The opening ceremony for the 2014 Winter Olympics is taking place as I write this. My prediction: Avaya’s approach to supporting multiple high-speed digital networks to support communications and collaboration at the Olympic Games will have profound implications for supporting multiple, multichannel conversations between companies and their customers. While this may seem like a stretch goal today, by the end of The Games, it will make perfect sense. At a recent briefing, Avaya executives made it clear that this is an event that showcases many “firsts” when looking at the architecture, nature and functions of the underlying network fabric. First and foremost, the scope of the project and the speeds involved – both for carriage of voice, video, text, tweets; and for network provisioning, construction and operations – are industry “firsts.”

It starts with giving the International Olympic Committee and the TV Networks (primarily NBC) the confidence to make this the first games to be 100% IPTV. Overall, the “fabric” network supports TV feeds from two clusters of sports venues. The valley floor has separate stadiums, domes or palaces for skating, curling, and featured events, while there are separate slopes, runs or half-pipes for downhill and cross-country skiing, extreme games, jumping and sliding. In addition there are three Olympic Villages for visiting athletes, each of whom has been provided a WiFi enabled tablet as a perk for participating, so there is bound to be a high level of demand for wireless connectivity throughout both the villages and venues. There are two separate “Media Centers” for reporters and correspondents to originate their video feeds. All are supported by a Tech Ops Center that rivals any NOC (network operations center) contemplated by an international carrier or TV network. All are supported by a huge data center and its back-up.

In addition to WiFi connectivity promised to the 5,500+ athletes, there are separate WiFi networks every sports venue for the spectators; the media and  the scorekeepers/officials. As Avaya executives explain it, “This is the first BYOD Olympics,” referring to the “bring your own device” mentality that prevails among all attendees. Many will have multiple wireless devices, including smartphones, tablets and notebook computers. Of course, Avaya notes that all of these “firsts” – first IPTV, first “free WiFi,” first “virtual network” and first BYOD event are made possible by the fact that this is the first “Fabric-Enabled” Games. This term, which evokes images of yarns, notions and buttons, only begins to capture the power of Avaya’s approach to network design, which places emphasis on performance, speed to deploy, scale and flexibility.

The implications for improving Conversational Commerce deployments should be obvious; but they probably aren’t. Today’s application developers, innovators and entrepreneurs operate at the higher levels of the communications stack. They use RESTful programming environments and agile techniques that treat network functions as abstractions. Building “communications enabled business processes” (CEBPs) is a matter of using pull-down menus to choose verbs and a drawing tool to connect resources. In essence, they take network functions for granted and assume that the components involved in connecting people with other people or resources is always there and always on.

This heroic set of assumptions becomes all the more risky when communications applications also involve dips into the world of Big Data. Call routing, for instance, used to be a simple, physical phenomenon. When a caller dialed a phone number, the dialed number coincided with a physical connection. But now a call may initially terminate in a “routing subsystem” that looks to a remote database to learn of business rules or conditions that govern the best path for that particular person’s call to take. To generate those rules, the routing engine, in turn, may have to consult other sources of metadata, such as the customer profile, transaction history and even current location. For this to work well, from a caller’s point of view, all of these queries must be completed in nano-seconds. Otherwise it feels like an eternity.

Potential problems are compounded as high-quality customer experience (CX) brings speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP) and other elements of a Personal Virtual Assistant (PVA) into the mix. To support human-like self-service that lapses into agent assisted service calls for a flexible, scalable, low-latency network “fabric.” Today’s CX is starting to put strains on what is possible using existing platforms. Avaya’s approach – and its implementation in Sochi – provides a vivid example of what’s available today. Ironically, if it works perfectly, it won’t be in the news. That’s the best we can hope for.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Articles, Mobile + Location

Tags: user experience, Avaya, Contact Center, conversational commerce, Wireless Networks