Digium announces closed handsets

Posted on February 5, 2012 by Rob

I did a serious double take when I read the PR this week about the plans that Digium, the original developer of Asterisk, has to enter the handset market with 3 devices in Q2 this year.

Yet another SIP handset with a new logo on it isn’t the surprising bit and until I read the detail I assumed that this would be some sort of soft Digium OEM branding of hardware from an established player. It is the sort of thing that we have thought about a few times and would allow them to exploit the Asterisk or Switchvox brand to give them more handset revenue whilst keeping their open credentials intact by continuing to play nicely with the rest of the handset market. That isn’t what these are. They are Digium developed and manufactured and will apparently have proprietary features specific to closed source Digium applications. If that is true then it really is a bold departure.

As most folks will know Digium has a range of products which, up to now, have been mostly focussed around the open SIP VoIP comms market based on its early leadership in this field from developing the Open Source Asterisk code base a decade ago. Their original business model centered on monetising the ground breaking Asterisk code by selling telco interface cards to folks that used it, and latterly from a commercial PABX based on Asterisk called Switchvox which they purchased in 2007.

I guess that this isn’t a great place to be commercially any more. Digium have a number of strong competitors in the interface card space with no real differentiation other than the Asterisk brand association. The importance of these cards is in any case declining at their CPE end of the market which is moving at great speed away from local legacy telco interfaces towards SIP trunks. So they really need to make Switchvox work for them which is what I assume this is all about.

When we developed our Asterisk based PBX product in 2004, we could see the prospect of a huge market shift away from expensive and inflexible PBX systems which were at that time all using proprietary lock-in and exploiting the lack of standards between the PBX and the handset to keep the customer captive for all parts of the solution. Asterisk was a glimpse of the future, it’s adoption of cloud friendly open SIP standards broke this lock-in and enabled us to develop products which were flexible and worked with the many emerging SIP handset vendors like snom, Polycom & Sipura to deliver very competitive end to end solutions. Yes, there was an engineering problem to solve to make all these open handsets behave seamlessly but this was not that hard although it was resource consuming. Today we automatically discover and provision over 70 different handsets from half a dozen vendors but maintain compatibility with many more due to our use of exclusively open interfaces.

In the meantime purchasers have recognised the distortions caused by proprietary lock-in and even the old stalwart vendors now boast open SIP handset interoperability because it is now a “must have” on many procurement specifications.

From early information on these handsets, it looks like Digium may have launched a bid to rewind time and take Asterisk back into the 80s and 90s world of closed proprietary phone systems to make a few extra bucks on handsets in Switchvox sales. If they have then it will be interesting to see how that works for them.

This early information is very sketchy and more detail is promised soon on how the handsets will integrate. It could be that Digium intend to use their own handset designs to pioneer open functionality that gives smoother operation of features between handset and switch. If so then that will be great move for entire industry and we look forward to being able to add support for three more handsets that provide a further proof point to our customers that open solutions are the way to go! Who knows, Digium may be able to build a great business out of providing well thought out open handsets that create as much of a buzz as Asterisk first did a decade ago.

 

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Has e-mail had its day

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Rob

This interview with Thierry Breton about his zero internal e-mail plan for ATOS caught my eye a few weeks ago.  Actually M. Bretton’s pronouncement isn’t new, he first made it in Feb this year, but the BBC interview comes at a time when the idea has achieved new currency with similar pronouncements about the death of e-mail as we know it from a range of commentators.

Of course some of these need taking with a pinch of salt. Mark Zuckerberg telling us that Facebook Messaging will probably render e-mail obsolete is hardly a independent data point, but what is true is that the stats show e-mail use is falling dramatically within some groups and using some technologies. The much quoted ComScore report if you read the whole thing, shows webmail use falling like a stone in the 12-17 age group and less dramatic falls in use among 18-22 year olds but actually saw an increase in email use among older age groups as well as a huge 30-40% increase in mobile e-mail usage, so this is a much more balanced picture than the headlines portray.

If we forget the stats for a moment, what we should be asking is “is e-mail the best tool for internal communication?“. The answer depends on what kind of communication, for some things e-mail is a pretty good tool, for others it is terrible!

For those of us in the generation that introduced e-mail into a workplace where letters, fax and even telex were the norm for written communication, it can seem like e-mail is now the universal communication tool. It is fairly timely (although not real-time), reasonably low overhead, produces a persistent record of the communication and can be used to share documents via attachments. The trouble is that whilst it is better than many other forms of written communication that preceded it, it is at best only reasonable at many of the things we now expect it to do.

We expect real time delivery of e-mail, but in reality it is nothing like. E-mail communication is store and forward with variable delays at each stage, add to that the necessary spam filtering with its false positives, and the fact that I have sent an e-mail gives me no guarantee at all that you will receive it in any particular timeframe or indeed at all. How many hours a year do you waste making phone calls to check that an e-mail has been received?

Now the low overhead and persistent record thing. Sure, just typing a few lines of e-mail and pressing send is pretty quick, but because it is a fairly formal communication that often isn’t what happens! We know that whatever we say now will likely be archived by the recipient and may be forwarded to others or quoted back to us maybe years later. There is therefore an implied necessity to choose our words very carefully lest they be mis-interpreted so that quick two minute reply becomes a paralysing proposition of checking, wording and re-wording. Is that really a vast leap forward from writing formal letters to each other?

Social networking users, particularly the key school leaver and “new graduate” age groups have worked out that Instant Messaging is synchronous and offers lower overhead communication which makes it very appropriate for most informal communication in peer groups. Like it or not, they will be the folks that shape how our workplaces communicate over the next few years and I confidently predict that few will have a preference for e-mail.

Of course e-mail is also useful because we can use it to share working and formal documents via attachments right? This is actually the bit that e-mail is really bad at. When I get sent documents for comment and review by e-mail, firstly a whole copy of the document (1st copy) ends up in my mailbox and everyone else it was sent to. I open it up to edit or make a comment and have to manually save it to a local or network file system (2nd copy) . I then have to compose a reply, remember to manually attach the right version of my edited copy and send it back to the originator where it then sits in my Sent mailbox (3rd copy) and their inbox (4th copy). If they then want to edit it, they have to save the copy locally (5th copy) and so on!

Shared document workspaces (even if they are just a basic fileshare with some versioning conventions) are a much more efficient and less error prone way of collaborating on documents.

Whilst an outright ban on internal e-mail would be unworkable for us as most of the e-mail we exchange daily does in any case originate or end up externally, I think we need to start challenging ourselves about each e-mail we send. We need to work out if we may just get better value out of our and the recipient’s time by using IM, or just walking a couple of metres down the corridor and talking to them.

So e-mail, a superb efficiency tool that has transformed the workplace or a much abused time waster? Please leave a comment.


 

 

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New features and Fridays hangout

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Rob

It happened again, I ran a technical hangout on Friday and we quickly hit the 10 attendee Google+ hangouts with extras capacity. I’m sorry if you were one of the folks that couldn’t get on because of this.

The main thing that we talked about were the raft of “small” new features that we have introduced into our products over the last few months, so I’ve put together a quick Prezi with an overview of these as a consolation for folks that couldn’t get to the hangout. All you need to do is click on the play button below to animate the Prezi, and then click to step through it, or just zoom out and pan around the display area clicking to view the bits that interest you in your own time.

From my previous blog on the topic, it will be obvious that I quite like the Prezi technology and I’m getting better at driving it. You’ll notice this latest effort now includes embedding video clips of UI features as shown using screen sharing in the hangout. Syncing sound with them is still evading though me so don’t bother turning your audio up because there isn’t any (yet).

Back to the hangout limits

I’m struggling to decide what to do about banging our head against these every Friday. I guess we could do one or more of the following:

  1. Persevere with hangouts, small and interactive is good!
  2. Find some way of recording the hangout so that it can be viewed later by folks who want to
  3. Beg Google to get to play with hangouts on air (effectively a broadcast hangout which can have lots of “watchers”)
  4. Switch to a more formal webinar format for more capacity

I’m not sure that I personally favour option 2 as for me, the whole point of hangouts is that they are an informal thing. If everyone has to start watching their words carefully because they are being published on the interwebs for posterity then I think that will make the dynamic different.

Certainly I’d probably start scripting more of what I’m going to say and practicing the demo steps. My normal prep for a hangout is to grab a cup of coffee 5 mins before I start and then switch my webcam on and see what questions pop up, with a backup plan of something to talk about for half an hour if you are all a silent lot like last week! If we are going to record things then I would want to switch to more formal webinars.

So what do you think. If you’ve been in a hangout, or tried to get in but couldn’t, or didn’t have time: how could we make this work better for you? Please leave a comment.

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Do SIP trunks give good audio quality?

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Rob

SIP Audio QualityWe’ve started doing regular google+ hangouts with our reseller community and one of our partners dropped in yesterday to give me a grilling on our recommendations over SIP vs ISDN trunks.

His question went something like this “My colleague has just been on one of your training courses and he came away with the impression that we should be using ISDN rather than SIP trunks over broadband if we care about call quality. Is this true?”

Like all complex questions, the answer to this is a definite “maybe” so needs a bit of explanation.

Lets deal with call quality first…

Depending on the codec used, SIP trunks can deliver the same, or better inherent call quality (audio bandwidth) than ISDN. The actual call quality will only be as good as the network that the call is delivered over. The end to end underlying network needs a 0% packet loss at all times and low jitter. If either of these conditions are not satisfied then audio breakup and/or quality degradation will occur.

Some folks have other ideas on this and I’ve often heard figures like 1% or less packet loss quoted for good quality audio but this is demonstrable nonsense. SIP connections chop the analogue audio stream up into typically 20 millisecond segments and put each of these into its own packet – that’s 50 packets per second. If you have a 0.5% packet loss rate then one of these samples will be lost every 4 seconds which means there will be an audio drop out or blip 15 times a minute at half the oft quoted 1% max packet drop rate. Is that good enough for your customers? (it certainly isn’t for mine). I can just about see how less than a 0.1% packet loss rate could be seen as acceptable, that’s one blip every 20 seconds or three a minute but that is still nowhere near “ISDN quality”.

So do broadband circuits deliver these kinds of characteristics? The shortest answer I can come up with for this is “sometimes”.

The longer answer needs a bit of an explanation about the technology. ADSL broadband was invented to provide cheap download connectivity that was able to leverage existing variable quality telephone lines using as much of the interference free spectrum as is available on an individual line. That’s why the bit rate that you get on a particular line usually varies from the maximum. Most other link technologies say “provided the connection path has these electrical characteristics, the link will work reliably”, ADSL says “the protocol used adapts to the line, trading off speed against reliability on a dynamic basis to give the best download speed available with acceptable reliability”.

This is all great for us as consumers, it means that we can get fantastic broadband speeds for web-browsing and downloading without paying loads of money to have expensive fibre installed to our premisses. Because this has created a mass-market, Broadband circuits only cost a few pounds a month and everybody is happy.

Which brings on the next part of the problem. If an exchange has 50,000 broadband subscribers and they each have a 20Mbit/s broadband then in theory a terabit of Internet download connectivity would be required to guarantee to meet demand. This would be uneconomic and largely unnecessary so providers of consumer broadband don’t work this way. In reality, Internet televised football matches excepted, not all of the subscribers will be using all of their bandwidth at the same time so contention is used to reduce the backhaul cost between the exchange and the rest of the Internet. This means only putting in enough bandwidth from the exchange for a certain percentage of all connections to be used at the same time and sharing this bandwidth out so that at busy times packets are dropped to slow all of the connections down a bit. Most of the time that is OK as nothing like full bandwidth is in use on all connections simultaneously, but that is why even if you have a 20Mbit/s connection you get nothing like that download rate at 8pm on a Friday evening. When everyone else starts using their Internet heavily, some percentage of all packets, including yours, are being dropped to throttle back your connection on a contended service.

If you need 0% packet loss for VoIP then contended network connections are a problem as these can semi-randomly generate packet loss dependent on factors such as time of day and other users on the same exchange.

It is possible to purchase uncontended xDSL connections (usually SDSL), but because these are more expensive to provide and also have a much smaller market these are generally much more expensive. You do however need an uncontended connection if you want to guarantee SIP audio quality.

Next, what about reliability…

We’ve already discussed how rate adaptive (ADSL & VDSL) link layers use the available interference free spectrum on a circuit and adapt to provide the best available bandwidth on a link.

Unfortunately line characteristics do change over time and factors such as slight degradation of connection points, humidity and temperature changes, the number and kinds of other broadband service being provided on pairs in the same bundle and electrical interference can all impact on the fragile broadband signal on an individual pair. This is fine as in general error detection and correction will kick in to repair packets and eventually dynamically reduce the data rate on the line to avoid the frequencies where problems are being experienced. More profound changes in the line quality particularly corrosion in splice points and repeated random electrical interference can have a more dramatic effect and cause frequent line drops or a radical reduction in data rate. These are particularly difficult for the line provider to diagnose as the line will often have acceptable DC and audio frequency characteristics even when failing in this way such that is passes standard line tests. In order to defend against huge numbers of expensive maintenance investigations for “my broadband is going slowly” on what is basically a low cost consumer product, the bar is set quite high in terms of the level of line degradation that is considered to be a fault, and the time to investigate SLA on consumer broadband circuits is several days because of the difficulty in resolving these complex issues on low cost of the circuits.

More expensive business grade circuits with a fixed data rate and line characteristics which are specified so that a line is clearly either in-spec for the data rate or faulty do exist and indeed it is possible to purchase a better fault response SLA on these lines. As above these circuits are more expensive than commodity consumer or business broadband.

Summary…

Broadband can be reliable enough to run SIP trunks or remote handsets with the same or better call quality and nearly as good a reliability as ISDN, but these need to be premium uncontended circuits with an enhanced fault package.

You can run trunks or hosted telephony over consumer grade broadband, but the results will be variable. For 95% plus of the time the quality will be fine on most circuits but depending on the circuit, local exchange and a range of other factors outside your control there will be times when the call quality isn’t “ISDN grade”.

What do I do? My home broadband is on a BT 20C Network exchange so the range of cost effective DSL options is limited to contended 8Mb/s BT Wholesale offerings from whichever retail provider I use for my broadband. I have a remote SIP phone on my desk for when I work from home and, whilst this will never give me business grade call quality in this environment, it is great for internal communication. I wouldn’t put an entire small business on SIP in this kind of environment though as it could never deliver guaranteed call quality.

At my office we have both a 100Mbit fibre Ethernet bearer with appropriate QoS in both directions and an ISDN30. We use them interchangeably for voice as they both give approximately the same call quality and nearly the same reliability. I can easily envisage a day when we would drop the ISDN30 provided we had a second similarly reliable diverse data connection, as SIP gives us the same quality with greater flexibility in this environment.

So what is your experience with SIP over xDSL, am I being too much of technical purist or does this line up with what you see in real life? I’d love to hear more data points from folks who are delivering reliable SIP services over ADSL with more info about the environments where you feel that this works as well as ISDN.

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Being a UK Technology Vendor

Posted on November 5, 2011 by Rob

UK Technology VendorThe technology world transcends national and cultural boundaries, so there is nothing special about being a UK based technology developer right? Having spent a good bit of my life before founding ipcortex working with teams of software developers in the US, UK, the rest of Europe and further East I have to say that this is only partly true.

The UK still produces some of the best software engineers in the world – a continuing legacy, in my opinion, of the pioneering role that several British Computer Science departments played in the early development of this young industry. This isn’t a perpetual advantage; as the industry matures, inspired and inspiring engineers now come to the fore no matter where in the world they start out, as evidenced by the increasing globalisation of software development.

Well motivated and capable product developers are however only part of the equation, the other key factors are how well the product is designed to meet the needs and expectations of its users and how easy it is to make it work properly within the environment that they will install it.

When the people who specify and implement the product really understand the way that their users want it to operate then the result is usually an intuitive solution that meets their needs. On a purely technical front, if a product has to cope with 100s of different localisations then likely none of them will be perfect or the configuration will be complicated beyond belief.

These are all especially important in the communications market as the way that we communicate is often very cultural, and national or regional standards still permeate the way that we connect to legacy telecommunications networks.

These latter reasons explain how a small and agile UK company can quickly deliver innovative products that resonate with the market better than the output of multi-national vendors with many times the resources to apply. It is all about knowing very clearly where to focus effort and doing so relentlessly.

Obviously even we do not purely target the UK market for our products and are gaining much experience from a global perspective as we produce product variants for other regions. UK users will however always be special as we can really engage and understand the local requirement in a way that is so much harder when your developers and maybe even your support desk are thousands of miles and several time zones away!

 

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Every Business should have a Call Centre

Posted on October 22, 2011 by Rob

This is a hard proposition to sell as, lets face it, the phrase “call centre” has an awful lot of negative connotations. These often stem from the experience we all get as consumers when large businesses use the technology badly to pare their transaction costs down to the bare minimum, often at our expense.

It is therefore quite understandable that many medium-sized business managers who take pride in providing effective personal customer service may well be less than positive about implementing functionality often associated with call centres on their phone system and sceptical that this will allow them to improve responsiveness.

There is also another issue: many legacy phone system vendors position “call centre features” as an esoteric and expensive add on that costs lots of time and money to set up. Taken together this can lead to users thinking that using intelligent call handling features to improve the way they deal with their customers isn’t a useful step for them.

This couldn’t be further from reality. Using well thought out auto-attendants to ensure that your customer always ends up talking to the right person in your organisation for their query improves the experience for the customer, but also improves business efficiency as they don’t also spend time first talking to the wrong person.

Using queues to manage peak time demand to key functions can help you to improve your response to all callers. Most callers will perceive say a maximum 2-3 minute wait, followed by instant access to the right staff to be better than a repeated engaged tone and random chance of getting through when trying to make an urgent query. This of course only works if you are able to deliver a consistent maximum wait by combining queue use with pro-active monitoring and clear reporting so that managers easily view historic patterns of calls and use these to best deploy their staff throughout the week and manage their performance. When combined with real-time alerting on building delays which allow an immediate response by adding resources or overflowing calls this removes the possibility of annoying customers with unacceptable queue wait times.

All of the above need not take any significant time or extra cost to set up. On our VoIPCortex platform all the basic customer contact features such as auto-attendants and call queues with real-time status monitoring panel and e-mail alerts on key thresholds as well as reporting of queue and agent performance are built in across the product range and accessed via our intuitive web-UI. There really is no excuse not to at least investigate  what professional call management could do for your organisation.

So are call centre features something that can make a positive impact on your business or are they still not for you?

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Presentation Style

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Rob

Like most people, I’ve been using tools like Powerpoint for more years than I care to remember. The end effect is that when I start thinking about presenting an idea I subconsciously drift into structuring this as slides in my head: a progression on screens with sets of words on them that wind from an introduction, inexorably (or insufferably) to a conclusion.

Aware of the built-in formulaic tedium of this kind of presentation, when I can, I ditch slides or perhaps use a single slide or very short intro at meetings to set a context because that is what everyone expects and then leap off into an animated conversation or interactive technology demo.

This approach works well for a product demonstration or an off the cuff opinion session, but it isn’t so good for more formal presentations. These need good structure and supporting facts to convey information accurately (and lets face it to be taken seriously) so it used to be back to Powerpoint for these.

Every once in a while, a technology comes along that adds an extra dimension to the way that we represent information to the extent that it encourages better thinking. I’ve been playing with a tool called Prezi recently and it seems to offer a much better alternative to slide decks for some things. Take a look at this Prezi which is a 2-minute primer on the UC and the Cloud Whitepaper I wrote last month:

Prezi has been around for a few years and I’ve been watching their progress. They started as an interesting idea which looked a bit clunky at the edges and not quite complete enough to use in anger in a commercial setting. The first implementations lacked basic features like the ability to customise the colours used or add a corporate logo, and there still are quite a few developments needed that would make it more useable for mainstream work but I think that it is already good enough to provide a fun alternative to traditional slide decks for many of the things we do.

So what do you think, is Prezi a superficial gimmick or should I switch to using it for sessions like the VoIPCortex Technical Training days?

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Why I Wrote the Whitepaper

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Rob

We’ve just published a Whitepaper I wrote called Six Strategic Decisions for UC and the Cloud. UC is nothing new and readers of my previous post will be well aware that I consider Cloud to be a term which is verging on overuse so you may wonder why have we published this now.

The combination of UC and Cloud Computing, with the step developments that are taking place in both of these areas, are creating a point of inflection in the communications industry. As consumers many of us already understand and are embracing applications that embody these technologies and this is feeding through to corporate end-users who are starting to ask questions of their suppliers about how they will deliver these in a corporate setting.

Whenever rapid change like this takes place in an industry, there is jostling among players to position whatever technology they are currently betting on as being the ultimate embodiment of the changing dynamic. What I don’t really see is much alignment between some of this positioning and the real step changes in capability that Cloud implementation should deliver. I believe that this…

  • IS about increasing speed of deployment and reducing costs
  • ISNT about integrating all of our communications needs into a single access environment based on one technology (this has been tried at various points in the industry and never works)
  • IS about enhancing flexibility and mobility by leveraging open interfaces to provide useable access from whatever device we have conveniently to hand
  • ISNT about putting pale, inward facing applications onto closed corporate desktops for internal consumption only.
  • IS about enabling unified rich communication with our customers and suppliers to deliver real business value
  • ISNT about delivering proprietary, introspective solutions with added “virtualisation” pixie dust which don’t really change the user experience.

The whitepaper examines all of the potential that the combination of UC and Cloud technologies can bring but tries to cut through the noise and hype by distilling this down to six key strategic decisions that will determine the effectiveness of an implementation.

The whole thing is quite concise and worth reading in full, but if you only have time for a 2 minute primer then I’ve taken the key points out and turned them into a Prezi here.

So how do you see UC and Cloud affecting your organisation?

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Will Resellers have a role in a “Cloud Enabled” World?

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Andrew Moloney

 

When the topic of “cloud” comes up in conversation with our partners, it’s not uncommon for worry lines to start to appear on their brows. Some worry that if products become services in the cloud then their ability to add value will disappear. At ipcortex, we just don’t subscribe to that point of view. In fact more than that, we think that for the savviest resellers this inflection point could be as game changing for them, as we believe it will be for vendors like us. Here’s why…

Industries that go through periods of major transformation also tend to produce winners and losers among the formally dominant players in the industry. As both UC and cloud develop and mature they will require a much broader set of skills and capabilities from both the technology vendors offering products and services, and the resellers and integrators seeking to secure business based from them. The large “legacy” vendors, used to deriving business from proprietary on-premise systems may be the ones who struggle the hardest to come to terms with this new paradigm. Indeed, their complex pricing structures and “handset heavy” revenue models do not lend themselves well to a shift in value towards cloud based services and open standards interoperability. It is at times such as these when newer entrants in the market and the resellers that partner with them, are able to leverage the inflection points and start to rapidly change the vendor landscape.

A UC and cloud enabled world will favour vendors that:

  • Have open standards architectures at their core, and actively seek to broadly integrate with a broad set of vendors in the marketplace
  • Accept that proprietary “lock-in” will no longer be enough to keep customers loyal and instead drive to deliver true value in a much more competitive market
  • Do not rely on complex pricing models and reliance hardware/ CPE with complex feature upgrades to maintain the margin in their business.

For resellers and integrators we believe that their role will not disappear, but it will start to transform. It will no longer be sufficient to align closely with one or two of these vendors, become skilled in their proprietary architectures, and rely on “nickel and dime’ing” feature bolt-ons and on site support in order to make a living.

A UC and cloud enabled world will favour those resellers that:

  • are aligned with their customer’s business processes and objectives
  • are able to add value on the basis of consulting and service
  • understand cloud computing and associated technologies and are able to advise their customers accordingly
  • embrace a much broader ecosystem of products and services, giving true flexibility, value and choice to their customers through a combination of on-premise and cloud based products and services.

There’s plenty of scope to add value in a cloud enabled UC world. It won’t be in delivering low value, low margin hardware installs and feature upgrades, but it will be in higher value more consultative selling. And don’t forget – delivery of any IP based communications solution will still require a robust, resilient, secure, IP network over which to operate within the business and out to the cloud. Indeed, arguably it becomes of even greater importance.

Will Resellers have a Role in a Cloud Enabled UC World?Resellers need not worry, but for some, they really do need to prepare…

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Demo World

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Rob
Photo by Marcin Wichary

Photo by Marcin Wichary

There is a land called “demo world” where solutions only have to ever run in small, pre-tested configurations, in ways that make them shine brighter than their competition. Applications in demo world only have to communicate with themselves and even then only for a handful of users because of course demo world doesn’t operate on any scale or have external links as that would be far too inconvenient to properly explore in the available meeting time.

Desktop applications in demo-world have very pretty interfaces which allow you to see lots of detail on at least say 5 or 6 other users in real time with gorgeous big graphical icons that are visible from the other side of the seminar room. Of course in the real world we often need to search, narrow down and communicate with 100s of contacts in the course of a day or week, but again that really isn’t a concern in demo world as all you need is a scroll bar at the edge of the screen to navigate around a practically infinite canvas of huge icons. In demo world those applications run on a very limited range of desktop software environments because it is of course much better that way (for the vendor anyway).

Large vendors dominate demo-world. Their carefully choreographed sales teams learn the scripted demos from specialist sales engineers and all goes well as long as they remember to stick to the script and do not allow too much time for inconvenient questions.

But we don’t live in demo-world. We have to design products that work well in the real world.

In the real world, users want the desktop app to run the same on any of the environments they use: PCs, Macs, tablets and web based on any browser rather than some particular version specified by the vendor.

In the real-world it isn’t how well an application performs when used to talk to someone running the same thing on the next desk that is important, it is how well it lets us shrink the gap when talking to someone using another system elsewhere on the planet that matters because these latter people are generally called “customers”.

So how do you tell if you are being sold a demo-world solution? During the scripted demo or Webex of the solution, ask a few questions that relate to how you actually need to use the system. Ask how well it allows you to see presence status for 100s of users at the same time, or quickly narrow down a contact search with two or three keystrokes whilst holding a conversation. Ask the salesman to demonstrate an instant message exchange to a customer on another system entirely, or to quickly configure a non-trivial call handling path with multi-line presentation. If any of that takes more than a few seconds or involves the need to “just check on that and get back to you” then you may have just dropped off the edge of demo-world.

 

 

 

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