These are trends that must rank just behind Cloud as one of the biggest talking points of the year for CIOs, analysts and the IT press. For those unfamiliar with the term, the consumerisation of IT refers to the growing reliance on mobile devices, true public cloud services and social media for business use. BYOD – bring your own device – is a massive part of this, and relates specifically to the steady (and often stealthy) introduction of personal mobile devices (a label which, by the way, includes tablets and laptops as well as mobile phones) into the work place.

It’s something that’s happening within companies of all sizes, from SMEs, to multi national enterprises and everywhere in the vast space between. There’s a multitude of reasons why – common examples include where savvy users are finding company-provided devices to be too prohibitive or locked down, or the budget isn’t there in the first place. Perhaps they simply prefer using their iPhone to the Blackberry or the Nokia 3210 that they were given when they joined the company, and is still going strong (or would be, if it wasn’t at the bottom of their desk drawer!).

The bottom line is that ultimately, users have greater experience with these types of devices from their personal lives and are using this to decide which devices they use at work. IT departments need to decide whether to fight this movement, and risk that some users will disregard the policy anyway (which in turn could lead to lack of security) or to encourage it.

Fortunately, open standards and SIP have taken away many of the technical barriers to encouraging BYOD. They’ve meant that compatibility with a range of mobile phones and tablets is possible, and it’s not just a case of the company needing to provide a certain model or brand, on a certain firmware version to all employees.

That said, however, policies around security, data ownership, best practice/behavioural policy and reimbursement will still need to be developed so the adoption of BYOD isn’t always an obvious choice to make. So what does this mean for the humble desk phone? Is BYOD sure to dominate, and make it extinct? My feeling is that there will always be users and environments where a desk phone makes sense – but it’s important that handset vendors continue to innovate if they’re to remain relevant.

We’re pleased to see that many vendors are demonstrating their commitment to this with some really quite innovative developments. Recently, we’ve been very impressed with Polycom’s new VVX 500 (check out our CEO’s first impressions at this blog post) and we’re also looking forward to Yealink’s new affordable video phone, the VP530, which should be available in the coming months.

So, what do you think? Is the desk phone dying a death? Will it prevail, or merely persevere? And how do you feel about the prospect of saying goodbye to clunky kit on the counter?

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Well not exactly, I tend to get whatever I can scrounge from the dev or demo pool. We support over 80 different handsets from six different vendors so there are almost literally 100s of phones on the bench in the development office or the demo suite, or just stacked up on shelves in a store room for regression testing or in case anyone ever reports an interop problem that we need to investigate.

Last time I found a phone out of this stockpile that that was worth “borrowing” was when Polycom obsoleted the Soundpoint IP-601 in favour of the IP-650. That was about 6 years ago! At the time, the IP-601 was a really nice phone that met my needs perfectly. The first open SIP handset that I know of with an LCD based BLF pad, and because it had been replaced by the IP-650 it was easy to have it move quietly to my desk.

Yesterday, that IP-601 mysteriously rebooted in the middle of a conversation with a customer. Not good when you work for a phone company! Come to think of it, it spontaneously rebooted one day last week too. I’ve never had a problem with it before so I’m thinking maybe after 6-years, old age is setting in and I should pension it off.

About 10 seconds later, Steve tells me that Polycom recently sent us a production sample of the VVX-500 and he has finished bench testing with it but it could do with hammering in a production environment. Bingo! in common with everyone else in the office, I’ve been trying to wangle a way of getting a VVX-500 on my desk ever since I saw the first beta sample. Now it doesn’t do to be blatant about this and pull rank to nab all of the good stuff but he walked straight in to that one!

The VVX-500 isn’t new to us, we had beta samples and integrated support for it into our PBX builds before the public release so it is well supported by recent PBX firmware. I also demonstrated this phone at last weeks google hangout so some of you may have seen it there. Just about everyone who sees the VVX-500 in the flesh thinks that it is a thing of great beauty. This is however the first production unit we’ve had and certainly the first time I’ve used it in real life.

I have to say after using for a day, I am convinced that all phones will look like this in a few years time. An intuitive touch screen interface is instantly useable by anyone who can work a smartphone and this replaces the huge desk eating form factor with myriad buttons on older phones. At the same time it maintains quick, uncomplicated access to basic functions like making and receiving phone calls for users who “just want a phone”. The north/south/east/west/fire buttons, which were in my opinion the least-bad way of navigating complex menus are a thing of the past. This is rather ironic because as far as I know these were pioneered by Polycom and are now just blindly copied by everyone else entering the market. I guess the goalposts just moved!

Stop Press: Steve tells me that my old phone is running out of date firmware and an upgrade will probably fix my rebooting problem so I can have the 601  back when I have finished testing the VVX-500. Don’t hold your breath, it could need a lot of “testing”, probably several years worth!

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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