Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Bryan Richards, editor-in-chief of VoIP Magazine.com, has a go at Microsoft’s Unified Communications Strategy.  In main, he wonders about the value, writing:

“It’s all very interesting technology but seems a bit much to make a phone call even if it is just to leave a voice mail.”

and…

“making a phone ring when someone is at their desk is helpful, but its far from a revolution in productivity.”

It’s hard to disagree, and that’s the reason I called the announcement a damp squib. It’s the intersection of the fundamentals of presence and business processes that will provide the value that customers are looking for.  That intersection will happen in three phases:

1. implementation of presence infrastructure - the servers, etc that are capable of managing presence information.
2. automation of presence setting - relieving human beings of the necessity to set and review presence status.  If this step doesn’t happen, nobody will use presence.
3. new applications dependent on presence.

An example I know well, obviously, is the iotum relevance engine.  It performs many of the functions of a human assistant, in respect of managing telephone calls.  It is dependent on presence, and both uses and performs automated presence setting. With the presence feature (and many other sources of input) it is able to predict the relevance of a communications request, and your likelihood to want to take that call.  The fact that it can ring the correct phone is merely the icing on the cake.

Presence, by itself, is a hard sell. It doesn’t indicate anything about the users receptivity to a communications request.  It simply reflects physicality.  And that’s why presence, as implemented today, is broken.  The tragedy is that many people are turning the feature off, because their only experience of it is IM which can be as large a productivity drain as email.  Its potential is still waiting in the wings.

Microsoft’s announcements, while interesting, are about infrastructure and automation.  They’re not yet about changing the world, and, won’t be able to even begin until late 2007.  If you’re interested in experiencing what that world can be like today, check out offerings from Communigate, or from their hosted partner, Versature, here in Ottawa.  Versature will also be making the iotum Relevance Engine available to their customers shortly.

A couple of days after I wrote Microsoft’s Unified Communications “Strategy”, I got a nice note from Kyle Marsh, unified communications evangelist. He gave some additional details about the products, as well as correcting a mistake I made. I understood that Exchange would be renamed Microsoft Communcations Server, which in fact is not the case. He also invited us to participate in a developer lab in Redmond at the end of the month.

I found his discussion of the use of the Subject field quite interesting. We’ve been fans of using extended SIP attributes as inputs to the iotum Relevance Engine for some time. It’s great to see this happening.

Thanks for the email Kyle. (reprinted below, with permission, for those interested in knowing more).

 

From: Kyle Marsh [mailto:Kyle.Marsh@microsoft.com] Sent: June-28-06 2:30 PMTo: Alec SaundersSubject: Microsoft Unified Communications

Hi Alec,

        Been quite a while since we touched based. I have two reasons for emailing. First I am having a developer lab for our next wave of product releases July 24-27 here in Redmond. Would iotum be interested in attending? It is a API level lab.  We have some interesting new features that could make integrating iotum and our unified communications more interesting. For example, when someone sees an email they may want to respond with an IM or voice or video conversation instead. In Outlook they would select “Call’ and the subject or the email would be sent as part of the invite so that the user being called could see the call’s subject before accepting the call. Other applications could start communications the same way. I think that a call’s subject would help iotum determine the call’s relevance.  We expect that in the 2007 timeframe all requests for communications, regardless of them media type IM, voice, video, email, etc., will start taking advantage of this ability.

Second I noticed something on your blog I thought I should update you on. We are not renaming Exchange to Communications Server. These will continue to be two products. As we move forward they will start to take advantage of each other’s features more. For example in 2007 if you start a voice conversation with another user from Communicator (or any device) you may end up leaving voice mail in Exchange’s unified messaging. Today your PC-PC voice call would just not get answered. You may be underestimating what we are doing and scale of our commitment in this space.  The most concise description of what we are doing is in the BillG exec mail:

The arrival of unified communications signals the beginning of the convergence of VoIP telephony (which provides the ability to route telephone calls through the Internet), email, instant messaging, mobile communications, and audio and video Web conferencing into a single platform that shares a common directory and common developer tools.

So iotum and Microsoft decide to federate, or let their infrastructures automatically federate. Now we can have each other on a contact list, or maybe just have each other’s names in a Word document. If we need to  communicate it is just a click away. Each participant can decided what form the communication can take IM, voice, video, conference, etc. Maybe we use our PCs, or phones, or even mobile devices.  We call each other, not each other’s devices. Perhaps iotum could not just decide if I should take the communication, but what mode I could allow. If I am in my office I could take a voice call with you on my desk phone, but in a meeting, depending on what my role in the meeting is, perhaps I could do an IM from a PC or mobile device.  I could classify you to receive different amounts of presence information about me then other people see. My team member could be allowed to see my location, or maybe the subject of the email I am working on right now, or the identity of who I am currently communicating with (trading floors need that actually) while you as a federated contact may see simply “Busy”.  iotum could start adding information to my presence that would help an iotum at the other end make a better judgment about the relevance of a communications request.  At the platform level we are enabling a lot of cool scenarios.

Anyway, enough rambling on my part. Let me know if you would like to participant in the developer lab.  I see you are making lots of announcements lately and wining lots of awards. Congratulations. It is great to see good ideas succeed.

Thanks

Kyle

It’s been quite a trippy month on the Saunderslog.  Midway through the month I wrote a short piece on the Mosquito Ringtone, which has catapulted traffic into the stratosphere (or, at least, what I consider to be the stratosphere). 

• Today I’ve passed 150,000 visitors.  
• At around 900,000 page hits for the month, and averaging more than 30,000 per day, there’s a good chance that this could be the first million page hit month. 
• Heaviest traffic day recorded was the 22nd, after the Mosquito Ringtone story was covered in Japan, and Saunderslog was mentioned.  12,476 visitors, and over 150,000 hits.  On the 22nd, I transferred nearly 5G of traffic.

It’s been a wild ride.  The effect on my pocketbook has been nice too.  I’ve passed $700 in ad revenue, which is a little more than 7x a regular month.

Thanks to all my readers (especially the Japanese ones!).

I have the distinct impression that Rich Tehrani had the same briefing from Communigate that I did.  He certainly seems to be as excited.  He has been talking up the idea of a unified SIP address (what Communigate calls SIPifying the world) in order to deal with the proliferation of addresses we all have.

On a related note, Russell Shaw is calling for a directory of VoIP addresses as well.  He notes that with the proliferation of providers, it’s getting harder and harder to reach the person you want. People change phone numbers!

It’s all about identity, isn’t it?

That’s also the tree that Marc Canter is barking up, with his latest project, PeopleAggregator.  PeopleAggregator is a social networking platform, built on open standards, and capable of aggregating all of your identities into one place, and transporting them wherevere you want.

That’s a king size vision.

Jajah just became the latest to offer free telephony.  Their shtick?  Calls on the PSTN are free, between Jajah members, in a whack of countries.  If you’re calling between non-members, they cost not much, but a little more than some of the services which don’t have any free calling — about 3 cents / minute here in North America.

Yawn, right?

The interesting parts are the pieces you find when you dig deeper. 

• First, they have a business account.  It’s just a regular Jajah account, but with a single bill.  What it means, though, is that your employees can install any of the Jajah Plaxo, Outlook, Mac, or Firefox toolbars, and immediately start calling from within applications.
• Second, they provide a bunch of click to call buttons.  Your customers can click to reach you from a web page, and your ordinary phone will ring.
• Third, they expose an API which you can use to integrate Jajah with any website or application. 
• Fourth, scheduled calling.  You can schedule phone meetings easily from within Jajah too!

By focusing on generating a volume of users with free calling between Jajah subscribers, Jajah is going to quickly create a large “community” of users.  It will give them a user base to sell to quickly.  More importantly, though, is that this community is actually a directory of numbers.  To Jajah’s credit, they have a decent privacy policy which would prevent them from marketing this information to a third party. 

Far from being lame, this is a clever strategy.  Moreover, the technology foundation for Jajah is Asterisk, which gives them the ability to quickly build out new services, as we have seen them do since their launch a few months ago.

Free voice, new applications, and a user controlled directory… can you say Voice 2.0?