Along a more serious vein (literally), IBM’s researchers are joining forces with speech technology specialist Nuance Communications to use IBM’s “Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities” in conjunction with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) solutions (not to mention its life-like speech synthesis) to provide hospitals, physicians and payers access to critical and timely information. Doctors and professionals at Columbia University Medical Center and the University of Maryland School of Medicine are collaborating with IBM and Nuance. Physicians at Columbia and helping to identify some specific incidences where Watson’s technology can be of greatest use and doctors at Maryland are helping with user interface design.

The two companies expect the first commercial offerings from the collaboration to be available in 18-24 months. It is part of a much larger joint development effort that is described in this press release from IBM’s Web site.

In this article in PC Magazine, Ray Kurzweil calls it, “one small step for IBM, one giant leap for computerkind.” In the article, one of the most telling quotes is, “I’ve always felt that once a computer masters a human’s level of pattern recognition and language understanding, it would inherently be far superior to a human because of this combination.” And I think, deep down inside, many people (perhaps the TV viewing population) would believe Kurzweil’s assertion.

I may be corrected, but I’m pretty sure that Watson is not using automated speech recognition to “hear” the answers (or clues). But there is a significant amount of “natural language understanding” brought to bear as the computer deals with the text input and identifies the topic, determines the meaning of the words in context and starts formulating a response from its database.

Watson’s success (even if it doesn’t “win” the Jeopardy competition) furthers the cause of “Virtual Assistants,” exemplified by Siri, Vlingo and the culmination of Google’s speech-enabled initiatives. This article, which appeared in Engadget in mid-January, has embedded video that shows how Watson answers questions during the practice round. It also gives significant background on the data processing, pattern recognition, language “understanding,” statistics (to determine confidence in an answer) and even the mechanism for pressing the button.

I believe that the life-like synthesized voice of Watson is the quality that will have the lasting impact. It sounds like a person. It is able to detect irony and puns. It even appears to have a sense of humor (although having a topic like “Chicks Dig Me” seems like th product of a bad straight man. The TV audience are more ready to accept the reality of a talking computer, just like Mr. Ed, the talking horse from TV’s “golden years” or Kit the talking car from “Night Rider.” It is no longer the product of willing suspension of disbelief. Rather, it is the product of wishful thinking as the general public comes to expect to be able to converse with computers or computing resources over mobile phones or microphones installed in their PCs.

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Lightbulbs are turning on all over the blogosphere and soon will provide sufficient illumination of a long-standing issue that will shape mobile access to social networks, financial institutions and corporate mail and message stores. This is an especially important development now that there is a clear path from locked-down, premises-based computing and collaboration resources into shared servers and “virtualized” computing environments “in the cloud.”

AT&T Labs is taking a leadership role in promoting anonymous authentication. As illustrated in a diagram in this article by Brian Oliver Bennett in “Laptop”, the architecture underlying Watson, its core automated speech processing platform, puts speaker verification on the same level as such core capabilities as speech recognition, text-to-speech (TTS) rendering, natural language understanding (NLU) and advanced dialog management.

Laptop’s Bennett was especially interested in SAFE (Secure Authentication For Everyone) and its potential to protect mobile users as they use laptops and mobile devices to carry out their favorite online activities, like social networking or accessing personal information. As he explains:

Most interesting though is AT&T’s Safe (Strong Authentication For Everyone) security protocol. It uses four factors for authentication; voice, account info, validated mobile device, and location. The good news is these protocols are envisioned to operate behind the scenes to enable faster, more convenient account protection and login.

The video in this Gizmodo post (though noisy and a bit hard to follow) provides a solid usecase for voice based authentication for both laptop and mobile subscribers using Facebook. Anyone who has had his or her FB account compromised will immediately appreciate the value of a service that authenticates the user (not just a recognized device, browser or client).

Another little appreciated but fundamentally important aspect of voice biometric-based authentication is its support of anonymous validation. On services like Facebook or any social network where a user might benefit from using an alias (think “Fake Steve Jobs”), such pseudonym users find great benefit in a resource that can assure them that makes sure that impostors will be thwarted, should they try to obtain access under false pretenses. In this case, the system doesn’t care about revealing who you are, but can ensure others (your readers or the people with whom you want to carry out business) that you are who you claim to be.

Anonymous authentication is at the heart of supporting electronic commerce and will play an increasingly important role on the mobile internet. This fact is recognized by members of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as they codify the standards that underlie future Web- and cloud-based services. Note this post by W3C Team Member Dave Raggett in which he notes that he is working on a method of anonymous credentialing, which he equates to a student ID card and cites the usecase where a university student need only “prove you are a current student, but not for your actual identity.”

Raggett says that he is working with personnel at IBM’s lab in Zurich to develop an extension to Firefox that supports “zero knowledge proof” of identity. As described, it would use a PIN or passphrase, but – as the video mentioned above indicates – that phrase (or series of random digits) can be spoken, rather than keyed, into the system to prevent false accepts and temper false rejects as well.

Raised awareness of mutifactor, anonymous authentication among application developers, standards makers and major brands (like AT&T and IBM) hold the promise of accelerating introduction of marketable products within realistic planning horizons. Associating anonymous authentication with the globally accepted (and fundamentally insecure) social networks should be a relatively near term boon to real world use.

At base, IBM is taking a pragmatic, “feet-on-the-ground; head-in-the-clouds” approach that has its roots in the idea of “the Service Grid” which I first saw described in depth by John Hagel (then at McKinsey) in his 2002 book, “Out of The Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow Through Web Services.” While this idea may be orthogonal to the idea of “cloud computing,” Hagel uses the beginning of the book to describe a layer of functionality that’s required to solve key problems surrounding security, reliability, transaction integrity, billing and orchestration of functions. These are the proven strengths of global telecom carriers.

In this era when phone companies are most fearful of becoming “fat, dumb pipes”, IBM proposes to provide them with ready-made resources to make their living through the care and feeding of a highly-reliable service grid in support of better Web services (which, in many cases is left up to third-parties who will take advantage of maturing standards, API’s and “ontologies” to create better mechanisms for intra- and inter-enterprise communications and commerce). This approach is very consistent with IBM’s own efforts to support instantiations of its products and services as hardware, software or “hybrid” offerings. IBM is careful not to obsolete, commoditize or cannibalize its current product and service mix. Yet it will continue to make its living by creating bigger opportunities for its customers, partners and technology providers to bring their own solutions to market.

Big Blue is taking the calculated risk that those solutions will incorporate a sufficient share of IBM branded SKUs. In the true spirit of RC (Recombinant Communications) IBM will provide the genetic material that comprise forward-looking solutions and let the specialists splice them into made-to-order solutions. The product lines span hardware (from appliances to super-mainframes), software (which has been moving steadily away from “brands” like Lotus, Tivoli or Rational and toward WebSphere branded middleware that supports the services oriented architectures (SOAs) that make cloud-computing and Web services possible and professional services, from the likes of IBM Global Services.

The largest telephone companies are the target customers for IBM’s platform, but this marketing initiative creates a whole new “ecosystem” of entrepreneurial firms poised to play their wares as part of a broader service grid. Mentioned in the product launch are the likes of Broadsoft, Corent Technology, deCarta, Jamcracker, Juniper Networks, NetApp, Openet, RightScale and Wavemaker. IBM has been a major investor in many of these platform providers. Big Blue also expects a broader range of application, technology and infrastructure providers to join the ecosystem as the demand for new features and functions are made manifest.

Pilot projects have already been launched by Orange Business Systems in Western Europe, as well as Shanghai Telecom and SK Telecom along the Pacific Rim.

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.

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According to its press release, IBM believes that businesses are already spending $46 billion on cloud-based solutions. Without citing specific sources, it sees a 28% annual growth rate to $126 billion in 2012. Cast Iron has built its business, to a certain degree on vendor neutrality. Its Web site is emblazoned with links that promote interconnection between and among Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Apps.

Given that some assembly is always required, the acquisition should provide plenty of revenue opportunities for the integration specialists at IBM Global Services, but the focus appears to be on IBM giving its customers the ability to do their own integration. As explained by Craig Hayman, the General Manager of IBM’s Websphere Group, IBM’s customers can “integrate business applications, no matter where those applications reside. This will give clients greater agility and as a result, better business outcomes.”

This sort of agile assembly of solutions that combine widgets and other re-usable sets of code wherever they may be found is at the heart of Recombinant Communications. It recognizes that employees at many business enterprises have become impatient with the pace at which new features and functions can be introduced that extend Web services to their desktops, laptops, smartphones or other mobile devices. In the age of “I’d rather do it myself”, they will find companies like IBM and its technology partners giving them the green light and companies like Cast Iron Systems giving them confidence that resources in the cloud can operate at the levels of efficiency and reliability required for enterprise-grade computing and communications.

“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.

Meanwhile, Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg expands its roster of Telepresence endpoints into the mass market. In the 2nd quarter of 2009, alone Tandberg sold 15,663 “endpoint units” and generated nearly $206 million (US) in revenues. Yet, while Cisco markets high-end, dedicated Telepresence centers tightly coupled with Cisco’s broadband IP routers and switches, Tandberg has found success in more modest installations that work with IP-routing infrastructure from multiple vendors and had recently forged partnerships with the likes of Siemens (in support of OpenScape’s multi-vendor routing) and Microsoft (in support of videoconferencing in conjunction with the Office Communication Server (OCS).

Video teleconferencing is definitely on an upward trajectory as employees in large companies discover how easy it is to initiate a video conference. In some cases they need to book time in a dedicated “Telepresence” facility. But a growing percentage are growing comfortable with the idea of toggling from text-based “chat” to desktop video at the click of a mouse. Tandberg has built its market share by bringing lower-cost telepresence centers to the the high end of medium and large enterprises. That’s also where Mitel comes into the picture with the latest roll-out of its Series X package. Among the products in its UC suite is a telepresence package that offers the same three-screen, hi-def, feel-like-you’re-in-the-same-room quality of the mid-six-figure Cisco Telepresence center.

The fact that Cisco values Tandberg at $3 billion says that enterprise video is about to hit an uptick, built on more affordable equipment and broader distribution. Outside the enterprise, we expect to see an uptick of equal proportions in user-generated video through uploads and peer-to-peer video chats.