VoiceCon 2009: Seeing is Believing

Guest post by Amir Zmora

Categories: Technology

April 6th, 2009

[Amir Zmora, our VP marketing, went  to VoiceCon 2009, and all I got was this  guest post... his first guest post can be found  here.]

VoiceCon Orlando was held last week, and for me it was the first time attending the event. Weather in Orlando at this time of the year is great, and the venue was very nice – you just had to keep your feet away from those alligators wandering around in the resort’s water streams.

If I was to pick the two main topics that were shown and discussed at VoiceCon Orlando, they would be Web 2.0 everywhere and video. The event included many demonstrations and products that bring Web 2.0 into business life and consumer products, as well as video in greater use, size and frame rate.

Video becomes bigger and faster

Wandering around the show floor at VoiceCon makes it clear: video is here big time. It was hard to find a single PBX/UC vendor that didn’t have some kind of video play. This spans from video enabled enterprise and consumer phones, through large HD video screens, to telepresence meeting rooms.

One of the clear trends in the videophone space is the integration of Web 2.0 capabilities into the phone. New phones announced provide not just voice and video calling capabilities, but are becoming a complete communications device with Web browsing capabilities, IM (through common providers as Yahoo, MSN and Google), RSS feeds (for stock, weather and news updates), picture viewing (through UGC sites like Flickr), Internet radio and many more cool capabilities, with more to come. An example of such is the new Grandstream video phone.

Grandstream GXV3140 Multimedia IP Phone

While media phones are getting a lot of traction, when looking at these I find it hard to view them as a compelling solution, from a user experience standpoint: resolution is small, and so what you see is mainly the nose of the person on the other side of the line (and some noses are bigger than others…).

This brings me to the other end of personal video communication – those using HD resolution with a very clear picture, at 30 frames per second (FPS), now going up to 60 FPS. Examples of such solutions come from companies such as Tandberg and Polycom, but they are priced at the level of ~$10K, so they are rarely to be found on the common work-desk. I am still waiting for that one solution that will drive these embedded devices to real mass deployment, with high quality and reasonable pricing.

Web 2.0 means business

Web 2.0 tools and social media are being used for business purposes for a long time but this is mainly as a pure marketing tool. We rarely see them being part of unified communication and corporate information systems. VoiceCon showed that this is no longer true, as large UC vendors are starting to introduce innovative solutions that utilize social media for business purposes as part of the CRM and UC systems.

An example for this is organizational information sharing, based on social media. This allows employees to share and collect information based on common areas of interests. Another example is Cisco’s internal Mac support (as mentioned in Cisco’s CTO, Pamdarsee Warrior, keynote) through a dedicated Wiki, where employees support each other as the organization’s IT department doesn’t provide this service.

Avaya demonstrated this trend nicely through their newly announced Avaya Aura architecture. Basically, it provides better and more open communication, meaning multi-vendor, multi-location and multi-business. It is of course built all around SIP. This architecture also allows for integration with social media, so one’s profile can be utilized in contact centers, providing much more context to the call than just caller ID.

An example of such integration is a person asking a question on Facebook, looking for recommendations on TV sets. This eventually leads to the creation of a session with an online shop recommended by a friend of this person. Avaya has already proved in the past that they are up-to-date and into social media through their Facebook application for click-to-talk telephony.

Openness should come next

To make a long story short, VoiceCon 2009 was exciting and refreshing, especially the part where the large enterprises are adopting what was once thought to be “kids stuff” (communities, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Still, I’m hoping to see more openness, where UC vendors will utilize real SIP standards, allowing any device to connect to their system. The fact that, in order to connect a device to a UC vendor’s system, “integration” is still required, with those nasty tweaks and twists, means we are not yet through with those “walled gardens” in  the PBX industry. Hopefully, more refreshing announcements breaking these walls will follow in future VoiceCon events and elsewhere.