Today, Cisco announced formal arrangements with a number service providers to offer Quad on a hosted or managed services basis. The chosen service providers include ACS (a Xerox company) in North America, Logicalis UK in Western Europe, and Alphawest (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) in Australia.

Its objective is to give companies of all sizes, around the globe, the opportunity to experience Quad for themselves. Unlike a lot of social media, Cisco employees see Quad as a real boon to productivity. If integrated with Cisco Pulse (which I wrote about in this post in November 2009), it can be used to “tag” elements (like audio tracks from teleconferences or the contents of messages) to make them more suitable for sharing.

Based on its own experience, Cisco realizes that the value Quad will differ on a company-by-company basis. It is a service that each company will have to experience in order to recognize its tangible value. That’s why Cisco has engaged CapGemini to act in both a consulting and system integration capacity as part of the roll-out. CG’s roles will span from “defining use cases and business goals for social collaboration to implementing and integrating Quad within the customer’s existing processes and environments, as well as driving governance and adoption to ensure the effective use of the platform.”

This move to cloud-based instantiation of Quad will make it more competitive with Microsoft Lync (which is offered on a hosted basis through Microsoft Office 365 and the Azure cloud) as well as IBM’s collaboration suite offered on a hosted basis as LotusLive. That said, Cisco Pulse stands to be a real differentiator.

Because the package of software uses the same core logic as full-blown Aura implementations, Communications Manager is the call handling resource and all of the other Avaya-branded resources support presence management, system management and reporting, resiliency and fail-over. Sales people and channel partners require no special training to sell it and, by Avaya’s calculation, solutions carry a retail price that is 15%-22% less than competing products.

This is a low-cost, starter package designed to run on a single HP server, or to be virtualized and put on a shared server. That means it automatically ships with Avaya Aura® Session Manager, Avaya Aura® System Manager, Avaya Aura® Presence Services, Avaya Aura® Session Border Controller (in April), Avaya Aura® Application Enablement Services, Communication Manager Utility Services, Avaya Aura® Communication Manager and Communication Manager Messaging. It also fits with Avaya’s Agile Communications Environment (ACE) to enable quick and easy integration through “connectors to “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft Lync.

In an analyst pre-briefing, Avaya cited a few beta customers (under NDA) who are deploying configurations that include multiple contact centers, video and the “FLARE Experience,” referring to the AJAX-dependent, dynamic desktop (if not Avaya’s own enterprise tablet).

The branch or retail gateway is a cost-effective way to extend Aura functionality to sites with no more than 384 users. This architecture provides for centralization of system management and applications while supporting popular local functions, like auto-attendant, voice mail or clients for Aura-based apps. This gateway is set to ship “in March.”

Avaya is starting its marketing push for Aura Midsized Edition (Aura ME) today, with general availability for “greenfield” implementations (as well as “bolt on” for selected versions of Communications Manager and Communications Server 1000) in April. Programs to support “easy migration to SIP” from Aura ME 5.2.1 and older CS implementations scheduled for “the first half” of 2011. The same for implementation of the Contact Center package in “greenfield” envirnoments.

Our recent survey results reveal that the use of social media collaboration and community-building is becoming as commonplace in the enterprise as the use of the traditional email and conferencing systems that IT departments have endorsed for years. It is becoming increasingly clear that when organizations add social media strategies and tactics, they increase their competitive edge, engage customers and promote loyalty and longevity.

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You can also obtain a free copy of the survey results from Empirix by following this link.

Calling it “our seventh cloud,” Benioff has made Heroku and its ability to support Ruby, a peer with the core Sales Cloud (the initial salesforce management and CRM offering), Service Cloud (back-end for customer service operations including contact centers), Chatter (collaboration), Jigsaw (business data), the Force.com (ISV development tools) and Database.com (pure DBMS-designed to compete with Oracle and Microsoft). When Heroku chief executive Byron Sebastian joined Benioff on the stage at Dreamforce, he showed how the platform could be used to build Facebook pages quickly and easily for major brands, retailers or product companies.

While the Heroku acquisition puts fast assembly of Web sites and services in the spotlight for the moment. Looking at the full-spectrum of “clouds” (of “platforms”) launched by Salesforce.com reveals a rich resource of genetic material for both customer-facing and intra-enterprise collaboration. This point was driven home on the first day for Dreamforce during which several sessions when the demonstration of Service Cloud 2 “Live” depicted an operating contact center with live agents responding to emails, tweets, instant messages and “live” questions from attendees.

Demonstrations by Interactive Intelligence and LiveOps give the real world feeling to the Recombinant Contact Center and new architectures for accommodating the demand for both self-service and assisted service over a multiplicity of channels. “We have the technology!” And the demand for a flexible approach that spans “the cloud,” agile programming platforms, widgets and gadgets on agent screens, apps or browsers on the client side will give companies a broad range of solutions providers to choose from.

Benioff explicitly takes on Microsoft and Oracle, but in the realm of customer care, self-service and assisted self-servcie, he’ll have to add Cisco, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent/Genesys, Voxeo and perhaps Amazon.com to the list of alternative solutions providers. The five new clouds that his company has introduced at Dreamforce 2010 provide ample proof that he’s preparing for battle.

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Meanwhile, at the posh Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Cisco held its second Collaboration Summit featuring major updates and extensions of the resources that support both intra- and inter-company collaboration, as well as collaborative customer care. The Twittersphere was also alive with comments from the Defrag Conference in Denver, and tweets surrounding a variety of talks about generation, control and filtering of streams of BIG DATA provided a counterpoint to presentations of enterprise infrastructure, architecture, software and services that encourage collaboration, communications and conferencing.

In Cisco’s case, the day-and-a-half of briefings on architectural pillars, product descriptions, strategy discussions, customer testimonials and demonstrations, provided vivid pictures of usecases for the rapidly maturing line of core technologies – including social platform and IU associated with Quad, the inter-company communications support of IME, the Android-based Cius tablet, and the virtual desktop. Collectively they provide Cisco customers and partners solutions that leverage the core functional elements: Interoperable Open Architecture, Flexible Deployment Models, Enterprise Social Software, Pervasive Video and Secure Intercompany Communications.

I’ll be issuing an advisory next week with more details on the contrasting approaches being taken by Microsoft and Cisco. My top-line thoughts follow:

For customers and technology partners looking for Microsoft to fulfill on its promises surrounding Lync to facilitate PBX replacement, the company does not disappoint. For those looking for a UI (user interface) that supports multimedia messaging and conferencing, Microsoft Lync delivers those goods as well. Indeed, if you are a customer that is steeped in the server-side architecture where Active Directory houses the company directory, Exchange is the core of email and messaging and Office applications are the foundation of productivity, Lync is your glue.

Cisco’s approach puts much more emphasis on the rapid arrival of “pervasive video” as the model for interpersonal and intercompany communications. It will require some retooling of the way that broadband media streams are managed from endpoint-to-endpoint, but Cisco and partners are working on many of the answers there. Another point of major departure revolves around the contact center, where Cisco has a vision that embraces social networks (with Socialminer), Capture and analytics and a new desktop (Finesse) that serves as a “container” for all sorts of agent and supervisor apps and instances. By contrast, Microsoft will depend partners, led by Aspect, InteractiveIntelligence and PrairieFyre to deliver on contact center functionality.

The implications and promises of the two approaches are the core subject of my forthcoming advisory.

While monitoring the Tweetstream surrounding the announcement, I noticed that more than a few “unified communications” (UC) experts referred to the service as an example of UC. I strongly disagree. The service doesn’t really unify anything. Facebook is just taking control of all the streams that cross over into its walled garden and then delivering the results in a context that makes it most deliverable to the user. (This approach has already begun to raise privacy concerns exemplified by this Tweet from HARO founder Peter Shankman “So all our chat/email/text/IM history in one place – That Facebook will OWN? No thanks.” I don’t think that’s the kind of UC people want to buy into.

On the other hand, there’s a lot going on under the hood with FB messaging that has nothing to do with UC and showcases the power of RC concept. As the peripatetic Robert Scoble points out in a Tweet “Geeks will like this. Facebook’s new messaging system is built on Cassandra, hBase, Haystack, Thrift, ZooKeeper, memcache…” These are examples of the rich base of open source assets that today’s RC adherents have to work with.

That rich genetic material also includes cloud-based instantiations of Microsoft’s Office Suite as explained in this blog post by Takeshi Numoto, a Corporate VP at Microsoft:

As shared in Facebook’s announcement, Facebook’s new messaging platform integrates the Office Web Apps to enable Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents with just one click. As you know, Office helps you create stunning documents that bring your ideas to life. Now you can easily share those ideas with your friends and family on Facebook. I’m really excited about being able to make it even easier for people to use Office to access and share information across different devices, networks and platforms. With the Office Web Apps on Facebook, you have even more ways to express yourself with Office and easily share your thoughts with people that are important to you.

If it is “unification” it is highly selective and user powered. True to Darwin and the notion of natural selection, there will be aspects of “facebook.com” that are destined to enjoy high popularity, usage and longevity. With Microsoft’s endorsement (the software giant holds equity in Facebook), it has the potential to become a powerful platform for sharing and collaboration inside and among enterprise employees and partners. I don’t see a robust link to reliable communications infrastructure (meaning a relationship with a network operator) at this time, but would expect some of the global network operators (and infrastructure providers) that are already Microsoft partners to figure out how to profit from business efforts to support (and control) social interactions emanating from desktops and cubicles.

Of course, I’d also like to see more initiatives around support of voice services.

The statement represents Mecker’s commitment to “leveraging the innovation and knowledge of the community” and helping to see that customers are not locked in “from the metal to the UI.” This is but one more set of evidence that “Big Code” (meaning the major enterprise software providers) are recognizing that it is going to be the sort of widget-driven, componentized and often cloud-based world where taking a “recombinant approach” that enables customers and partners to splice together their own custom solutions that combine (and leverage) selected elements in the old code base in ways that conform to and integrate new technologies, features and architectures.

Mecker’s comments reflect the fact that SAP “gets it”, but the proof will be in the execution and acceptance by developer partners. According to the article, the company has established a Code Exchange within its Developer Network to encourage the sharing or IP among partners, integrators and customers. As part of a three-pronged strategy to encourage innovation in the areas of “mobile, in-memory and cloud” domains, it will be creating special “micro-communities” sometime next year. Obviously, it has a long way to go.

The products will be generally available before year’s end. So will details regarding the availability of Lync online (a hosted version of the server software) and Lync Web App (a Web-standard conformant client). All support initiation enterprise enterprise voice, instant messaging and web-, audio- and videoconferencing into a new, connected communications experience.

As noted in the press release, more than 120 enterprise customers have already been engaged in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Lync. Likewise 30 partners have announced beta versions of Lync-compatible hardware, software or services – though finding details on the partnerships has been very difficult.

Rebranding and packaging of the Unified Communications suite is a timely (and most likely expensive) step for Microsoft. From our perspective, OCS has been a major “win” in Microsoft’s efforts to dominate enterprise IT “from the desktop in” as employees use it to initiate instant messaging, conferencing and other forms of real time communications. Existing customers and partners will find Lync to be a more coherent way to integrate email, messaging and collaboration tools embedded in legacy Office, Exchange and Sharepoint installations.

As we suspected when we issued this briefing after the SpeechTek Conference in New York City, the speech processing capabilities – once packaged as SpeechServer and began its disappearing act when it was integrated into Microsoft OCS 2007 – have evaporated from Lync. The target isn’t so much voice dialing, message dictation, or voice-to-text translation as integration of telephony and messaging into productivity software.

Classic Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has totally disappeared from Microsoft’s UC repetoire. This confirmed what we were told by Tellme’s Grant Shirk during a briefing at SpeechTek. In essence, speech-enabled IVR applications will be instantiated “in the cloud” by Tellme. This will make for some very challenging development efforts as competitors in the world of RC (Recombinant Communications) simplify the process of adding speech recognition in ways that promote both collaboration and customer care in ways that transcend traditional boundaries between individuals in contact centers, cubicles, home offices and mobile situations.

It will be interesting to delve into the areas of intersection between Lync and the broader challenges associated with developing and promoting its “natural user interface”.

In other words, Web developers can build communications-enabled apps “without knowing anything about communications.” Genius!

As characterized by Hussain, ACE is the product of marketing “pull” that crosses several functional areas in an enterprise. Demand starts at the functional level, where platform incompatibilities may have thwarted a departmental head’s efforts to reap the benefits promised by providers of “unified communications.” ACE comes to the rescue with shrink-wrapped “connectors” for Cisco, Avaya (including the vestiges of the Nortel CMS line), Tandberg (video endpoints), IBM SameTime, and Microsoft OCS. Thus Avaya makes it possible to overcome incompatibilities with a single DVD that runs on a couple of servers and carries a list price of $10,000-$12,000 for the core license plus per user fees of $50-$100.

As for common use cases, Hussain provided profiles of implementations at a number of global businesses. For example a multi-branch global bank provided a form of “follow-me” connectivity by providing “hot desks” for itinerant executives. The service integrates a voice network that includes IP-PBXs from both Avaya and Cisco with presence management and call origination based on IBM Sametime. In other instances, the ACE SDK was used to “communications enable” business processes and workflows with APIs to CRM and knowledge management systems to support better medical care or customer care in financial services.

Architecturally, ACE resides “on top of” Aura, Avaya’s branded middleware SIP-based communications. Hussain explained that Avaya’s product offering has changed so that ACE will emerge as the application development environment for Aura as well as multivendor environments, and that the “lower layer toolkit (back into Aura Session Manager) will be ACE.”

Hussain, who is a veteran of the “Nortel side of Avaya”, was especially pleased that ACE is now a part of Avaya’s DevConnect program, referring to Avaya’s community of 3rd party developers, acknowledging that this sort of program was “missing at Nortel.”

Avaya is on the right track with ACE. It is putting tools into the hands of the people that are driving enterprise-wide innovation and making sure that key elements of Avaya’s existing fabric for call-handling, voice processing and multi-media interactions remains entrenched in multi-vendor solutions. The short list of supported vendors – IBM, Microsoft, Cisco/Tandberg – is not as “open” as might be ideal, but it does represent a high percentage of Avaya’s current market space.