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.

The US telephone market is more diverse and complex today than at any time before. To that point the US FCC recently reported a fairly dramatic piece of data: almost 20% of US residential landlines are now VoIP-based. 

According to the press release associated with the release of the FCC "Local Telephone Competition" report:

• At year-end 2008, there were 141 million traditional switched access lines in service and 21 million interconnected VoIP subscriptions in the United States, or about 162 million wireline retail local telephone service connections in total. Of these, 97 million were residential connections and 65 million were business connections.
• Of the 162 million total connections, 48% were residential switched access lines, 39% were business switched access lines, 12% were residential VoIP subscriptions, and 1% were business VoIP subscriptions.
• Of the 97 million wireline residential connections, 74.5% were ILEC switched access lines, 19.5% were non-ILEC interconnected VoIP subscriptions, 5.8% were non-ILEC switched access lines, and 0.3% were ILEC interconnected VoIP subscriptions.

These data are from 2008 so they're bound to be different now. The VoIP penetration might be as much as 5 points higher today. 

The vast majority of US residential VoIP subscribers (81%) receive VoIP as part of a "broadband bundle." This is primarily cable companies offering discounted packages of Internet, TV and telephone together. This is part of a larger cable strategy to retain subscribers and steal voice revenues from rival telcos. 

Over time more residential calling will move to lower-cost VoIP or wireless plans. However, the move toward tiered pricing could affect consumer behavior accordingly. Today, according to the US CDC, 25% of US households have no landline at all.

The migration to IP-telephony should be unremarkable, except to say that, once “plain vanilla” voice moves to the cloud, it can be treated like any other stream or data file. Thus customers have learned that they can capture conversations (or voice messages) as audio files, attach them to emails and forward them or “share” them much as they would any MP3. With the help of services like Google Voice, customers are incorporating their home phone numbers into personal “find me/reach me” schemes that can be set up more easily than ever before.

The next steps will be to augment their voice conversations with more robust renditions of “CallerID”, which can include photos or other images, status messages, location indicators and recent check-ins, tweets or newsfeeds. Said steps will take place in the undetermined future, in that the migration has largely been for cost savings purposes. Still, the idea that one-out-of-five of the homes you pass in the U.S. are “talking over the Internet” should spur some developer and applications providers creative energy.

As illustrated on the Microsoft Azure Web site, the folks in Redmond are making a direct attack on Amazon’s Elastic Cloud platform, but doing so in a way that has explicit hooks into the latest .Net application framework. The special sauce is the Azure Platform AppFabric, as described here. Its intent is to make it easy for Web services developers to combine, integrate and/or federate resources and services regardless of location (on premises or in the cloud).

I mentioned Bing Maps in the first graph of this post because Microsoft is using Tech-Ed to launch a new Bing Map App Software Development Kit (SDK) with the expressed purpose of encouraging developers to build location-aware applications “on top of” Bing Maps. A new Bing Maps API, made generally available later this year, will enable developers to build more robust “mashups” that, at a minimum, will incorporate real time information (Tweets, blog posts, photos, search results) as overlays of the maps, satellite views and street views that have been fodder for some very eye-catching demos in the past few months.

Attendees were also excited to learn that, for the first time, Microsoft was unveiling the full list of features for both Microsoft Office Communications Server (Version 14) and the latest Exchange Service Pack. According to a company press release, “Key new features in this release include expert search, Office document and application sharing, and one-click meeting access from Outlook, SharePoint and mobile phones.” None of that sounds particularly new, but it is always nice to see OCS getting some props and exposure among a broader set of IT professionals and developers.

Speech processing, call processing and multimodal communications got little or no attention in the pre-conference promotion. Instead, Microsoft applied the Law of Large Numbers to puff up the importance of its announcements (which admittedly fall in the shadow of the announcement of a new iPhone). The importance of Azure is in its reach. As Microsoft explains, Azure is one of “the world’s largest cloud services — with more than 600 million unique users on MSN, 4 billion Bing search queries monthly, more than 500 million active Windows Live IDs, 20 million users of the rapidly growing Xbox Live gaming service, and 40 million paid users of Microsoft Online Services across 9,000 business customers and more than 500 government entities. Thousands of customers in more than 40 countries have moved to production environments with Windows Azure, an Internet-scale cloud computing services platform hosted in Microsoft datacenters.”

Azure is not quite Google (in scale or feature set) and it’s not quite Amazon.com’s EC2 in terms of support of ecommerce functions and back-ending IP-telephony switches and apps (think Asterisk, Twilio, Tropo…). Yet it is destined to play a very important role as part of the interstitial fabric among multiple enterprises for application sharing, conferencing and collaboration. There’s a long row to hoe, if it aims to make a mark in mobile commerce or the fast-growing world of IP-based, multi-modal communications. Then again, there’s no better place to get things started than a partners’ conference with over 10,000 attendees.

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IME has turned into a revenue opportunity for Cisco partner Dimension Data and a showcase for the progressive nature of Australian enterprises. As I described it in this post back in November 2009, the IME is designed to enable a company that has already made the move to Cisco’s Unified Communications infrastructure to auto-discover” other islands of Cisco UC. It can start with a single phone call and expand to cover the full range of end-to-end, broadband communications and collaboration.

The demo during the Bates keynote at Enterprise Connect was initiated by employees of Queensland Rail in Australia and received by folks at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater. After an initial call “discovered” that both were operating versions of the Cisco software that could support broadband video, they were able to use traditional phone numbers to launch a video conference call. Because the call was in a Cisco UC cloud and the IME protocol was employed to “authenticate” the endpoint devices the call could traverse each company’s firewall or session border controller without disruption.

As demonstrated, the video paths were encrypted and secure. The systems at either end were able to determine that the path was secure and, ultimately, deliver the highest level of service that the systems were able to deliver. Through these demonstrations, Cisco shows how IME is bound to become the vehicle for expanding the footprint of its broadband, IP-based cloud beyond traditional corporate boundaries.

BT’s NGCC services are supported by data centers on three continents. Its OneVoice offering was launched in December 2009 in conjunction with Cisco as part of its global, cloud-based IP telephony portfolio. Now, two months on, BT’s applying some of the new age marketing methodologies to try to accelerate global acceptance. The granularity of the offers is impressive. Enterprise customers can choose among “per concurrent agent”, “per logged-in agent” or choose to pay per usage, based on “per effective hour or even per effective minute”, starting as low as 4 pence per minute.

Incumbent carriers, like BT and its western European peers like Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia and Telefonica are playing the important role of catalyst for enterprise customers that are making the transition to IP-Telephony. AT&T, Verizon Business and QWEST are in a similar position in North America. Thus far BT, with such a granular offer is the most aggressive in creating a package that lowers entry barriers posed by high prices and complexity.

Unified Communications, iPhone apps and dashboards for enterprise VoIP are slipping into the category of “commodity.” What caught the eye of the digirati was a Facebook app called 8×8 Connect, which was introduced on the second day of the ITExpo. Here’s where Om Malik invites readers of GigaOm to “Call Me via VoIP on Facebook. In the article, Om conducts a test drive of the new service (which can be accessed and launched here). Om notes that the service “could be especially helpful for small business owners and consultants, who could use it as a way to generate interest in the products/services they’re selling.”

Om also mentions that it could be improved by making it “more personal.” His example would be to allow users to upload their own picture, avatar or brand so that it can be displayed with the user’s phone number (I’d call this part of the movement toward better Caller ID). He also sees advantages to being able to embed the “Call Me” button on a company or individual’s “fan pages.”

My trial went a little differently. I followed the link from GigaOm to the “8×8 Connect” page on Facebook. Then things started to go awry. Being the unintentional demo breaker that I am, I accidentally mis-typed my email address and (probably because my proper name is much more than “Om Malik”) my “8×8 Connect” record and registration form is associated with another Dan Miller, who had been there before me and entered a different mailing address and a bogus phone number. Needless to say, I lost confidence in going any further and removed the app from my Facebook account. After doing so, I went back into the app to see if I could “fix” my mistake, but the record of my evil twin seems to be persistent.

I applaud 8×8’s effort to add click-to-call to social networking and hope this registration “bug” is just that – a fixable bug. However, one of the major challenges faced by solutions providers in the era of Recombinant Communications is to continue to introduce a steady stream of innovative services, but they need to do a better job of testing such services. Alternatively, they could just “do a Google” by calling every new offering a “beta.”

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Putting things in perspective, so-called “incumbent” carriers serve hundreds of millions of subscribers, often across multiple “plays” (IP, fixed-line voice and wireless). But Google Voice has followed more of an “invitation-only” protocol when rolling out the service that has constrained the unbridled growth that competing phone companies seem to fear.

Yet the Google filing uncloaks some of the fascinating arcana of IP-telephony. There’s no question that Google will inevitably become a dominant player in the VoIP and call-management business. But as the list in the final paragraph of the BusinessWeek article reveals, Google is also creating new business for the largest of the IP-based voice carriers – the so-called “peers”, as well as some of the also-rans. Going back a few years, Google raised global suspicion as it contracted to use as much “dark fiber” as it could. Likewise, as an active lobbyist for opening up wireless “white spaces” for telephony apps, it is easy to picture Google as an innovative “first-among-peers” with the ability to leverage the billions (not 1.4 million) users of a broad range of real-time and near-real-time services.