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Will Everything Really Be Everywhere?

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I'm not a great fan of the name "Everything Everywhere" - fortunately, the joint venture entity won't trade under that brand - not least because it sets expectations rather high. It invites the obvious retort "Everything Everywhere? More like Nothing Anywhere!" but the reality might just match the hype.

I'm pleased to report that we're now in possession of some statistics that tell us they might just deliver the network and proposition we're hoping for. They come from the company itself but are "unofficial" until the combined network is lit up in September.

Firstly, the channel model: it will be 55% indirect and 45% direct. So we can put to bed the myth that most people (business or consumer) buy from the network direct. They don't, and the trend is heading inevitably towards indirect channels like Charterhouse.

Secondly, the brand positioning: the two brands will continue for the time being with T-Mobile being positioned more towards smaller companies and Orange towards larger companies. To all intents and purposes, the brand is irrelevant. Customers will be able to choose the tariffs and bundles that best fit their needs, as the network is the same. Any feelings about the brand to which they are contracted will be emotional and subjective only.

Thirdly, the commercial model: existing contracts will continue as they are, unchanged. At contract end, the customer will have the option to continue with T-Mobile (or Orange) or move to the other brand and take advantage of different packages. So there's no real change, just additional choices for business customers, with a stronger underlying network.

Finally, the combined network: it will be strong, possibly stronger than we anticipated. Some stats (compared to T-Mobile today):

The network will have more than double the number of 2G sites
It will more than double 2G indoor coverage (we won't bore you with the techie reasons why!)
3G coverage will reach 98% of the UK population, 20% more than now
(O2 has 84% 3G coverage; Vodafone has 80% 3G coverage)
EE will have 4,000-5,000 more 3G sites than any other network

Mobile broadband on T-Mobile is already industry leading with an average download speed of 1.3 Meg, making it somewhere between 20-30% faster than other networks. They've just won best mobile broadband 2010 from the comically named Broadband Genie; the combined network will only improve this class-leading position.

If you are on T-Mobile, and there's no T-Mobile coverage available but there is Orange coverage, it will pick up the Orange network. Likewise, Orange customers will move to T-Mobile where there's an Orange blackspot. The billing will be unchanged.

In short, there are five major areas of upside:

Greater voice coverage due to increased network coverage
Greater data coverage due to increased network capacity
Far better 2G and 3G coverage indoors
Ability to switch seamlessly between networks
Retention of brands means there is still commercial choice

It's difficult to see any downside; if you're on another network, or T-Mobile/Orange, talk to us today about the differences these changes could make to your organisation.

Voice and IT Strategy

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMT

I read some interesting statistics last week. They were taken from Barclays Capital Enterprise Chief Information Officer Survey 2010 and are provided courtesy of Mitel. This is going to read a bit like "IT Family Fortunes", but in a good way.

The first question is simple: what are the biggest trends driving spending decisions in 2010?

(Queue Vernon: "our survey says"...)

Top answer: server virtualisation, with nearly 60% of respondents having this as their top priority.

2nd answer: cloud computing, retaining its second position from last year.

Second question: what are your networking priorities for 2010?

Top answer: IP telephony (with layer 2-3 Ethernet switching and WAN optimisation closely behind).

So on one hand, senior IT management are being driven by virtualisation and exploring cloud-centric technologies. And on the other hand, they're preparing their LAN/WAN for convergence and IP telephony. Are they looking to combine the two? Nobody knows, definitively.

There's no definitive survey answer because no surveys are asking two simple questions:

What is your strategy for voice virtualisation?
What is your strategy for cloud communicating?

I would argue that they're not asking the questions because they don't even know that there are answers. There are, and we have them. Right now, cloud and virtualisation are data-only areas for IT management yet they're investing in voice technologies too. It's time to combine the two, or at least to have a strategy for doing so.

Other blogs and other content on this site have more information on these hot topics. If you're a CIO, IT Director or IT Manager who is looking at both the strategic direction of your company and at technologies like virtualisation, cloud and unified communications, we'd love to get your thoughts on the services we're bringing to market and see if there's a fit with your plans.

A Bright Idea

Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 GMT

The "Names have been changed..." blog below makes it clear that I've never been the greatest fan of unified communications as a term, or the overall industry obsession with UC.

Evidence seems to show that people respond better to products with real names or names designed to create an emotive response. Recent examples of this are the likes of Orange's Racoon and other animal packages (mildly disturbing as they are) or HTC's Desire.

Real names also help with recollection and familiarisation. I know that I've got a BlackBerry Curve, I think it's an 8900, but I don't really care. I know the difference between a Curve, a Bold and a Pearl.

Maybe we can make UC more human, memorable and likeable too?

So.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I present the new name for unified communications.......

Lucy

Volcanic Ash Cloud Communicating?

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

WARNING: THIS BLOG CONTAINS DUBIOUS PUNS AND OBVIOUS GAGS!

Let's face it, the odds on me being able to resist weren't great. Judging by what else I've seen online, at least I'm not alone...

In the wake of the recent catashtrophe, there's been an eruption of interest in new working practices. In 2010 to date, there have been several points that have come up in every customer meeting so far:

Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery
SIP services and flexible call handling
Cloud-based services, including communications

The last week or so has seen a new topic on everybody's lips:

So who have you got stranded abroad then?

Business leaders are blowing their tops. Their plans are up in the air, but sadly their people are not. It's a new type of Fixed Mobile Convergence - you're on the mobile, but you're pretty damned fixed.

There's no reason that inability to travel should ground our ability to do business. With these sorts of technologies, we can work from anywhere:

Powerful smartphones, with email and application access
Laptops with 3G modems and company network connectivity
Cloud Computing & Cloud Communicating - who needs offices?
Video Conferencing & Collaboration - who needs meetings?

Lots of organisations have nascent flexible working initiatives. If a volcanic eruption - and the potential for more - can't make these plans take off, what will?

Don't let some ash choke your company. There are better and smarter ways.

(P.S. I reckon that's 7 "jokes", and no Iceland references, so at least I elavated the dialogue.)

The Illusion of Choice

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Instinctively, we think we want and like choices - the more the merrier. But do we really? Take mobile phones as an example: look at the successes of iPhone and BlackBerry and compare that to the relative struggles of the likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson.

I used to have a Nokia phone and BlackBerry just for email. The last time I had to choose a Nokia was a nightmare - hundreds of phones from which to choose (or so it seemed), features I couldn't tell the difference between, a bewildering choice. In the end, I just said "I'll have the same one as everybody else".

I'm a BlackBerry kind of guy and a "power" email user. So, like my kin, I think the iPhone is a toy and it takes me 10 times longer to type anything on them. And don't get me started on their infuriating "let me show you my latest app" owners - I'm happy just with BrickBreaker.

(I jest, of course; for the record, I'm a huge Apple fan, I've used Macs since Macintosh Plus in the 80s and I've owned 6 iPods. So please, zealots, don't hunt me down!)

Nobody can deny that the iPhone has been a roaring success, and I can't help but think it's because people say "I want an iPhone" and that's the decision made. It's the same with BlackBerrys - part status symbol and part joy to use - where you've got the choice of the same one as everybody else or the slightly cheaper one or the slightly more expensive one. Easy peasy.

I'm not saying that the technology is easy, it's not. Huge amounts of R&D have been ploughed in by Apple and RIM to make their devices the market leaders they are today. The key for me is that their R&D focuses on crucial elements like the user experience and manageability/security for businesses. Not in spitting out device number 58 in your range because you grew up with Heinz and you love to tinker with variety.

I think there are lessons for everybody in the technology value chain. Manufacturers and suppliers need to make their products easier to understand. Integrators like Charterhouse need to take complicated technologies and turn them into a handful of easy-to-understand solution options. And end-users need to focus on the 2 or 3 business issues that they're trying to resolve. If we can achieve that, collectively, then we can be successful together.

Virtualisation & Cloud Communicating

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMT

In the first couple of months of the year we've had roadmap briefings from two titans of the comms industry: Avaya and Mitel. Two very different journeys to subtly different destinations, but three marker posts are common to both roadmaps:

Virtualisation of platforms
Centralisation, potentially in the cloud
SIP services will be the glue

Avaya's Aura platform is essentially a "marketecture", in that it's an umbrella term for their unified communications suite, most of which already existed. There are two new components, both relating to delivery. The first of these is a new virtualised platform, allowing all Aura software components to be collapsed onto a single server for up to 1,000 users. The virtualisation trend is clear. The second element is Aura Session Manager, which will allow multi-site enterprise to centralise and consolidate the "brains" of their IP telephony infrastructure onto one platform, with SIP gateways connecting the remote sites. And that platform can reside in one site or in the telco cloud.

On the Mitel side, they've decoupled the call control - now known as "Mitel Communications Director" or MCD - from the 3300 platform and can now deliver it in a variety of different ways:

On a standard 3300 ICP
On industry-standard servers in a virtualised environment
In "Multi-instance Communications Director" (MiCD) mode

For virtualisation, they've partnered with VMware to do so. Intuitively, it seems like they've nailed their strategy; if you're going to go down the virtualisation road, working with the world-leading, 89% market share boasting, pioneer of the industry makes perfect sense.

MiCD is a high-end, telco play, but the same trend is evident. It doesn't matter what platform you'd like your MCD 4.1 call control delivered on (3300, virtual servers or MiCD), it can sit in the cloud or in your offices. And you can still have a mix of centralised and distributed platforms and gateways.

For both Avaya and Mitel, when you add SIP trunks to the mix, we can have an IP telephony delivery model with zero hardware, except phones (and with softphones and FMC softclients, they're only optional!).

"Cloud Communicating" gives you the benefits of hosting without the drawbacks of hosted:

You retain the assets and control
Uniform dial plan across all sites
Centralised SIP trunking
Elimination/rationalisation of incoming lines
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
IP applications delivery mechanism
A platform for full IP/UC migration
Burstable voice and data connections

I won't pretend that this stuff is easy. You'll need a partner who understands IP telephony, unified communications, wide area networks and SIP trunking, and who has their supply chain ducks in a row, because the "single vendor solution" in this world is a complete myth. The integration challenges are considerable but the cost and user benefits are enormous.

There's No Business Like Snow Business

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Happy New Year to you all, I hope you all enjoyed the Christmas period and haven't been too inconvenienced by the snow. We've started 2010 like we finished 2009: chaos on the roads and transport networks, with the attendant absenteeism in the workplace. Press reports this morning told us that nearly half of the UK's workforce didn't make it in yesterday, which seems extraordinary.

As a resident of Hertfordshire, my trains were running (albeit with delays and cancellations) but were virtually empty. Which tells me that a large number of people could have made it to work but have decided to use the weather as a convenient excuse to extend their holidays. Others aren't so lucky - especially up North - and genuinely cannot make it to work.

Never has the need for a real Business Continuity strategy been so clearly needed. We hear people tell us that they have remote working capability but what they really means is that a tiny percentage of their workforce have a laptop and could access the network if they wished. How many people who are "able" to work from home are currently out sledging with their kids? I don't want to be all "bah humbug" just after Christmas, but I think we know there's some skiving going on! Likewise, many of those who are snowed in are twiddling their thumbs, wishing they could do something constructive. As a director myself, I know that these things cost UK plc money.

Ask yourself these questions of your business:

Can your people connect to the corporate network from home?
Can your people connect to the corporate network on the move?
Do they have teleworking telephony capability at home?
Can they be reached on their company extension/DDI wherever they are?
Do you have presence and availability tools to see if they're working?
Do they have conferencing capability so they can communicate properly?
Do they have collaboration capability so they can have virtual meetings?
Can the business redirect calls from one site to another immediately?
Can you deliver any calls on any number to anybody in any location?

If it's all "no" or only "yes" to the first one, you need to look at the impact of that on your business in terms of lost productivity and lost service delivery. If you can say "yes" to them all, you're probably wondering what all the fuss is about! Your business is running as smoothly as it ever was, even if people aren't in the office, and you've not noticed any difference.

Here's the bottom line. You're paying your people thousands of pounds each, every month, to do a job for you. A UK average salary employee (£24,000 pa) costs you £100 a day in wages alone; probably 50 to 100% more in real terms. Why not spend a few hundred quid on at least your most critical employees to ensure they can still work and your company can keep running, whatever the circumstances?

Don't let this snow business leave you with no business...

The Names Have Been Changed to Confuse the Innocent

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Our recently achieved Mitel Unified Communications specialistPARTNER accreditation has left me conflicted. This, along with our unified communications awards, the ongoing industry obsession with UC, and a flagrant desire to push up our Google page ranking, means I find myself having to bang on endlessly about "unified communications".

So what's the problem? I must confess: I hate the term and I always have. To borrow from Yogi Berra (for our American readers), "it's déjà vu all over again". I remember when I first started in the industry and I was wowed by demos of unified messaging. The problem came when we talked to customers: the industry got tied up in knots explaining what "unified messaging" meant, how it was different to "integrated messaging" and "voicemail", etc etc. The poor end-user would be sat there thinking "I don't care what it's called; how's it going to help me and my business". But no, we continued to ram the UM term down their throats.

The net result was that it was a resounding failure, shipments never reached anything close to analyst forecasts, and the industry scratched its collective head in mystery as it was (and is) a good product, perfect for the pre-BlackBerry era. My old mate, the writer Bob Emmerson, taught me something over 10 years ago when I was a young man: "a confused market doesn't buy, it waits". I've never forgotten that and it's never stopped being true. In short, the UM lesson is that the market was confused, didn't understand why one man's definition of the technology bore no resemblance to the next, the vendors got involved in a "my UM is real UM, his is not" battle, and nobody adopted the technology.

Sound familiar? UM evolved to become UC, and the industry is up to its old tricks. I've not heard two vendors (or resellers, or journalists, or analysts) give the same definition. And even a neat Gartner-esque articulation is several lines long. I spoke at a recent industry channel roundtable and, when prompted by the Chairman, the audience all reckoned that they'd seen no growth in unified communications in the last year. Yet, when prompted by me, almost all of them had seen growth in teleworking, mobile twinning, conferencing and collaboration, and the like. Isn't UC just an amalgam of these technologies?

I did a straw poll (admittedly unscientific!) of our sales and presales guys. Not one had ever had a business decision maker ask them for or about "unified communications". The people who knew the term tended to be IT people, especially those who are Microsoft (or Cisco) centric in their roles. Of the IT Directors who had heard the term, almost all didn't understand it and consequently didn't like it either.

And still, the "confusopoly" continues. Our friends at Avaya, Cisco and Mitel have changed the names of all manner of products in order to cram "unified communications" into the middle of them (even if the old products had, over many years, developed a brand and name recognition). This results in some ungainly and long product names which leads to the industry defaulting back to an old friend: the acronym! Cue mass confusion...

My highlight of the year was hearing about CUCIMOC. It's pronounced "cookie mock" which is spectacularly appropriate, as it really does take the biscuit. It stands for "Cisco Unified Communications Integration for Microsoft Office Communicator". I won't bore you with what it means - it does what it says on the tin - but doesn't that just beggar belief? Admittedly, there's not a "real" product called CUCIMOC but the expression "Cisco UC Integration" is a Cisco trademark, and the industry itself talks in this sort of language, and that inevitably filters down to the end-user.

Will we never learn? Unless we're talking about better project working, improving client service, eliminating travel, being there without going there, and all the stuff I try and talk about in Our Solutions, we're not going to get as far with UC as we should.

Mobile Applications Explosion

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 GMT

I'm beginning to get concerned about the explosion in mobile bandwidth utilisation. Every article I read these days is all full of doom and gloom on the topic, with predictions of a 25 fold increase within three years giving cause for some alarm.

Here are just two of the articles I've read recently:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8325634.stm

http://mobile.broadbandgenie.co.uk/broadband-news/smartphones-not-dongles-hogging-mobile-network-bandwidth

Simply put, traffic is expected to increase by a factor of 25, but capacity is not increasing by anything like that amount (I don't have the figure but I don't need it to know that) neither are the revenues that could fund the potential necessary investment.

There's no doubt that it's the popularity of the iPhone (which will only increase when O2 lose their exclusivity), their "app for that" marketing, and the sales of other smartphones (benefitting from the Apple-led) wave of consumer interest that is to "blame" for this situation. Mobile data and mobile applications have exploded - and it's not just USB dongles on laptops and browsing on smartphones that's causing it.

Apple has hit the 100,000 app mark, which is quite remarkable. A great many of these are also available on other smartphones - e.g. RIM or Symbian devices - though those don't get the same attention. Equally, the vast majority of these are consumer applications. Many people - myself included - are predicting that the popularity of consumer apps, and the use of smartphones to do things that used to be desktop/laptop apps, will also lead to a glut of business-centric apps, or at least a lot more applications integration and use of smartphones for more than just email.

The question is simple: what will they be? That's the answer I've yet to see. It reminds me of one of the more interesting forums I was asked to present at, probably 7 or 8 years ago. The UMTS/3G licenses had been granted, buildouts had started, but the industry was mired in what we amusingly termed "wapathy". Wapathy - named after the much-derided mobile technology of WAP - became a byword for people's lack of interest in much hyped new technologies. The presentation I was giving was to a conference on the future of mobile data. It was a room full of very talented programmers, who all had mobile gaming or mobile applications businesses, who openly admitted that they were there "to find out what we can sell to businesses". They arrived bereft of ideas and left in the same boat: their consumer-centric worldview was incompatible with my stated need for "everything I have in the office, I want on the move".

That was the position in 2001-2002. It remains eerily similar, with two major (and important!) distinctions. Firstly, advancing technology has removed many of the barriers - we now have the colour screens, screen size, battery life, battery size, usability, user interface, etc, that early 3G phones/WAP phones lacked. Secondly, we've got the pent-up consumer demand. But do we have the business applications?

To date, the BlackBerry has been king and mobile email has been the only app in town. Chuck in a bit of recreational web browsing and position-related/context-sensitive push or pull information, and that's about as scientific as it gets (though I'd still rather lose an arm than lose my BlackBerry). Mobile business people want the same thing as the desk-based business person: namely, access to CRM, ERP or whatever business applications PC users enjoy. Corporate telephony, conferencing and presence-aware communications are already there - though most people don't know or understand what FMC can give them - but adoption in the real world is slow.

I don't believe anything "new" will come along for the business market; there's enough to be done providing access to the applications we currently use without dreaming up new mobile-only apps. And the whole point is moot if the network operators don't solve the capacity problem. Businesses will invest in real-time access to corporate applications, but only if that access is fast, safe and reliable.

Avaya Acquisition of Nortel

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Well we might as well start with something chunky. Avaya's acquisition of Nortel is about as large and potentially disruptive to the industry as it gets. In a way, it represents life coming full circle. Here's the timeline, for the history buffs:

The Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1878
The Bell Telephone Company of Canada was formed in 1880
American Bell (as the company was then called) became American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) in 1885
Bell Canada was forced to spin off its manufacturing arm in 1895 and the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Limited was born
In 1976, Northern Electric & Manufacturing became Northern Telecom, known almost immediately to all as Nortel
In 1996, AT&T spun off its manufacturing division and Lucent was born
n 1998, Nortel acquired Bay Networks and became Nortel Networks
In 2000, Lucent spun off its enterprise systems business and Avaya was born
In 2009, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection
Later in 2009, Avaya acquired Nortel's enterprise business unit, reuniting what, over a hundred years ago, started life as the world's original telecoms manufacturer

It creates a monster, nothing more, nothing less. Two of the greatest names in the industry have combined and sadly, one will probably disappear. I was invited to the global web conference when the bid was first announced but they were understandably cagey. And as of last week, when we heard Lee Shorten (Avaya UK & Ireland MD) address an industry audience, details were still not forthcoming.

Charterhouse will be attending Avaya's annual channel conference in a few weeks' time, and this "mega merger" will be top of the collective agenda. What will the future hold? Who knows. We'll keep you posted about what they say, and we'll see if that's what pans out. Watch this space!

Welcome!

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Charterhouse Blog! This is a new forum for us to interact with our customers, suppliers and any other interested netizens out there.

Our hope is that we'll cover topics like:

Industry news and developments
Product launches and reviews
Opinions, thoughts and ideas

For a lot of the time, it will be a mix of the above. After all, there's not too much point in just telling you stuff without telling you what we think, is there?

More importantly, we encourage you to use the comments field below to respond to what you've read, point our readers to other interesting subject matter, whatever you feel would be appropriate. We hope you enjoy it!