Posts Tagged ‘unified communications’
Last night, Avaya held a workshop on “The Social Enterprise – Are you ready for it?” and they did a big homage to the power of social networking and Facebook. – no big surprise there since one of Avaya’s executives happens to be the author of “Facebook Marketing for Dummies.” However, the big wakeup call was a demo of “FacePhone” and its implcations are likley to cause heartburn for the traditional UC crowd.
“FacePhone” is a technology demo/prototype cooked up by Avaya Labs, Avaya’s R&D “think tank.” While not a shipping product, Avaya made it clear it would be more than happy to do a real-world test of the software with an enterprise.
Built using Facebook’s APIs, Avaya’s FacePhone is an enterprise app that loads into Facebook and is designed to enable social networking functionality within the enterprise, on a business-to-business basis, and on a business-to-consumer basis and enables voice,video, “availablity” as well as the stock Facebookness of chat and IM. … doesn’t this sound a whole lot like UC?
Hmmm… it’s like UC, but it’s built on a common platform and is built to leverage social media with both call center features (consumer to biz, biz to biz), as well as enable communications within the large enterprise. Smells a lot like “traditional” UC solutions, but at a MUCH LOWER cost of implementation. Since users are already familiar with and using Facebook for communication, this app fits right in.
Used internal to an enterprise, FacePhone is designed for corporate users to share information without “leaking” it to the whole world… as you’d get if you simply posted queries to a Facebook phone open to the whole world.
The biggest headache to UC has been implementing a solution on either a “try before buy” basis and then spending more money to analyze and enable/improve business-process communications. In theory, you could set up FacePhone a whole lot quicker and with some people already familiar with FaceBook in yammering to their friends and relatives, the adoption and usage curve should be a whole lot quicker.
Nortel’s asset fire sale “could possibly gut” its 3 year UC partnership with Microsoft, Network World says. Uh, yah think? Given that HP and Microsoft swore to be friends and jointly invest up to $180 million at InterOp last month, I’d say both companies are in splitsville.
Back in 2006, Nortel and Microsoft rolled out a four year plan called the Innovative Communications Alliance (ICA), designed to jointly develop and sell UC and VoIP technology to enterprise customers. Nortel brought the phone knowledge, some middleware, and its installed base while Microsoft brought Office Communications Server (OCS) and its brand name.
Sale of Nortel’s various assets and divisions could leave the ICA partnership without Nortel’s IP PBX platform, engineers working with Nortel on joint products, and – probably the biggest loss – Nortel Global Services, the consulting arm for ICA.
Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski predicted the partnership would generate $1 billion in revenue, but by 2008 Nortel was reporting a $3.4 million loss on the effort.
Avaya may pick up Nortel’s UC business for $500 million, one of Canada’s papers is reporting. If this takes place, Avaya would overlap with its UC own products AND Microsoft has a UC partnership with Avaya, leaving everyone guessing as to what redundancies would be chopped.
If Nortel Global Services goes out the door in the next wave of asset divestment, so does support for Microsoft’s UC try-it program for customers.
(Of course, this doeth beg the question why Microsoft isn’t putting down some cash to pick up some assets on the cheap, but it might be too busy with Bing to care…)
Besides, Microsoft and HP are already cozy with their own four year (hmm, where’d that come from?) “strategic global initiative” to deliver an end-to-end UC and collaboration solution, with the two companies earmarking up to $180 million in “product development, professional services, as well as joint sales and marketing, to help organizations lower costs and improve productivity.”
Further down the HP press release, there’s a lot of nice bullet points about how HP will have a dedicated team of service professionals (like they had with Nortel), as well as work with communication service providers for hosting solutions for SMBs (Like they did with Nortel).
ShoreTel this week reported its financial results, bringing in $31.2 million and reporting a GAAP net loss of $7 million, around $0.16 per share.
Most of the GAAP (General Accepted Accounting Principles) net loss is wrapped up in $4.1 million for legal settlement costs with Mitel over a patent fight; the two companies agreed to play nice and cross-licensed the technology in question. There’s also $1.8 million in stock-based compensation expenses and $0.5 milling in restructuring charges. If you knock out the various one-time charges, non-GAAP net loss for the quarter was $0.8 million as compared to $0.3 million in non-GAAP net income this time last year.
Investors shouldn’t fret, since the company closed out the quarter with over $108 million in cash and equivalents. It’s also racked up a bunch of high-profile customer wins in the UC space with professional sports organizations including the Verizon Center (Rock the Red!!!!) with a 1,500 user deployment, the San Francisco Giants and AT&T Park, and the Frisco Rough Riders, a double-A affiliate of the Texas Rangers. And according to the all the folks who went to VoiceCon – vendors voting on products – ShoreTel’s product got the Best of Show, the third straight win (Hat trick, Rock the Red!!!) for the company at VoiceCon.
Next quarter (i.e. from now to the end of June 30, 2009), ShoreTel expects to bring in revenue between $29 million to $34 million, with GAAP operating expenses to be between $20.5 million to $21.5 million, including $1.5 million in stock-based comp expenses.
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