The Lippis Report

July 24th, 2006

On June 25th, in San Francisco, Jeff Raikes, President of Microsoft´s Business Division, changed the IP telephony and communications landscape forever. He did this on so many levels with the company´s Unified Communications (UC) announcement. He boldly told IT executives to stop spending on IP telephony since Microsoft´s Unified Communications products will radically increase corporate productivity and change the cost of ownership of enterprise communications, thanks to software economics. He pushed aside Avaya, Cisco, Mitel, ShoreTel et al., by saying that these companies do not have the vision and ability to execute on the next wave of IP telephony. The next wave is the strategic phase that ushers in communications-enabled business process and brings with it a new communications experience for hundreds of millions of people. And you know, Raikes is right, most IP tel suppliers don´t have the next wave vision.

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July 24th, 2006

I interview Robert Redford and Greg Mayfield of Cisco to understand their Services Oriented Network Architecture, or SONA. While all major IP telephony firms have positioned WebServices/SOA as the new communications application development platform, Cisco focuses on the network as the IT platform. Cisco uses SONA to position the network beyond a connectivity service to a platform with callable services such as location, authentication, presence, call control, etc. It is a great discussion for anyone interested in where IT is going.

July 24th, 2006

By SpanLink

This paper from SpanLink is an excellent example of an infrastructure approach to communication-enabled business applications. Contact centers can dramatically increase efficiencies and customer satisfaction by using advanced team productivity suites. These packaged solutions merge enterprise applications and Web services, developed through a service-oriented architecture (SOA), with IP contact center resources. They deliver a new level of productivity applications to agents, supervisors and administrators. Installed in days versus the months required with custom solutions, an advanced contact center productivity suite will enhance customer-enterprise relationships and facilitate the development of new enterprise applications to link customers´ day-to-day needs with enterprise offerings. To find out more, download this paper.

July 17th, 2006

While business decision makers are increasingly layering real time applications such as voice and video over their IP networks thanks to its economic and business value, technical professionals have grown increasingly alarmed at the performance of their converged networks. It turns out that many have not assessed their IP networks to support real time flows and thus find performance degradation of their new converged networks robbing them of benefits originally sought. As performance falls, technical managers try tweaking configuration setting on switches, routers, communication managers, wide area services, appliances, and buying more local and wide area bandwidth to alleviate the problem. All the while the business decision makers scratch their heads and wonder, at times out loud, did we make the right decision?
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July 10th, 2006

Corporate telecommunication budgets are changing. Voice transmission and toll charges use to dominate service provider bills to corporate customers. Now with the huge growth of mobile services and attractive pricing plans, minutes have shifted toward mobile operators, resulting in mobile bills representing a larger share of corporate telecommunication spending. Case in point, one of our clients is experiencing a 15% decline in wireline and toll use, while wireless minutes are growing at approximately 28% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). The good news for them is that voice minute unit cost is dropping overall by some 3% annum. Another client spends $1.2 million and $600K per year on toll and mobile charges, respectively. The catch is this client has not summed up all mobile spending by employees in remote offices, international sites, etc. We estimate that there is an additional $600K per year of mobile charges buried in expense reports around the company; bringing mobile usage expenditures equal to toll charges. These are but two examples of a systemic change in enterprise communication spending.

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July 10th, 2006

Zeus Kerravala and I discuss two large industry announcements. First, we dive into Microsoft’s new Unified Communications announcement which we believe will start the communication application wars between Microsoft and the IP telephony vendors such as Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Nortel, et al. Then we weigh in on the pros and cons of the Nokia Siemens Networks joint venture and what will happen with their enterprise businesses. We check the mood of the market by reporting on the Cisco and Nortel user group conferences. We spend 25 minutes covering these important topics. Enjoy.

July 10th, 2006

I explore the third phase of IP telephony, the strategic value phase, which combines business process modeling tools with SOA and communications to deliver the new application creation model. This new communications-enabled application creation model is being used by service providers and developed by all the major IT software and some IP telephony vendors. Lawrence Catchpole Chief Strategy Officer and Co-founder of M1 Global joins the program to explain the benefits of communications-enabled business process.