its relevance in the marketplace and depends on patent litigation and asset sales for much of its revenue today. Its demise will surely provide material for business school students to study for years to come.

How could this happen to one of America’s most respected companies that provided a technology everyone needed, wanted and used on a regular basis? The answer to that question takes you back to the year 2000 and my college photography class. Kodak was a major player in the global imaging market, earning nearly $14 billion in revenue, and saw a bright and profitable future. On page 37 of its 2001 10-K filing it boasted to investors, “we expect to generate $6 billion dollars of cash flow after dividends in the next 6 years”, further stating this cash flow would be used to pay down debt, maintain or increase the dividend to shareholders, or fund acquisitions that promote profitable growth. So how did it fare in its quest to predict the future?

Rather than produce an average of $1 billion in cash flow each year from 2002 to 2007, it generated a mere $70,000, or 7% of managements stated goal, only hitting the target in one of the six years. And, that was before dividends to the shareholders.

Kodak is clearly an example of a once-great company that lost its way. If you had invested $1000 in the company in 2000, it would only be worth $20 today. In December 2010, Standard and Poor’s, noting the company's fall from greatness, removed Eastman Kodak from its S&P index and today the company’s market capitalization sits under $300 million, valuing the company for less than the cash on its balance sheet. Barring a miracle, Eastman Kodak, like life’s moments it helped so many capture, will be nothing more than a memory within one year’s time.

The takeaway and application to the world of technology is simply this: what the marketplace demands is a constantly moving and ever-changing target. Companies that choose to rest on their laurels and sit behind recognized brand names rather than continuing to lead with innovation and adaptation will be punished. Finally, a lesson many camera and one hour photo shops learned the hard way- any business or person with equity, either directly or indirectly, depended upon an upstream supplier has an obligation to formulate independent thinking and assessment as it pertains to said supplier and the general state of the industry in which they operate. Failure to assess the business and its prospects objectively and filter management's rhetoric against unbiased information is both naive and senseless.

Avaya

From its initial spin-off in 2000 from Lucent as an independent, standalone company, Avaya performed rather well. After stumbling some out of starting blocks, the business appeared to be gaining momentum as it approached mid-decade. It rode a rising tide of increasing unit sales and strong demand for its core, on-premise PBX technology. It was also able to grow its gross margins from 42% in 2000 to 46.1% in 2006. Most would consider the business conservatively managed, using cash flow to pay down debt, divesting of non-core assets and investing in R&D. In fact, by 2006, it had paid down all of its long-term debt, increased shareholder’s equity to over $2 billion and was earning a steady and respectable 4% net profit for its shareholders.

Leveraged Buyout of Avaya

As the nation approached mid-decade and the housing bubble fueled exuberance, private equity companies were once again in vogue and able to raise huge sums of money from investors. These investors, expecting outsized returns on their capital, turned to firms that could employ alternative wealth management strategies needed to generate large profits. One way in which private equity firms had historically achieved these types of returns for their investors was by taking large companies private and re-engineering them in a transaction known as a leveraged buyout or LBO. In a LBO transaction, the buyer, typically referred to as the financial sponsor, acquirers a company and finances a large portion of the purchase price with debt. LBOs and other leveraged transactions have been around since the 1950s (known then as bootstrap deals) and over time, the playbook has changed little. The investment firm, looks for a company that has a history of stable cash flows, low or no existing long-term debt, and hard assets that can be pledged against the new debt generated in the transaction. In 2007, Avaya fit the mold perfectly. At the end of its fiscal year, the company had significant cash flows ($266 million in Earnings from Operations), a pristine balance sheet with not a dollar of long-term debt, and $4.5 billion in reportable hard assets (subtracting Goodwill and other intangible assets).

The stage was set and in June 2007, private equity giant TPG Capital, along with smaller, technology focused Silver Lake Partners, announced their intention to purchase Avaya for $17.50/share or about $8.2 billion. In the official press release, John Marren, a partner of TPG said “As one of the earliest private investors in technology and telecommunications, TPG has come to know and admire Avaya for its roster of leading customers, history of product innovation and commitment to customer service.”

TPG and Silver Lake officially completed the purchase of Avaya Inc. on October 26^th of 2007 using a holding company set up on June 1^st of 2007 named Avaya Holdings Corp. (formerly Sierra Holdings Corp). The final purchase price amounted to $8.3 billion dollars, which included just over $5 billion in new debt. The timing couldn’t have been worse for TPG and Silver Lake, completing the transaction just as private-equity lead LBOs deals reached their peak and the economy bordered on collapse. The macroeconomic environment was deteriorating by the day and the uncertainty was forcing businesses to hold cash and postpone or cancel any major capital investments. The year 2007 was also significant from the perspective that measurable increases in the adoption rates for business hosted phone systems were first seen, driven by advances in soft switched technology and falling monthly usage prices. Using the internet, companies, particularly smaller ones, could now move their PBX to “the cloud”, saving money they would once have had to spend on an on-premise solution from companies like Avaya and the telecom VARs who installed them.

Macro demand aside, internally Avaya was coping with its own financial issues. The interest payments needed to service the massive amount of new debt on the balance sheet, falling gross margins driven by price cuts needed to stimulate demand and other acquisition and integration costs were starting to pile on and take their toll. All told, by the time its 2008 fiscal year ended, Avaya had watched as its gross margins fall to an all-time low of 41.1%, added a net $5.2 billion in new debt to its balance sheet and recorded a staggering $1.3 billion net loss, all while burning though $676 million dollars in cash. As the dealers and other business partners gathered in Las Vegas that year for the fun filled annual meeting, one can only wonder how many were aware of what was really happening.

Next two years

If 2008 seemed like a hard year, things wouldn’t get easier anytime soon. Avaya was beginning a dangerous free fall in many key areas of its business. Organic revenue began to slide and would end the year $773 million dollars lower than in 2008. The company continued to bleed red ink, finishing 2009 with an $845 million net loss. It would maintain its cash levels by issuing more debt. If there was a bright spot one could point to, it would have been gross margins, which did improve from their 2008 historic low, but still finished 2009 at an unimpressive 45%, well off their previous few year's margin rates. With its core business deteriorating and the broader economy still weak, Avaya desperately needed something to get it back on track and ignite its sales and profits. With the sheer size of its business, small changes or acquisitions wouldn’t move the needle. Avaya needed a game changing transaction.

In June of 2009, Nortel announced that it no longer planned to emerge from bankruptcy and would seek a buyer for all of its business units. Avaya, seeing just the opportunity it needed to curtail its downward slide, wasted no time and, on July 20, 2009, announced a “stalking horse” bid of $475 million for a collection of assets that included Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions unit, a stake in Nortel Government Solutions business and DiamondWare, an ill-timed acquisition made by Nortel in 2008 which developed 3D high-fidelity audio. The business units being considered generated nearly $2 billion in revenues and would give Avaya access to new customers and new technology. Other bidders also saw the opportunity and joined the auction for this once crown jewel of Nortel’s carcass, which caused the asking price skyrocket. On September 16, 2009, Avaya emerged as the winning bidder in bankruptcy court with a final bid of $933 million, nearly double its initial offer. A transaction of this magnitude would take massive funding and Avaya wasted no time, quickly raising nearly the entire purchase price in debt and piling that on to the $5 billion already on its balance sheet. Avaya carefully calculated the transaction could be viewed as 2+2=5 and by combining Nortel’s assets base with their massive distribution network and leveraging the synergies, it could be just the game changing opportunity needed. While the transition has been accretive to revenue and brought with it the promised new customers, technology, patents, and a low margin data business now called Avaya Networking, the financial benefits, especially profitability, are still yet to be seen.

2010 and today

There is no doubt the last three years have been challenging for Avaya. In a broader sense, America suffered a recession unlike anything it had seen in decades. The downturn in the economy was sharp and swift and nearly every business felt its pain. Companies large and small have had to reexamine their own business strategies and adjust to the changing environment. Most companies today say they are feeling much more optimistic concerning their outlook and those listed in the S&P achieved record levels of profitability last year. For Avaya, the road to recovery has been longer and the hill much steeper to climb than most. It is currently producing some of the worst financial results in its history. Dealers and most anyone else with Avaya’s logo tattooed on their company’s polo shirts should have serious concerns about the current financial health of Avaya and its long-term viability as an operating business. So why then are its business partners, those who are dependent on it as a major supplier to their business, so docile when the conversation comes up? Most simply don’t have the facts correct. When asked about Avaya’s financial health, many dealers will state that the business is, and has always been, profitable. No concerns, period. End of story. Well, let’s explore that conjecture further starting with its profitability.

Profits

Since 2007, Avaya has failed to earn a profit. It recorded staggering net losses of $1.3 billion in 2008, $845 million in 2009, $871 million in 2010 and has recorded $764 million in losses through the nine month period in fiscal year 2011 (ended on June 30) making it well on its way to another potential $1 billion loss for the full fiscal year.

Equity

Turning to the balance sheet, if you were to equate a business’s financial statements to a high school report card, the profit and loss statement becomes your GPA for the most recent semester and the balance sheet would be your cumulative GPA, showing how well you’ve done during your entire time at the school. Watch most business owners when shown their financial statements for the first time after the close of an accounting period. Their eyes will glace at the net profit line on the P&L first and then quickly move over to the equity line on their balance sheet, showing them how much their stake in the business is worth in comparison to the previous period. Of course, the equity line is usually never the same as the true market valuation of the business, but, it tends to give a pretty good indication if the business is doing the right things and creating or destroying value for its owners over time.

In the case of Avaya, the business was managed fairly conservatively through the middle of the decade and, like any well run business, its shareholder equity grew. In 2007, Avaya had $2.5 billion of equity on its balance sheet. This healthy equity cushion enabled it to absorb the $1.3B loss in 2008, deceasing its equity nearly dollar for dollar in the process. As the years progressed and losses continued, the equity in Avaya fell proportionately, moving from a high of $2.5 billion in 2007 to a deficit of $1.5 billion in 2010, an almost unbelievable destruction of $4 billion dollars.

Debt

In addition to losing money and destroying equity, Avaya engaged in another dangerous act of financial engineering, From 2008 onward, its balance sheet was loaded up with enormous amounts of debt. This debt, used by TPG and Silver Lake to fund the initial acquisition and then to prop up declining organic revenue by purchasing NES from Nortel, has become a major problem.

Some debt, used correctly and thoughtfully in the capitalization of a business, can be an important strategic tool, helping to amply returns. But the use of too much debt can pose problems for any business, essentially handcuffing its owners use of cash flow years into the future and preventing reinvestment back into the business, dividend payments, or acquisitions. In the case of Avaya, its total long-term debt now stands at $6.1 billion, greater than one full year’s total revenue. A big problem, that’s only getting worse.

Pick your Payment

The least senior of Avaya’s debt is the senior unsecured cash-pay notes ($700M) and the PIK toggle notes ($834M), both of which are interest only and carry no obligation to pay down any principal until the balloon payment date in 2015. Examine this debt further, and you’ll discover the PIK notes issued on October 24^th,2008 have terms allowing Avaya, its sole discretion, the opportunity to decide the way in which it would pay the interest that accrues bi-annually on the debt, giving it the option to pay accrued interest in cash or by adding additional principal to the face value of the note. In similar fashion to a residential sub-prime homeowner with a “pick your payment” option on his home mortgage that decides to forgo the monthly house payment because he has no income, letting the principal balance owed on his home rise, Avaya, with little in the way of EBITDA, has also decided to pay their interest-only payments with additional principal. It subsequently added $84 million in to the original $750 million face value of the notes, bringing their current balance to $834 million.

Avaya itself acknowledges the risks associated with its enormous debt in its latest S-1

regulatory filing on pages 24-26:

“Our degree of leverage could adversely affect our ability to raise additional capital to fund our operations, limit our ability to react to changes in the economy or our industry, expose us to interest rate risk to the extent of our variable rate debt and prevent us from meeting obligations on our indebtedness.”

“Our debt agreements contain restrictions that limit our flexibility in operating our business.”

“We may not be able to generate sufficient cash to service all of our indebtedness and our other ongoing liquidity needs, and we may be forced to take other actions to satisfy our obligations under our indebtedness, which may not be successful.”

“Despite our level of indebtedness, we and our subsidiaries may be able to incur additional indebtedness, which could further exacerbate the risks associated with our degree of leverage.”

It furthermore states:

Our degree of leverage could have important consequences, including:

•

making it more difficult for us to make payments on our indebtedness;

•

increasing our vulnerability to general economic and industry conditions;

•

requiring a substantial portion of cash flow from operations to be dedicated to the payment of principal and interest on our indebtedness, thereby reducing our ability to use our cash flow to fund our operations, capital expenditures and future business opportunities;

•

exposing us to the risk of increased interest rates as borrowings under the senior secured multi-currency asset-based revolving credit facility and the senior secured credit facility are at variable rates of interest;

•

limiting our ability to make strategic acquisitions;

•

limiting our ability to obtain additional financing for working capital, capital expenditures, debt service requirements, acquisitions and general corporate or other purposes; and

•

limiting our ability to adjust to changing market conditions and placing us at a competitive disadvantage compared to our competitors who are less highly leveraged.

IPO

Currently Avaya is attempting to sell around 20 percent of the company to the public for about $1 billion and has plans to use the proceeds to retire long-term debt, preferred shares outstanding and pay additional fees to TPG and Silver Lake as part of a management agreement detailed on page 183 of the S-1 filing in which Avaya currently pays its sponsors $7 million/year in “monitoring fees” under a contract that now expires in 2021 (the contract originally expired in 2017 but has been extended four times). The agreement, signed by Avaya, has a clause making the entire contract payable at the commencement of any public share offering, resulting in an additional payout to TPG and Silver Lake in the amount of about $70 million dollars, the current present value of the remaining contract that would be payable over time.

All Avaya Business Partners should hope its owners are able to sell a slice of the business back to the public. The resulting debt pay down and slight recapitalization of the business from selling new equity can only be good for Avaya internally and for its partners. Although the initial S-1 prospectus was filed on June 9, 2011, Avaya has yet to complete the transaction. And while the markets have been extremely volatile since the official filing, there are some things investors rarely have an appetite for. Avaya has the tough task of convincing investors they are not Harry Houdini and won’t make their money disappear like Mitel did in April 2010 when it IPO’d at nearly $13/share, used the proceeds to repay debt and then watched the stock plunge 85% to just over $2/share today.

Summary and Conclusions

While Avaya continues to dominate the market for on-premise PBX systems and other telecommunications equipment, it faces a long, steep road ahead to regain its business health and profitability. Of course Avaya is not alone. The entire telecommunications industry is under siege from over levered balance sheets and a downturn in demand for the core hardware they sell as evidenced by recent company announcements and news headlines like the one from the Wall Street Journal published on Friday November 11, 2011 describing the mounting pressure faced by the Chief Executive of Alcatel-Lucent to right the struggling telecommunications company after lowering its profit forecast for 2011.

The Gun is Out of Ammunition

In its quest for profitability, Avaya has few options left. If it wants to increase gross margins, it will need to continue to migrate away from equipment sales and move towards software centric, hardware agnostic solutions. This, of course, places a whole host of new requirements on its channel partners from additional training and certifications needed by the dealers to the supply chain stress distributors will feel as they find ways to cope with lowered unit volumes. It also places the company in dangerous competition with incumbent, well heeled, deep pocketed software companies who also want a piece of the software pie; which can only be likened to hunting a grizzly bear with a butter knife . Avaya can, and will, continue to cut away at redundant operational expenses as it finishes the Nortel integration that should take its SG&A expenses closer to a historic 30% of revenue vs. almost 34% in 2010 and produce approximately 200 million in expense relief. It also has the option to squeeze additional revenue from its channel partners by restating the share of the revenue it takes from maintenance agreements and other managed services or decreasing the business partner “discounts." In an effort to grow its direct revenue, Avaya, in some cases, competes directly with its channel partners, stating in the S-1 filing on page 57:

“…despite the benefits of a robust indirect channel, our channel partners have direct contact with our customers that may foster independent relationships between them and a loss of certain services agreements for us. We have been able to offset these impacts by focusing on other types of services not traditionally provided by our channel partners, such as professional and managed or operations services.

Any action within the channel will need to be balanced with a degree of caution however. Although most partners seem content “paying-up” for the opportunity to fly the Avaya banner, there is surely a limit to their generosity.

Without an immediate and sustainable return to profitability, the end-game for Avaya is near. In the world of LBOs, cash flow is the axis around which every deal turns. Investors make big acquisitions with the intention of paying the debt down in 5-7 years and exiting the investment at a profit. In the case of Avaya, the cash flow projections simply didn’t materialize and we are fast approaching the five year anniversary. Post-acquisition, debt actually increased while revenue, on a real basis, has stayed flat (and backing out Nortel, revenue is down). Assuming a miracle is not in the cards, I see only three near-term options for Avaya’s investors: 1) continue to hold the investment and prop up any cash flow deficits with fresh cash 2) exit a large chunk of the business via the already planned but yet to be executed public stock offering, using excess proceeds after fees to pay down the debt; or 3) break the business apart, selling off assets to retire debt.

Of the three options, I would highly doubt there is much appetite for option #1, which leaves a public stock offering or asset sale. If neither of these options prove viable, the last and final option would be to follow Nortel’s path and file for either Chapter 7 or 11 bankruptcy. This option looks even more attractive after reading page 195 on the S-1 prospectus stating that nearly all of the $6.1 billion of long-term debt is guaranteed by the US subsidiaries. In doing a few short calculations, one can quickly figure that the international subsidiaries, operating in expanding markets around the globe, are earning approximately $2.27 billion in revenue with a debt free balance sheet. Leaving a few, to wonder just how valuable that business, if freed from its debt laden brother in the US, could be.

In thinking about Avaya, I’m reminded of an old Wall Street saying: “cut your loses short and let your profits run.” With little in the way of profits besides “management oversight” and consulting fees, Avaya’s investors have been extremely patient. However, as the LBO of Avaya nears its fifth anniversary, and the prospects of a large payday for TPG and Silver Lake dwindle, expect the veneer of patience to start to wear thin. Avaya’s business partners would be well served to wise up and stop placating the hype. Dealers need to take an objective look at Avaya’s business results and begin formulating plans for their own business based on a number of possible outcomes. Ultimately, Avaya’s fate is in its own hands and the hands of its Business Partners. Everyone should understand the stakes are high and the margin of error is razor thin. Any deviation from here onward will only prove disastrous for all. "

By: JMHawkes

Consultant at SonicMG

http://telecomvardeath.blogspot.com

Sources:

Avaya S-1 filing, filed August 24,2011:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418100/000119312511231170/ds1a.htm

Business week profile of top money losing businesses 2010:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2011/fortune/1104/gallery.fortune500_money_losers.fortune/15.html

Press release issued by TPG/Silver Lake after acquisition of Avaya:

http://www.silverlake.com/pdfs/avaya-release-final-6-4-07v2new.pdfhttp://www2.nortel.com/go/news_detail.jsp?cat_id=-8055&oid=100259133&locale=en-US

IP Office 8.0 Release Date Moved to December 12

2011-12-02T16:53:00.002-05:00

To ensure the upcoming release of IP Office R8.0 software, Avaya's flagship solution for small and midsized enterprises, meets those rigorous standards, the general availability (GA) date for the software release has moved from 30 November 2011 to 12 December 2011

Check back soon for more updates about Avaya IPO Version 8.0

Check out the IP Office 8.0 Overview

Avaya Evolutions Toronto Recap

2011-11-28T12:11:00.001-05:00

By Rob Daleman

The annual Evolutions show is one of my favorite days of the year. Once again this year, I wish to thank all of you who came out to support the show - our customers, partners, analysts, consultants and members of the press. In all, we had 1,200 people came to join us to hear from industry experts, thought leaders and see some amazing product demos in the tradeshow area. For those of you who missed the show, here is a quick recap.

To kick things off, Avaya Canada president Ross Pelizzarri and I introduced the concept of "The Power of We" through the Power of Music, and were joined onstage by 8 piece Acapella group Retrocity. Retrocity built up an excellent vocal rendition of Toto's Africa.

Ross Pelizzarri then had a little fun introducing John Dilullo to a new Canadian hockey jersey. After donning the jersey, John reiterated Avaya's $165 Million commitment to R&D in Canada. Many of the products on display at Evolutions, including IP Office, Web.Alive, Handset software, ACE and many others are engineered in our Belleville and Ottawa facilities.

Fellow bloggers Phil Edholm, Chris McGugan and Rejean Bourgeault took to the stage and discussed the vision guiding Avaya innovations in UC and Contact Center. Look for videos shortly!

The tradeshow floor really shined this year, with excellent demos on Avaya Aura Contact Center, Data Solutions, IP Office (DR and Radio solutions!), a FlareTM zone and ACE zone. Thank you to our partners who integrated amazing mobility solutions into their booths as well.

The main sessions ended with a great keynote from Don Tapscott. I highly recommend his most recent book, Macrowikinomics. Don's speech was exceptional, touching on the end of the industrial age, and the launching of the connected age - including the need for better collaboration to drive real global transformation. Check out more here.

During the day, we ran a Twitter contest. Over 1300 tweets were sent from the show - a big congratulations to @neilhyndman, who won the iPAD2 that was up for grabs.

Finally, we finished with a cocktail reception and prize draw - amazing prizes were available to be won. As part of the prize draw, Unity Telecom sponsored an appearance by Darryl Sittler, who was on hand all day greeting customers and presented one of his signed sticks to a lucky winner.

Thank you again for all of you who participated in this year's show. Look for us in Montreal on February 16, 2012 and Calgary on March 8, 2012. Save the dates for next year's Toronto show will be out shortly!

By 2016, Smartphones Are Expected to Account for 90.8 Percent of All Handsets Sold in the U.K.

2011-11-28T12:10:00.002-05:00

DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/86af77/the_united_kingdom) has announced the addition of the “The United Kingdom Telecom Intelligence Report: Content and Connectivity Provide Growth Opportunities for UK Telcos” report to their offering.

The mobile penetration rate in the U.K. is expected to reach 152.8 percent (or 98 million subscriptions) by 2016, which will be driven by the growth in data card adoption and M2M service uptake, says Olena Kaplan, Associate Analyst at Pyramid Research. Pyramid Research expects smartphone adoption to increase by 40 percent by 2016, up from 50 percent in 2011. The growing demand for simultaneous data access by multiple devices, which will be met by 4G technology following the 4G license auction in 2012, will result in mobile data service revenue reaching 7.7 billion ($11.7 billion) by 2016, she adds.

The service revenue decline seen in 2010 will continue, with the UK market accounting for 34.7bn ($53.8bn) in service revenue in 2011. The introduction of MTR cuts in April 2011, together with the EU reduction of roaming prices, will result in mobile voice declining at a CAGR of -2.73% (-3% in USD) in local currency terms over the forecast period. The growing popularity of Internet access, combined with the growing affordability of high-speed broadband, will result in broadband service revenue growing at a CAGR of 4.53% in local terms, reaching 5.1bn ($7.8bn) by 2016. The government’s high-speed broadband initiative will further assist the expansion of the network. The growing demand for simultaneous data access by multiple devices, which will be met by 4G technology following the 4G license auction in 2012, will result in mobile data service revenue reaching 7.7bn ($11.7bn) by 2016, demonstrating the expansion at a CAGR 2.18% of in local terms (1.9% in US).

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/86af77/the_united_kingdom

The Biggest Business Opportunity in Bring-Your-Own Device

2011-11-28T12:07:00.000-05:00

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Ian Gallagher

There’s a lot of talk about the post-PC era, but the reality is many Canadian organizations are still managing a huge fleet of desktops and have not truly taken advantage of the opportunities in this mobile-driven computing stack.

At Cisco, the shift toward Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) has brought a multitude of new devices, operating systems and architectures to the corporate world. But the biggest and most meaningful change these tablets, laptops and smartphones could have on your business is the complete transformation of the way your employees collaborate.

New tablets and smartphones launch just about every month – a trend that continues to push the bar higher and higher for mobile apps and HD video capabilities. But just allowing iPhone or Android-based devices into your business isn’t enough. Collaboration software and services need to fill in some key gaps.

Over the last few weeks, we have made a strong push to do this for businesses of all sizes, unveiling a plethora of upgraded products and services in our collaboration solution portfolio. All of our technology announcements aim to take collaboration mobile and beyond the desktop.

With our updated Cisco WebEx, users will now be able to engage in high-quality video meetings from their Cisco Cius, Apple iPhone and Apple iPad devices. WebEx users will also be able to access files and presentations in the cloud from their PC or mobile devices. The ability for users to connect to Cisco TelePresence meetings from their tablet or smartphone, means employees will finally have enterprise-grade collaboration away from the confines of their office. If you haven’t tried the Cius with built-in TelePresence yet, this video may change your mind.

We also upgraded our Jabber platform, adding a plug-in that gives users TelePresence capabilities on Apple, BlackBerry, Android, Nokia and Windows products.

For employees working from home, on the road or in a branch office, our WAAS offering has been optimized for Citrix XenDesktop and HDX technology to help deliver virtual desktop and apps to mobile devices faster and with less bandwidth than ever before. As collaboration tools rely more on HD video, rich media and voice, building out a strong IT infrastructure to do the heavy lifting is crucial to delivering media-rich content to tablets and smartphones.

Making it easier to communicate via video to your employees’ mobile devices, we also announced technology that will be particularly exciting for Canada’s crop of small and medium-sized businesses.

To mark the fifth anniversary of our landmark Cisco TelePresence product portfolio, we also released the Cisco TelePresence MX300, an affordable nine-person TelePresence system that can be set up in about 15 minutes. We’ve also upped the BYOD ante and integrated TelePresence with Cisco Jabber to allow users to join TelePresence calls from their desktop PCs, laptops and tablets.

In our dedication to provide professional solutions that enable BYOD and scale to small businesses, we also released upgrades to two IP telephony platforms in our Unified Communications portfolio. The Cisco Business Edition 3000 and Cisco Business Edition 6000 bring video, instant messaging and presence to mid-size businesses still using aging public branch exchange (PBX) systems. Seamless integration with Cisco Jabber for instant messaging and presence rounds out the new features.

While these products updates were the highlights, they are just a sampling of Cisco’s recent activity in the collaboration space. To dive deeper into our latest collaboration portfolio and check out new videos and technical briefings on key collaboration technologies, please visit the Cisco Collaboration Virtual Launch Experience site.

With the move to BYOD becoming a reality for businesses of all sizes, you need technology solutions that make it simple and secure for your employees collaborate and access the information they need on the device they want. For IT managers, opening up your environment to strange new devices might seem like a scary experience, but at Cisco we can help usher you into the era of BYOD worry-free. Besides, as the saying goes “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Utilizing the power of new endpoint devices to connect your employees together like never before can empower your business to become more mobile, social, visual and virtual.

Embrace the post-PC era!

Cisco Continues to Help Customers Transform Their Business

2011-11-28T12:05:00.000-05:00

By Blair Pleasant

At the annual Cisco Collaboration Summit in beautiful Miami Beach, analysts and consultants got to hear about several new product announcements, hear from Cisco customers about their implementations, and see some cool demos. For me, the best part was talking to two of my favorite people, Vishakha Radia and Bryan Tantzen, about Cisco and business transformation.

Several years ago I wrote about Cisco’s Customer Business Transformation Group (CBTG), which works with customers to help them understand how they can transform their businesses using Cisco technology (at the time it was UC, today it’s about collaboration technologies). By understanding and analyzing customers’ communication and collaboration pain points, the group helps customers identify how they can transform their business, based on their business goals and various user roles. At the recent Collaboration Summit, I got an update about the CBTG and how they’re developing a number of use cases and proof points about how real customers are experiencing real benefits using Cisco collaboration solutions, while transforming their businesses in a variety of ways.

While the focus of the group initially was about using unified communications (UC) to transform business, today it’s about using collaboration, which in Cisco’s definition includes UC, as well as tools such as Cisco Cius and Quad. As Vishakha explains in this podcast, the CBT team works with customers to identify use cases by looking at the customer’s communication and collaboration problem, and then identifies the solutions that can solve these problems, as well as their business value - whether it’s cost reduction, enhanced worker productivity, or changing their customers’ experiences. The CBT group found that the transformational benefits of collaboration can deliver 10-15 times the value, and that customers can achieve significantly more benefit if they focus not just on cost reduction, but on the impact to the business.

These use cases are utilized in several ways, including helping the Cisco sales people position and put together appropriate bundles for customers, and they also become the foundation strategy plan for organizations to implement collaboration solutions. Vishakha and Bryan noted that they have 40 validated use cases for the Cius, based on real-world customer examples, as well as about 20 use cases for Cisco Quad.

The primary use cases for Cius fall into the areas of education, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, high tech, energy, and retail, with subsegments in each category. For example, in the retail category, there are use cases for customer service, merchandising, operations, retail workforce communications, and sales. Cius use cases include horizontal examples such as virtual expert, field service, and field sales (e.g.; using Cius to enable sales people in the field to find and connect with the appropriate virtual experts to accelerate the sales process), as well as specific vertical examples, such as patient care and insurance claims.

The following are a couple examples, based on actual Cisco customers and their experiences. As mentioned, there are over 40 use cases for Cius, so this is just a small sample.

Insurance: Mobile collaboration between insurance agents and remote claims adjustors using Cius, as well as UC, screen sharing, and expertise location technologies, can help speed insurance claims resolution. Cisco’s customer found that whenever there is a major natural catastrophe, they experienced a major spike in the claims, which overloaded their phone system and created scalability and logistical problems. By using Cius and other collaboration technologies, the agent who arrives on the site of the damaged property can pull up information online and interact via video with the claims adjustor who can assess the damages remotely. They can call up policy systems to assess coverage provisions and decide what provisions can be made to resolve issues resulting from the damage. By accessing the remote expertise much faster by using Cius and its video capabilities, the agent can improve the customer experience, reduce the time it takes to settle and resolve a claim, and improve customer retention.
Higher education: When working on team projects, students found that 10-20% of class time was wasted trying to schedule and coordinate after-class project meetings. To help students working on team projects remotely, Quad and Cius are used to provide a mobile and virtual team space where the students can see each other’s presence status and connect with each other when needed, and can collaborate face-to-face regardless of where they’re located. Multi-point video collaboration on Cius or other mobile devices lets the student share and create documents in real time. Group IM helps them more efficiently reach teammates and coordinate meetings, and their project discussions on Quad are captured and stored so that they can be accessed when needed. The university providing this use case found that the travel time to after-class meetings for the team projects was reduced by 50%, saving $93 per student per meeting and improving meeting participation by 22%.
Other education examples include: using video to provide a virtual learning experience during campus closures due to severe weather or pandemics; using Cisco Cius to replace students’ heavy backpacks filled with books and printed materials that cost schools millions of dollars each year; connecting with teachers and classmates using presence and group chat after class to solve problems and get answers to questions and engage in group video chat for group assignments; and using Cisco Cius to record classes as well as images of written notes that can be viewed by students who miss a class.

Whether it’s increasing real-time access to business intelligence, or providing anywhere access to key call center performance metrics, the results of these use cases have commonalities that can be attained in almost any vertical. The common thread of increasing mobile collaboration, accessing expertise when needed, enhancing mobility, enabling remote workers to feel more connected, and improving general productivity, all result in increased revenues and improved customer satisfaction.

I’m pleased to see Cisco’s emphasis on use cases that demonstrate not only the benefits of collaboration (and UC), but also help organizations understand how they can use these technologies to help them meet their goals. Technology for technology’s sake is irrelevant – it’s all about how best to use the technologies to meet business goals. Cisco’s CBT group clearly gets this, and continues to work with its customers to identify the business cases, and to help others get the “aha” moment and see how these technologies can be used in various parts of their organizations.

Avaya comes out with 2 fun new videos

2011-11-23T13:35:00.002-05:00

Avaya has a interesting new approach to marketing themselves online. Check out these 2 new funny videos from Avaya