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As I’ve mentioned previously, there’s been a lot of excitement about cloud communications recently. We’re seeing an inflection point beginning with wide spread agreement about the ROI of hosted solutions and continual increase in awareness of this value.
Nick Carr, author of “The Big Switch,” a best-selling account of the transformative effects of cloud services and cloud computing has a great low-tech historical analogy for this, comparing the shift in our industry to a similar shift 100 years ago in how business and factories obtained power.
He talks about how in the 19th century, factories or mills would be built on a river. Owners would then have large waterwheels made to generate power for the factory. In essence, every business would need to invest in, and maintain its own local power production. That’s a complex, and costly undertaking, and resulted in mill owners spending more time on complex hydraulics and drive shafts than on their core business.
Of course, this model sounds ridiculous now. Within a few years of the turn of the 20th century, these premises-based production systems were abandoned, left to decay, a historical anomaly – because now businesses were getting their power from “the cloud” – from new, centralized ‘electric companies’ that revolutionized manufacturing:
“Manufacturers came to find that the benefits of buying electricity from a utility went far beyond cheaper kilowatts. By avoiding the purchase of pricey equipment, they reduced their own fixed costs and freed up capital for more productive purposes. They were also able to trim their corporate staff, temper the risk of technology obsolescence and malfunction, and relieve their managers of a major distraction. Once unimaginable, the broad adoption of utility power had become inevitable….the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.”
The above is an excerpt from Mr. Carr’s astonishing book, a best-selling account of the transformative effects of cloud services and cloud computing. Mr. Carr is the keynote speaker at this year’s BroadSoft Connections Users’ conference, which is shaping up to be our best Connections event ever. I’m very much looking forward to Mr. Carr’s keynote, and certainly excited about seeing as many of our customers and partners as possible as well – as it’s our customers who are building the solutions that will eclipse today’s ‘waterwheels’ .
Reliable service and call quality no longer separate one telecommunications service provider from another. Businesses and consumers expect quality access. Voice services in general have become a commodity. What puts one provider over another today is the delivery of enhanced services coupled with the best customer care. Long-time telecom analyst and CIMI Corp. President Tom Nolle recently covered the topic on SearchTelecom.com.
One company that seems to have this down is PAETEC (NASDAQ GS: PAET). PAETEC makes enhanced communications a no-brainer for tens of thousands of businesses around the country. A BroadSoft customer since 2002, PAETEC delivers personalized communications solutions and unmatched service to business-class customers in more than 83 of the nation’s top 100 metropolitan statistical areas.
PAETEC conducts a regular series of Educational Webcasts designed to share important industry trends with customers. Recently, they reached out to BroadSoft to participate as a guest, focusing on how businesses today are benefiting from enhanced communications. PAETEC’s VP of Product Development Pat Herron and BroadSoft’s Jonathan Wagner were interviewed about what’s behind the Voice 2.0 curtain. They dig deeper into what businesses want when it comes to communications and how best to provide it.
In this Webcast interview, Pat and Jonathan hit on a number of buzz words we hear a lot these days like business continuity, unified communications, and service level agreements. They break all of these down to explain where the real value in each one is and offers advice on what businesses need to look for when considering a VoIP partner.
Click here for the audio.
I am often surprised by the things I remember from my childhood. Of course there are the life lessons about good manners, playing fair and putting things back where you found them. But then there are those silly things that impress you, which you don’t quite understand why until later in life.
I vividly recall one day watching cartoons as a child, the Jetsons specifically. Jane was sleeping when her video phone rang. She obviously did not think she was looking her best, having been awakened from her slumber. Before answering the phone she put on a perfectly quaffed mask of herself.
Of course my immediate reaction at the time was — how vain. But now, I am a bit less judgmental.
Having access to multimedia communication options anytime and anywhere in our personal lives is now a reality. Today BroadSoft introduced the latest enhancements to our consumer solutions. Read the press release here.
Through our broadened focus on the consumer experience, we are delivering on a vision to enable the “connected” consumer to have access to a host of information, entertainment and other communication services, anywhere and at anytime, in the home or on the road.
We are empowering consumers by enabling them to control all their multi-media devices and communication services from a single, BroadWorks® powered online account.
Our consumer experience builds upon our BroadWorks Voice over IP application platform, a proven architecture, which manages multimedia communication sessions between devices for voice, video, messaging and content, beyond the boundaries of the subscriber home.
The way individuals chose to communicate will continue to evolve. Can you imagine what might be next — the notorious shoe phone?
The way companies develop and earn revenue from new products (the world of R&D) has changed forever, and it is a great thing for all of us.
In April we announced our 2nd annual developers contest, XCv2, and earlier today we announced the winners. The interest and momentum in developing applications that either make our lives easier or are just plain amazing – thanks to the continued advancement of technology – continues to grow.
In only its second year, our developer challenge generated 10x the registrations over last year, and helped to grow the BroadSoft Xtended open-development community to well over 2,000 developers, who turn innovative ideas into reality.
Announcing the winners is of course exciting – but the applications will really be put into action next month when they are demonstrated live at our annual users’ conference, BroadSoft Connections 2009: Voice & Vision, during the much anticipated “Show Me the Apps” session. Show Me the Apps focuses exclusively on new applications that allow our service provider customers to further maximize their current investment in BroadSoft and the future evolution of their services and businesses. You can watch video clips of last year’s Show Me the Apps event at http://developer.broadsoft.com/smta.
But for now – let’s get to it. This year’s winners are….
In the consumer category, MyZazu from WorldxChange took first place. The app offers an online portal for users to share events and updates with their contacts via text-to-speech, email, SMS and twitter. Basically you can tell your friends and family what you are up to using any form of communication you so desire.
In the cool category, the winner is JoeDeveloper.net’s Visual Voicemail for Polycom’s VVX1500, which transcribes voicemails for business users and with just one click to a link in the transcription you can call the person back. There’s really no excuse for not returning phone calls when it’s this simple.
MobileMax Enterprise Edition tied for first place in the business category with Excendia Virtual Assistant. MobileMax is a Unified Communications (UC) application for mobile phones. It makes features in BroadWorks – such as your own personal web portal to manage communications, call conferencing and access to an auto attendant—accessible on a cell phone.
Excendia Virtual Assistant is a speech-enabled application that allows mobile users to listen and reply to emails, send new ones, review and schedule calendar appointments, control their phone status and call forwarding using hands-free, eyes-free voice commands while driving, or from any phone.
The selection process was very challenging…..so thanks to all the developers who submitted just fantastic applications. Look for all the contest applications on our next-generation Xtended marketplace next month.
In recent weeks, blogging superstars Peter Radizeski and Rich Tehrani both picked up and promoted BroadSoft’s “Why Hosted Unified Communications is like a Gym Membership” page.
In case you missed it on our web site, UC is very much like a gym membership, because for if you’re taking UC seriously, it makes much more sense to buy UC as a ‘service’.
Consider the gym/fitness analogy – if all you want is to do some light exercise, you could buy an exercise bicycle for your basement, or you could go join a gym for a monthly fee. If all you’re doing is light exercise like this, then there’s really no ‘best’ way – you’ll make this “buy vs. lease” decision based on your personal preferences and circumstances.
But now let’s say you’re really going to focus on fitness – in addition to your exercise bike, you could buy a treadmill, free weights, swimming pool, basketball court, Nautilus machines (of course, you’ll probably need to build an extension to your basement too at this point). When you look at things in that vein, buying this equipment is pretty foolish – it obviously makes much more sense to ‘rent’ this equipment by joining a gym for a monthly or yearly fee.
Unified Communications is really exactly the same model – if all you need is simple “voice”, then you can buy a premises-based product or a hosted service – like the exercise-bike-only user, this is primarily a decision based on personal preference and circumstances. But if you need “Voice 2.0” or Unified Communications – something that integrates mobile, video, enterprise apps like Call Centers, CRM, Microsoft OCS, IBM Sametime, web 2.0 services, and on and on and on – well, that’s not really something you’re going to want to built in your ‘basement’ or IT closet.
One final observation – one area that BroadSoft’s gym vignette doesn’t really talk about is maintenance and operational support, and that’s worth remedying. Let’s assume you’ve struck it rich and bought yourself an amazing state-of-the-art home gym, with all of the equipment we talked about above. Now let’s say that your futuristic super-computerized treadmill breaks down, and needs to be repaired. Or even worse, maybe – it becomes obsolete when there’s some newer and more futuristic treadmill available.
When you’re a member of a gym, these problems are taken care of for you – you show up one day and equipment is fixed, replaced, or upgraded as needed, with no work required from you. If you take a moment to think about that, that’s a pretty astonishing value prop with Hosted UC that probably hasn’t been fully appreciated yet.
UC is powerful, but complex – and when maintenance, support, and operations are delivered by a service provider, that’s a huge benefit to the end customer.
Unexpected catastrophic outages are sort of like root canals, shoplifters, and Pauly Shore movies – you sort of have a vague impression that they exist, but you never expect them to actually happen to you.
Last Thursday, it happened to me.
So, for years now, I’ve been promoting why BroadSoft’s hosted business services provide disaster recovery and business continuity that simply can’t be matched by premises-based PBXs or Unified Communications systems.
This is a pretty simple concept – if your communications system is hosted ‘in the cloud’, then you’re protected from any flood, fire, or other disaster at your site. Your communications data and services are all protected in a managed network, and services like BroadWorks Anywhere allow you to continue running your business from your mobile or other devices, even if your primary phones are unavailable.
In fact, BroadSoft-based service provider Telesphere won an industry award –Most Innovative Disaster Recovery Service – based on this very functionality. In Telesphere’s case, one of their customers, Warehouse 86 in Memphis, had a site decimated by a tornado, and in the aftermath of the tornado, several fires broke out, making it impossible to gain access to the site. Yet throughout all this, Warehouse 86 didn’t miss a single call or voice mail, and all employees were able to continue making calls using their mobiles during the outage.
So – back to last week – around 3pm, this popped up on my mobile:
Sure enough, a contract crew on the street outside our offices accidentally cut all of our access to the outside world. No data in or out of our Gaithersburg headquarters.
But – since our communications service is provided ‘in the cloud’ in a hosted data center, all of our phone numbers stayed live. Gaithersburg and all our other global sites continued to receive incoming calls on our mobiles via BroadWorks Anywhere (many of us were out of the office meeting customers anyway; we use BroadWorks Anywhere every day). All of our voice mail and video mail stayed active. All of our BroadWorks conferencing bridges stayed live, and all of the BroadWorks Call Centers that are used for our technical support organization stayed live. Even our integrated Microsoft Office Communicator Unified Communications presence stayed live – when I would make or receive a call on my mobile, my OCS presence state would change to “In A Call”, so my BroadSoft and colleagues in Montreal, Melbourne, Sydney, Belfast, and other sites (which did not lose physical connectivity and therefore saw no issues) were able to see my telephony status.
In business telephony – outages aren’t an option. If we’d had a premises-based system, we’d have been out for the count and entirely disconnected from our colleagues round the world. But with our hosted BroadWorks solution, we stayed productive, and responsive to our customers and partners.
Michael Tessler
Scott Hoffpauir
Leslie Ferry
Alex Doyle
Curtis Hartmann
Shirish Andhare
Paul Adams
