Why Some Companies Succeed in their Cloud Migration and Why

I was at a conference last week and got to talking with my friend Michael Keefe, who is the National Director for Latisys. I have known Mike for about a dozen years and he has been a reliable source of information for me as technology changes. I asked Mike a very straight forward question. Why do some companies succeed in their migration to the cloud- and what makes a successful business case?

Mike provided me with some answers- and he continues to be a great resource.

Here are the basics:

How: Identify Strategic Goals- which is another way of saying, plan, assess and provide a realistic workload.

Why: Improve Business Functions- cost control, speed and agility, and elasticity.

Identifying Strategic Goals

Smart companies use the cloud as part of an IT strategy. Although the phrase “IT strategy” can have many different meanings, in this context we’re referring to the high-level plan to meet increasing demand for IT resources. Most companies must provide users with complex systems that achieve high performance in secure and scalable environments. These companies must manage mission-critical applications and increasing workloads across multiple platforms while transforming legacy applications and processes. They must accommodate ever-increasing storage and network capacity—and do it all at a reasonable cost. The particulars of these decisions vary by company, but for each of them, the long-term vision of how to meet these challenges comprises the IT strategy.

As functions such as e-mail become increasingly mission-critical, and as users gravitate toward rich media, most such strategies require new resources. So where to get them? Few CEOs are willing to increase the percentage of budget allotted to IT. They’re wary of capital-intensive development efforts, mindful of a legacy of misspent investments in IT. Meanwhile, reducing other existing IT expenses through virtualization has been a surprisingly productive approach for the past few years—but most companies have already gone as far as they can with such efforts.

Some users—and executives—push for the cloud. Yet many IT leaders resist, citing concerns with security, vendor lock-in, performance, availability, and integration. And although these concerns are legitimate, users rarely find them persuasive. This is why successful companies have an IT strategy. To be effective, to deliver ongoing value to the company, IT must be more than merely a provider of services. It must have a strategy to understand how external forces will continue to transform the business, and seek opportunities to move in the right direction. The value of IT comes in knowing which of the users’ problems are best served by the cloud, and making the appropriately strategic deployments. It comes in judging those problems, and other opportunities, in the context of the business’ overall goals. It also comes in knowing how to avoid threats.

Successful companies negotiate these opportunities and threats by having not just any strategy, but a good one. “Let’s move to the cloud” is a poor strategy—and so is “We can’t put anything in the cloud.” The savviest companies have strategies that find unique, upto-date, company-specific answers to the classic challenge of seeking to provide business users with the services they need while optimizing budgets. The cloud is merely one of many vehicles that these companies use to accomplish that strategy.

Improving Business Functions

For most companies, the IT strategy identifies one or more business challenges that will define the coming years. Three potential examples are:

1. Cost Control: As compute and storage requirements explode, how can companies avoid huge future capital outlays to purchase new processors or storage devices?

The operational advantage of the cloud is that it pools utilization across companies, so that one company can take advantage of another’s under-utilization. The financial advantage is that the cloud simultaneously shifts capital expenses (CapEx) to operating expenses (OpEx), which frequently results in better profits.

Thus, smart companies that have an IT strategy focused on cost control use the cloud to improve hardware utilization and finances. Some even use it to improve the utilization of their most important resources—their people. For example, many companies that run their email systems on Microsoft Exchange know that Exchange administrators are hard to find. Likewise, they may have legacy applications that require maintenance from senior IT staffers. By outsourcing such functions, they reduce headaches and improve employee morale. In the case of Exchange, their IT strategy likely debated the appropriateness of outsourcing an application as critical as email—and concluded that email may be critical to the business but is not one of its core competencies.

Successful companies thus gain significant savings from using the cloud to support their IT strategy with regards to scale, utilization, and CapEx-to-OpEx. They also manage expectations, realizing that the biggest effects are often not in reducing this year’s budget but in containing potential future cost increases.

2. Speed and agility: The pace of business today is faster than ever, and some businesses are held back by long, bureaucratic processes associated with IT resources. One such process is the provisioning of software tools to information workers. Many cloud serviceproviders are now offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to perform functions such as customer relationship management (CRM). Although these applications have many drawbacks, including limitations in security and flexibility, a huge advantage is that where internal software development efforts can take years, these applications can be available in hours. Successful companies thus evaluate how the benefits and drawbacks of such applications fit into the priorities set by their overall IT strategy.

Less hyped, less transformative, but often boasting a bigger cost/benefit ratio is reforming the process of provisioning hardware. Provisioning in the cloud can reduce the time and costs associated with software development testing or other such temporary demands. The old approach often required several days to get a server up and running and loaded with the appropriate data.

Provisioning infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in the cloud, a new server can be ready in hours. (See Figure 1.) Then, when the temporary demand is complete, de-provisioning the test environment ends its cost drain. Many successful companies also use the cloud to instantaneously provision CapEx-free resources for permanent demands, rather than purchase new hardware.

They can thus improve time-to-revenue and agility in expanding into new customer segments, quickly taking advantage of multiple site deployment, or experimenting with expansions of latency-sensitive applications.

3. Elasticity: Successful companies use their IT strategy to understand their workloads. They realize that they have three choices in addressing bursting demand in those workloads:

a) suffer from underutilization,

b) crash regularly during spikes, or

c) take advantage of cloud resources that can expand and contract with their needs. Examples of bursting demand include: when monthly financial reports are due, after a product is featured on TV, when an oil well is “hot” and needs to transmit massive amounts of seismic data, or when daily web traffic peaks.

Such scaling to react to customer needs is generally of huge benefit to a company’s business users. They can plan more confidently without capacity restraints. They can easily expand to new geographies or markets, execute promotional blitzes, or otherwise quickly respond to market changes.

In our experience, one of the biggest differentiators between companies that succeed or fail in the cloud is how well they understand their workloads. When they know if and how their demand bursts, they use cloud resources to manage it. When they don’t understand their workloads, they end up making poor cloud purchasing decisions.

I was really intrigued by Mike’s answer. I have more case studies and whitepapers to share with you. I will  continue to share via the PrimeTelecomBlog –or contact me and I can send them out to you with Mike’s compliments.

Prime is Coming out of the (Phone) Closet- Cloud Computing, Cloud Phones, Cloud Business Management

We went to a seminar this past week. We followed up with some pretty intensive vendor training from our partners- and there will be more on their offerings in the coming weeks. We learned a lot- and would love to share it with you.

Here are some reasons to give serious consideration to cloud-based business services.

BYOD

The “bring your own device” (BYOD) movement is rapidly altering the business landscape. Employees want to use the power and convenience of their smartphones to access data, sales reports, and other tools to enhance efficiency. Likewise, enterprises appreciate what improved productivity generated by the BYOD movement can do for the bottom line.

Immunity From Disaster

Another major benefit of the cloud is disaster management. Cloud-based communications systems include automatic redundancy. Voice, data, and all digital information are typically routed to multiple data centers. The days of a business losing business hour-by-hour when its phone system goes down is a thing of the past. Fires, super storms, equipment failures, and even cyber-attacks are no match for the built-in redundancy of IP-based telecommunications.

Those that had embraced VoIP phones and cloud-based computing on the East Coast prior to Superstorm Sandy were often able to continue operations when others with traditional systems were down for days.

Business Management “To Go”

For business managers and executives, cloud-based operations allow them to, in fact, be “two places at once.” One can head out to an impromptu but vital sales call without worrying about what will be missed while you’re gone. The advantages of a fully integrated system go well beyond the mere ability to stay in touch via smartphones. Full, seamless integration of all company operations is possible in the cloud, and it can be done securely.

OfficeSuite is one such platform that can integrate your office phones, mobile devices, and data networks into a single system. Over 100,000 business professionals nationwide already enjoy the ease and efficiency of cloud-based communications and business management. Companies like Broadview Networks has already helped many clients to realize productivity gains through OfficeSuite’s business phone systems.

No longer want to be tethered to your office phone? Move your operations to the cloud and you will feel liberated as you can conduct essential business from anywhere at any time – and on any device.

Scalability

Phones that work over the Internet can be set up without the need for telephone installers at your premises. Better yet, as soon as you add staff or new locations, the system is readily scalable. Grow as you need to without having to spend precious capital for new equipment. As you grow, simply add new licenses for your new employees and set them up on the system in minutes.

The number of businesses around the world that will be using Internet-based phone systems is expected to double in 2013, to over 100 million. There’s a reason for this communications revolution, so see how your productivity can soar with cloud phones and cloud-based business management.

Video and Telemedicine

For businesses, bringing people together face-to-face leads to advantages like improved communication, better, faster decision making and more effective team work.

In the case of telemedicine, high-quality video conferencing can save lives. Telemedicine can mean many different things, but often it involves connecting patients in small, remote clinics to specialists in large urban health care centers.

Telemedicine makes it possible for patients who need acute, chronic or emergency care to meet face-to-face with highly-trained specialists without the expense, inconvenience and delay associated with travel. Local providers perform assessments and provide care under the guidance of the specialists.

For patients, this means improved access to high-quality care. For local clinics, it means the ability to serve more patients locally and for specialists, it means being able to efficiently deliver more care to more patients from a single, centralized location.

When Renown Health (Northern Nevada’s largest integrated healthcare network) decided to implement a comprehensive telemedicine program to serve rural residents, they evaluated solutions from a number of video conferencing vendors including Cisco (Tandberg) and Polycom. In the end, Renown selected Scopia video solutions from Avaya. The result is the highly successful R-TeleMed program, currently covering 25 specialties with more on the way.

Scopia video solutions offer a number of advantages over competing solutions. Scopia video is the only option that provides HD-quality in both the data and the personal-interaction channel. For a specialist, the ability to view a diagnostic image, for example, in HD is critically important. Scopia solutions also offer important advantages in terms of security, ease-of-use and interoperability with existing systems.

You can learn more about Avaya and Renown Health’s R-TeleMed program here.

Are you an IITM? The VAR Guy told me that SMB’s Lose 24 Billion Dollars per Year In Productivity from Winging IT Management

This morning in our management meeting, we were discussing migrating some of our critical apps to the Cloud (onto a secure hosted platform). You would think that as a “Cloud evangelist”, I would make the decision immediately without thinking twice right? Wrong! As a responsible (read: due diligent, resource constricted, tight fisted) business owner, I feel that we need to review all of the options open to us. How much would it be if we kept the application and server in house (so I could reach out and touch it whenever I felt like modifying something or just gazing at it) versus how much would it cost to host it?  What other costs are there- beyond the apples to apples calculations of typical premise/cloud costs? It dawned on me that what is really happening is that instead of focusing on my core competency (helping my clients, sales, managing my staff, marketing – all of the things that a business owner does during the average day), I had become the defacto involuntary IT manager – or IITM. (You know I hate three and four letter acronyms- but, hey, I will use them to illustrate a point). Is there a cost for that?

I came across an article from one of my favorite columnists – The VAR Guy- and he introduced me to the IITM concept and its impact on my business. The full entry is available here: http://thevarguy.com/business-technology-solution-sales/smbs-lose-24-billion-productivity-annually-winging-it-management.

SMBs Lose $24 Billion in Productivity Annually From Winging IT Management

The VAR Guy

DH Kass

Tue, 2013-04-30 07:15

A new Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) backed research study discovered that SMBs worldwide fritter away some $24 billion in productivity annually by assigning non-technical personnel to manage their IT environments. Read between the lines, and the study makes the case for small businesses to more effectively leverage VARs and cloud computing.

The study, conducted by researcher AMI-Partners, examined the impact of so-called involuntary IT managers (IITMs) at SMBs in North America, Latin America and EMEA tasked with handling their companies’ IT solutions. In particular, the research focused on the impact on business productivity of IITMs in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Chile and India.

The $24 billion lost annually results directly from IITMs taking time away from primary business activities to perform IT management functions for which many are ill-prepared, according to the study’s findings. AMI surveyed 538 IITMs in small businesses with 100 employees or less and, from that data extrapolated that 3.8 million SMBs in the target countries manage IT internally with non-technical personnel.

While SMBs in the study invested $83 billion to equip their businesses with IT and communications equipment, they lost $24 billion in productivity trying to internally manage their IT environments. When asked about a solution to the problem, IITMs in the study believe that cloud-based solutions can ease some of the burden of managing IT.

“Many small businesses don’t have the budget for formal IT support, so they rely on the company’s most tech-savvy individual to manage their technology,” said Andy Bose, AMI Partners founder, chairman and chief executive. “As our research shows, relying on an Involuntary IT Manager can have an adverse impact on small businesses’ productivity, which can negatively affect revenue and translates into a very high opportunity cost.”

Other than pointing out how much productivity SMBs lose from fussing with managing IT operations on their own, the study’s findings indicated a movement to cloud services by SMBs. Indeed, some 33 percent of IITMs said they are likely to shift more IT spending toward hosted or cloud solutions while 36 percent are interested in a productivity and collaboration suite.

“The cloud when delivered right is a game-changer, providing small businesses with the IT solutions they need to solve their most challenging small-business technology concerns,” said Thomas Hansen, Microsoft SMB worldwide vice president.

Some highlights of the study’s findings:

• On average, IITMs lose about 300 hours per year of business productivity while managing IT
• 36 percent of IITMs feel that IT management is a nuisance
• 26 percent indicated they don’t feel qualified to manage IT
• 60 percent of IITMs want to simplify their company’s technology solutions to alleviate the difficulty of managing IT day-to-day

 

What can Napster teach us about the consumerization of IT (BYOD)

The article was published in Forbes magazine – here is the complete link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/netapp/2012/11/07/napster-byod/ This is a guest post by Jesse Lipson, VP and GM of Data Sharing, Citrix. I think that it is a great article- exceptionally well written and concise.

 
The music industry has undergone quite a transformation over the last 15 years. Of course, we can often apply lessons from other industries to our own.

source: Rhapsody

Back in the 1990s, if I heard a song I really liked on the radio and wanted to buy it, I’d have to make a trip to the record store. After battling traffic and jockeying for a parking spot, I’d rifle through the CD selection and—if it was in stock—I’d pay $15–$20 for the privilege (even if there were just a few songs on the album that I wanted).

This was a great model—for the record labels. But for music lovers, it was inefficient and expensive. Then Napster came and changed everything.

In many ways, Napster is like the BYOD trend. Read on: I’ll tell you why and I’ll give you my top tips to avoid bringing your own security nightmare…

Bring Your Own Piracy

With Napster, if someone heard a song they liked on the radio, all they did was type the name into a search box; they could download it instantly, for free. And they could share it with their friends.

Users loved Napster, but deep down we all knew that the model wasn’t sustainable: Napster lacked a way for musicians and labels to monetize and protect their intellectual property.

To cut a long story short, all that changed in 2003, when Apple released the iTunes Music Store: It helped resolve the conflict between the old and new models of music consumption. But iTunes wasn’t quite as convenient as Napster. Downloaded songs were protected from sharing by digital rights management (DRM) and they cost 99 cents each.

However, iTunes did allow users to buy music from the comfort of their own home, while letting the music industry monetize and protect their songs. Apple was able to satisfy both parties.

Standardization vs. Cowboys

The consumerization of IT is now driving a similar transformation in enterprise hardware and software. The traditional IT model is what I call Standardization, where employees are issued company-owned mobile devices, and forced to use infrequently updated software that’s only accessible inside the firewall.

There are benefits to Standardization, but it’s increasingly untenable: Employees come to expect the same ease of use and performance from the software they use at work as they do from the software they use at home, like Facebook and Twitter.

Frustrated with the inefficiencies of the old Standardization model, many employees are embracing a new model, which I call Cowboy Consumerization. They’re buying their own phones and tablets, installing their own software to store and manage company data.

Just like Napster, Cowboy Consumerization provides users with efficiency and productivity. But also like Napster, we know that Cowboy Consumerization simply isn’t sustainable.

So how Widespread is it?

According to an August 2012 Enterprise Strategy Group report, 70% of organizations know or suspect their employees are using personal online file sharing accounts without formal IT approval.

I spoke with a group of CIOs at Citrix Synergy three weeks ago. They were seriously concerned about the security risks that personal file sharing solutions pose within their organizations.

Among their top security worries:

• How do I protect corporate data and intellectual property if an employee leaves the company or loses their device?
• How do I ensure compliance with, say, HIPAA or FINRA rules, if we can’t see how employees store and share corporate data?
• How do I ensure that we’re honoring customer and partner contracts that require their data to be stored on-premises, in specific geographic regions, or with certain encryption standards?

Ultimately, IT needs to follow the example of iTunes and create a solution that combines elements of Standardization and Consumerization. There has to be a happy medium between those two models.

Here are some guidelines on how to square that circle:

• For company-issued mobile devices, use mobile device management or mobile application management (MAM) software for application provisioning and application/device wiping.
• For BYOD mobile devices, use a MAM solution to manage business apps on the device while letting the end user manage their own personal apps. That way, if the employee leaves or the device is lost, you can wipe just the corporate data from it.
• Enterprise apps need to be updated more rapidly than IT typically considers acceptable. Remember, you’re competing with consumer apps like Facebook and Twitter; employees have higher usability expectations. If you can’t keep pace, consider using a cloud vendor to deliver your apps.
• Different enterprises need to comply with different laws and regulations. Make sure that the software you adopt provides you with account-level preferences to allow you to tweak security settings. You need to meet your needs today, but also be able to revisit down the road, based on user feedback.
• Make sure that the new tools you adopt allow you to take advantage of existing investments, such as network shares or SharePoint.

As you evaluate the right BYOD strategy, think about Napster and the importance of creating a happy medium between security and convenience.

For more information about setting up your own BYOD policies- check out our FREE VIDEO LIBRARY at http://www.primetelecommunications.com/video-library-byod-bring-your-own-device/

Infographic: 5 Keys to Mobile Video

Incorporating mobile devices into enterprise videoconferencing requires a different strategy from implementing conference room video. Our new infographic shows the top five considerations when deploying mobile video solutions in the work place.

More than 70% of organizations are planning to get video capabilities within the next year, according to a study by Network Instruments.That rise in implementations means companies need to consider video in a way that is both cost-efficient in the short term and fits with long-term communications planning.

The benefits of mobile video conferencing include faster decision-making, enhanced collaboration, and improved sales and revenue. But businesses must also consider a solution that is easy to deploy and use.

See all five key considerations in our full infographic here: 5 Keys to Mobile Video.

Using the Cloud and Managed Services to Make More with Less

The bigger a company is the bigger their IT staff – a truism. While the best companies learn to scale operations and solutions beyond a 1:1 ratio, staff growth inevitably follows corporate success and computing sophistication. However, the vast majority of companies are on the ‘understaffed’ side of this growth in a significant way frequently lacking dedicated IT staff completely. The majority of companies rely instead on local consulting companies, staff with rudimentary knowledge, or the teenage children of the owner (in all seriousness I’ve seen this too many times to count).

A large non-profit I spoke with not long ago has a staff of over 1,000 with geographically dispersed sites, but an IT staff of about 6. They certainly had little hope of getting everything done through no fault of their own with so few people to manage a dozen servers and over a dozen remote locations. This last case is extreme in its ratio, but the limited staff overwhelmed by the amount of work and its complexity is all too common. How would they have time, initiative, know-how to move to the cloud?

One of the keys is timing, not finding the time, selecting the window that helps avoid disrupting ongoing operations or slipping delivery dates. While some companies make an outright strategic commitment to the cloud diving in deep, the majority want to put their toe in the water to test it out. Adoption of cloud computing is being used far more than most people realize from payroll by ADP to CRM & SFA (salesforce.com, NetSuite, Intuit), and hosted VoiP/PBX systems. While cloud computing is the most important change in IT today, the majority of companies systems are still run in-house and moving anything to the cloud creates significant discomfort for many.

Testing the Waters

Here are some steps for deciding how to test these water vapors:

1. Select a provider; learn how things work; make a plan.
2. New initiatives make an excellent choice in generally avoiding CapEx, avoiding impact to current systems, and significant unknowns surrounding total computing requirements and change management.
3. Integrate initial efforts with already planned deployments.
4. Use existing maintenance windows for integration and testing.
5. Pick a system/solution that has low business impact risk – not payroll, CRM, SFA.
6. Duplicate your production system, or use a non-production environment (development, test, QA) though alternative environments are uncommon for smaller companies.
7. Avoid “leaps of faith”. They don’t really work for computing solutions… test, test, re-test.

 

Common Uses

• Secure file sharing with your extended team. From managing your own file system to using cloud SharePoint, there are many options available.
• Everybody has email, but many cloud solutions offer integrated calendars, folders, document management, and more making teams far more productive with all the email touch points.
• Expand web and application servers to reduce latency for remote workers, improve overall scalability, or free expensive hardware for more critical in-house computing.
• Establish a backup service – very easy with commonly available tools with direct file system integration as a drive letter (Windows) or volume (Unix).
• Duplicate databases for high-availability or business-continuity use cases – MySQL Cluster, Oracle streams, SQLServer replication, etc. from the current system to a cloud database instance. Implementing a redundant database would be the easier and safer use, but with the option to change to a high-availability solution at a future date.
• For some companies with more sophisticated data needs (and staff), data warehousing and lightweight BI of the reporting variety would be a good option. Performance is sometimes an issue for cloud databases. But for prototyping, developing and more, it could be a good starting point. Moving to dedicated, private cloud solutions, provide excellent capabilities for databases while supporting the dramatic benefits of the cloud simultaneously.

The Beginner’s Guide to Video

Video solutions like Avaya Scopia make it simple for people to join a video conference from any device, including smartphones, personal laptops and tablets without complex licensing agreements or firewall issues. The cost of video collaboration is coming down, and user expectations, shaped by the ubiquity of consumer video conferencing tools like MS Skype and Apple Facetime, all contribute to rising demand for corporate video solutions. Then there are the compelling use cases: Medical centers can extend expert care to patients in remote clinics through video-linked specialists. Financial services companies can provide personal, face-to-face service to more clients in more locations. Educational institutions can expand their classrooms to reach more students and to enrich the experience for those they teach. One consequence of the rapid adoption of video collaboration technology is that many of the people who take part in the process of defining, evaluating, testing and rolling out video solutions are unfamiliar with many of key concepts and technologies. These included end-users who need to have a hand in defining how video will be used in the organization as well as technical staff who are new to video issues. To help, Avaya has created a quick, interactive guide that provides an introduction to important video conferencing concepts for a non-technical audience. The Guide includes: ·       Bandwidth Bandits: A short introduction to bandwidth management. ·       Compression: A quick visual introduction to the need for and technology involved in video compression. ·       Building Bridges and Avoiding Technology Islands: An introduction to the concept of interoperability. There’s much more, including a glossary that explains terms like Gateway, MCU, HD Video, and SVC. You can access the guide here: The Beginner’s Guide to Video

Video conferencing is booming. Here are 7 reasons why.

Video conferencing has been around for almost three decades, but in 2013, it is rapidly becoming an everyday part of doing business. As consumer offerings have grown, business interest has also expanded to meet the desire for a richer form of communication.

In our new Trend Advisor, “Video Solutions in theEnterprise,” we explore the seven reasons why corporate video conferencing is booming and why businesses of all sizes can’t afford to be left out.

One trend is how the proliferation of smart mobile devices is driving the desire for life like, affordable and easy-to-use video conferencing in the workplace.

To read the other six trends that are fueling corporate interest in adopting video conferencing, download the free Avaya Trend Advisor here: http://bit.ly/WZgzve.    

The Big 2012 Communications Predictions: How Are They Faring

As a global leader inbusiness communications systems, Avaya takes its position seriously. That’s why at the beginning of the year, it gets its best thinkers together to make predictions about communications technology trends, service innovations and broad market drivers.

Now that we’re into 2013, Avaya decided to take stock and see which predictions have been on target and which have missed the mark. You can see the full report at http://www.avaya.com/usa/resource/assets/whitepapers/12CommunicationTrendsfor2012Update.pdf

Here’s a synopsis:

#1: Mobility raises the expectation of availability. There is no question about the accuracy of this prediction—but it probably didn’t go far enough. Mobility is no longer just about availability. In its mid-year update, Avaya notes that employees now expect the same features and functionality in mobile devices as they have in their office.

#2: Contact centers test the value of voice. This is true, but it’s turning out to be a bit more complicated. In its update, Avaya points out that in today’s customer service world, it’s not about pitting one mode (voice, e-mail, text, etc.) against another, but “offering the right channel at the right time.” This requires proactively determining what kind of experience the user wants. “Once you identify the preferred channels, you can focus energy and resources on making them — and the customer experience — great.”

#3Contextual data spans the last mile of personal productivity.  Contextual data is information about the communications, not the communications itself.  Having contextual data easily accessible, for example, lets you retrieve a dial-in number and passcode after being dropped from a conference call. Or lets you instantly see a list of participants with information about how you’ve interacted with them and the documents and other resources relevant to the interaction. Getting contextual data is happening, but perhaps not as fast as expected. “At this point, contextual capabilities remain in their infancy,” Avaya notes, “with promising prototypes surfacing in the marketplace.”

#4: Businesses advance from social media to social business. Despite Facebook’s troubled stock market debut, social media is still hot. In the update, Avaya points out that companies increasingly use social media not only as a listening post but as a springboard to action. Establishing a command center for monitoring and responding to social media is becoming commonplace.

#5: Social media and customer care enter into an arranged marriage. Not only that, but the marriage seems happy all around. Avaya notes that as organizations get their arms around social media/customer care alignment, it helps them put real legs on their social media strategy.

#6: The SIP bar is raised again. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the foundation for streamlining enterprise networks and extending advanced communications to small and medium-size businesses. As more SIP-enabled applications become available, Avaya sees more organizations abandoning a cautious, stepwise approach to deploying SIP.

#7: Social interactions expose customer care’s flaws. There is no hiding in the world of social media.  Avaya notes that companies are getting used to its rough and tumble dynamics and responding by creating a culture of openness that encourages employees to engage.

#8: IT support staffs converge, part 2. This prediction will never be NOT true. But Avaya notes that while the movement to bring voice and data staffs together continues unabated, challenges keep arising (e.g., how to deploy unified communications.) Facing these challenges, IT continues to proceed cautiously “perhaps too much so in the eyes of some users,” notes Avaya.

#9: Continuous connectivity drives communications support services. Raw connectivity is critical to support services, allowing vendor support teams to “swarm” a customer problem using real-time by video and other tools.  In its mid-year update, Avaya notes that some companies are also migrating to other approaches, such as managed services, total outsourcing or software as a service (SaaS).

#10: Clients take control of managed services. IT departments are becoming more discriminating in the managed services they purchase and asking tougher questions, such as “Are our IT operating costs predictable? Do we have the IT staff we need? Do we have the budget to invest in the infrastructure to meet organization expectations?”  Answering “no” to any of these questions can make a company a prime candidate for managed services.

#11: UC managed services/outsourcing facilitates alignment between IT and business units.  Yes IT and business units keep cozying up. More and more, they are conducting unbiased analyses to determine whether creating a solution internally or turning to a service provider offers better value.

#12: “True” UC apps proliferate. Expectations for UC continue to grow, especially as BYOD enables true UC applications on smartphones, tablets and other devices. But barriers remain, as conflicting technologies and approaches limit usability and adoption. At midyear, Avaya is counseling companies to “discount the hype and do the homework.”