A meditation on SIP, SOA and Software

Today, the blog is thinking about SIP.

This was triggered by one of my customers turning to me yesterday and saying,

"SIP, isn't it just another of the IT industry's three letter acronyms for marketing? Just like SOA really, but even less likely to change things".

Now the blog has looked at SOA before (see posts like: "SOA - bringing CRM, telephony and business together? part 1") and the blog is a strong believer that SOA is a very major change in how IT is done. The downturn has perhaps slowed down the rate of SOA adoption, but nearly all the customers I work with are considering SOA approaches to at least some part of their IT environment.

For the communications industry, I think there is now little doubt of the impact of SIP. I suspect that SIP is going to bring with it a radical series of changes. To a certain extent (and to stretch an analogy), while SOA is the consequence of what client/sever did to the mainframe, SIP is the consequence of what IP has done to networking.

While I wouldn't defend this analogy beyond a certain point, I do think it highlights one interesting truth. The consequences of IP were to open up standards (much as client/server blew apart the vertically integrated architecture of the mainframe) and SIP just takes that to the next level. The impact of SIP may also be as disruptive as those changes were to some of today's business models.

The big thing for me about SIP is that it removes some of the last remaining geographic restrictions on call control. SIP trunking removes the last part of the TDM world, namely that lines had to terminate somewhere and there had to call control near it. To be sure, in the SIP world there still is a need for physical lines, but many of the physical dependencies on call management have gone.

For the call centre industry, this raises interesting possibilities. For example, Avaya have started to show how the use of a SIP session manager might allow them to virtualise ACDs without the application layer approach of Genesys or the network management approach of ICM. For Cisco, the rise of SIP represents a significant opportunity as services at the network layer (such as security) become increasingly important when using such a lightweight protocol. Also, SIP permits video as easily as voice, something that Cisco sees very much as the future. For other vendors, who haven't yet become so comfortable with IP, the rise of SIP represents a fundamental challenge.

Of course, an industry change tends to bring in new entrants and this is where it gets really interesting. I see SIP as ensuring that the future of the voice industry lies with software. That is a view some of the software firms share and is why so many have entered the voice market. I blogged this time last year on Microsoft and Google (See "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft"), but that was primarily from a CRM perspective.


Following VoiceCon this year (which I covered in this blog post), it's clear that so far Microsoft has the most advanced plans for voice of the software vendors. The enabler for this is SIP and OCS 14 leverages a very significant portion of its capability from what SIP enables. It's the capabilities of SIP that that provide OCS with its more interesting capabilities around presence, video and voice integration.

SIP has triggered a very interesting three-way fight. Previously separate areas (voice, data and desktop) are now different aspects of the same question. SIP brings into conflict the legacy voice vendors (with their communications expertise, such as Avaya), the network vendors (who have deep IP protocol vendors, such as Cisco) and the desktop/ software vendors (who understand presence and the desktop, such as Microsoft). It will be very interesting to see who can win this collision of different architectural layers.

Voicecon 2010 Orlando - Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya & SIP...

Most contact centre blogs don't start with Kierkegaard, but his famous quote, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards", is very applicable to VoiceCon. I find that it is only with sufficient distance from the event (VoiceCon 2010 ran Feb 28th to March 3rd this year) that you can actually get a perspective on what was said. In previous years I've blogged on the main events (see posts like "VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft" or "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect") but this year I want to stand back and take a longer view.

There's a very good summary of what happened on Blair Pleasant's No Jitter blog, and I don't intend to duplicate that here. Similarly, there is some very good ideas for the overall state of the voice industry on Dave Michels No Jitter blog. I'd slightly disagree with his order (I agree virtualisation is very real and very significant, but I wouldn't have put it at number one ahead of the change we're seeing from SIP and the vendor landscape) but I think his sentiments are spot on. Rather, my aim is to think about what was new for contact centres, and what wasn't from a strategic perspective.


Microsoft
This, for me was as important for what wasn't said as what was. There has been a lot of excitement following Voicecon about the release of OCS 14, and most of that is deserved. The capability to do 911, the transcription of voicemails and contextual calling are all nice features for the business user and strengthen Microsoft's case in for enterprise voice/ telephony systems.

What hasn't been commented on so much is the amount of time that Microsoft devoted to the call centre. In the 45mins of the video below, about 9 mins (from about 29mins in to 38mins) a decent proportion of Gurdeep Singh Pall's pitch:

Clarity Connect isn't a vendor I'm that familiar with, but they represent a very interesting Microsoft based approach to the contact centre and the customer service market. I've been previously quite dismissive of Microsoft in contact centre voice (see blog posts like: "Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition") while positive about their CRM Dynamics and CCF offerings (see posts like "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft").

I think my views have changed. Microsoft may not have announced that they are in the contact centre, but there is no doubt about the thrust of OCS 14. Microsoft are a serious voice player and have arrived in the contact centre even if much of the rest of the industry hasn't realised it yet.

Avaya
I think Avaya have to get full marks for managing to make a joke about entropy! It's not a natural subject for comedy, so not mean feat to get a decent laugh at the start of the presentation. The message I got from Avaya was that SIP was the source of profound & fundamental change in the nature of contact centre architecture. I'm inclined to agree and I believe that while SIP may not bring immediate change tomorrow, I think it's likely to fundamentally change how the technology works. Whether or not Avaya will ride this change or be crushed by it (much as Aspect has struggled with IP), I'm less sure. The Avaya Aura architecture looks very powerful, but it is as yet relatively unproven and the Avaya Session Manager is something I need to understand better to have a clearer view on. There's a lot of potential advantages to the Avaya approach and SIP helps explains how they think they can get synergies from their Nortel acquisition. The downside risks, though, should not be underestimated and I feel Avaya still have to negotiate some very tricky changes to achieve their transformation.


Cisco
The contact centre was only briefly covered in the Cisco pitch (from 14mins to 15:30mins in the key note address!) and was focused on the role of social media in contact centre. It was interesting and the role of Twitter, Facebook and so on in customer service is one that excites marketing departments greatly. This will be an area of future activity for contact centres, I have no doubt, but I'm not sure whether it will be a major one. Blog analysis (for instance) has been much hyped and can yield very interesting insights, but only about certain demographics and is still a niche part of analytics. Twitter is perhaps more widely used than blogs and so more revealing but I still think there is a debate to be had as to whether it is going to be a core part of customer service. My suspicion is that where industries are already using it (e.g. airlines) we will see it used by related industries (e.g. rail or toll roads) where customers are disconnected from the PC and reliant on mobile phones. Whether we will see it more widespread than that, I'm not sure.

In short VoiceCon revealed that there are some fundamental changes underway in the voice industry. The organisers have clearly recognised this with the decision to re-brand as 'Enterprise Connect' and I think they are right to. The future looks to me to be about software and communication, and anyone still pushing voice hardware will find it challenging.

Contact Centre Expo 2009 - Day One

It's that time of the year again, when most of the UK Contact Centre industry gathers in Birmingham for the Contact Centre Expo.

I covered the Expo last year (see the posts "UK Call Centre Expo" and "UK Contact Centre Expo Day 2") and was interested in the feedback I got as both comments and as e-mails. In the feedback, there was a solid body of opinion that the 2008 Expo lacked much innovation from the vendors. This needed to be weighed against a smaller set of feedback arguing that the show did offer new and valuable ideas, but nonetheless, there was a strong view that the exhibitors needed to raise their game.

I understand where the first group are coming from, but I still find the Expo very useful just because it has so many vendors and customers gathered in the same place and I find innovation a bonus on top of that. There are interesting ideas out in the exhibitor hall (as well as a few rather tired ones) and it's worth going round the Expo to see what is genuinely new.

So the stands that worked for me in the exhibitor hall, in no particular order, were:

• Sword Ciboodle - In some ways, nothing radically new from what I used to know as Graham Technology. In other ways some interesting incremental improvements and a feeling that the market for process based CRM was probably one of the growth areas of CRM. I've felt for a while that the record-centric approach of Oracle/Siebel grown too big for many customers and too 'one size fits all', so it was interesting to see a CRM approach that was much more process-centric.
  
• 60k - Presenting themselves as 'The Alternative BPO & Contact Centre Outsourcer', I was interested to see what 60k thought distinguished themselves from the many other outsourcers in the hall. Part of the answer was "Bulgaria", but the value proposition was much more than that. I've managed outsourced contact centres in a past job (we had European customers with customer service sites split between Europe and South Africa), and my experience is that outsourcing to far off locations can have real disadvantages when you try and manage the resulting operation. Nearshoring and so locating your centre within three hours flight time, but still with cheaper labour is very interesting. The crucial advantage of Bulgaria is that it is in the EU and the EU location is a big advantage over destinations like India when you think of the challenges with outsourcing and data movement compliance with the laws on exporting data outside the EU. What also interested me was the focus of 60k on higher value business process. I've long argued that this is where outsourcing needs to go (see past posts like "Offshore - why I would go for South Africa over India") and it was good to see 60k as a European outsourcer positioning things like 'Insurance Claims Processing' and 'Product Recall Management' that add real value to customers, rather than trying to sell cheap call centre seats.
  
• Egypt - I am very interested in the Egyptian contact centre industry as it shows what growth can happen very quickly with government support. I had a good chat with Raya contact centres, who run the contact centre operations of a number of the big tech firms. I must confess a vested interest here, as I recently blogged on Cisco opening their 300 seat centre in Egypt (see "New offshore developments in the European Market") and it was very useful to hear the Egyptian perspective on this.

So all in all very useful (on top of being an exhibitor with a decent number of customer visits to our stand).

Tomorrow, things I'd like to do are:

• Catch up with Redbox Recorders to understand what they are offering.
• Have a look at the Nortel stand to understand how they are presenting things after last weeks acquisition by Avaya.
• Talk to Aspect and better understand the relationship with Microsoft that is so prominent on their stand. (I'm guessing things have moved on since I covered posted on the tie-up announcements back in March last year "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect")
  

As always, do let me have any suggestions for other areas that are getting attention.....

VoiceCon 2009 - Now that the dust has settled, and IBM and Microsoft

So what to make of VoiceCon 2009 Orlando?

There didn't seem to be the major announcements that we got in 2008 (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but in some ways I think we saw events of more significance.

The first thing is that Microsoft are in this business and are in it seriously. Last year's announcements, while significant, suggested that partnering was the key to Microsoft getting into the voice business. This year the revolutionary aspects of Microsoft's arguments were much more explicit. I rather liked their key-note session. It made one or two very key points that as voice moves from a hardware based solution to a software centric solution, it changes dramatically and that this is the logical evolution of VoIP. I also liked the fact that their demo used a Mac running Safari to Microsoft compatibility. I'm not normally a fan of Microsoft, but I felt they did make the more insightful points. I remain dubious about their ability to execute, but then so were the TDM vendors about IP Telephony! The video is worth checking out:



IBM also did a good pitch, around their UC2 solution from Louts. I liked the blue screen of death April Fool's hoax, but otherwise I felt that they were showing an evolution of Lotus Sametime rather than the more radical changes that Microsoft had in their vision.

In short, I think this software-centric approach to voice is the vision of the future. Whether or not it will be delivered by Microsoft is open to debate, but this was a far more visionary view than the alliances of last year.

VoiceCon Orlando 2009 - Day 1 & Day 2

The blog is not at VoiceCon this year (travel restrictions as part of the global downturn), but I'm taking a keen interest at long range. Fortunately for those of us not able to travel, the VoiceCon 2009 site is running a good series of videos of all the key note speakers.

Last year saw some big announcements (covered in my blog post "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") but so far these haven't translated into much market change. To be sure Microsoft continues to push with OCS and has a developing Unified Communications story but I have yet to see them get significant traction in Europe. Microsoft and IBM go today, so it will be interesting to see if there are any major announcements from them.

Yesterday it Cisco and Avaya (among others) doing the key note speeches.

Avaya announced the launch of their new solution architecture 'Avaya Aura'. I have to say that at the end of it I was slightly underwhelmed. It seemed good but not as radical as some of their previous SOA type of messaging. There's a very good summary of Avaya Aura on the nojitter.com site from Shelia McGee-Smith.

Cisco's key note was by the CTO, Padmasree Warrior, and focused on the interaction between collaboration, social networks and video. This was illustrated with a (fairly lighthearted) scenario showing how these could be applied to health care. It also showcased real-time translation which is rather gee-whiz stuff, though probably going to be necessary in the future if conversations between different language speakers are to take place.

In short, so far all very interesting, but nothing terribly radical. We'll see if any of that changes with today's presentations. Even if there aren't major changes, it's clear that VoiceCon remains the main event for most of the world's voice industry.

Presence, Agent Availability and the practicalities of Contact Centre

I was very glad that my last post ("BBC Moneybox on Speech Recognition for banking ") was so interesting to so many readers. Thank you for the feedback and comments. It's very good to see so much happening in the speech market and I certainly wasn't aware of all the projects readers mentioned, especially those in Asia/ Pacific.

One of the other areas that has had a lot of interest lately is presence. Traditionally, presence has been a concept for intstant messaging and the contact centre has focused on agent state from the ACD. This distinction is now blurring and the big instant messaging vendors like IBM with Sametime and Microsoft with OCS are getting very interested in presence in the contact centre. It was something we saw at VoiceCon last year (see post: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect ") and I'm sure will develop further.

Aside from the technology, there are a lot of practical issues around how presence might be manged in a contact centre environment. There is a very good article on CRMxchange by Ross Daniels from the Cisco Contact Centre Business Unit setting some of the practical considerations and how you might look to use presence as practical function, not just a neat technology:

"For many people, "presence" means the little colored icons next to colleagues’ names on the buddy list of their Instant Messaging client. Is someone available? Do they prefer to not be disturbed? This is useful, and many modern business users would be at a loss without IM and its straightforward application of presence technology.
Since presence has proved its worth in facilitating communication between business users, how can it help improve interactions between businesses and customers? One obvious answer is to provide contact center agents with an IM client that allows them to chat with fellow agents or subject matter experts outside the contact center; this gives agents an opportunity to get answers to caller questions that are outside their areas of expertise.
There are a number of potential problems with this approach, however. Who should populate the agents' IM buddy lists? If agents do it, how do they know who the best experts are for answering specialized questions? What if five hundred agents add Bill from Engineering to their buddy lists, and then twelve of them try to IM poor Bill with questions simultaneously?

Consider also the usage challenges facing an agent armed with an IM client and a buddy list. When the agent is on the phone, do they really want to have to scroll through buddy lists to find the right expert to consult with? Presuming they find one or more available experts, how will they enlist their aid? IM them sequentially, or scatter ten IM’s to ten experts and go with whoever answers first? What if the best way to address the caller's problem is to have the expert join the live call? Finally, consider that a number of contact center administrators prefer that their agents don't use IM clients at all, since internal chat can be a distraction.

While it's true that there are ways to mitigate these kinds of issues, it's also true that presence technology can do much more for customer interactions ... if we broaden our thinking...."

You can read the rest of the article on here on CRMxchange, and I do recommend it.

My Contact Centre Top 5 Predictions for 2009

This year I thought I'd do something different to welcome the new year and stick my neck out by making some predictions. I'm often asked what I think the contact centre trends will be in 2009, and so I'll put forward what I think is going to happen.


Making predictions is always a risky business and 2009 looks so turbulent that the risks will increase. I'll have a go, but I am fully prepared that I begin 2010 with a blog post on how I got it wrong!


1. IP Contact Centres will continue to grow rapidly.
I'll start off with a relatively uncontroversial prediction. This is backed by most of the market analysts I've seen, but if 2009 proved anything, then it was that uncontroversial, analyst backed predictions could be totally wrong! The most up to date research I've seen was yesterday on Network World (see: "IP call centers will do well despite VoIP slowdown") where Infonetics' newest report had some interesting statistics. Infonetics predict the market for IP Contact Centre as growing 38% in 2008 and continued growth in 2009. The growth in 2009 could be as low as 5%, but that's still pretty rapid for a relatively mature market segment in recession. Forrester and Gartner have higher figures for growth, but I suspect they will revise them downwards as they reassess them in light of the global economic situation. Still, there is steady momentum towards Voice over IP (VoIP) in all aspects of telephony and I expect contact centre to follow the trend.


2. Fixing customer processes will be a major focus in 2009.
To a certain extent all contact centres (whether using TDM or VoIP for the voice traffic) can now do all the basic things needed, namely answer the phone and provide the agent with some information on the caller. These historically have been what technology spend has been focused on, answering the call (which is all the spend on telephony) and getting usable information to the agent (all the spend on CRM).

The problem is that telephony plus CRM has not not fixed most of the issues customers experience. What matters to customers when they call is (1) did I get my problem fixed? and (2) was it a pleasant experience. I've been interested in 2008 to see the big system integrators start to focus on process (see posts like: "System Integrators write interesting things about contact centre for the downturn!" or "Contact Centres, Process and Six Sigma") and much more focus on the customer experience (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline").


3. A major contact centre technology provider to fail/ be bought from administrators.
I'm not confident enough to predict who, but the press and blogs are providing quite a selection of possibilities. Nortel has had some rough press (see: "Nortel Drops After WSJ Says It’s Exploring Bankruptcy" and "Juniper: the big winner if Nortel goes under?") to pick just two recent articles and their financial situation is not good. There are still Nortel supporters, and I admire the optimism of the article "Don’t write off Nortel yet", but I can't say I share it. I do agree with the point the article makes that Nortel is underestimated and is still a very technically capable company and is likely to have fewer self-generated problems going forward.

Aspect may also have trouble, despite their alliance with Microsoft (see: "VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect"), but they haven't had the focus that Nortel has. They have a strong (and lucrative) product in Aspect Workforce Management but their core call centre offerings have seemed to struggle in recent years.

There is always the chance that Microsoft will buy one of these vendors (or perhaps private equity as with Siemens) but I'm not sure I see other obvious candidates. It's possible that SAP or Oracle might move in, as both have bought small IP contact centre companies in the past (SAP bought Wicom and Oracle bought Telephony@work) but that seems less likely.

4. Offshoring to decline further for front line customer service.I think it's hard to see further offshoring as going to be well received by consumers. Offshoring of call centres was perhaps already in decline for reasons of brand reputation and cost (see posts like: "HSBC creates 250 UK call centre jobs & offshore in decline ") and I think consumers will be very hostile to brands that are seen to be destroying jobs. In the banking industry this will be a particular issue, as with the banks potentially dependent on government, the views of politicians may suddenly be very important.

I think offshore for non-customer facing activities, like IT, may well go offshore more rapidly. The signs are there (see "Lloyds TSB offshores IT, not call centre ") and Barclays has been doing this for a while and I think this is an area where offshore may prosper.

5. Predictions will be wrong!
OK, this is a bit of a cheap one, but there is a serious point. In very turbulent times, the range of possible outcomes for a given set of events increases substantially.

The predictions I've made look the most probable, but I'm prepared to apologise profoundly if against my expectation, 2009 turns out to be the year of TDM offshore contact centres!

Software archaeology, financial services and the contact centre

There's an interesting (and brief) post on Grady Booch's IBM blog that got me thinking. Grady Booch, for those unfamiliar with him, is an IBM's Chief Scientist for Software Research but perhaps more importantly developed UML (Unified Modelling Language) and was very influential in the development of Object Orientated programming. I've seen him through my time at IBM and through the BCS (British Computer Society) and I find he always has something interesting to say on IT.

His particular post this week was on the first signs that 'software archaeology' is emerging as a discipline. I think this is long overdue as alongside Enterprise Architecture, management of legacy software is one of the biggest challenges in modern IT.

I've met this challenge regularly when working with financial services customers and it's been well documented (see Silicon.com on the subject last year). The financial services industry was (and is) a sector that understands how IT can bring efficiency and so adopted automation early on. The problem is that today this can mean an environment of very mixed and some quite elderly systems. What makes this challenging is that as business requirements change, an elderly system than ran quietly on its own in a corner might now need to make it's data available to other systems. Even more challengingly, in an SOA type of architecture it may not be easy to predict which combinations of systems they might be.

It's at this point that the project team usually discover that the documentation for the legacy system is incomplete and that most of those in the organisation who could have helped fill in the gaps have taken early retirement. This means that ripping it out and replacing it is not possible. One option is to bring back these retirees as consultants but this expensive and often not practical. The other emerging option is to do some software archaeology to understand what processes and dependencies are actually in the legacy code.

This has been one of the major challenges I've found in the financial services contact centre. The agents, often young or from a non-IT background, expect either a Microsoft Windows type desktop or a shiny, new Facebook style web 2.0 interface. Instead, they find themselves learning from scratch how to deal with OS2 or 3270 terminals and green screens. This has big impacts on agent productivity and training costs. It's also a long way from the type of technology I was blogging on in: "The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft".

Unfortunately, though, if the business logic for something like a life insurance policy is embedded in legacy code, and there is no documentation, then that system has to be kept running. As long as there are customers who could make claims (and that's potentially a 30+ year horizon for life insurance), then the organisation has to be able to manage them under the Ts&Cs of the policy and that means keeping the system as it is as there is no other truly reliable source of the information.

It may not be an expected outcome of software archaeology, but one of the big benefits it could bring is for the call centre agent in financial services. A more easily integrated desktop and presentation layer would help agents find the information they need far more easily. I've seen agents in one bank running three monitors each (and having to type out each piece of information the customer gave them three times to get it into into each system) because they couldn't integrate the various system interfaces.

Software archaeology may initially be focused on the back-end and legacy, but could become very important for the contact centre.

The future of contact centre - Google, Salesforce, Skype & Microsoft

A lot of interesting announcements in the last two weeks.

Firstly, Google announced a link up with Salesforce.com. I can see the logic, as explained by both companies, that this way embedded google apps in salesforce.com would allow users to switch data between (say) a google spreadsheet and a salesforce customer application.

What I find interesting about this is if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis.

Microsoft seemed to respond to this by announcing that Microsoft Dynamics CRM would be available in as an online offering. It is priced more aggressively than Salesforce.com ($44 per user for Microsoft vs. $65 per user at Salesforce.com) but otherwise it seemed to me to have no clear advantages over Saleforce.com and both were less functional than the offerings from Siebel and SAP.

All of which was very interesting and shows that where Salesforce.com lead, the rest of the CRM industry is following rapidly.

I mentioned in the first paragraph that if Google and Salesforce were to integrate Google's emerging communication offerings, as that would start to be a contact centre on a wholly SAAS basis. The google communication applications are an interesting collection of functions, there's Google Talk for instant messging and voice, and Google Mail for e-mail . Helpfully, if peer to peer voice isn't quite enough for you, then Google Pack for your computer includes the option to have Skype. In other words the raw functionality to build a web based contact centre is there in Google and if the idea's occurred to me, then you can bet it has occurred to Google.

It will be interesting to see when we start to see contact centre telephony as a SAAS offering, as this may be closer than many people assume.

Latest Gartner Magic Quadrant on IVR & Speech Self-Service

A good article on the Speech Technology Magasine Website setting out the details of the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for IVR and Self-Service ( titled the "Magic Quadrant for Interactive Voice Response Systems and Enterprise Voice Portals, 2008." and available from Gartner here).

I was quite please to see that the Microsoft Speech Server was dropped from the Magic Quadrant as I've never found it a relevant offering for the European Contact Centre. I've gone into the details of this previously (in "Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition" and "Speech Market Share"), but the main reason is that if you don't offer speech in European languages, you will struggle to sell in the European market.

It was also good to see Holly Connect getting onto the magic quadrant. I've seen a bit of them in the European market and their network based IVR/ self-service solution looks interesting for those who would like their self-service hosted by a network carrier. They're an Australian company in origin, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them push further into Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Otherwise, the Magic Quadrant has the usual firms in the leader's segment, Genesys, Avaya, Cisco, Intervoice and Nortel. For the full details (I won't duplicate them here) best to look at
the Speech Technology Magasine Website or buy the report Gartner .

VoiceCon 2008 - IBM, Microsoft & Aspect

I was interested to hear a number of the announcements at Voice Con 2008. I'm not in Orlando this year but a number of friends were at the announcement and I was interested to compare their comments with the press announcements.

The Microsoft and Aspect alliance announced yesterday is on, CCF magazine: "Microsoft Corp. and Aspect Software Inc. have announced a multi-year strategic alliance to help deliver unified communications to contact centres globally".

Of the press coverage, the most positive I've seen was nojitter.com, who described it as "Microsoft's One-two punch" and complimented Aspect on their marketing strategy. More typical was infoworld with "Microsoft buys its way into Call Centres".

In my view is that this is an announcement similar to the Microsoft and Nortel alliance. Anything that two major players do has to be of interest, but new entrants to a market don't mean that they are necessarily breaking new ground. My suspicion is that this is good for Microsoft as it gives them access to the Aspect install base and moderately good for Aspect as it lets them defend their install base with a strong partner. In terms of reaching contact centre functionality further into the enterprise, I'm not sure it delivers as much as Avaya, Cisco, Genesys and Nortel can already offer with the various forms of 'expert advisor'.

More interesting to me were the announcements from IBM. The first was the alliance announcements with ShoreTel, VBrick Systems, NEC and Ericsson. This completes IBM's alliances, as IBM Sametime already integrates with Cisco, Avaya, Nortel and Siemens and Sametime has long looked at Voice over IP capabilities. Compared to Microsoft, this makes IBM are much more open environment for Unified Communications than Microsoft. This was reinforced by the (expected) announcement of Sametime Unified Telephony, as a type of middleware for the Unified Communications telephone environment.

In short, I think Jan Dawson writing on his blog, twinloops , summed it up nicely:

"The IBM keynote was very dry, shorn of the visionary stuff from the Avaya and Microsoft keynotes from yesterday. It focused largely on new features and capabilities IBM is adding to its Sametime portfolio. And if anything, the key message was a slightly resentful, “we’ve been doing all this for 10 years, guys - how about giving us some credit?” The lack of vision stuff was probably helpful in reinforcing the perception that IBM is perhaps the most serious about UC, and just boring enough to pull it all off."

It will be very interesting to Microsoft and IBM once again competing head to head.

Technology firms, Europe and speech recognition

One of the fascinating things for me is the gap between the US and Europe.

I don't mean hostility, but rather the cultural gap relating to how business is done and what is required. Cultural issues, selling techniques and so on are probably for another post, as are labour laws, but this cultural difference tends to be most apparent in technology.

I've worked with a lot of technologies and in call centre it can be a major problem if it doesn't fit local requirements. Obvious examples are data privacy requirements, out oubound dialling and do not call lists and so on.

Yet what I find bizarre is that one of the most obvious areas (speech recognition technology) is one where there is often very little localisation from major vendors. Microsoft Speech Server is a good case in point - only available in US English. IBM similarly offer Websphere Voice Server in fourteen languages, five of them European . That's better, but most of the European languages are only on the older platform (v4.2 on AIX) and doesn't cover many common European situations (e.g. Belgium, where you need French and Dutch or ideally Flemish). It's no wonder then that Nuance have such a large market share by comparison when they offer 44 languages & dialects, and 24 of them are European. Even more importantly, localisation extends (for example) to three types of German and so cover Swiss and Austrian German as well as the accent of the Federal Republic.

Now I don't wish to suggest that Nuance are masters of this, in my work with them, I've found there are things they could improve, but they have got one simple idea built into their strategy. If you don't do customer service in the local language you haven't a hope of even attempting to solve the softer cultural issues.

Put it another way - would you try to sell to major US firms in any langauge other than US English and expect to be successful?