Liveblogging - Voicecon Keynote Bruce Morse From IBM - Not Unified Communications But Unified User Experience

Bruce Morse is giving the keynote at VoiceCon San Francisco. He started with a video about how IBM can do Unified Communications without ripping and replacing all the existing products. I blogged yesterday about the number 1 hallway conversation which is a pending announcement tomorrow with a deal with Microsoft.

The pending deal has to do with an interoperability deal between Microsoft’s Office Communications and Sametime. Word has it that there will be a major customer implementation (one IBM UC large customers and one large Microsoft customers) to showcase this new partnership. Specifically I understand that IBM and Microsoft will federate their presence across platforms. I’ll let the two companies talk more about it tomorrow. Bottom Line the conversation was very positive yesterday on the Microsoft and IBM Unified Communications partnership.

Today’s business reality business challenges and current climate
- speed and agility verses cost cutting
- gorwth and innovation verses project freezing
- collaborative culture verses immediate ROI
- change management verses extract more value from current investments
- social responsibility verses green business

Talking about communications and collaboration overload. Instead of making life easier many Unified Communications solutions introduces more complexities. New sets of tools being used by new generation of users (e.g. blogging and twitter).

Bruce talks about a new challenge: instead of focusing on the back end focus on the front end - to make it easy and intuitive to find others and connecting with them. Goal: to share information among users. Key to success ease of use for users.

Find, Reach, and Collaborate = Unified User Experience

IBM is looking at new social tools and technologies to integrate into their UC platform. Integration social networking (not sure what he means by that). Critical to IBM is delivering a software platform. They (IBM) think of Unified Communications as a system not a product.

IBM’s platform is SameTime. Bruce is talking about Lotus and how this isn’t the old Lotus. I’ve said it before (and other agree) that Lotus is bad for the IBM Sametime brand. The data that Bruce is saying is that they have more implementations on non-Lotus environments. (my opinion: please rebrand this and get rid of the Lotus Brand).

IBM UC is Open - Bruce is touting the openness of their APIs and technologies. They are multiplatform. They support all environments in big and secure environments. I think this is the big story with IBM. They are being very humble on their technology leadership.

IBM is now giving a demo… Showing off the presence information in a fully loaded enterprise environment. In an email client they are are loading up presence information to do a real-tme chat but it’s not just chat - it has other features that leverages the chat and adds other UI features.. (I wonder how it works in non enterprise environments - how do they federate the presence??)

Konrad Lagarde is showing his prsence and how it can be manipulated for his needs. He is advertising one phone number that he sets up policy to redirect calls based upon rules. This speaks directly to the trend that the users are in charge of their environment. Very cool feature doesn’t sound sexy but very important. Just showed video support but the buddy list and presence is nice. I wonder what their XMPP support will be.

Demo of social features: Now IBM is showing social software support - can link into communities. Users can subscribe to communities a sort of “vertical twitter”. From a twitter like community a call can be initiated - a conference call - fully integrated. I really like this feature. Community tools are awesome. Not much more demo’d there. I wonder how communities can be constructed or do they leverage external communities like Twitter and Facebook among others. I wonder if they would be interested in OpenSocial or non-enterprise version of this system. I’ll see if I can get Bruce to talk about that.

Bruce is back to slides talking about the benefits (IBM pitch) - he is talking about cost reduction impact of IBM UC. Now he just referenced Facebook in how employees are using Facebook in sharing unsecured information but that is the preferred user experience for those users. Sametime has been used to integrate external Facebook apps into the enterprise rather than the “lock down” policy others have deployed.

Bruce is basically saying that IBM Sametime is being positioned and used as an integration fabric across multiple environments like IM and Facebook among other enterprise legacy systems and products.

Communications enables business process is the big buzzword that ties all this together. With collaboration tools as the focus on the front end and applications and business processes as the focus on the backend.

Ron Sebastian is now giving a demo around the real time capabilities to update data based upon the UI and presence information and integrating it into other system (databases, email, ..etc). Now demoing widget support that is the container for presenting other information within apps.

The keynote is being twittered by the elite twitter force here @blairplez @danyork @alexlewis @furrier @ccrowson @dnm54 @nora_freedman @VanessaAlvarez1