I’m cleaning up my to-do lists in preparation to be out for vacation next week. I’m also making my vacation to-do list (I really like to make lists) because I’m not going anywhere — I’m spending the week at home. A lot of people tsk-tsk at me when I say I’m not going anywhere but I think the at-home vacation is underrated.
I enjoy extended time at home to work on projects and relax. I need to update the photos in my picture frames, reorganize some drawers, read a few books, finish a jigsaw puzzle (green frog on a green leaf with a green background – what was I thinking?) and re-watch my favorite movies: The Sandlot and The Maltese Falcon.
I’ll try not to think about work but I will. I get worried when I’m out of the office. If I’m not here “cracking foxy” (Bogart, The Maltese Falcon) on Fred and Eric, there is a possibility they may get distracted. They’ll work on projects they like, instead of what comes first on our group VoiceCon to-do list. So, I’ll rest up on vacation. Then I’ll be good and ready to do some catch-up “cracking foxy” with our VoiceCon chairmen when I return.
The web being what it is, earlier today, via a series of links that I now can’t recall, I found myself on a site called mashable.com, reading a post that estimates Apple’s revenues from the one billion apps that have been downloaded for the iPhone to be $25-$40 million.
The author characterizes that $25-$40M as “not much.” Personally, it’d meet my need for bourbon, smokes, iTunes, NetFlix, yogurt and Luna bars for the rest of my days, but I understand where he’s coming from: Those billion apps let users do lots of cool things, but from Apple’s perspective, their main contribution is to enhance the value of the iPhone platform; thus the author concludes “…,Apple is still primarily a hardware company…”
That led me to think about the enterprise communication platform vendors, you know, the companies that are morphing into software-based rather than hardware-based firms. To a large degree, I accept that proposition. In his presentation on “Pricing and Licensing for IP Telephony and UC” at VoiceCon Orlando, Doug Carolus from N’Compass, asserted that 75 percent or more of the functionality customers receive from an IP-PBX is actually implemented in software.
So, I get the argument, but I can’t help but wonder what will happen if communications hardware really drops to pure commodity status? Will software will ever match the revenue stream these vendors now receive from hardware? As shown in the chart below, Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting, found that UC licenses are priced all over the map.
Will there be enough coming in to keep these vendors whole?
I know that the mainstream media is out of favor and, in many cases, almost out of business, but I still love The New York Times.
Earlier this week, it ran a story about a search service called WolframAlpha, that is scheduled to launch later this month. The service is named for its founder, a physicist and computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram, and will apply artificial intelligence to massive databases to provide answers to the kinds of questions Google and other search services aren’t really set up to do. You can find the NY Times story here, the WolframAlpha site here and more about Stephen Wolfram here.
Now creating a new kind of search engine isn’t a trivial task and so I wasn’t surprised when one of the folks quoted in the NY Times story predicted that WolframAlpha will be “….very good in some areas and incomplete in others.” But I was struck by how appropriate that characterization is for what’s going on in enterprise communications.
IP Telephony and now Unified Communications are very good at some very important jobs. They help lower network costs because of line/bandwidth consolidation because there’s less need for separate, dedicated wide-area voice networks. On premises, you can have much more streamlined cabling and wiring plants. IP end points have paved the way for simpler and more unified messaging, and as IM and presence become more widespread, enterprises are finding they can get by with fewer ports on their voicemail systems. And UC makes possible new kinds of converged applications that can impact both personal productivity and the enteprise’s overall bottom line.
All that’s the “very good” part. The “incomplete” aspects include bandwidth and performance management systems that give IT/telecom execs confidence that all the converged traffic is passing through the network the way it is supposed to. And security. And more rational and less expensive options for systems and services integration. And more widely available WAN services, like SIP Trunking, that make real the promise of true, end-to-end, IP communications.
As we assemble the program for VoiceCon San Francisco, we’re very conscious of the need to provide information in a range of formats that will help attendees leverage what IP Telephony and UC do well, and present options for migration that circumvent where IP-Tel and UC remain incomplete. We welcome your suggestions and ideas……but hurry: We will be finalizing the program over the next few weeks.
We’re pushing hard to get the VoiceCon Virtual Event together, but we’re also gearing up to begin our planning cycle for VoiceCon San Francisco, which takes place November 2-5, 2009 at the Moscone North Convention Center. This is going to be a big effort because we’ve decided to really overhaul the program for San Francisco.
We’re not going to be changing focus, but we are changing our approach. The impetus is the fact that, as everyone knows, justifying travel expenses is getting harder and harder. We believe we’ve got compelling content, but what we needed to do was make sure every last second of the San Francisco event–and all other VoiceCons moving forward–represents something you can’t get any other way besides getting on a plane and flying to our show. We think that, given the advances in technologies like video, social networking, Second Life and so forth, that travel will probably always require a strong justification, even when the economy turns around and budgets ease up a bit.
So to start our planning, we got back to basics: We’ve got a building, and we’ve got three and a half days. What can we put into that place and time?
We’ve begun answering that question in broad terms: There should be demo sessions; you can get demos on the show floor, but having something like a hands-on experience from a third-party, objective instructor is even more valuable. We should make sure attendees have as many opportunities as possible to get face time, in groups as small as possible, with experts that they simply don’t come into contact with in their daily lives in the office.
We’re about to begin the process of translating these ideas into a plan that can actually deliver these opportunities to our attendees. As always, we welcome your suggestions about things you’d like to see at the show. Now’s the time to speak up–we’re open to everything.
Does “I did it!” ever lose its gratification? It hasn’t yet for me. A few nights ago, I watched through my kitchen window, a mother with the back of her child’s shirt scrunched up in her hand. She was running beside a young girl, helping her balance what was quite obviously her very first two-wheeler bike ride — no training wheels. As they reached the driveway across from my house I heard the young girl exclaim, “I did it!”
It gave me pause and I began to think about some “I did it!” moments in my life that came courtesy of VoiceCon. Like living through my first VoiceCon – it was in 2003 — when a blizzard almost made us cancel the event. Or the first time a session drew more people than we had chairs. The first event in which I trained the whole operations team. The launch of the VoiceCon Tour, VoiceCon Amsterdam, the attendee party this past VoiceCon Orlando, the list goes on and on. Wow, I get to say, “I did it!”
Of course, I don’t really do it on my own. It takes the entire team for VoiceCon to have successes. But this is my post and the not-so-secret among those that know me is I love to say: “I did it!”
The VoiceCon team is well into the preparation cycle for our upcoming virtual event. The VoiceCon community is voting with their mouse clicks and the vote is that the virtual event program is of value — registration is very strong. If you haven’t been able to register yet, I hope you will. At the end of day on June 10, you’ll log out of the VoiceCon virtual event with valuable information you won’t get anywhere else. You can use that information to create another “I did it!” moment in your career. I’ll be celebrating with you…virtually of course.
If you check out the VoiceCon Virtual Event Program for this June 10th’s event, you’ll see that we’ve pretty well fleshed out most of the program. I want to explain a little about the formats.
The sessions that you see billed as taking place in “Room 1″ and “Room 2″ are webinars–really nothing more or less. Presenters will deliver PPT-based talks, and you’ll be able to ask questions. The tool we use for these will be identical to the one we use for our VoiceCon Webinars.
I’ll hasten to add that the two sponsored sessions, which will be led by representatives from Alcatel-Lucent and Interactive Intelligence, are not going to be sales pitches. Alcatel-Lucent is wrapping up its preparations, so I’m not going to pre-empt that, but I can say that the hour they’re sponsoring will be very much a practical, non-vendor-focused session.
Likewise, we’re very fortunate to have the CEO of Interactive Intelligence, Dr. Don Brown, delivering a talk on ROI and process automation. Dr. Brown’s an outstanding speaker, and I’ve already seen his slides, and they’re very much focused on technical and organizational issues, without dwelling on product pitches.
The other element of the Program is the live text chats, which you’ll see are being led by the outstanding trainers from Telecom + UC Training. I encourage you to drop in on each of their chats and pick their brains.
Finally, to the title of this post: We do have one chat session time slot that remains open. I’d like to know what you’d like to see slotted as a topic for that chat. If we get a consensus, we’ll find the right expert to lead a productive discussion. Leave your suggestions here in Comments, or email me at ekrapf@techweb.com
We’ve just launched the website for VoiceCon’s first virtual event. As with any new endeavor, there has been a learning curve. Some of the planning has been straightforward and we’ve applied the live event format of what we do and how we do it. However, we are learning through experience the areas of the virtual event that are very different from live events.
The biggest challenge for me has been reining in my desire to brand everything VoiceCon…and I mean everything. For those of you that have been to a VoiceCon event, you know that if I can stick something to it, hang something over it or build something around it, then that something is going to have the VoiceCon logo. This past VoiceCon Orlando I took it a step further and branded the people–did anyone see our VoiceCon tattoos? So in my head virtual VoiceCon is a dream come true and is just like the Tootsie Roll commercial from the ‘70s: “Whatever it is I think I see, becomes a [remove Tootsie Roll reference enter VoiceCon reference] to me.”
As we go through the process, though, I’m learning that there are limitations in the virtual environment too, and as usual, I can’t have everything I want…but I’m still trying. I hope you’ll visit the VoiceCon Virtual Event website (www.voicecon.com/virtualevents) and register for Transforming the Enterprise with Unified Communications on June 10 to see all the creative things we’ve come up with.
May 15th, 2009 |
