In the contact center will continue to support Aurix’s existing customers and channel partners. It is a product that has proven its mettle in the classic context of deploying analytics on an existing corpus of stored voice files to support agent training and workforce optimization. It is also the root of delivering “relevant screen pops” based on the context of the call and “nuance detection” aimed at both agent and caller.

But that’s only the beginning. The acquisition was driven by the Emerging Technologies business unit, under VP Chris McGugan. He sees the Aurix core engine and IP as foundational technology that can be spliced into a variety of solutions across the entire enterprise. The same attributes that make it possible for the Aurix phonetic speech search engine to monitoring up to 100% of recorded calls makes it possible to do the sort of “near real-time” speech processing to tag the content of the streamed audio associated with video content or collaboration platforms. This, in turn, enables real-time identification, searching and audio mining.

Avaya’s new in-house approach to speech analytics turns it into the connective tissue that can help its enterprise customers connect the dots between other “Big Data” analytics initiatives. It’s no coincidence that only yesterday database and CRM giant Oracle purchased Endeca, a small New England-based company that specializes in analytics and pattern recognition across large repositories of both structured and unstructured data. The difference is that Endeca conducts its analysis of text and other content on the Web and e-commerce sites. Note the lack of speech analytics. In the world of multi-channel, multi-modal and real-time commerce, Avaya recognizes that treating content and meta-data that starts as spoken words may be more important than ever, and now it Avaya doesn’t have to look outside its Emerging Technologies group for what it considers to be the best-in-class technology. At the same time, the company brings a robust set of analytic tools into its mainstream product line and will add an important component to the quality of service that it delivers to its enterprise customers and, in turn, to their customers.

The latter app, Mobile Voice Control, provides companies with the ability to employ Dragon Speech recognition to speech enable popular applications. It is the same resource that is integrated into Siri, Price Check by Amazon, Ask for iPhone and many other speech enabled mobile services.

The complete Mobile Advantage Portfolio will add more natural language processing under the name NaturallyMobile and stronger authentication mechanisms employing the capabilities of Nuance’s line of voice biometric based speaker verification. The objective is to provide its enterprise customers with foundational resources to support a better mobile experience for their customers.

I agree with the company’s researchers, product managers and general management with the belief that the combination of strong authentication, accurate speech recognition and better language understanding supports better conversational commerce. Opus Research’s sees conversational commerce as grounded in “Trust, Transparency and Convenience.” Nuance has distilled a parallel set of objectives for Mobile Advantage by supporting “discovery, accessibility, connectivity and simplicity.” If done right, they amount to the same thing.

Nuance is pushing ahead with the development of a platform and service architectxure with the working name of “Prodigy” to capture organize the components of a better mobile customer experience. The Mobile Advantage portfolio is the starting point. It brings together voice control with call steering while taking into account understanding and recognition of each individual’s intent. DragonGo! is an excellent precursor product for a high-quality customer experience. It combines accurate speech recognition with an engine that does a good job of imputing the speaker’s intent and then linking directly to a mobile resource that addresses the user’s need.

The number of targets is comprehensive (around 200), yet constrained, in that it has deeper integrations to popular, relevant destinations like Yelp!, Google Maps, Fandango, OpenTable. It recognizes the difference between an instruction and information that can be used for form filling. It also provides for user iteration. If it delivers query results from Yelp! when Google Maps would be more appropriate, it allows for the user to move a visual carousel to the more appropriate resource.

It is not hard to imagine how an enterprise customer care app can be adapted to the Dragon Go! approach. It is all about recognizing the customer’s intent and delivering the right resource and doing as much as possible in a user-controlled (aka self-service) model.

Lync’s progress through the Microsoft code mill has been accelerating. We noted the name change in this blog post on September 13. At that time, 120 enterprise customers were already using the software as part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP). In that previous post, we said that getting details on partnerships was a bit difficult, however that was remedied in this September 14th posting on Microsoft’s TechNet blog. It shows the specifics on 30 hardware, software and service vendors with products to showcase using beta versions of Lync. In addition it claims “more than 400 partners are involved in readiness activities to help customers plan, deploy, manage, and support Lync 2010 when it is generally available later in the fall.”

In the mean time, Microsoft has polished much of its marketing rhetoric to suit the times. OCS 2007 R2 was unquestionably designed for on-premises deployment preferably in an all Microsoft environment. By contrast, Lync is intimately (ahem) linked to a cloud-based strategy that Microsoft calls “extensible and open” while at the same time designed to “minimize legacy infrastructure costs,” which could mean a mass migration to softphones or, as I mentioned earlier, a higher reliance on cloud-based applications and infrastructure.
Apropos moving to the cloud, as Gregersen frames it:

If you caught our Office 365 disclosure last week, you saw that the next version of cloud productivity from Microsoft will also deliver the 2010 suite of products, including Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and Lync, to customers of all sizes. Additionally, Lync Online will federate with consumer communication applications like Windows Live Messenger (now supporting high definition audio and video), and with IM and presence with AOL, Yahoo!, Google and Jabber. Getting connected with others is a beautiful thing!

Agreed! “Getting connected with others” would be a beautiful thing. Whether Lync becomes foundational to the sort of multi-vendor, developer-friendly opportunities that characterize the age of RC (Recombinant Communications) will be determined as Lync goes to GA, Office 365 evolves and developers/partners learn just how open and extensible Lync really is.

All this activity and creativity “in the cloud” comes at a time when we continue to hear about the classic backlog in enterprise IT departments. While executives from marketing or the contact center look for ways to support “social CRM” or “cross channel customer support,” the IT department has to grapple with what it considers first order concerns like network security, data integrity or compliance to a slew of strictures from SarBox to HIPAA to PCI.

The current situation sets up IT to be the “can’t do” entity in a “can do” era. This is why so much of the Web-based marketing and commerce activity happens “outside of” or some say “in spite of” enterprise IT. In the contact center domain, which is arguably where computers and communications systems first learned to talk to one another, “integration with back end systems” always takes longer than setting up a speech-enabled IVR and call routing system on the “front-end”.

Now that multi-channel (phone, Web, text, video) or cross-channel (Web-chat, IM-phone) contact centers are becoming more commonplace, IT departments are challenged to keep up to a much more dynamic and fast changing world. Latency is the villain for customers (who can’t stand to be put on hold), contact center managers (who, likewise, monitor average hold times, but also detest the time it takes for IT to support a new report or installation of a new agent “portal”) and departmental heads (who look for speed when getting activity reports to support their business objectives).

I argue that it’s time for enterprise IT departments to publish their own API’s. Actually, it would be better if they maintained their own private versions of Programmable Web. On its home page PW describes itself as “more than a directory and community, it’s programmable” adding that it provides application developers (who can be enterprise employees or third parties) with “a simple and structured way to access the powerful registry and repository capabilities of PW.” Just replace “PW” with “IT” and let the magic happen.

I’m an analyst and I don’t code. Much of what I describe may already be taking place. I know that the leading enterprise IT infrastructure providers (IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, SAP…) and the contact center infrastructure providers (Avaya, Genesys (Alcatel-Lucent), Cisco, Aspect, InIn…) have tools and “integrated development environments”) that look something like PW, but something’s missing. I think it’s the intent to support agile development that can be blessed by IT as it goes about it’s business of keeping core infrastructure elements secure and reliable.

Update: Programmable Web’s RSS feed posted this story about a steep increase in demand for IP folks familiar with mashups (and APIs)

The philosophy is to let users (or system integrators) take advantage of increased real estate “on the glass”, along with increased processing power of the new devices, to give the application “virtually any look and feel”.

The following paragraph stood out:

Microstrategy anticipates that customers will end up creating internal “app factories” enabled by the vendor’s mobile framework, said Sanju Bansal, executive vice president and chief operating officer.

That’s the language of RC, each user can build his or her own mashup of information and data. Under the hood, the application makes judicious use of “user-role identification, auto-location detection through GPS data and a barcode scanning feature that employs the phone’s camera.”

The use case mentioned by Kanaracus involves the hospitality industry, where a general manager can get quick access to key financial performance variables, such as the mix of room rates or other revenue drivers. But what really captured my imagination (as the platform battle between Android and iOS looms so large among developers) is the comment by Jon Gorman, CTO of Alloso Technologies, praising Apple’s locked-down approach to iPhone development. Gorman notes that the refresh times between OS releases “has allowed time for the APIs (application programming interfaces) to stabilize.”

BI is a field with significant revenue potential. According to the article, per-user license fees for mobile Microstrategy range from $550 to $2,000, although the company is priming the pump by offering 25 free perpetual licenses to selected customers.

Lest you think this will only add more confusion to the already amorphous market for UC products, consider that it truly plays to HP’s strength. As illustrated in the chart below, the IT giant’s revenues from software and professional services are eclipsing those from printing, imaging, storage, servers and personal systems combined, making it a system integration powerhouse. As we approach the two-year anniversary of the acquisition of EDS, it is bold acknowledgment that HP is ready to apply its considerable expertise and experience with Avaya infrastructure to help smooth over many of the bumps and fill in the gaps as they apply the principles of UC in inherently multi-vendor, non-homogeneous environments.

The deal brings Avaya a partner that can provide a number of service delivery options for its core call processing and contact center technologies. HP has the potential to ease the potentially painful transition from those rock-solid, fully-depreciated, PSTN-friendsly Definity ACDs over to the more future-proof SIP-friendly world of Aura. The move looks so seamless on a project plan, but there are only a handful of system integrators that can work with customers to orchestrate the transition as a managed service encompassing resources around the globe, both on premises and “in the cloud.”

This press release provides more color on the agreement between the two firms. It clearly emphasizes such capabilities as life-cycle management and support that HP brings to multi-vendor environments that are ripe for Avaya Aura. It is clearly a professional and managed services play that also serves the purpose of helping Avaya maintain its presence in enterprise IT environments where the move to IP-telephony is an open invitation for competition from Cisco, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and others.

Because it serves as a virtual desktop, it brings Cisco’s Quad, as well as Show and Share into the mix. Quad is a highly flexible user interface that serves as a repository for all the widgets, gadgets, applets or feeds that can be packed into a personal portal. Cisco Show and Share is positioned as a “social video community” platform which, as the name implies, provides a mechanism for employees to share videos to support the projects that they are working on with a broader team.

Cisco calls Cius an “enterprise tablet”, which differentiates it from the Apple iPad (while taking advantage of many of the technical attributes that are iPad-like). For instance, the ability to access an enterprise’s secure VPN (virtual private network) is baked in at the factory. Many of the features support quick and seamless transitions from the Cius’s “virtual desktop” to an employees physical desktop in support of mobile employees.

From a competitive standpoint, it is a nice, pre-emptive strike by Cisco against not just Apple, but any incursions by makers of Windows boxes, like Dell or Lenovo, but especially HP. Cisco is also making a bold appeal to the Android developer community by inviting them into the Cisco Developer Network (CDN).

CDN may not rival the iTunes AppStore, but building apps that conform to API’s that can be dropped into Quad and displayed on the Cius out in the wild should be a provocative challenge to Web app developers around the world.

Addendum: Cisco told the trade press that the device will be generally available in “early 2011″. It will be equipped with both front-facing and rear-facing cameras. It will connect with peripherals wirelessly through Bluetooth (in addition to WiFi) and physically through USB ports. Finally, the targeted street price is “less than $1,000.

Greg Sterling has an interesting angle on the competitive impact Cius may have on Rim’s plans to introduce a tablet here.

“I think customers are very content,” says Bruce Elgort, president of Elguji Software. “What they did not see [at Lotusphere] is yet another set of versions, another set of features. They saw continuity, they saw that Vulcan is the Lotus vision for consuming services, something that is more standards-based and they saw software like Connections that is ready for the enterprise.”

Elgort was talking about an initiative called “Project Vulcan”, which was unveiled at last week’s Lotusphere 2010. It also marked the triumphant return of Alistair Rennie, as the new General Manager of the Lotus business unit (replacing Bob Picciano, who will become head of sales for all of IBM Software). Rennie will work closely with another former GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin, who is taking charge of a newly formed “solutions” group within IBM Software. Its counterpart under the new organization is a “middleware” group, headed by Robert LeBlanc (who had been in charge of worldwide software sales and marketing).

Both Rhodin and Rennie are well-versed in and committed to solutions that are built around open APIs and RESTful programming models. As Rennie explains in the Network World article, “Vulcan becomes the framework for integration of collaboration and business services with refinement and context delivered through social analytics.” In other words, IBM expects end-users to build their own solutions through HTML5-based browsers in ways that mimic their experience with their favorite social networking tools.

IBM’s Lotus-branded software has long had hooks into the social realm with products like Connections (a variant of Lotus Notes/Domino), Sametime and Quickr. At Lotusphere demos showcased how the combination also supports mobile/social communications, using client software that runs on RIM Blackberries.

A few years ago, when he was GM of Lotus, Mike Rhodin told me that the most interesting developments wold always combine two-or-more of the packaged solutions and that higher productivity and value are always “at the interstices” (at least I think that was the quote). These interstitial developments are at the heart of Recombinant Communications and the product announcements from Lotusphere, along with organizational changes highlight IBM’s presence (along with the likes of Cisco, Google, Microsoft and dozens of others) on Opus Research’s Recombinant Communications Leader Board.