Teblog

A quick route to unified communications?

A cheeky little outsider from Spain has been quietly snitching large unified communication (UC) deals from under the noses of major competitors.

(Reminder: a major benefit of UC is the acceleration of business processes, especially when participants are separated geographically.)

When I was invited to meet with Dialcom, I was amazed that it was still in business. In 1982, I was using Dialcom for my Telecom Gold email account. As it turned out, this is a completely different Dialcom and one that's keen to change its name. It is in the process of transitioning to the more meaningful Spontania, which happens to be the name of its UC software suite.

Yep, that's right, software suite. No hardware at all. Not even an appliance version, it just goes on a Linux server while ActiveX or equivalent controls are stuck in the clients. Clients can be Firefox and Internet Explorer, plus a number of mobile phones and PDAs. Flash, Macintosh and iPhone will be supported later this year, as will SIP. RIM's BlackBerry isn't yet on the radar.

The company has around 100 customers, mainly in Europe, but is beginning to pick up some decent deals in the USA. It targets medium to large organisations as a rule and plans to serve Europe through major VARs. It sells directly in North America but, globally, its ISVs and SIs provide vertical solutions. Vertical markets include health, energy and pharma'. If someone would care to deliver the functionality as a service to smaller businesses then Dialcom would definitely be interested.

IT managers generally don't warm to the idea of 'their' network being used for video or unified communications. But this stuff can be throttled back to suit the circumstances. Bob Johnson, the company's president and COO says, "256k to 512k would support seven or eight people in an active collaboration session."

At the desktop, we're talking about video, audio, application and file sharing, remote control, collaborative whiteboarding and instant messaging. And it works. Its adaptive bandwidth monitoring optimises performance to fluctuating network conditions. Images downgrade reasonably gracefully.

It's pure IP, as you might expect. But the firm has all sorts of edge connectivity bits so that companies with legacy switchboard equipment can still benefit. It also interoperates with H.323 video and can be incorporated into Outlook and Notes.

Price-wise, the Linux-based system, probably comes in below the competition, especially when you take into account that installation is the work of a few hours at most. 25 concurrent users comes in at just under $40k. Obviously, the more users, the lower the per-seat price.

It's an interesting take on the UC business and it's one that will satisfy the demands of the majority whose needs are straightforward. They want to see each other, talk to each other, show each other stuff and exchange files during the session. All this, and more, is available with barely any upheaval for the IT department.

I think I'll close with an "olé".

Unless you'd like to tell me what's wrong with the idea...

Lovelock and Lawson: read 'em both

Well, Earth Day was not the smartest day to jump on a plane to California to, among other things, meet some folk to talk about environmental sustainability. Still, I made up for it a bit by reading a couple of environmental books. Except, of course, they were made from mashed up trees. Oh dear.

One of the books was James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia - a couple of years old now, but worth a read. The other was Nigel Lawson's book, hot off the press, called An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming. An interesting juxtaposition of reading materials, to say the least.

Let's just say that the two men aren't even close to agreement when it comes to global warming, or global heating, as Cameron calls it. Lawson can't see what the problem is, even when he takes scientists at their most pessimistic. Lovelock, on the other hand, is convinced we're on the cusp of dramatic and devastating warming, with all of its attendant consequences for humankind.

Although they have different perspectives on the degree danger we face, both agree that something's going on and both think that some action makes sense. Broadly speaking, Lovelock wants all hands to the pumps while Lawson believes that we should behave in a more measured fashion.

But, having said that, I was quite astonished at how much they agree with each other. Not least when it comes to nuclear power. Both regard it as the most sensible way to deliver the power we need while minimising the damage to the environment. This seems to be an emerging theme whichever way I turn these days.

Lovelock tends to be quite respectful of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) while Lawson considers it far too biased for a supposedly objective organisation. He has fun with its estimates for global warming and wonders whether the massive amounts of money and inconvenience to today's population can possibly be justified by the anticipated benefits.

In one example, he uses the scientists' own best and worst case scenarios to show that, in one hundred years, the developing world will either be 8.5 or 9.5 times better off than it is now. Given that both outcomes are billed as equally likely, he wonders what level of sacrifice today would make the higher outcome worth pursuing.

Lawson's book has been diligently researched but he focuses on the narrow issue of global warming. Lovelock takes a more holistic view, essentially urging us to look after the planet, so that it will look after us. Lawson doesn't think that his book will 'shake the faith of the true believers', but it certainly contributes some reason to the debate. As, indeed, does Lovelock's.

Either book may jar with your present way of looking at things but, if we don't think about this stuff from multiple viewpoints, we'll never arrive at an informed opinion. We'll simply be believers of one position or another.

There's more to life (death?) than carbon

In another life, I experienced government targets at first hand. The government in question was the same one we in the UK have now. At the time, I found the targets a source of great impudence because they seemed to owe little to reality and a great deal to wishful thinking.

Of course, we don't get anywhere without realistic, or even challenging, goals. They provide us with yardsticks for our achievements. But they do need to be rooted in some grasp of reality in order to be taken seriously or, if they're unavoidable, to win the respect of those affected by them.

And this is what bothers me about the environmental targets set by the government. Frankly, yesterday's introduction of 2.5% biofuel into our nation's forecourts is a classic example. It coincides with the announcement today that basic foodstuff prices have risen for the fifth time this month and some countries are refusing to export rice in order to feed their own people affordably.

Is there a connection? Of course there is. Do the politicians care? I wonder about that sometimes. Taking over arable land or destroying forests in order to grow crops to create fuel (which some countries do) is an affront to nature, not to mention the people who live there. And the end result is no less carbon pumped out from motor vehicles which, surely, ought to be one of the objectives given that we're increasingly taxed on our emissions. (The narrow argument, by the way is these emissions are reabsorbed by the biofuel plants themselves.)

And here we find the problem. Objectives are generally derived from narrow economic arguments, which take little account of human reality. I recently read a transcript of a speech entitled The Challenge of the 21st Century: Setting the Real Bottom Line by sustainability expert Dr David Suzuki which articulates the insanity of the way we make these high level decisions.

He talks about the wisdom of ancient people who regarded earth, air, fire and water as sacred elements. Everything that we are, and our very survival, relies on the combination of those elements. But, as he points out, anything that nature does on our behalf is regarded as an 'externality'. i.e. it's not part of the economic equation. I guess this is why carbon now has a price on its head. It's a start, but it's only part of the story.

As well as carbon being the number one public enemy (or money-making opportunity, depending who you talk to), we really need to consider what our actions are doing to the entire ecosphere - earth, water and air - if we're really going to tackle the survival of humankind in any meaningful way. Lopsided thinking is not really good enough.

If you're in IT, you might be thinking, "So, what's this got to do with me?" The answer is "quite a lot actually" because you support most business processes. In order for them to meet external or self imposed environmental targets, they need measurement and performance information for themselves and their suppliers. They need the support of teleworking or telepresence technologies to cut travel. In all sorts of ways, they need the support of IT systems to help improve their own environmental footprints.

This is not a one-off, quick fix, this is a change in how we work and live forever. And I believe it will lead to a change in the way that an organisation views IT. It will finally be seen as an integral and beneficial part of the company.

Don't put lipstick on the pig

Today's issue of PR influences covers 'greenwashing' - "the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service."

It's good to see professional PR folk in action. Part of their job is to make sure that companies don't get carried away with their rhetoric and make fools of themselves. Of course, there will always be poor PR folk who see their job as "putting lipstick on the pig". We have to take a certain amount of personal responsibility for filtering good PR from bad.

Once upon a time, it was easy to pull the wool over most people's eyes, by writing good press releases, advertisements and brochures. The public didn't have much of a voice - the letters page of the newspapers, the complaints desk of a company or the local advertising standards authority. In other words, except in newsworthy cases, not a lot would happen.

Now, with bloggers galore, some will always be expert enough to see through the greenwash and blow the whistle. And we all know how fast bad news travels through the blogosphere. And how mainstream media organisations quickly pick up juicy stories.

We hear about companies that claim to be carbon neutral which is wonderful, if true. But, if close examination were to reveal that one of the directors drives a gas guzzler or that the heat from the data centre is being vented to the atmosphere, then the carbon neutral claim falls apart and the company risks ridicule.

The best option is transparency. To show what steps are being taken to run a sustainable (financially and socially, as well as environmentally) business and not make any pretence that things are better than they are. Some IT companies - IBM, Sun, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Fujitsu Siemens spring to mind immediately - seem to be very forthright in their claims and their explanations.

They still fly people around when necessary, but they'll talk about how much travel has been cut. They still have to run high-powered data centres - even more so for those who offer hosted software services, but they'll talk about how much they've slashed their energy bills through consolidation, virtualisation and other measures.

Of course, they would all like to sell more equipment, software and services and they will dangle the cost and environmental savings that are possible. But they are also well aware that new equipment brings its own environmental costs, including the disposal of old equipment. Honest discussion around these issues will win vendors more customer loyalty than misleading claims based on dodgy premises.

Indeed, they may well find that their revenues rise for hosted services, consulting and software, even if an increasing awareness of sustainability among customers were to lead to a slowdown in hardware sales.

IBM's Bluehouse: a human hub?

Even after 42 years in IT, I still tend to forget that projects are always at their most attractive before they're implemented.

A good idea captivates and it's easy to get carried away with enthusiasm, temporarily forgetting that there's a whole lot of hard work in moving from idea to reality.

In the case of an IT product or service, the hurdles are not just technical. You have inconvenient things like channels to market and user acceptance to consider.

All this flooded into my mind following a visit to Lotusphere Comes To You at the Wembley Stadium the other day. Having visited the main event in Orlando earlier this year and been really fired up by Bluehouse I started to mull the reality behind the idea.

Bluehouse is intended to be a software-as-a-service offering from IBM for companies with 5 to 500 employees. According to IBM/Lotus, it will "provide extranet collaboration services for open social networking, instant messaging, file sharing, project management and web conferencing." And it is designed to appeal to those with no internal IT.

It still sounds good to me and I am sure that IBM will have no trouble pulling it off technically. But the way ahead is murky. IBM isn't used to dealing with small companies and its channel isn't used to selling subscription services. Nor, in the main, are the users ready for this kind of SaaS.

It would be interesting to think of IBM as a latter-day web business with curvy corners and off-the-page selling. This strikes me as an unlikely route to market. Or it could jump into bed with (or buy) someone with a ready-made channel. But this seems expensive for an idea which might still be ahead of mainstream user thinking.

I suspect that IBM is being driven by wishful thinking and the prospect of all that lovely monthly revenue pouring in from millions of SMBs who are presently beyond reach. Once attached to the IBM mothership, the opportunity exists for lots of additional revenue from an incremental expansion of the services which can be pushed (or is it pulled?) down the pipe.

But then, another scenario occurs to me. What if a company wanted to connect its business partners to its own collaboration services? It might have already bought into the Lotus collaboration story big-time and sees value in extending its reach. This might be possible, right now, using an assortment of publicly available services, but it might not offer the security, accountability or reliability that matches the company's governance and integration requirements.

Auto-makers and insurance companies provide intimate access to their suppliers and agencies for commercial transactions. I wonder if Bluehouse could end up becoming a hub for human transactions?