Siemens calls its new product line AudioPresence(tm) HD. It integrates HD-quality, standards-based audio codecs (G.722) into the range of speakers, microsophones and aucoustic components that are embedded in its OpenStage-branded IP phones.
The same technology will be integrated in the upcoming release of OpenScape UC Version 6, which supports multi-party audio conferences and brings an “Automatic Gain Control” feature which is designed to “normalize” the annoying rises and falls in voice volume across multiple talkpaths.

As Siemen sees it, HD is best suited to support conversations “among people with diverse native language backgrounds” which they see as a fast growing market. They are backed, in this assessment, by global research firm MZA Ltd., which predicts that the worldwide conferencing solutions market will grow to nearly $8 billion at a compound growth rate of over 13%, attributing that growth to restrictions on business travel.

The announcement of HD voice coincides with the launch of its OpenStage 5 SIP phone. The company positions the OpenStage 5 SIP phone as an entry level phone that supports AudioPresenceTM HD, as well as many other key business and security features.

The announcement served the god of product continuity while fulfilling on the promises of platform agnosticism (supporting both Cisco ICM and Genesys, for instance) and constantly expanding features and capability. Existing Aspect customers will be pleased to find that the new products and services are organized into Aspect’s customary lines of business, including a voice portal platform that supports inbound, outbound and blended interactions; workforce optimization; and the very popular collections and “streamlined collections” applications. Aspect IP 7 adds support of IM, email and chat (all under the purview of the Workforce Management resources), making it a single platform for inbound, outbound, chat, Email, SMS, IM and IVR, as well as quality and workflow management.

In a conference call last week Aspect executives, including Gary Barnett and Serge Hyppolite laid claim to some capabilities that distance Aspect from its competitors. The UC applications that were showcased include: “Seamless Customer Service, which starts with a Voice Portal but transfers calls based on rules supported by its “Ask an Expert” routine, including the ability to connect to the agent with whom the caller has most recently spoken.

Beyond the applications announcements, Aspect revealed some very interesting metrics. Looking at the prior years sales, revenue is split as 35% inbound, 35% “blended”, and 30% outbound. What’s more “Unified IP” has accounted for 44% of its sales. Another bit of background from the preview call was the description of “distributed call center” or network of gateways to promote scalability. “Gateways” are in Bangalore, New York City and London with a Contact Center ACD operating in Miami. I don’t know the complete details, but it sounds like there’s a cloud-based strategy for Aspect in there somewhere. Coupled with Microsoft’s strong commitment to Office 365 and Lync Online cloud-based” implementations of Unified IP 7 are a natural way to scale up and go global simultaneously.

UC (Unified Communications) was only part of the answer. Already leading proponents like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft added the idea of “Collaboration” to their UC offerings. As I discussed in several posts throughout 2010, these companies, along with Avaya and a group of socially-inclined or “cloud-oriented” contact center software providers (think Aspect, Gold Systems, InteractiveIntelligence, RightNow or Voxeo as examples) are defining collaborative customer contact strategies that not only add social channels to the customer engagement model, but also extend customer care and support outside brick-and-mortar contact centers.

Taking an RC tack on the multichannel challenge gave enterprise decisionmakers a chance to leverage existing infrastructure, such as their CRM systems, interactive voice response applications and contact center logic to fulfill customer demands over multiple channels. A prime example is Voxeo’s concept of “Unlocked Communications” which refers to the ability to use the same logic, scripts and back-office databases to support customer communications over the phone, SMS-text, IM, or the Web. For larger enterprises, Cisco’s support of Customer Collaboration in the contact center has added SocialMiner, which monitors popular social networks to support rapid response to relevant posts by contact center agents, treating social networks as one of many “channels” for customer care and support.

As for Multimodal, let’s take a UX (user experience) angle on the topic. As the population of “smartphones” grows, we’ve learned that part of the formula for customer empowerment involves giving a user the choice of input modalities. For members of the automated speech community, the concept was best summed up a couple of years ago by Google’s Mike Cohen when he said that Google wanted to make speech an alternative “every time a keyboard or keypad is used.” You could think of that as “speech-enabled” or “voice” search, but I think of it as multi-modal, with an emphasis on user choice. As a result (noted in this post) we’ll see more attention paid to UIs (user interfaces) that let desk-bound Web browsers or airport ensconced laptop users, as well as smartphone toting mobile subscribers, choose the modality that best fits their situation or context.

Which brings us to the third “M”: Mobile. As Opus Research documents on a regular basis on the Internet2Go site, Web-based activity is moving inexorably into the mobile realm. From an RC perspective, the growing percentage of calls or other interactions that originate from mobile devices has a dramatic impact on customer care “callflows” or “workflows.” We framed it as “The Customer is Always On” in a couple of webcasts in 2010.

Yet the impact on the contact center is just a reflection of broader changes afoot. This year eBay, the prototypical peer-to-peer marketplace on the Internet, reported that holiday sales carried out through mobile devices more than doubled in 2010 (over 2009). More than 30 million people have downloaded the eBay mobile app.

eBay’s experience dramatizes another key factor in the RC story moving into 2011. The RC approach enables end-users to build their own experience. They shop for, select and assemble their preferred applications “on the glass” of their smartphones. Alternatively, they can open a browser (or app) and “check-in” to a selected business; carry out their conversations in their preferred modality, format or social forum; conduct searches, find friends, businesses, products or services of interest; and even make purchases using a mutually agreed upon payment method.

So that’s the set-up as we enter 2011. More choices for mobile browsers/shoppers/socializers/buyers. Implementation challenges for merchants and enterprise decisionmakers of all sizes. Uncertainty among application developers, device makers, network operators and enterprise infrastructure providers who strive to bring valuable software and services to the marketplace. Inherently unsecure and vulnerable environments for both social and business commerce.

RC is the Answer
This may sound like a broken record (for those readers with experience that includes pitted vinyl and phonograph needles) but the stage is set for better understanding and implementation of RC strategies, meaning implementation plans that uses “mashups” that meld what works among the existing speech processing, call processing, CRM, contact center and collaboration infrastructure with cool new communications-enabled resources and telco capabilities.

For the RC community, this is what we expect to see in 2011:

1) Ubiquity for speech in the multi-modal interface: The bad news is that speech-enablement may start to behave like a commodity. The good news is that speech will, indeed, be an alternative any time a keyboard may be invoked. The better news is that there will be financial hay to be made (and indeed a revenue model) for apps that include highly accurate, intuitive, context-sensitive implementation of speech on an “as needed” as well as “when wanted” basis.

2) Better listening through chemistry: In this case, I’m referring to better chemistry between and among app developers, device makers and network operators. This means more effective developer programs from network operators. Thus far, we’ve made note of RC-driven, developer-centric initiatives from the likes of Orange, AT&T, Rogers and others as they seek to provide more open access to valuable resources such as location awareness and billing functions.

They are aided by initiatives by technology providers such as Alcatel-Lucent, Amdocs and others.

3) Analytics enter the customer care workflow: At a recent Analyst Summit, Cisco conducted an impressive demonstration of Socialminer, which included the use of Nexidia’s speech analytics capabilities, to do problem detection that could trigger an agent response in near-real time. [Cisco's John Hernandez will be speaking at our upcoming C3 - Conversational Commerce Conference accompanied by a demonstration of Customer Collaboration instantiated "in the cloud" courtesy of Spanlink. That's RC in action!]

4) Moving boldly with a safety net: In our recent Webcast I was joined by Bob Hockman as we discussed survey results showing how social media are permeating both contact center and enterprise IT infrastructures. Ready-or-not, here they come. It puts a premium on pre-testing of all the talkpaths and constant quality monitoring to avoid latencies and ensure the best customer experience.

5) Which brings us to “Security,” validation and authentication- Now that mobile phones act as wallets, know your location, house your contact list and calendar plus a record of the calls you’ve made in the past month, it’s clear that they must be protected, right? What’s more, as we wittingly or unwittingly witnessing skads of personal data, search histories and activity streams move “into the cloud” (be it run by Google, Amazon, Experian, Verizon or others’), everyone needs to take stock of what it takes to secure the data we physically hold and protect the stuff that resides elsewhere from people who might gain access by pretending to be us.

Given the heightened exposure and higher levels of sophistication among the “bad guys,” we’re living on borrowed time. Opus Research believes that voice biometric-based user authentication and identity validation is destined to take on heightened importance, following geometric growth curve fueled by the increased functionality of devices and the growing number of applications that support mobile commerce.

The crying need for imaginative implementation of voice biometric authentication on mobile devices is what motivated Opus Research to work with VoiceVault to launch the Mobile Voice Biometric Challenge, as a chance for the mobile app developer community to get hands-on experience with voice biometrics as a way to prevent unauthorized access to information or capabilities that reside on the device or made accessible through the device.

Conferences to Bring These Topics To Life
Early in the coming year Opus Research will convene two conferences to bring together executives and though leaders from the business enterprises, technology providers and implementers giving shape to Conversational Commerce (Feb 2-3 in San Francisco) and Voice Biometrics (March 23-24 in Amsterdam)

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

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.

Click here to view the playback.

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

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

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.

Four different services, in two different categories are offered. Two services, “Private Cloud” and “Backup services” fall into the “Infrastructure-as-a-Service” (IaaS) category. “Security Services” and “Unified Communications” are considered part of the “Software-as-a-Service” (SaaS) offering. According to promotional material, this pre-packaging is designed to provide a simple, pay-per-use means to adopt a cloud-based approach to enterprise computing and communications.

Orange Business calls “Flexible 4″ an end-to-end service that offers the services of best-of-breed technology providers in pre-tested configurations. We’ll see how that plays out in the marketplace, where such out-of-the-box or standard solution sets still must be tweaked to interact and interoperate with existing technologies and multi-vendor solutions. Support of “private clouds” is an important development and the Flexible 4 approach will minimize capital spending over time, the question is whether it has the potential to eliminate the need for professional services to integrate with existing technologies.

All told, it just doesn’t feel that flexible.

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”.

Beside, the ability to originate a phone call (or even a video chat) from “inside” an email client is a candidate for the “most demo’d” feature for the “Unified Communications” suites from Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and a handful of others. According to the “Google Operating System” blog post, Gmail users will be able to click on a “phone icon” which will open a “chat client” that includes a dialpad for originating a phone call. It will also illustrate the credit balance a Google Voice user has on his or her account. For those of us who have used Google Voice on an iPhone, the similarities sound pretty striking. You are presented with a landing page that features the keypad, but also provides one-touch access to Buzz, Gmail and “more”. The keypad captures digits and then initiates a a call that that ultimately goes over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). It’s pretty slick, and ultimately transparent to the user (except that a dialog box appears to say that it is originating a call from some third party’s number.

These are by-no-means “stupid phone tricks.” Google is making its point that “voice services” are an integral part of Web-based offerings and that the Web extends from desktops to smartphones to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) on a natural, as needed, basis.