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G00246939 Hype Cycle for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2013 Published: 31 July 2013
Analyst(s): Geoff Johnson
This Hype Cycle evaluates the life cycle maturity of unified communications and collaboration and related technologies. It shows how emerging technologies are transitioning UCC deployments beyond major suites to include numerous collaboration variants, mobility and cloud UC delivery.
Table of Contents
Analysis...... 3 What You Need to Know...... 3 The Hype Cycle...... 4 The Priority Matrix...... 8 Off the Hype Cycle...... 9 On the Rise...... 10 Customer Engagement Hub...... 10 Intercompany Multimodal UCC...... 11 3D Video Telepresence...... 12 Private Cloud Communications...... 14 Social Co-browsing...... 17 Web Real-Time Communications...... 18 Context-Enriched Content...... 20 Hybrid Unified Communications and Collaboration...... 22 No-Email Initiatives...... 24 Presence Federation...... 26 Ensemble Interactions...... 27 At the Peak...... 28 Expertise Location and Management...... 28 Open Source in UC Components...... 30 Collaborative Authoring Tools...... 33
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Context Delivery Architecture...... 35 Enterprise Video Content Management...... 38 Transcoderless and Software-Based Videoconferencing Infrastructure...... 39 Context-Enriched Services...... 41 Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS)...... 43 Sliding Into the Trough...... 45 Mobile Collaboration Client...... 45 Cloud Office Systems...... 46 External Peer-to-Peer Communities...... 48 Communications-Enabled Business Processes...... 50 Mobile Unified Communications...... 52 Cloud UC (UCaaS)...... 53 Climbing the Slope...... 56 Emergency/Mass Notification Services...... 56 Rich Presence...... 59 Rich Media — Live Streaming...... 61 Open-Source Communications...... 62 SIP Communications...... 65 Internal Peer-to-Peer Communities...... 66 Unified Communications and Collaboration...... 68 Unified Communications...... 70 Video Telepresence...... 72 Rich Media on Demand...... 74 Entering the Plateau...... 75 Mobile Social Networks...... 75 Mobile IM...... 77 Location-Aware Technology...... 79 Mobile Search...... 81 Appendixes...... 82 Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels...... 84 Recommended Reading...... 85
List of Tables
Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases...... 84 Table 2. Benefit Ratings...... 84
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Table 3. Maturity Levels...... 85
List of Figures
Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2013...... 7 Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2013...... 9 Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2012...... 83
Analysis
What You Need to Know
This Hype Cycle examines the key unified communications and collaboration (UCC) technologies, and forecasts how they will impact users and business performance during the next 10 years. Seventy percent of these UCC technologies will mature within five years, and 60% will have a transformational or high impact if their implementation is led by genuine business requirements.
The separate communications technologies that are at the heart of UCC suites and solutions are progressing steadily toward maturity. A stand-out development is the way that enterprises are embracing emerging collaboration tools to extend basic unified communications (UC) to include collaboration solutions (UCC) in a very significant way. Social networking is a similarly significant source of business innovation from an adjacent market. The high innovation rate in both collaboration and social networking is counterbalanced by numerous short-lived solutions that begin as interesting products or services but do not last or proliferate in the ways that Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or YouTube have (see "Hype Cycle for Business Use of Social Technologies, 2012").
Enterprise UCC solutions based on familiar technologies, such as telephony, messaging and conferencing, are being supplemented by rapidly developing communications architectures, platforms and applications based on fast-moving networking technologies such as presence, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), unified communications as a service (UCaaS) cloud delivery and rich mobility solutions. These will facilitate deeper use of UC as an aid to improving individual employee and corporate productivity, facilitating and augmenting business processes. Much of the innovation in UCC and UCaaS is coming from adjacent collaboration, cloud and mobility markets (see "Hype Cycle for Consumer Services and Mobile Applications, 2013," "Hype Cycle For Wireless Devices, Software and Services, 2013," "Hype Cycle for Cloud Computing, 2013").
Communications applications such as contact center workflow or communications-enabled business process (CEBP) will increasingly invoke UC applications such as presence, conferencing or contact center services to leverage or automate routine business operations.
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The Hype Cycle Enterprises have long sought mechanisms for controlling and leveraging disparate communications technologies in consistent ways to enhance productivity. This need has led to today's enterprise UC and continues to drive UCC developments, including complete UC suites such as Microsoft's Lync, Cisco's Jabber or IBM's Sametime and their emerging cloud-delivered variants.
Today, the term "UCC" still describes the use of popular collaboration tools from within UC environments. UCC will always be less mature than core UC. It is characterized by the use of tools for document sharing, content management, video clips, voice, and video and Web conferencing (especially by knowledge workers), as well as the widespread use of social networking tools (such as Facebook and Twitter) from within UC. We expect UCC technologies to become increasingly synonymous with UC, and for UCC to be referred to as just "UC" within a few years.
A balanced enterprise UC portfolio should deliver functionality in six broad communications technology areas:
■ Telephony, including fixed and mobile telephony, softphones, the evolution of PBXs and IP PBXs, including "click-to-call" functions, and other live/real-time communications, such as video telephony.
■ Multiparty conferencing, including either separate or integrated audio/voice, video and Web conferencing capabilities, as well as blended or compound conferencing capabilities like Web plus audio plus video, that attendees can invoke from a desktop, tablet or smartphone.
■ Messaging, including email, fax, voice mail, unified messaging and emerging social networking alternatives such as Facebook, Twitter or Weibo.
■ Presence and IM, which will play an increasingly central role as the next generation of communications are integrated into routine communications, business applications and processes, because their indication of readiness, status or availability can give context and be leveraged into IT applications.
■ Software clients in UC suites, which must allow access to multiple communication functions from consistent interfaces, such as hard clients (desktop phones, videoconferencing units), thick desktop clients (downloaded), thin browser (or Web) clients and mobile/smartphone clients, as well as specialized messaging, alerts and notification clients embedded in business applications.
■ Communications applications, which are a broad group of communications-centric IT applications. They will typically share information over networked IT solutions, such as emergency or mass notification services or location intelligence to give context. These applications directly integrate communications functions into key applications, using consolidated administration tools, collaboration applications, contact center applications, and notification or alert applications for communications-enabled business processes.
UC deployments continue to be driven mainly by business interest in individual employee and workgroup productivity and support for remote working and customer service. By adding the collaboration and related technologies outlined in this Hype Cycle, businesses expect to provide a
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wide range of communications options to facilitate their staff's interactions, operations and customer service in any situation.
Virtually all businesses (more than 95%) continue to deploy three or more communications clients (to support at least telephony, email/messaging and conferencing), rather than the idealistic and unachievable goal of having a single universal UC client across multiple devices, including smartphones and tablets.
Unified communications today is based on software and hardware clients operating in commoditizing IT environments based on generic servers, large-scale consolidated, virtualized data centers, and emerging private and public cloud infrastructure. Unfortunately, many organizations' UC road maps are not strategic. They are confined to planning and implementing tactical upgrades of individual components, such as telephony or messaging (email or IM) or conferencing, without much of a holistic sense of what they want to achieve from UC in the medium to long term. Inquiry with Gartner analysts shows that most have not even considered leveraging communications in their IT applications for productivity. Leading organizations that have planned for UC in their upgrade road maps are often also tactically focused on cost savings and operational benefits for IT, rather than on opportunities to make the business more effective.
Most organizations have been disappointed by the lack of simplified and complete suites to deliver UCC and the consequent complex decision making. "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications" shows how Cisco and Microsoft dominate in UC solution suites. Recently, Cisco has paid more attention to "unifying" its UC portfolio. Its solutions were previously broad but not well unified, made up of separate, often nonintegrated, products. Cisco now has a strongly unified solution with very complete capabilities in all areas, including video and telephony.
Microsoft, on the other hand, had strongly unified suites built to work as a single solution. Microsoft must pay particular attention to the communications element of its solutions. Its solution does not perform well in the critical areas of telephony and video. Lync telephony is incomplete at this time. To remain a leader, Microsoft must have complete communications capabilities. Although Microsoft, IBM and other vendors from adjacent markets are promoting social networking and related collaboration solutions, these efforts do not make up for critical gaps in core UC functions. For most enterprises, an additional complexity to be resolved is how to source UC from a hybrid of on-premises UC and UCaaS.
Although more than 95% of UC solutions are installed on-premises today, the use of hosted or facility-managed services from large-scale virtualized data centers is increasing (see "Forecast Analysis: Enterprise Communications Applications, Worldwide, 2Q13 Update"). Looking ahead, the arrival and progression of cloud alternatives such as UCaaS will encourage enterprises to create hybrids of on-premises and cloud solutions.
Important emerging architectural developments that will leverage and extend UCC developments into enterprise IT applications are examined in the Hype Cycle entries for context delivery architecture, context-enriched content, and Web real-time communications.
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An overall conclusion from the 2013 Hype Cycle for UCC is that although the core operational requirements of UC appear to be largely met in the near term, there is a long way to go to incorporate the new and innovative UCC solutions given that 35% of these technologies will take five to 10 years to mature. This could introduce difficulties for both vendors and users of those UCC technologies and suggests that there may be a risk of them becoming "obsolete before maturity" in ways that are currently unforeseen.
Technologies Added
Four technologies have been added to the Hype Cycle this year or changed in their description as the role of each technology evolves:
■ 3D video telepresence (added)
■ Social co-browsing (added)
■ Collaborative authoring tools (formerly "simultaneous co-editing")
■ Location-aware technology (replacing location-aware applications and location intelligence)
A general theme for these additions is that leading-adopter enterprises are increasingly expecting to gain richer services from UCC (especially collaboration) and to leverage or mash up previously stand-alone technologies into more sophisticated applications.
Following are the unified communications applications and technologies that business, infrastructure and IT operations leaders should monitor. Depending on your enterprise's risk profile, you should decide whether or how to include these technologies in your current planning horizons (see Figure 1).
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Figure 1. Hype Cycle for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2013
expectations Enterprise Video Content Management Transcoderless and Software-Based Videoconferencing Infrastructure Context-Enriched Services Context Delivery Architecture Collaborative Authoring Tools Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) Open Source in UC Components Expertise Location and Management Ensemble Interactions Mobile Collaboration Client Presence Federation No-Email Initiatives Cloud Office Systems Mobile Search Location-Aware Hybrid Unified Communications Context- External Peer-to-Peer Communities and Collaboration Technology Enriched Communications-Enabled Business Processes Web Real-Time Communications Content Mobile Unified Communications Mobile IM Mobile Social Networks Rich Media on Demand Cloud UC (UCaaS) Video Telepresence Unified Communications Social Co-browsing Unified Communications Private Cloud Communications and Collaboration 3D Video Telepresence Internal Peer-to-Peer Communities SIP Communications Intercompany Multimodal UCC Open-Source Communications Customer Engagement Hub Rich Media — Live Streaming Rich Presence Emergency/Mass Notification Services As of July 2013 Peak of Innovation Trough of Plateau of Inflated Slope of Enlightenment Trigger Disillusionment Productivity Expectations time Plateau will be reached in: obsolete less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau
Source: Gartner (July 2013)
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The Priority Matrix The Priority Matrix for the UCC Hype Cycle maps the number of years to mainstream adoption for each technology against the degree of business benefit expected to be created by its use in enterprises.
Nine technologies are forecast to reach sufficient technical and commercial maturity to achieve at least early mainstream adoption in less than two years: open-source communications, mobile search, mobile instant messaging, SIP communications, rich media on demand, rich media — live streaming, mobile social networks, location-aware technology and enterprise file synchronization and sharing.
Of the 14 technologies that will reach mainstream adoption in two to five years, only Web real-time communications and context-enriched services are forecast to have a transformational impact as the need for communications appliances is displaced by communications delivered directly by clicking a button in a Web browser. Seven technologies will deliver high business benefits — UC, UCC, Cloud UC (UCaaS), expertise location and management, emergency/mass notification services, external peer-to-peer communities and mobile collaboration clients. Six will deliver moderate benefits — private cloud communications, rich presence, open source in UC components, transcoderless and software-based videoconferencing infrastructure, enterprise video content management and internal peer-to-peer communities.
Forecasting the future roles of technologies in the five- to 10-year horizon is a high-risk task with unclear outcomes given the difficulties, complexities and uncertainty in the global IT and networking industries. UCC technologies expected to become mainstream within five to 10 years include hybrid UCC, intercompany multimodal UC, context delivery architecture, context-enriched content, communications-enabled business processes, customer engagement hubs, ensemble (mobile) interactions, cloud office systems, collaborative authoring tools and presence federation.
Four technologies are forecast to become obsolete before they plateau. Social co-browsing, no- email initiatives, mobile unified communications and video telepresence all share the same characteristic of being supplemented or displaced by other practical alternatives before they can reach market maturity.
Given the short time frames for many of these technologies to reach maturity and deliver business benefits, infrastructure and operations leaders should be planning now for evaluation and investment in the transformational and high-potential technologies shown in the UCC Priority Matrix (see Figure 2).
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Figure 2. Priority Matrix for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2013
benefit years to mainstream adoption
less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years
transformational Context-Enriched Context Delivery Services Architecture Web Real-Time Communications
high Enterprise File Cloud UC (UCaaS) Communications-Enabled Synchronization and Business Processes Sharing (EFSS) Emergency/Mass Notification Services Context-Enriched Content Location-Aware Technology Expertise Location and Customer Engagement Management Hub Mobile Social Networks External Peer-to-Peer Hybrid Unified Rich Media — Live Communities Communications and Streaming Collaboration Mobile Collaboration Rich Media on Demand Client Intercompany Multimodal UCC SIP Communications Unified Communications Unified Communications and Collaboration
moderate Mobile IM Enterprise Video Content Cloud Office Systems 3D Video Telepresence Management Mobile Search Collaborative Authoring Internal Peer-to-Peer Tools Open-Source Communities Communications Ensemble Interactions Open Source in UC Components Presence Federation Private Cloud Communications Rich Presence Transcoderless and Software-Based Videoconferencing Infrastructure
low
As of July 2013
Source: Gartner (July 2013)
Off the Hype Cycle
The 4K x 2K TV displays Hype Cycle entry has been dropped, because screens are not seen as strategic to UC. Customer interaction hub has been renamed "customer engagement hub," and cloud collaboration services has been renamed "cloud office systems." Context-enriched services has been added, and external community platforms was dropped in favor of peer-to-peer communities. Open-source software in IP telephony has been dropped because it has been "obsolete before plateau" for more than a year, and location-based applications has become subsumed by location-aware technology.
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On the Rise
Customer Engagement Hub Analysis By: Michael Maoz
Definition: Customer engagement hubs (CEHs) are cross-channel CRM customer interaction applications that include customer-controlled communication (that is, social), allow personalized engagement with customers across all interaction channels including social, and reach all departments. These hubs are the precursor to the next generation of the contact center: the customer engagement center.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: During the next five years, 25% of leading companies will extend their customer service contact center goals to support social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as online community activities. This will lead to a shift from "contact center" to "customer engagement center." In 2013, only 2% of organizations will have the technologies and processes in place to provide a consistent customer experience across departments and channels. The need to support the anytime-anywhere customer and heightened business awareness are making this a top issue among customer service managers. The CEH will be part of a broader social CRM suite offering within eight years. The customer engagement hub can be used by all departments: marketing, sales, customer service, logistics and others.
User Advice: Directors of customer care, vice presidents of services and IT leaders should conduct an inventory of the key processes that not only drive customer satisfaction, but also foster customer engagement. Test the fitness of CRM-oriented applications to fulfill the needs of the engaged customer. Look at vendor road maps, and assess the vendor's and organization's readiness to evolve customer engagement processes and technologies. Identify areas for improvement before approaching IT for support or funding.
Business Impact: An emerging CEH will foster personalized engagement with customers across all interaction channels, including social, and will reach across all departments in the enterprise. The CEH will support the transition from transactional economics to a more comprehensive view of customer relationship economics. The issue of customer care will become a more systemic theme across the enterprise as CIOs strive to hit their goal of retaining customers as a way to grow revenue; a CEH will be required to support these initiatives. There is a 40% likelihood that the CEH will remain a conceptual framework and never evolve into a product. Vendors tend to focus on what can be mass-produced and easily sold rather than on products that can transform a business but require complex buying centers and change management. This limits the feasibility of a true CEH.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center"
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"CRM Technologies for the Emerging Customer Engagement Hub"
Intercompany Multimodal UCC Analysis By: Steve Blood
Definition: Intercompany multimodal unified communications and collaboration (UCC) is the ability for users inside one organization to share presence information, communicate and collaborate using instant messaging, audio, video and Web conference sessions with other users in another organization, irrespective of the technology platforms selected by their respective IT departments.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Large numbers of organizations are moving forward with UCC, offering employees multiple modalities for communicating in voice, instant messaging (IM), video, email and conferencing. The problem is this collaborative functionality and the ability to switch between modality is only largely available from within a single vendor technology platform.
There are three key barriers to enterprise intercompany multimodal UCC:
■ Competitive market forces: The UCC market is only just emerging, and competition is fierce as vendors start to compete from different ends of the collaboration spectrum; from voice vendors such as Cisco and Avaya; messaging vendors such as Microsoft and IBM; video from Polycom and Cisco; and cloud-based solutions from Google, Microsoft and Skype. While there is some integration emerging to improve interoperability of the discrete channels (telephony, instant messaging and video), the capability to escalate between the modalities and establish collaboration sessions between different technology platforms on an ad hoc basis is very limited today.
■ Development of standards: Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) services are available from a number of next-generation network and over-the-top service providers. SIP can support multimodal communications; however, from a tariff perspective, there has been little interest from network service providers in offering more than just voice connectivity. Over-the-top peering exchanges can deliver multimedia federation as a service across a private or Internet- based network, which bypasses the network service provider. Partnerships between Neustar and service providers such as XConnect and Equinix provide a uniform resource identifier (URI) directory for enterprise federation of multimedia SIP connections. While promising, the concept of using this type of peering for multimedia UC is not well-understood and requires everyone to work with a limited number of players. It is also not clear which protocol will prevail for delivering multimodal UC. While SIP is emerging as the standard for voice and some video communications, Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is more accepted as the intercompany standard for IM.
■ User acceptance and sharing of information: While early adopters of collaboration tools have changed their working styles to be more interrupt-driven and multitasking-oriented, these styles may not satisfy other generations at work today. Even with the technology challenges of intercompany collaboration resolved, there will be the administrative issue of how to manage the distribution and sharing of sensitive information with customers, partners and suppliers. Policies and practices are only just emerging in the UCC product sets.
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User Advice: The perceived greater effectiveness of creating an interrupt-driven working environment can be measured against user resistance to changing work environments and perceived loss of privacy. Organizations should start by evaluating the benefit of extending multichannel UC beyond their own enterprise networks as a discrete intercompany exercise, with a limited number of partners, customers or suppliers. This could also be an exercise inside a large organization that has multiple buying centers, between different UC technology providers. A UC federation project could also be aligned to the opportunities and challenges with introducing social media into the organization.
Services provided by communications middleware providers such as NextPlane and Esna Technology can help to federate discrete communications modalities between competing vendor platforms. Additionally, Blue Jeans Network achieves a "meet me" capability between vendor platforms. Since standards in SIP are slow to evolve and the working groups established to address this issue are not fully supported by leading competitors, communications middleware providers are likely to be instrumental in providing early intercompany federation services.
Consider also cloud-based Web conferencing for providing intercompany multimedia UC integration to avoid the increased risk associated with security and privacy of enterprise federation. In some cases, this may be integrated into your corporate UC solution.
Business Impact: Intercompany federation of UC modalities has the opportunity to extend the early benefits identified with UC inside the enterprise to customers, partners and suppliers. The immediacy of the interrupt-driven work style will help to speed up collaboration and improve decision making by engaging a select group of users at an optimum time to reach a better collaborative output, benefiting all those in the supply chain.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: Blue Jeans Network; Esna Technology; NextPlane
Recommended Reading: "Predicts 2013: Success in Leveraging UC Will Be Easier With a Unified IT and Business Strategy for Collaboration"
"Transform the Workplace With Focus on Bricks, Behaviors and Bits"
3D Video Telepresence Analysis By: Adib Carl Ghubril; Geoff Johnson; Sanish KB
Definition: 3D video telepresence facilitates collaboration by providing disparate parties with a lifelike visual experience, such that participants perceive themselves to be all together in one place.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Early and current commercial video telepresence installations such those from Cisco (acquired Tandberg), Polycom (acquired HP Halo), Huawei
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Avaya (acquired Radvision), Logitech LifeSize, and Huawei telepresence use flat, high-definition TV screens, specially lit rooms and require heavy consumption of bandwidth. These should be considered as partial telepresence solutions because, ideally, telepresence attempts to implement all the human sensory elements remotely but practical deployments are limited to sight, sound and manipulation (omitting smell and taste). Haptic tele-operations developments or tele-robotics (for manipulation) have tended to be undertaken quite separately from telepresence. Telepresence is distinct from virtual presence, which gives participants the sensation of being immersed in a simulated virtual reality environment.
Companies such as DVE Telepresence, Actis and TelePresence Tech are promoting some advances in video telepresence, including 3D stereoptic displays and eye-level optically embedded cameras, but these solutions are discounted here because they do not satisfy all three criteria for 3D telepresence, which are as follows:
■ Creating a 3D image, either with a volumetric display or through stereopsis (each eye gets its own image)
■ Rendering view-dependent images (changing what is viewed on the screen based on the position of the user's eyes relative to the projection)
■ Focal accommodation (projection depth and focus)
Nevertheless, 3D telepresence is gaining momentum now that 3D camera technology is relatively stable and applied across a wide breadth of use cases. These systems, still found primarily in laboratories, will use a stereoscopic depth camera system to generate a 360-degree map of the source, which is then reconstructed at the destination with the stereoscopic projector's system or volumetric displays. The image is then superimposed on a background appropriately matched to the surroundings at the destination, such that attendees will feel like the display is an extension of their surroundings. Furthermore, because different portions of the 360-degree image will be shown to those attendees as they move about, they will feel like the people being telecast are physically present.
Microsoft's Applied Science Group has demonstrated a system, using a projector and wave guide, to display two sets of images — a left/right image for person 1 and a left/right image for person 2 — tracking the two people as they change their orientation relative to the display. For example, a participant who stands up and walks to one side of the display expects to, and indeed does, view the side of the telepresence participants. Microsoft is also planning to apply some of this technology to its Skype app.
Only a handful of companies have a working commercial setup for this, and these target conference applications and staged events.
User Advice: Although commercial telepresence systems that provide 3D images and eye-level contact among the participants are available, true 3D systems are still being developed and should be considered only as an R&D endeavor.
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Meanwhile, consider enriching your stage presentations during company town hall meetings or industry conferences using sophisticated 3D telepresence systems that allow you to dynamically introduce animated characters, for example, and create special effects with presenters. 3D telepresence will also appeal to users in high touch collaboration end-applications such as remote surgery, distance education or manipulation in hazardous environments.
Early practical 3D video telepresence deployments are likely to require special room and lighting formats much like that needed to display Pepper's Ghost holograms (literally using smoke and mirrors to create the illusion) such as Musion's.
Business Impact: Business travel is a variable cost that affects all organizations, whether they are for-profit or not, and regardless of industry or sector. The process of reaching an agreement between two or more parties, whether it is concerning a purchasing decision, a course of action or a concept, involves cognitive and social factors. Cognitive factors, such as reasoning and the discussion of facts, can typically be adequately undertaken without all parties being in the same physical space. Social cues, however, are more difficult to convey in a teleconference, yet they are often critical to effectively "closing the deal."
If the old adage is true and "people do indeed buy from people," whether it is a product, service or idea, then the benefit of 3D telepresence is clear because it allows businesses to maximize the probability of a constructive interaction while minimizing the often-prohibitive travel costs associated with bringing people together.
Applications are likely to be led by entertainment (to offset high initial costs); enterprise executive communications (for high impact); distance learning (industrial training or in education); legal/judicial (avoids moving prisoners); medical (remote imagery); banking (boardroom not customer use); high- end retail promotions; employment recruitment interviews and displacement of international travel.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: DVE Telepresence; Microsoft; Musion Systems; TelePresence Tech
Private Cloud Communications Analysis By: Steve Blood
Definition: Private cloud communications has all the attributes of public cloud services in that it is scalable and elastic, metered by use, and uses Internet technologies, but it is deployed and managed as a shared service as part of the organization's IT network.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Private cloud communications can be aligned to Gartner's definition of cloud and has similar attributes to the emerging communications as a service solutions. There are, however, distinct differences from public cloud communications, as highlighted below:
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■ Service-based: The service is provided either by the organization's IT department or is a managed service by a communications services or IT provider, which differs from public cloud services, where the service is provided from infrastructure external to the organization. Organizations will prefer private to public cloud where there are limits to the network quality and coverage of external services, or where some regulatory issues restrict the use of public cloud.
■ Scalable and elastic: Communications services will be added to the private cloud architecture, taking advantage of virtualization to build scale and flexibility to manage all user communications requirements across the organization. This is very similar to the public cloud, except that the location of the service is internal to the organization's IT network. The degree to which the service can scale both down as well as up is a key attribute of cloud, and differentiates it from the more commonly offered external hosted communications services.
■ Shared: In place of having departmental solutions for communications, or site-based equipment, a single communications platform will serve to meet the needs of all users within the technical and commercial limits of the architecture proposed (distance, diversity, regulatory, etc.). The concept of a shared, public cloud is that a single service will support multiple customers. In this particular model, the service supports multiple departments inside the organization.
■ Metered by use: In place of the more traditional right-to-use communications license that organizations would traditionally purchase, they will be able to pay on a utility model based on the active number of users at any predefined point in the contract term, most likely a monthly billing cycle. Billing is either directly by the vendor in the case of self-management, or by the service provider in the case of a managed private cloud service. This is a key attribute for communications and readily available for network connectivity and usage, but one that is not so readily available at an application level.
■ Uses Internet technologies: At the core of the service, the platform is Internet Protocol (IP) based. The connection of services to users and between organizations may include private IP networks (Multiprotocol Label Switching [MPLS], Ethernet), public Internet and public Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) services.
Private cloud will compete with external public cloud services where organizations feel they have the skills and infrastructure capabilities to support internal communications requirements of users and the ability to scale to meet demand. We also anticipate that many IT managers will prefer private cloud solutions over external solutions because management, security and control of the communications infrastructure is a key role they provide to the business. Private cloud communications will satisfy CIOs' objectives for agility and cost optimization while maintaining job security for the IT managers responsible for communications. Where offered, organizations are likely to consider private cloud as an alternative option to public cloud services and, thus, we anticipate healthy adoption through the next five years.
User Advice: Where there is a strategy inside the IT department to build a private cloud architecture, organizations should evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of adding communications to this environment. This is especially true where communications is seen as more
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strategic and organizations want to retain control over the speed at which they develop and deploy enhanced communications services.
Currently, there are limited options for external communications as a service solution that spans multiple geographies. This is really important where IT managers need to deliver a single service to distributed users across the organization. This requires a single-vendor solution approach and most services providers today are in "build to order" mode, which will impact the limits of scalability, elasticity and lead time of an external service. Organizations that have deployed their own internal network to the majority of office locations and users might consider this an appropriate infrastructure for a single-vendor communications approach.
Private cloud communications, made available as a utility model in place of the traditional perpetual right-to-use license, is an option we believe will be more available through the next five years (see "Prepare for Dramatic Changes in Enterprise Communication Costs and Pricing Models"). Organizations will need to be selective with their technology providers, and review partners for the emerging consumption model.
The total cost of ownership is an important place to start when evaluating which route to adopt. Organizations should compare closely the cost of external services, which will typically include the cost of administration and management as well as ongoing software support costs with the cost of providing a private cloud, and continuing with the traditional capital purchase and perpetual license model. While external cloud services generally have a lower cost of ownership in a direct comparison of services, in some regions the cost of reducing the IT head count will prolong the ROI calculation.
Business Impact: Private cloud communications will have similar attributes to public cloud in that it will enable organizations to implement and manage communications with greater agility: faster implementation, greater resilience and more effective use of capital with the utility model. We also anticipate that the utility model will enable organizations to trial enhanced communications services at minimal cost and risk, enabling them to identify benefits early as part of the business case for a wider deployment. With a utility license in place, IT managers will have the option of moving services between private and public clouds to accommodate business demands.
This model will mostly be applicable to larger organizations with a large IT staff and strong service management skills. For smaller organizations, or those with fewer IT staff, the public cloud model will be both more cost-effective and provide a better service than trying to run cloud communications in-house. Except for very large, multisite organizations, the cost of private cloud is always likely to be higher than public services.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Altitude Software; Collab; Dicolab; eZuce; Presence Technology
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Recommended Reading: "Prepare for Dramatic Changes in Enterprise Communication Costs and Pricing Models"
"Design Your Private Cloud With Hybrid in Mind"
Social Co-browsing Analysis By: Michael Maoz
Definition: Social co-browsing is the collaborative sharing of the same Web space with one or more parties from a social network, regardless of the physical location of the two parties. Through social co-browsing, the parties can share a browser view and simultaneously browse a website.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Social co-browsing works in a synchronous fashion, distributing the URLs visited by one person to the other participants' browser. Social co-browsing differs from screen sharing in that it doesn't involve sending screen shots of the presenter's screen to one or more participants; instead, it distributes the URL visited by one person to the other person or party's browser. It differs from collaborative browsing services offered by a contact center, in that there is no customer service representative (CSR) involved in the process Social co-browsing is at an early phase of adoption in the Hype Cycle. In terms of enterprise adoption, only a minority of organizations with advanced social efforts are looking at ways to expand their reach by providing customers in hosted communities or open social networks with the ability to engage with each other. In terms of supporting technologies, only a small number of technology providers are offering social co-browsing solutions; however, the expansion of collaborative browsing to social co- browsing will be fueled by user's growing interest in engaging with one another.
The two most common ways to deliver social co-browsing are via the download of an applet by customers or just browsing to a shared Web space or browser extension. Downloading an applet provides more security controls, because the applet can block out certain information. The challenge is that few customers want to install foreign applets on their mobile or desktop devices. When browsing to a shared Web space, there are few controls for what can be seen.
This technology has not seen mainstream deployment, and will be rolled into the bigger Web customer service suite solutions market for 2015.
User Advice: Although the concept of engaging with somebody else to complete a task or compare notes using a browser is well-established, the acceptance of sharing the same Web space for potentially private information has been poor. The technology for collaboration is fairly mature, but the business process and benefits are unproven; therefore, don't implement real-time social co- browsing services if you do not have a collaborative culture in your customer base.
Business Impact: Few actions promote organizations' products and services as much as satisfied customers. By providing technologies for two or more customers to collaborate and share Web space in a social co-browsing environment, organizations can turn happy and loyal customers into service and sales representatives. Social software and collaborative browsing are gaining synergy, and can successfully work together to enable customers to share Web screen space with others.
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Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: flock; RockMelt; Sweeva; Unblu
Web Real-Time Communications Analysis By: Geoff Johnson
Definition: Web real-time communication (WebRTC) is an HTML5 standard in a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) draft. It's an open-source framework that will enable real-time communications to be delivered from within Web browsers. Basic applications like voice calls, video chat and peer- to-peer file sharing are expected in early developments, but WebRTC is also expected to eventually facilitate the fundamental building blocks for high-quality communication for business use of browsers in broadly based networking, audio, video and collaboration components.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The WebRTC framework was released as open source in June 2011. It built on original work by Ericsson Labs, and is supported by Google, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and potentially Microsoft. The group's early ambitions are to develop adequate APIs so that broad developer adoption can occur. The companion RTCWeb group at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is working to define a set of protocols that will also facilitate real-time communications in Web browsers.
Google integrated WebRTC into its Chrome development channel in January 2012, opening use of the WebRTC API. Mozilla integrated WebRTC into its Firefox alpha release in early 2012, providing audio mixing in a media stream. In April 2012, Mozilla released a demo of WebRTC video calling running inside its Firefox browser. Google Talk has a video chat plug-in for the WebRTC framework. The FreeSWITCH project (January, 2012) supports the iSAC audio codec. Doubango Telecom (May, 2012) provided an HTML5 SIP client using WebRTC. Nokia and Cisco are active. Most communications suppliers have at least rudimentary WebRTC solutions planned for 2013 and 2014.
Microsoft has gone its own way with its CU-RTC-Web API, which is outside the Standards' reliance on session delivery protocol (SDP). This may slow total adoption due to the two separate (but nominally interoperable) approaches.
Given the interest and active development support from major vendors, it is likely that WebRTC will become a platform that is more than just a vehicle for delivering compound communications for mobile devices and consumers in the short term.
User Advice: Within the next two years, major vendors and the open-source community working on WebRTC developments are likely to solve many of the initial issues required to enable communications from browsers as part of the patchwork of the HTML5 solution sets being devised at present. Beyond the next two years, there is significant motivation for a wide range of users and suppliers in very diverse arrays of communications applications to be interested in exploiting WebRTC concepts and practices, and to extend them into mainstream enterprise networking.
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WebRTC uses iLBC, iSAC, G.711, and G.722 codecs for audio, and VP8 for video. Enterprises should expect that WebRTC will eventually become robust enough for use in communications applications generally. Prepare for WebRTC to be used in browser- based unified communications and collaboration (UCC), contact center and video conferencing.
A useful indication of how it may develop comes from Kaazing and its full-duplex, but asynchronous, real-time Web communications for enterprises. Its WebSocket solution uses W3C standards, but has been developed outside the HTML5 standard. It shows how Web application developments may provide communications that are necessary to support massively scalable, low- latency, real-time Web apps. Kaazing's customers use these in financial services, gaming and social networking, and in telecommunications applications.
One obvious weakness of WebRTC deployment for enterprise use, or by communications service providers, is the lack of a central player to provide a managed directory for users. That role will be diffused for some time, unless enterprises or communications service providers (CSPs) act to fill it. Expect enterprising third-party directory facilitators to emerge, but no broad mainstream adoption before 2014 to 2015.
Business Impact: WebRTC applications will become particularly useful when used as an SIP endpoint. Do not confuse the potential enterprise-grade WebRTC developments with today's use of browsers to deliver chat.
Expect communications infrastructure vendors to provide a number of versions of HTML linked to popular mobile devices and applications, initially using the common WebRTC for various media. The popular demand for bring your own device (BYOD) will encourage use of WebRTC for inter- operation and federation for tablets and smartphones.
Within contact center operations and communications-enabled business processes, WebRTC can create browser pages as real-time communications objects to be used in workflow, e-commerce and business process applications. As such, WebRTC has the potential to transform industries because no clients need to be downloaded to access communications: just click from a browser.
Similarly, WebRTC Web services applications can use a browser to create real-time video connections to other WebRTC devices or to WebRTC media servers using RTP.
Many operational technologies (OT) using thick-client or thin-client applications over limited bandwidth networks will benefit from the ability to derive and provide a rich suite of communications from a Web browser associated with their industrial applications.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
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Sample Vendors: Acme Packet; Bistri; Crocodile Rich Communications Suite; Ericsson; Google; Kaazing; Microsoft; Mozilla (Firefox with Greasemonkey); Opera; Priologic Software; Pubnub; Tenhands; Thrupoint; Tokbox; Twilio; Unified Office; Vidtel; Voxeo; Zingaya
Recommended Reading: "Predicts 2013: Success in Leveraging UC Will Be Easier With a Unified IT and Business Strategy for Collaboration"
"Cool Vendors in People-Centered Computing, 2013"
"Mobile UC: Extending Collaboration to Smartphones and Tablets"
"Examining the Piece Parts of HTML5, a Multifaceted Initiative"
"Magic Quadrant for Web Conferencing"
"HTML5 to Take on New Role in Mobile App Development"
Context-Enriched Content Analysis By: Pete Basiliere; Mick MacComascaigh
Definition: Context-enriched content is highly relevant content, information and data that is based on the user's context in the moment and is served to whatever medium the recipient prefers. The media may be a Web browser, mobile phone, tablet or printed materials. Context-enriched content is differentiated from traditional communications by incorporating the user's context and an assessed understanding of the user's need in the moment.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Context-enriched content leverages knowledge of the user's location, gender, customer status, proximity to other devices, activity and other parameters — such as interests inferred based on the time of day, CRM and ERP data, past behavior and predicted activity — to publish truly personalized content. Context itself is much more than a GPS location; it is derived from one or more of these factors:
■ Sensed (based on location or proximity to other devices)
■ Inferred from activity (tasks, relations to other people)
■ Extracted from content (author, document type, key concepts)
■ Explicit (social tagging, comments, bookmarks)
Context-enriched content, along with additional elements, such as design, functionality and social components, contributes to a more targeted and highly relevant experience.
The Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) enables successful implementation of context-enriched content by providing seamless access by the recipient to the meaningful information they need, when and where they want it. Context-enriched content aligns with Gartner's concept of context-enriched services. These services use information about the end user to anticipate the person's immediate needs and to proactively offer more sophisticated, situation- aware and usable functions.
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The idea behind context-enriched content is that when we know the context, then we know the information the user most likely needs. As a result, the idea applies to not only consumers but also to people within the enterprise. At its simplest, context-enriched content could be a consumer- oriented marketing message that results from an analysis of purchasing and calling patterns. Within the enterprise, context-enriched content applications would serve up corporate data based on the individuals who have gathered for a decision-making meeting and the functional areas they represent.
User Advice: Context-aware technology providers — Leverage your core customer communications management offerings' core technologies to build a publishing platform that incorporates contextual information from mobile devices. The content must be more than location or purchasing history, but must incorporate all available knowledge about the user and be predictive. Although context-aware advertising will be the leading application in the near term, this is not the whole story. Users will want as much (or as little) content about your enterprise clients' products as is appropriate to them, instantaneously. Providers must also minimize data transfer latency and ensure user privacy.
Enterprises — The first application of context-enriched content should focus on the consumer and result in highly personal and relevant information. Engage leading-edge providers to develop prediction algorithms that serve up relevant content based on context and an understanding of the customer's behavior and then provide the ideal experience for that individual while assuring the privacy and security of the individual's information. In the longer term, understand that context- enriched content can be oriented to not only consumers, but to any environment, including the workflow within your organization.
Business Impact: Context-enriched content is a blend of structured and unstructured data, information and context in a context-enriched service. It is the evolution of existing customer communications management, Web content management and CRM technology to understand and mine user behaviors and buying patterns, to understand more about the customer or constituent to deliver more relevant information. Applications will make recommendations based on such parameters as the user's real-time physical location, personal preferences and past behaviors, the time of day, and clues extracted from message content. Enterprises must hire and/or train staff capable of developing the context modeling, preference modeling, location sensing, activity detection, user experience design, mobile handheld user interfaces and text mining tools natively or with a provider's software.
Given the emerging state of this relatively new concept, providers must develop not only the content-creating software applications that they will provide to enterprises, but also to the retail outlets for their applications and business relationships with content distributors and mobile communications carriers.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
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Sample Vendors: Apple; Dai Nippon Printing; Google; Greystripe; HP; Nuance Communications; Oracle; Pitney Bowes; Saepio; SDL; Xerox
Recommended Reading: "The Nexus of Forces Dramatically Reshapes Customer Communications"
"Customer Communications Management Software Providers Must Meet the Demands of the Nexus of Forces"
Hybrid Unified Communications and Collaboration Analysis By: Megan Marek Fernandez
Definition: Hybrid unified communications and collaboration (UCC) enables organizations to operate UCC through blended cloud and premises-based deployment models. The hybrid split between the cloud and premises can be based on functionality, geography or use case.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A growing number of providers are offering blended provisioning of UCC elements. Hybrid UCC is typically provisioned in one of three ways:
■ Functional hybrid provisioning — Features certain unified communications (UC) functions (like audioconferencing or telephony) delivered via the cloud while other UC functionality (like videoconferencing and email) is obtained via premises-based solutions.
■ Geographical hybrid provisioning — Features UC elements delivered in different ways depending on the location of users. For example, users in a branch office site could obtain telephony functionality via the cloud while users in a different site or geography could obtain functionality via a premises-based solution.
■ Utility or use case hybrid provisioning — Selects cloud or premises UC delivery based on the UC use case such as achieving a volume threshold. For example, internal audioconference calls for up to six people could be obtained through a premises-based solution, but conferencing requirements growing beyond six users could be obtained via the cloud to meet this larger capacity demand.
Organizations employ hybrid UCC procurement for reasons relating to flexibility, costs, business requirements and organization structure. For example, an organization can use an existing Internet Protocol PBX with remaining useful life for voice functionality while obtaining conferencing capabilities via the cloud. Hybrid can also be appealing for planners concerned with adhering to regulatory or internal-communications requirements. For example, email functions can be delivered via a premises-based solution to retain control of sensitive content while communications elements with fewer regulatory or security requirements (like conferencing) could be obtained via the cloud. Furthermore, some organizations have customization requirements or cultural preferences that demand on-premises functionality for certain UCC elements while being open to cloud provisioning for other elements.
While most organizations could in theory benefit from hybrid UCC delivery, hybrid provisioning is not fully mature. Integrating hybrid UCC elements can be complex and expensive. The required
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professional services costs to get the premises-based equipment to work with the cloud environment can destroy the business case. Furthermore, for geographical hybrid provisioning, determining which party is responsible for managing the different elements of a hybrid solution can pose challenges. We expect inhibitors associated with provisioning hybrid UCC will gradually diminish over the next five years as unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions gain maturity and UCaaS providers secure automated tools to support hybrid environments.
User Advice: Organizations considering full UCaaS should evaluate hybrid UCC as an interim path to cloud. A detailed asset assessment should be obtained to help determine the functions with remaining useful life that should reside on-premises. As part of the evaluation, planners should work with UCaaS providers to generate integration cost estimates. This should include, for example, costs associated with re-creating dialing plans and managing converged elements.
Determine regulatory, governance or security requirements that will impact UCC provisioning model decisions. Work with your provider early on to ensure that basic compliance with these requirements can be satisfied.
Consider hybrid UCC provisioning as a tool to fulfill peak demands for certain capabilities. For example, evaluate cloud-based conferencing for large-scale or external conferencing activities while utilizing premises-based conferencing for either internal or small conferencing sessions.
Evaluate the hybrid UCC capabilities and limitations of providers (technology providers, service providers and system integrators). Consider the integration capabilities (and costs associated with integration efforts) of various hybrid UCC elements. Define a road map that takes into account which party has responsibility for management and maintenance associated with blended cloud/ premises-based elements.
Business Impact: Hybrid UCC provisioning offers organizations flexibility (financial, use case and asset management) when obtaining UC functionality. Blended procurement allows planners to leverage key premises-based infrastructure that may not have reached the end of its useful life, may be bound by certain compliance, security, regulatory or company requirements, or has associated internal IT management expertise while granting the flexibility to obtain other UCC elements (or portions of these elements) via the cloud. Essentially, planners should factor application use, existing investments, in-house IT staffing resources, and other business requirements into their UC adoption and use road maps instead of being restrained by the limitations that siloed premises- based and cloud-based provisioning may present.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: AT&T; Avaya; BT; Cisco; Dimension Data; HP; IBM; Microsoft; Siemens Enterprise Networks; Verizon; Vodafone Global Enterprise
Recommended Reading: "Toolkit: Sample RFP for Unified Communications"
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"Planned Research for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2012"
"Best Practice: Pricing for Unified Communications as a Service and for Outsourced UC"
"Four Best Practices for UC RFP Review"
"Toolkit: How to Develop an Effective Unified Communications and Collaboration Road Map"
"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America"
"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
No-Email Initiatives Analysis By: Jeffrey Mann
Definition: No-email initiatives seek to eliminate, or at least drastically reduce, the use of email for internal communications and collaboration. These efforts seek to reduce the problems of email overload by switching communications to enterprise social network platforms which offer richer and more varied forms of collaboration (for example, activity streams, comments, ratings, recommendations wikis and blogs).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Email has become such a pervasive business tool that it has fallen victim to its own success. For many organizations, and most individuals, the problems of email overload have become acute. Its ubiquity leads people to use email for purposes for which it is not well-suited (for example, document store, workflow, real-time discussions, and decision making). Better training and deployment of available tools and add-ins can address many of these issues, but over-reliance on email has become enough of a concern that a few organizations are considering the drastic step of seeking to eliminate email altogether. They reason that there are better alternatives available, but so long as email is still there users will naturally gravitate toward it. From this perspective, the only way to prevent backsliding is to eliminate email.
Although the concept of no-email is provocative and attractive on many levels, a narrow focus on eliminating the use of this one tool is unlikely to have a long life. Several years ago, many organizations held "No email Fridays," where employees pledged to send no messages on Friday — usually leading to "Lots of email Mondays." The trend did not catch on. Despite the growth of social software, the volume of business email continues to grow. In fact, the two need not be seen as opposing one another. Thoughtful integration of email with social and other collaboration tools provides more benefits than a potentially distracting "battle" to eliminate it. Vendors such as Harmon.ie and Calinda Software take this approach.
While some organizations will require the extreme step of aspiring to quit email totally, to break out of established routines, the primary benefit of no-email initiatives for most organizations is to demonstrate that elimination is possible. This move can spark discussions and deeper consideration of the role of email in an enterprise collaboration strategy. Although we do not expect that enterprises will focus on eliminating email as a goal in itself, the deeper implications of adopting more flexible and social ways of working will influence enterprises for some time.
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User Advice: Examining processes and application implementations to find and remove unnecessary or non-useful email generation can increase efficiency and reduce the time needed to process email. Many applications automatically generate messages, or distribute information via email that is not useful or can be reviewed in other ways more efficiently; for example, RSS feeds, activity streams, portal dashboards. Removing newsletter subscriptions and email distribution lists are also good ways to reduce the email burden.
For most organizations, elimination or at least reduction of email volume should be a result of effective social software implementations, and not a goal in itself. Elevating elimination of email to a primary goal risks distracting users from the real business goals (increasing efficiency, encouraging innovation, and so on) and invites fruitless political discussions between those who like email and those who hate it.
Organizations can use no-email as a rallying call from leadership to focus attention on the needs and benefits for cultural change to achieve real productivity benefits. However, the broader initiative must go further than just "no email," to include a full blown change management program to adopt new ways of collaborating.
Do not measure the success of a change management project solely on the reduction of email volume. No one benefits if instead of sending pointless emails, employees send pointless comments or posts. Employees must understand etiquette and expectations around the use of social tools as well as with email to use them effectively.
Business Impact: Given the ubiquity of internal email communications in businesses today, elimination of it would truly have a transformational effect, although we believe that few organizations will (or even should) actually achieve it.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Atos (blueKiwi); Calinda Software; Harmon.ie; Jive; Microsoft (Yammer); salesforce.com; VMware (Socialcast)
Recommended Reading: "Roundup of Email Research, 4Q11-3Q12"
"Combating E-Mail Overload"
"Innovation Insight: No-Email Initiatives Invite Innovation by Attacking Email Inefficiencies"
"Use This Framework to Plan the Evolution of Social Networking Your Organization"
"Enterprise Attention Management: An Enterprisewide Response to Information Overload"
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Presence Federation Analysis By: Bern Elliot
Definition: Presence federation enables different presence services to share presence information at a server-to-server level, forming a superservice. Presence technology will be defined separately elsewhere.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: There are four basic forms of federation, based on whether it is within a single company or not (intracompany versus intercompany), and based on whether it is among same or different vendor services:
■ Federation among presence services or applications provided by different vendors:
■ Intradomain (e.g., within a company)
■ Interdomain (e.g., among companies)
■ Federation among presence services or applications from the same vendor:
■ Intradomain (e.g., within a company)
■ Interdomain (e.g., among companies)
Federating different vendor solutions is more complex than federating similar solutions, because the vendors are often competitors. Federating within a domain is more complex than among domains. Within-domain federation is complex, because it must resolve issues such as where the master copy resides and accurate real-time replication of information.
The ranking in this technology focuses on the area of interdomain and different-vendor federation, although intradomain is also briefly discussed below.
There are significant technical and market issues to address before interdomain (e.g., intercompany) federation at a server-to-server level will be possible. Standards definitions are required, and there are two different instant messaging (IM) and presence standards tracks:
■ Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
■ Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP)
The definition of interoperability among vendors requires resolving differences. The significant factor is that the vendors in the communications and collaboration markets use presence for competitive differentiation. Part of this is to seek competitive advantage with their own presence solutions. This competitive positioning of products reduces the ability to advance interoperability.
Intradomain federation between different vendors (within a company) can be partially addressed by creating a subsidiary presence service that operates as a presence proxy (effectively as a user agent) to a superior presence service. This approach is used by several vendors to report telephony status to a different vendor's presence service.
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The federation of presence is a subset of the broader issue of intercompany multimodal UC, which is discussed elsewhere.
User Advice: Users should expect intervendor presence to remain at a basic level for the next several years. It is possible to exchange presence information, but this is done at a client-to-server level, not a server-to-server level. For example, telephony information can be reported from Vendor A to a presence service operated by Vendor B. However, users should ensure that the solution works and is robust, because, in some cases, the solutions are not reliable when either vendor upgrades its service. However, deeper integration among presence services at a server-to-server level will have to wait.
Business Impact: Presence federation has the potential to improve how business partner employees are able to collaborate.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Alcatel-Lucent; Cisco; IBM; Microsoft; NextPlane
Recommended Reading: "Emerging Technology Analysis: Presence-Based Contact Routing"
"MarketScope for Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence"
"Context-Aware Computing: The Rich Presence Perspective"
"Recognize and Avoid 'Creepiness' in Social Media Projects"
Ensemble Interactions Analysis By: Adib Carl Ghubril; Stephen Prentice
Definition: Ensemble interactions refer to the idea of a user interacting seamlessly with an ensemble of different devices, maintaining synchronization across them all to support the completion of a task in a preferred and convenient manner.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Human-machine interface discussions around syncing a user's various displays — via a personal cloud or a specific technology — have taken a back seat to activities around speech, "wearables" and touchless interactions through gestures and eye movements.
Although a few demonstrations of the concept have been shown, technology that bridges the physical and digital world — to allow for multitasking between paper and computer work, for example — is still immature and is the subject of academic research. However, the advent of an OS platform across computing devices of various form factors and end applications, such as iOS for smartphones, tablets and TVs, raises expectations about the concept's viability. Nonetheless, user
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expectations about how multiple devices should collaborate in delivering an experience are undefined and uncertain, and the number of domestic devices that could participate in interactions is limited. The growth in Internet Protocol (IP)-enabled TVs, and the increasing availability of wireless networking in computing and entertainment devices, suggests that home media will be an early area of adoption of ensemble interactions. Emerging technologies (for example, wireless video interfaces) and the use of geological location technology, which triangulates the location of devices indoors using a combination of Wi-Fi GPS and cellular signals (by companies such as Navizon), will facilitate rapid shifting among display devices.
Content providers are fundamental stakeholders in this technology and may be the most able to raise the hype on it. We need to see more demonstrations from Netflix, Sony and Amazon, as well as from smart TV providers, such as LG and Samsung, on how users can, for example, continue to consume or produce content anywhere in the home by dynamically switching where the content is being displayed (that is, switching to whichever screen is available in the room or area they walk into).
User Advice: With a growing realization of the importance of the customer experience, linked to greater use of mobile and even wearable devices, user organizations should monitor this technology because, as it emerges, it could further complicate assumptions about what device an interaction is taking place on. This is because the device might change during the interaction. Organizations conducting business in situations in which two or more smart devices are in the same vicinity (such as when consumers congregate in retail stores) should pilot ensemble interactions that are implemented using communications applications.
The possibility of syncing multiple devices of many users makes ensemble interaction an enabler of collaborative work in the workplace and could also support a user's multitasking needs.
Business Impact: Vendors in areas such as mobile devices and consumer electronics should monitor and sponsor research into ensemble interactions. Vendors that manufacture a wide range of consumer electronics (for example, in the mobile and home entertainment markets) should explore this technology as a way to add value when consumers purchase more than one product from the same company.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: Less than 1% of target audience
Maturity: Embryonic
Sample Vendors: Microsoft; Motorola
At the Peak
Expertise Location and Management Analysis By: Michael Maoz
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Definition: Expertise location and management (ELM) involves identifying human expertise — whether in a department (such as customer support), within an employee somewhere in the organization or crowdsourced from a social network. ELM offers ways to maintain in-depth representations of skills, geographic locations, availability and other parameters relevant to the use of the expertise.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: ELM has broad impact in areas such as logistics, customer service, healthcare, technical support, and advice for, by and to consumers. For example, large multinational organizations can use it internally if the corporate directory proves to be inadequate. ELM requirements have changed from the traditional approach of "find the resources with the correct skills" to an approach in which the resources must be integrated into dynamic customer engagement processes. For example, the trouble ticket or case has this workflow built into the process. This occurs in near real time and in one of several possible interaction channels — for example, interactive voice response (IVR), email, instant messaging (IM), Facebook, LinkedIn, directory services or a Web-based customer service application. This can be external (peer-to-peer customer community) or internal (done within an employee social network or a skills database) location management. The system can identify the appropriate person based on skills, location and availability. It is also important to determine the status of that resource (available, on which channel, where located, current workload) before integrating the person into an interaction process.
Automatic identification and skills capture has increasing interest because of new ways of building dynamic user profiles, based on "attention metadata" — that is, by looking at what users are actually doing. For example, if the user is in the email system, the case extracts the email addresses and the customer's URL.
Social networking trends support this advance — for example, analysis of social posts, social bookmarks and tagging have valuable side effects in capturing information about an individual's interests or expertise. This information has uses beyond expertise location (such as identifying like- minded individuals) that promote collaboration. Although some of the technology for ELM is mature, new vendors (such as Cisco) with products that tap more deeply and broadly into user activities are creating new expectations and awareness of this technology, which is adding to the hype.
As customer engagement center and contact center managers look to increase competencies in matching required skills to available resources, traditional skills-based routing systems will need to evolve to take on ELM characteristics.
User Advice: ELM is most successful when it is used to solve business problems that are difficult to articulate or communicate explicitly and that involve highly skilled people. In customer service, website users may encounter situations in which they need human assistance for a brief part of the overall interaction — a service agent in a contact center may need the intercession of an expert to supply an answer, or the agent may need to transfer the call to an expert.
Dynamic people profiles and searches are increasingly seen as integral components of a support environment that encourages unplanned collaboration and informal interactions as effective ways to solve business problems. ELM increases productivity and organizational success by identifying and locating resources in globally dispersed and increasingly virtual organizations. Identify activities that
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would benefit from the easy identification of experts or — more generally — from the ability to search for people according to their interests or experience, and consider deploying the relevant technology to do so.
The privacy implications of ELM should be considered carefully. In all cases, this technology should be deployed carefully, accompanied by adequate training to prevent misuse and to allay concerns about privacy violations. Profiles are key, as is the process of expertise identification. In CRM and learning, ELM needs to be more formal — for example, profiles must allow for expertise tagging. In informal communities, ELM is more a function of progressive disclosure.
Business Impact: ELM can increase effectiveness in contact centers, websites and kiosks for customer problem resolution, as well as improve community-building relationships.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Cisco; CrowdEngineering; eXelate; Hoover's; LinkedIn; Microsoft; SAP; Urban Airship
Open Source in UC Components Analysis By: Geoff Johnson
Definition: Open source in unified communications (UC) describes the use of open-source community software solutions in any of the six essential areas of UC: voice (including fixed and mobile telephony); messaging (email, voice mail, unified messaging); voice, video and Web conferencing; instant messaging/presence; communications applications (including collaboration and social networking); and the UC clients that launch and control applications (which may be thick or thin, in hardware, software or mobile clients).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The battle for adoption of enterprise unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions is dominated by popular UC solutions such as Microsoft's Lync or Office 365, Cisco's Jabber, or IBM's Sametime in Western economies. These solutions are very complete in functionality. Currently, product extensions in these suites are occurring mainly in collaboration and social networking. Disruptive open-source developments like webRTC and Android may significantly change the outlook for OSS use in enterprises within three years. Gartner expects a bifurcation to occur where developments like webRTC could emulate Android and become very popular or, alternatively, OSS UC components could remain niche and become obsolete before they can plateau.
The number of enterprises actively considering a tightly integrated road map for UCC varies significantly according to corporate culture and geography. Some attempt to implement a best-of- breed solution by choosing and integrating component communications for their UC solution, but suites are so much more attractive for their low-risk, high-innovation rate, cloud or on-premises delivery and wide technical support.
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Enterprises in emerging economies are more likely to be working with only a few of the six areas necessary for a balanced and complete UCC solution, and even less likely to have a UC road map. They are also much more likely to consider OSS UC components, and are willing to run the risk of integrating and supporting their own best-of-breed UCC solution because local support costs are low and they see in-house support as an opportunity to avoid proprietary license fees.
Interest from enterprises in OSS UC elements is limited to price-sensitive users in emerging economies with some interest in particular industry verticals in Western economies such universities and developers for service providers where it may be embedded in their UCC products. For example, BigBlueButton is an OSS Web conferencing solution developed for distance education.
The net position is that, while there are differences in adoption, there is some interest in OSS for UC component communications; it has been triggered and is rising, but it is well before any peak of expectations. The speed of increasing interest will continue to be slower in the West, of broad interest in developing nations such as Russia and in Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging economies in Asia such as India, China, Indonesia and Thailand. In these regions, a significant motivation is the apparent low cost, the opportunity for self-paced innovation or working in local languages, especially Mandarin, Portuguese (in Brazil) and Spanish.
User Advice: Potential users of OSS UC components should see the advice given in related research for open-source communications within this Hype Cycle. Most enterprises will be best served by choosing network integrators to conduct their OSS projects because there are significant legal and technical support responsibilities associated with OSS. Integrators also have resale opportunities and economies of scale that enterprises do not have (for internal use).
Enterprises running open-source projects require particular management attention. The necessary OSS governance models are still mainly works in progress in most businesses, in addition, new skills and technical processes are typically required. The use of OSS in component communications in UC remains fragmented and is immature, with no clear segmentation and only occasional indications of leadership from popular solutions. Enterprise strategists and project planners need to determine which, if any, open-source products to use in their particular situations; favor OSS solutions with a large installed base and significant commitment to support from commercial vendors.
Successful open-source UC products are becoming platforms for on-premises solutions and also a part of public or private cloud solutions. For example, eZuce's openUC product contains voice, video, instant messaging, presence, conferencing, collaboration, call center and mobility based on the sipXecs open source UCC project. StarPound CORE is an open-source software platform for UC and business process management.
OpenVox, Druid and Elastix Open Source Unified Communications Server provide UC functions. OpenSSL Toolkit, OpenSSL Project and a wide range of open-source software are licensed for use in Cisco Unified Communications Manager. OBM, Open-Xchange, Scalix and Zimbra are noted for email, calendaring and collaboration. Cisco's Jabber, Novell's Kablink, Openfire and Pidgin are used for IM and presence. Alfresco is an open-source enterprise content management (ECM) system that competes with established solutions, such as Microsoft's SharePoint, EMC's
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Documentum, and IBM's FileNet. In social networking and blogging, enterprises should evaluate the most popular relevant solutions (such as Apache Roller or WordPress) but not pursue OSS for its own sake.
Expect OSS to be used mainly for the component communications, which can be integrated into popular UC solutions or to localize best-of-breed UC products with language or popular social networking, collaboration or email offerings. As an example, eZuce's openUC becomes a much more complete UC suite when OpenXchange's email and calendaring is included.
Business Impact: Interest in OSS for use in UC components is generally from the supply side of OSS, and they are maturing in their communications and collaboration solutions. Most business discussion is now caused by an interest in integrating around stand-alone applications, such as using Outlook to manage the calendaring functions to book rooms or events or authentication for videoconferencing, content or webcasts. Integration including OSS becomes one of the considerations, rather than the earlier tone — which was "why bother?" Most enterprises will be satisfied with the cost and convenience of UCaaS and not bother with OSS.
Although OSS telephony, messaging, content management and search are popular, stand-alone social networking and microblogging products are not.
Businesses should be aware that dual licensing with choice of either open-source or commercial licenses is possible for the most popular solutions.
Similarly, open source is being used in emerging cloud alternatives that generally complement on- premises UC solutions. Examples include roZoom's Open Functions (which bridges public, private cloud and UC), Ingate Systems integrations around eZuce, Digium's SwitchVox Cloud, or Dialogic's media and signaling functions in UC using OSS.
Google Apps, Microsoft Lync and Office 365, Cisco Jabber and HCS, and IBM Sametime are now considered adequate as UC suites, which means that OSS custom development for enterprise UC is unlikely except where support for particular languages or application performance indicators (APIs) to key UCC elements is not available nor popular in specific markets (especially in non- Western economies). As the most popular open-source communications and collaboration products become platforms, businesses in emerging economies may deploy domestic national OSS UCC solutions, but multinational business operations will continue to choose proprietary UCC suites.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Acquia; Alfresco Software; Atlassian Software Systems; Automattic; Dialogic Communications; Digium; Google; Liferay Portal; MindTouch; Mobicents; OpenLogic; roZoom; Red Hat (JBoss); Sourceforge.net; TWiki; Zimbra
Recommended Reading: "Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting-Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both?"
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"Hype Cycle for Open-Source Software, 2013"
"Market Trends: Open-Source Adoption in the SMB Market, 2011"
"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
"Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications"
Collaborative Authoring Tools Analysis By: Hanns Koehler-Kruener; Tom Austin
Definition: A new category of collaborative authoring tools is available containing many elements: from individual components like real-time document authoring through to complete packages including authoring, delegation, tracking, auditing, consolidation, review and publication. This category includes simultaneous collaborative editing but is more expansive.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Collaborative authoring is a new way for people to work together on documents and other content. Many people work on the same document at the same time — ideally, with content being locked at the lowest logical level (that is, character, cell or single draw object) and with all changes visible as they are made without delay and with no need for a manual "refresh." Within this model, the entire document can be open to all to edit or sections can be delegated (and progress tracked) at the individual or subteam level. All edits are visible to some or all participants and the consolidation burden is shared in real time, improving consensus formation and ad hoc or structured process efficiency.
Most team authoring processes are done the old fashioned way, with an email draft of a text document, spreadsheet or presentation is reviewed and commented upon by several collaborators, who each forward their comments and suggestions back to the original author, who then has to consolidate the comments and reissue a new draft in a prolonged and inefficient cycle within which it's difficult to develop a strong consensus.
Some organizations have advanced beyond that model, either by building their own collaborative editing applications on top of either SharePoint (most recently) or Lotus Notes, or by buying components or packages from specialist third parties that provide off-the shelf, real-time, collaborative authoring accelerators.
Some selected user groups like contract and RFP authoring groups are keenly adopting collaborative authoring.
For most people, however, the change will come more slowly because:
■ Users will try to avoid learning how to use new content editing tools.
■ Some individuals may not understand the concept and may fear possible confusion if many people edit the same document at the same time as they lack experience with open collaboration.
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■ IT organizations typically assume that all users need is email and Microsoft Word. Although Word supports comments, comments on comments, revision marks and version comparisons, the process is slow and the results often fail to leverage the positions and knowledge of all involved contributors.
■ Because vendors of collaborative authoring packages or components are not well known in the market, responsive IT organizations assume they need to build these tools for their users. Those projects get sized and prioritized (usually well down the list because they're often viewed as less strategic) and eventually built (leaving the enterprise with the costs of maintaining and evolving what often turns into legacy code).
■ Integrating traveling workers or those in disparate time zones is problematic and still requires some offline editing and consolidation. Further, those users may feel excluded from the process and accommodations will need to be made in the social and cultural evolution of these tools.
Collaborative authoring has moved from a work in progress into a diverse field with multiple vendors serving the market with a variety of tools and functionalities at different levels of aggregation. Component-level tools include Google Docs, the Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint ecosystem and IBM Docs. Other, more complete packages include Xait, PleaseTech, Litera and Workshare. While aimed at specific and narrowly-focused markets (oil and gas, legal and government, for example), many of these packages can add value in a broad array of markets. Most products are offered as cloud-based services and provide rollbacks and audit trails. There are some differences in content locking as certain products, for example, allow only one person at a time to edit a section — though several people can edit different sections simultaneously — while other products impose no locking restrictions. Editing can be limited to anything from a full rewriting of the text to just being allowed to comment, and each comment or change can be approved or rejected by the document owner.
Some earlier products (most wikis, for example) support "near-real-time" simultaneous editing, but typically do not show edits by others as soon as those changes are made — only when the page is refreshed. In addition, they often lock content at the "section" level, not at the character, word or single-draw-object level. These fall outside Gartner's definition of collaborative authoring. Nonetheless, there are many occasions when wiki-style tools are perfectly appropriate. It is, however, likely that some of these tools will offer simultaneous collaborative editing options by 2017.
User Advice:
■ Cultivate pockets of success before promoting more general use of collaborative authoring tools. Target use cases where speed brings value in the rate of consensus formation or process completion. Examples include RFP processes and deadline-driven team document production.
■ Find potential evangelists outside of the IT organization and encourage their involvement in limited pilots.
■ Collaborative authoring will not be limited to internal use. Many of the use cases will involve cloud-based services and multiple internal and external business parties.
■ Provide experience-based guidance on when (and when not) to employ collaborative editing.
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■ Consider cultural issues and devise plans to ensure that users without real-time access don't feel excluded from the project.
Although this approach to editing and authoring is typically less well suited to the creation of new content, it can be valuable in brainstorming sessions. What's more, final style, layout and other quality checks are best performed in more traditional ways.
Collaborative authoring benefits from at least a minimum level of socialization between participants — that is, it works best when people are comfortable working with one another "in the real world."
Business Impact: Collaborative authoring can improve the formation of consensus as participants tweak a document while watching others do the same, or by seeing all edits by other reviewers at the same time. By eliminating lengthy and cumbersome review, comment, approval and editing workflow cycles (typically carried out by email and using "track changes"), simultaneity dramatically increases the speed at which second (and later) passes and near-final edits are performed in a group context. Since all authors and reviewers are working on a single copy of the same document, there is no need for lengthy consolidation steps after reviewing or authoring together. The final benefit will be vastly increased productivity and speed from draft to final version.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Google; IBM; Microsoft; PleaseTech; Xait; Zoho
Context Delivery Architecture Analysis By: Gene Phifer; Ian Finley
Definition: Context delivery architecture (CoDA) builds on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) interaction and partitioning styles, and adds formal mechanisms for the software elements that discover and apply the user's context in real time.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Context-aware computing involves improving the user experience for customers, business partners and employees by using the information about a person's or object's environment, activities, connections and preferences to anticipate the user's needs and proactively deliver the appropriate content, product or service. Enterprises can leverage context-aware computing to target prospects, increase customer intimacy, and enhance associate productivity and collaboration. From a software perspective, context is information that is relevant to the functioning of a software process, but is not essential to it. In the absence of this additional information, the software is still operational, although the results of the software's actions are not as targeted or refined.
The first fully context-aware technologies were horizontal portal products, which used both static and dynamic context attributes, coupled with a rule engine, to deliver relevant access to content,
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applications, business processes and people. Prior to portals, personalization engines exhibiting some context awareness were used to fine-tune recommendations for product purchases based on prior purchase history and collaborative filtering. The most visible recent addition of context awareness was delivered via mobile devices, most notably location-based services. Most context- enriched services are implemented in siloed, proprietary systems, where a particular person, group or business process profits from being situationally aware. To replicate, scale and integrate such systems, a new set of services, supported by an architectural construct known as CoDA will emerge.
CoDA provides a conceptual framework for solution architects that enables them to define and implement the technology, information and process components that allow services to use context information to improve the quality of the interactions with the user. The technologies may include portal products, context brokers, state monitors, sensors, analytic engines and cloud-based, transaction-processing engines. Context-aware computing is maturing relatively slowly, compared with mobile and Web design. This is natural, because CoDA will rely on those technologies to provide a stable base on which context-enriched services can be built.
CoDA will also define data formats, metadata schemas, interaction and discovery protocols, programming interfaces and other formalities. As an emerging best practice, CoDA will enable enterprises to create and tie together the siloed context-aware applications with increased agility and flexibility. For employee-facing apps in the enterprise, as with SOA, much of the pull for CoDA will come from packaged-application and software vendors expanding to integrate communication and collaboration capabilities, unified communications vendors and mobile device manufacturers. Web megavendors (e.g., Google), social-networking vendors (e.g., Facebook) and service providers will also expand their roles to become providers and processors of context information.
The CoDA style considers information, business and technology domain viewpoints. The technology domains are application infrastructure, communications infrastructure, network services and endpoints (devices). Thus, CoDA provides a framework for architects to discover gaps and overlap among system components that provide process and analyze contextual information. A key challenge for CoDA will be information-driven, rather than technology-driven. This key challenge will revolve around what information sources can provide context; which technologies will enable that information to be provided in a secure, timely and usable manner; and how this information can be folded into processes.
Gartner introduced the term "CoDA" in 2007, based on developments in such areas as mobile communications and cloud computing. Through year-end 2013, we expect aggressive enterprise architects and project managers to weave elements of CoDA into their plans to orchestrate and build context-enriched services that rely on federated information models and delivery services.
CoDA relies on SOA as a foundation and is related to EDA, because enterprise architectures need to be agile and scalable to support context-aware computing. We expect CoDA to evolve into a new, lighter-weight style of architecture, leveraging the progress of the main context providers. It will reach the Plateau of Productivity gradually, after 2015.
User Advice: Although CoDA is an emerging architectural style, Type A organizations can benefit in the short term by applying its principles as they experiment with use of context information to
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improve user experiences in customer-facing services and enterprise productivity. Leading-edge organizations should begin to incorporate CoDA constructs into infrastructure and services to gain competitive advantages with the early use of context-aware computing. Type A organizations should now be identifying which information sources, external (e.g., from social software sites) and internal to the enterprise, will provide context information to a range of applications.
Build competencies in CoDA's technology domains, particularly in communications, because the migration of voice from silos to general applications will be a key transformation, opening up new opportunities to create applications enhanced by context-enriched services. Understanding mobile development will also be key. The refinement of your enterprise architecture to include CoDA constructs assumes prior investment in SOA. Most mainstream, risk-averse organizations should not invest in building a CoDA capability; instead, they should explore the acquisition of context- enriched services through third parties.
Business Impact: Context awareness is a distinguishing characteristic of some leading software solutions and advertising services, particularly personalized advertising that targets mobile users from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and others. During the next three to five years, context- aware computing will have a large impact on Type A businesses in two areas:
■ Extending e-commerce and mobile-commerce initiatives toward consumers
■ Increasing the efficiency and productivity of the businesses' knowledge workers and business partners by providing relevant access to content, applications and business processes
Context-aware computing will evolve incrementally and gain momentum, as more information sources become available, and cloud-based, context-enriched services emerge. However, these will initially be siloed and will not use a standard or shared CoDA model.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Appear Networks; Apple; Google; IBM; Interactive Intelligence; Nokia; Pontis; Sense Networks; Wolfram Alpha
Recommended Reading: "The Competitive Dynamics of the Consumer Web: Five Graphs Deliver a Sustainable Advantage"
"An Application Developer's Perspective on Context-Aware Computing"
"Predicts 2013: Context-Aware Computing"
"Drive Customer Intimacy Using Context-Aware Computing"
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Enterprise Video Content Management Analysis By: Whit Andrews
Definition: Enterprise video content management (EVCM) encompasses software, hardware or software as a service (SaaS) offerings, plus associated network services intended to manage and facilitate the delivery of one-to-any video across Internet protocols in an on-demand and (possibly) live fashion. It differs from digital asset management (DAM) in that DAM is used to manage videos (as well as other rich media) for the use of creative professionals, whereas EVCM is intended to serve any or all workers and customers who need to watch videos.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Companies and governments are fascinated by YouTube, which captures the attention of consumers and leads the popular online video segment. Gartner sees growing interest in EVCM from organizations seeking to unify their video strategies for live and on-demand one-to-any capabilities. This interest is still emerging, and consolidation is only just starting to bring together the various valuable areas of functionality. Functional extensions such as search, event capture, editing and metadata development are speeding adoption.
User Advice: Organizations should embark on projects that enable them to explore ways in which video can uniquely enhance communication, learning and training. Waiting until end-to-end solutions are commonly available will result in workers making their own decisions without support, by turning to online video sharing to provide value to customers — which may be the best strategy for some projects.
Social features, such as those that allow users to sort videos by popularity and to add comment streams, user ratings and recommendations, make video-sharing tools attractive, but user uptake of such features is limited and often disappointing. In general, opt for short vignettes on video, instead of standard lectures.
Business Impact: Videos make highly effective vehicles for the communication of knowledge and emotion. They can improve audience empathy and the sense of value. Video has value in its ability to transcend language and skills, and it narrows the gap between novice and expert for visually complex tasks. Videos will be extremely important for customer service (and self-service) in visually complex task communication, and will prove increasingly valuable in providing a channel for emotional, impactful conversation.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Alcatel-Lucent; Brightcove; Cisco; iStreamPlanet; Ignite Technologies; Kaltura; Kontiki; Limelight Networks; Ooyala; OpenText; Peoplefluent; Polycom; Qumu; Ramp; Rayzz; Reality Digital; Sonic Foundry; Sorenson Media; VBrick Systems; ViewCast; Viocorp; Vitreo Internet Video
Recommended Reading: "Toolkit: Derive Value From Enterprise Video Sharing"
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"Best Practices: Combining Video Content Management With Web Conferences"
"Making the Most of Video Content Management Driven by SaaS or Cloud-Based Models"
"MarketScope for Video Content Management and Delivery"
"Apply Analytics to Your Internal Video Share Usage to Maximize Its Value"
"Metadata Will Improve the Return on Your Video Investments"
Transcoderless and Software-Based Videoconferencing Infrastructure Analysis By: Sanish KB
Definition: Alternative video infrastructure architectures use mechanisms to replace the traditional hardware-based central infrastructure, particularly multipoint control units (MCUs), in videoconferencing environments. Two main forms of alternative architecture exist: software-based MCUs (softMCUs) replicate the function of dedicated hardware MCUs in software, while transcoderless infrastructures use switching and routing of a single codec — either H.264 SVC or H. 264 AVC — to forward video traffic rather than processing it, thus avoiding MCUs altogether.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: MCUs have long been a key component in enabling multiparty calls. At a time when the cost per port of typical high-definition MCUs runs to thousands of dollars, these alternative architectures offer dramatic cost reductions, which are a prerequisite for mass adoption of personal video (on unified communications [UC] soft clients, for example).
These architectures may well develop in tandem, with transcoderless solutions using the H.264 SVC encoding standard linked to softMCUs running regular H.264 AVC via a gateway. Both are likely to be sold on the basis of software as a service, and both are suited to cloud deployments by service providers. Gartner inquiries and user surveys demonstrate a continually growing appetite for personal video.
At the executive level, organizations are showing an increasing preference to deploy 10 executive personal systems over a single room-based system at the same cost. In the wider user context, Gartner inquiries have shifted massively from discussions about group video to discussions about video-enabled UC environments.
Transcoderless environments that are destined to connect users whose devices or soft clients have differing performance characteristics require an encoding standard that can deal with different endpoint constraints on bandwidth, resolution or frame rate, which currently means using the SVC implementation of H.264.
All major vendors of both videoconferencing systems and UC solutions will have adopted H.264 SVC during 2013. This does not mean that SVC will become the common standard for all video communications at that juncture; a significant proportion of systems will continue to run H.264 AVC. However, for future deployments, particularly soft clients, SVC is likely to be of key importance — at least until H.265 is ratified and starts to gain traction in the 2015 time frame.
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SoftMCUs, while not new, are likely to become an increasingly common part of the solution set from UC providers as a means to enable multiway calling. Their adoption in more mainstream video applications will happen as a result of the drive toward closer links between UC and videoconferencing deployments. These two realms are already coming together in early-adopter environments, using traditional hardware approaches, and video is now commonly tied to wider UC investment decisions.
Gartner expects the significantly lower cost of softMCU deployments, coupled with transcoderless environments, to accelerate this trend over the next two to three years. However, these alternative architectures will not completely replace traditional MCUs for as long as older encoding standards and legacy endpoints remain in use. Equally, there will always be a demand for very high performance infrastructures for specific use cases, such as immersive telepresence. But the time that these architectures will take to dominate the market has accelerated and is now in the three- to five-year time frame.
User Advice: As enterprises increase the reach of desktop video to more staff, prepare for a nonlinear increase in the use of video. Early adopters have a peak utilization level of about one in 50 end users actively involved in a video call at any given time. User organizations should expect this to rise to around one in 20 end users by 2015 and scale their infrastructures accordingly.
While SVC is a standard, there are currently several different implementations, and these have not yet undergone significant interoperability testing, so ask providers about their ability and willingness to support multiple implementations until a common form has been agreed. For softMCU deployments, seek assurances on how performance is affected in higher-latency environments or where multiple different codecs are in play.
Enterprises planning to expand the video infrastructure with softMCU or transcoderless infrastructure need to evaluate the implementation partner's capability to integrate, manage and provide support.
Business Impact: Gartner expects video to become much more pervasive over the next two years. Businesses are already beginning to shift their focus away from expenditure on high-end systems, but the widespread availability and use of much-lower-cost infrastructure solutions and their ability to enable Internet-based video communications are critical to enabling this transition.
For organizations that video-enable entire business processes, the results will be transformational, allowing them to do so at far lower cost points and to reach far more users. For most organizations that simply want to enable ad hoc video communications for the majority of their workforce, the impact will be more moderate — video will become another communications modality available to users and is unlikely to achieve significant usage levels on a per-employee basis.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Emerging
Sample Vendors: Avaya; Blue Jeans Network; Microsoft; Polycom; Siemens; Teliris; Vidyo
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Recommended Reading: "Cool Vendors in Unified Communications and Network Systems and Services, 2013"
"Survey Analysis: Video Communications Stands Among the Top UC Technologies but Is Not Yet Pervasive"
"SWOT: Vidyo, Videoconferencing and Personal Telepresence Solutions, Worldwide"
"SWOT: Polycom, Video Communications Solutions, Worldwide"
"Competitive Landscape: SMB Videoconferencing Will Come from the Cloud, Worldwide"
"Why Reach Is the New Quality in Enterprise Video"
"Planning for Pervasive Video: How to Survive and Succeed"
Context-Enriched Services Analysis By: Anne Lapkin
Definition: Context-enriched services are those that combine situational and environmental information with other information to proactively offer enriched, situation-aware and usable content, functions and experiences. The term denotes services and APIs that use information about the user to optionally and implicitly fine-tune the software action with better situational awareness. Such services can proactively push content to the user at the moment of need, or suggest products and services that are most attractive to the user at a specific time.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Context enrichment refines the output of services and improves their relevance. Since Gartner began covering this topic more than six years ago, context- enriched services have gone beyond simple scenarios (for example, one category of context information such as location) to more complex services that use several categories of context information (for example, location, group behavior and purchase history) to further refine the output. The majority of current implementations are consumer facing, in mobile computing, social computing, identity controls, search and e-commerce — areas in which context is emerging as an element of competitive differentiation. Enterprise-facing implementations, which use context information to improve productivity and decision making by associates and business partners, have slowly begun to emerge, primarily in offerings from small vendors (see "Context-Enhanced Performance: What, Why and How?"). While personalization is not a new concept (portals have used a level of personalization for many years), context-enriched services extend that model further by including a vastly increased number of data points about an individual from a wider variety of sources.
The focus on big data has created a favorable environment for the development of context-enriched services. Many big data use cases are focused on customer experience, and organizations are leveraging a broad range of information about an individual to hyperpersonalize the user experience, creating greater customer intimacy and generating significant revenue lift. Examples include:
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■ Walmart — Whose Polaris search engine utilizes social media and semantic search of clickstream data to provide online customers with more-targeted offers (leading to a 10% reduction in shopping cart abandonment).
■ VinTank — Which analyzes over 1 million wine-related conversations each day, to predict which customers will be interested in specific wines at specific price points, and combines that with location information and alerts wineries when a customer who is likely to be interested in their wines is nearby.
■ Orbitz — Which has utilized behavioral information from user history and search to develop predictive patterns that would increase hotel bookings by presenting users with hotels that more closely match their preferences. This project resulted in an addition of 50,000 hotel bookings per day — a 2.6% increase (see "Orbitz Worldwide Uses Hadoop to Unlock the Business Value of 'Big Data'").
Context-enriched services have moved significantly forward this year, from a pre-peak 10% position to post-peak 5%. We expect that the continued focus on big data analytics will drive significant movement from now to 2016. Because of the dramatic increase in context-aware computing as a big data use case, we are revising the "time to mainstream adoption" downward — to two to five years.
User Advice: IT leaders in charge of information strategy and big data projects should leverage contextual elements sourced both internally and externally for their customer-facing projects. In addition, investigate how you can leverage contextual services from providers such as Google and Facebook to augment your existing information.
Business Impact: Context-enriched services will be transformational for enterprises that are looking to increase customer engagement and maximize revenue. In addition, context enrichment is the next frontier for business applications, platforms and development tools. The ability to automate the processing of context information will serve users by increasing the agility, relevance and precision of IT services. New vendors that are likely to emerge will specialize in gathering and injecting contextual information into business applications. New kinds of business applications — especially those driven by consumer opportunities — will emerge, because the function of full context awareness may end up being revolutionary and disruptive to established practices.
Benefit Rating: Transformational
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Apple; Facebook; Google; Microsoft; Sense Networks
Recommended Reading: "Orbitz Worldwide Uses Hadoop to Unlock the Business Value of 'Big Data'"
"Predicts 2013: Context-Aware Computing"
"Context-Aware Computing Is the Next Big Opportunity for Mobile Marketing"
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"An Application Developer's Perspective on Context-Aware Computing"
"Drive Customer Intimacy Using Context-Aware Computing"
Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) Analysis By: Monica Basso
Definition: EFSS offerings enable individuals to synchronize and share documents, photos, videos and files across multiple devices, such as smartphones, tablets and PCs. It includes sharing with friends, colleagues, partners and customers or, on a mobile device, data sharing among multiple apps. Additional EFSS capabilities include cloud data storage, security and collaboration. On the client, these features are offered through native applications, the file browser or the Web browser.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Consumer devices drive the adoption of personal cloud file synchronization, backup and sharing such as Dropbox, iCloud and GDrive. These services are simple, powerful and often free in the entry version, which makes them a perfect tool for many IT users to leverage at work. The proliferation of bring your own device (BYOD) programs in the enterprise market furthers this trend. Unfortunately, personal cloud services represent a serious security and compliance threat for most IT organizations, enabling employees to easily share corporate documents with third parties, completely outside IT's control. While personal cloud services are proliferating at work, many IT organizations are still either not aware or in denial mode. However, the most security-conscious organizations aim to establish control, not by simply banning personal services, but by deploying enterprise-class EFSS capabilities to enable secure mobile content sharing and collaboration.
This is driving a rapid market development with services and platforms for EFSS. In addition to file synchronization, sharing and backup, the critical capabilities of these offerings include:
■ Mobility, with native apps for a variety of mobile smartphones, tablets, notebooks and desktops — as well as Web browser support
■ Security and management, such as password protection, remote wipe, data encryption, data loss prevention, containerization, digital rights management, acceptable use, access tracking and reporting; back-end server integration with SharePoint, Active Directories, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and other corporate platforms is present as well
■ Simplicity and usability, with optimized user interfaces and interactions such as file drag and drop and file open in applications
■ Storage, which can be offered in the cloud as part of the service (public cloud model), be integrated from existing repositories or third-party services (hybrid), or be implemented as a separate repository on-site (on-premises)
■ Collaboration, such as cooperative editing on a shared document using change tracking and comments
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Organizations focusing on the replacement of personal cloud services with secure alternatives while aiming to preserve simplicity and usability tend to consider public cloud offerings such as Box and YouSendit. Those with tighter requirements on data control, as well as those with large deployments and storage infrastructure capabilities, tend to focus on hybrid solutions (such as Citrix and OxygenCloud) that, in these scenarios, grant more control and price convenience. Organizations with strong requirements on data protection, under strict regulations about data storage or with complex data manipulation requirements tend to prefer on-premises deployments (for example, Accellion, Acronis and WatchDox). Another benefit of hybrid solutions is to support mobile access to corporate data through cloud services, without creating data replicas in someone else's cloud.
The market includes a growing number of competitors originating from different markets and technology areas, and it is developing in multiple directions: social and collaboration (for example, Box, Dropbox, Oxygen Cloud, SugarSync and HighTail), security and data protection (for example, BooleServer, nCrypted Cloud, ownCloud and WatchDox), storage integration and backup (for example, Egnyte, Mezeo, Mozy, Druva and EMC), managed file transfer and collaboration (for example Accellion, Acronis), content management (for example, Alfresco, OpenText, IBM and Huddle), virtual workspaces (VMware, Citrix and Cortado), enterprise mobility (AirWatch, Fiberlink, Good Technology, MobileIron and SAP), and mobile devices (Apple, Google and Microsoft). The technical barriers to entry are relatively low, so we expect to see more vendors launch their EFSS offerings in the next 12 months, with large IT players entering this market through acquisitions or by broadening their product portfolios.
Security and compliance risks may slow adoption in the enterprise. Roadblocks exist in regulated industries where the cloud provider isn't trusted by the regulator and may be located in another country or under different legislation or may require specific certifications. Another issue may be the cost of storage services that adds to mobility costs and is difficult to justify versus storage infrastructure, especially for large deployments. This may lead enterprise preferences increasingly into hybrid solutions.
As this acquisition and development trend continues, EFSS capabilities will increasingly be standardized and become commodities. Eventually, a small number of IT vendors, most of whom are leaders in other markets, will lead in the EFSS market as well. In three to five years, the EFSS market will likely not be a separate market. EFSS capabilities will be absorbed by broader markets already mentioned, and the EFSS market will be subsumed.
User Advice: Organizations that have introduced employee-owned device programs should be aware of the easy availability and growing adoption of these tools. They should explore potential security risks (giving particular consideration to data encryption and access permissions) and evaluate how to exploit these capabilities to enhance mobile collaboration and user productivity. These organizations should also consider enterprise-class offerings. Organizations that depend on email systems for the majority of internal file transfers should re-evaluate message file size limits to ensure they manage the demand for external file transfer capabilities.
Business Impact: Enterprise file sharing will enable higher productivity and collaboration for mobile workers who deal with multiple devices. Organizations investing in such capabilities will enable a more modern and collaborative real-time workplace while reducing or avoiding the inherent
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security/compliance threats of personal cloud services. Business benefits will happen in terms of increased productivity and cost savings.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Accellion; Acronis; AirWatch; BigTinCan; Boole Server; Box; Citrix ShareFile; Dropbox; EMC; Mezeo Software; nCrypted Cloud; ownCloud; OpenText; SAP; TeamDrive; VMware; WatchDox; YouSendIt
Recommended Reading: "MarketScope for Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing"
"Enterprise File Sync and Share Will Shift Storage Management Burden From the Edge to Data Centers or Cloud"
"Cloud File Sync/Share Is Not Backup"
"Secure Low-Cost Data Sharing and Collaboration With iPad"
Sliding Into the Trough
Mobile Collaboration Client Analysis By: Monica Basso
Definition: A mobile collaboration client is a mobile application that integrates functionalities such as telephony, SMS, email, IM, presence, social networking, RSS news, activity streams, file synchronization and sharing into a single screen. Examples include status posting to multiple social networks from an IM client and enhanced contact lists with real-time social information.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Working with multiple mobile communications applications, such as voice, email, IM, SMS and social networks, on a phone isn't easy. Different clients, contact details and message repositories increase complexity, while integration is often limited. This fragmentation is being progressively reduced as multiple communications capabilities converge into a single, presence-enabled messaging client on mobile devices. Convergence is developing at the client side, hiding technology complexity from users and letting them focus on messaging content only. The user experience on a mobile client will be enhanced thanks to a blend of cloud services from multiple providers. This dynamic is similar to that occurring on PCs with fourth-generation collaboration clients.
Multiple vendors, from handset manufacturers to application vendors, will contribute to this area. Each will take a slightly different path, depending on core competencies. No single vendor offers full support for integrated collaboration on a mobile device; however, any mobile OS platforms (e.g., Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10) integrate, to some degree, SMS, email, IM,
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presence and social information into a single mobile application. For example, they integrate various calendar and contact information from corporate and public services into a single view. Also BlackBerry Hub consolidates all conversations in one place.
This technology augments traditional approaches to unified communications and collaboration (UCC) deployed on the corporate server side. Not only can it more easily take advantage of contextual information originating in mobile devices (e.g., location), but it can also more easily blend corporate and personal services (e.g., public social networks and email services), based on the individual's presence. Because it connects personal and professional data, this convergence is also creating potential security and privacy risks.
User Advice: Explore emerging mobile, personal integrated communications capabilities that will develop in mobile applications to enable a richer, real-time communications and collaboration experience for your users. Be wary of actual performance, which might affect user experience, as some implementations are still partly unstable.
Business Impact: The availability of integrated messaging capabilities on mobile devices will increase the usability of mobile tools, driving further adoption among employees. It will also make mobile workers more productive and more responsive to client requests and collaboration within the organization.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 1% to 5% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: AgreeYa; Apple; BlackBerry; Google; Microsoft; Nokia; Xobni
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
Cloud Office Systems Analysis By: Tom Austin
Definition: The cloud office systems (was cloud collaboration services) product category incorporates cloud collaboration services and adds content creation, communication, social and coordination services, data access and customizable, extensible platforms that can be integrated with other systems. Most users adopt a subset of capabilities beginning with email. The term "Microsoft Office" refers to a specific set of products from Microsoft; the broader term "cloud office systems" is a generic label. Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps for Business are two examples.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Microsoft and Google have been investing very heavily to drive enterprises to their own office system services provisioned from the cloud. There are many other service providers in this space, and while some offer a very broad suite (such as IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business), there are hundreds of others that provide more narrowly-defined, cloud-based subsystems that are either relatively free-standing in the cloud (such as basecamp.com) or integrate with one of the very broad offerings (for example, RunMyProcess).
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Service providers have been creating the appearance of significant momentum in this segment, with advertisements and press releases implying total success. However, as is typical in the early stages of a hyped market segment, actual penetration trails the expectations the ads try to set. We estimate that a little over 8% of the total potential market for cloud office systems has moved as of 2Q13. That sounds small but it reflects 50 million users (a very large number already) because the total potential market, today, is huge (630 million users).
The office system market — including cloud and on-premises alternatives — is growing, we estimate, to over 1.1 billion users by 2022. For more details about market sizing and growth rates, see "New Developments in the Cloud Office System Market." That same research also elaborates on:
■ Benefits. These include lower net cost (particularly for smaller enterprises); greater agility (by virtue of faster availability of new features); lower overheads (that is, replacing capital investment requirements with operating expenses, smoother cash flow and fewer dedicated IT resources required); easier provisioning; greater reliability and security (particularly for smaller organizations); and improved user experience and financial incentives offered by the service providers.
■ Drawbacks. These include higher net cost (particularly for larger enterprises); other strategic priorities (office systems have not been the forefront of most IT organizations strategic priority list for decades); security; compliance and regulatory concerns; integration with other on- premises systems; complexity; unmanageability (despite various governors available to buyers, ultimately, the service provider controls the rate of evolution); inflexibility; functional deficiencies; asymmetry between cloud and on-premises variants; hidden costs; immaturity (including support, management, administration and reporting); and general, overall concerns about risks.
■ Adoption rate. We expect this will accelerate by the end of 2014, with the market growing to 273 million users in 2017 (33% of the larger total potential market) and 695 million users in 2022 (60% of 1.158 billion).
User Advice:
■ IT leaders must avoid yielding to self-serving vendor migration pressures. Move when and if appropriate and pit Google and Microsoft against each other. Movement to cloud office systems is not inevitable for everyone. We expect one third of the market is not going to move there for the foreseeable future.
■ Most larger enterprises can be comfortable waiting at least until the "early majority" period (2015) if they will migrate. However, enterprises of any size with an imminent need for a major overhaul or replacement of existing office systems, and small or midsize businesses in general, should plan to move more quickly.
■ Resist supplier pressure to commit to new, long-term contracts. Test whether their offers are for their benefit or for your own.
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■ Where it makes sense, run pilots with multiple cloud office system providers. These pilots should involve your internal customers, not just IT. Large enterprises (those with 10,000 or more potential users) should consider exploiting multiple vendors' offerings and avoiding lock-in where ever possible.
■ Consider the significant cost-savings arguments made by both Google (for Google Apps for Business) and Microsoft (for Office 365), but look carefully to discover the cost-related risks as well. A move to the cloud may be a financial one-way trip.
Business Impact: Although the expected growth in movement to cloud office systems services will have wide implications for the industry as a whole, it will have a moderate to low impact on individual organizations. For some, the benefits will obviate the drawbacks. For others, the opposite may be true. Every enterprise is different. Although the cited benefits should enable enterprises to provide more employees with access to these services, they will not suddenly enable large shifts in business practices or new capabilities.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Google; Huddle; IBM; Microsoft; salesforce.com; Thinkfree Office; Zoho
Recommended Reading: "The Cloud E-Mail and Collaboration Services Market"
"Google Apps for Business: Leading with Gmail"
"Explore Microsoft's Office 365 Plans and Suite Options Now in Advance of IT Operations Inquiries"
External Peer-to-Peer Communities Analysis By: Jenny Sussin; Michael Maoz
Definition: External peer-to-peer communities are virtual places for collaboration among people and organizations in the market ecosystem outside the enterprise, including prospects, customers, suppliers, partners, influencers and even competitors on occasions. External peer-to-peer community sites leverage social-software tools that enable community members to interact online to share ideas, provide support for other members, offer suggestions and comment on others' ideas.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Over the last year, external peer-to-peer community sites have progressed from adolescence to approaching early mainstream adoption as they are adopted for product engineering, marketing and customer service purposes. We broadened our focus in 2013 from the definition in 2012 (formerly known as Social CRM: Community Peer-to-Peer Support) to encompass more community types. The drive toward external peer-to-peer communities has not been quite as fast as initially anticipated, perhaps due to its taking a back seat to increased interest in social media analytics and social campaign management. These three areas (social media analytics, social campaign management and external peer-to-peer communities)
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juxtaposed illustrate companies' desire to reach out through existing communities on sites like Facebook and Twitter to communicate and garner insights from their constituents versus bringing them into owned pages.
We continue to see interest in peer-to-peer community sites, because internal peer-to-peer communities have become more commonplace and organizations look to extend the capabilities of those communities beyond the firewall. Companies have been using external peer-to-peer communities to refine business processes and establish best practices for selling along with their partners, co-create products and provide a site for peer-to-peer customer support and serve as an interactive extension to their websites.
Common external community features include:
■ Wikis
■ Blogs
■ Forums
■ Analytics
■ Ratings and reviews
■ Q&A
■ Moderation
■ Member directories with profiles
■ Polling
User Advice: Identify a business objective to be achieved through the establishment of external peer-to-peer communities. Recognize known constituent behaviors, and set realistic expectations for activity, and the level of activity needed to be achieved to meet business goals. Establish a clear marketing and communications plan around the introduction of the community/communities to your constituency. Assign a community manager and administrator to keep members continuously engaged in the community to sustain its business impact.
Business Impact: External peer-to-peer communities will have the most impact when there is a clear objective associated with the communities and a clear call to action for community members. Customer support has been the perfect success story. Success usually comes as customer service savings from call deflections, decreased costs for traditional market research, and increased customer satisfaction. Gartner has seen success with external peer-to-peer communities across the areas of marketing, customer service and market research/product development.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
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Sample Vendors: Demand Media; Get Satisfaction; Jive; Lithium Technologies; Oracle; Telligent
Recommended Reading: "Critical Capabilities for Peer-to-Peer Customer Community Software"
"What You Need to Know About Peer-to-Peer Community Software for Social CRM"
"Case Study: Social Initiative Dramatically Improves a Company's Customer Support and Profitability"
Communications-Enabled Business Processes Analysis By: Geoff Johnson
Definition: Communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs) enable communication functions to be integrated with IT systems and applications as an aid to automating business transactions and activities. CEBPs raise alerts, messages and notifications, set up conference calls, or leverage presence to automate the IT component of business processes or handle exceptions to business rules.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: A practical example of a CEBP is the use of alerts and notifications to automate the handling of exceptions, variations or interruptions to business processes or IT applications, such as using business rules to redirect incomplete or nonstandard customer service inquiries, goods or documents supplemented by rich messaging to engage and inform all the necessary parties.
Major unified communications and collaboration (UCC) suites' APIs routinely facilitate CEBP. UCC suites include a variety of communications and collaboration applications. These systems make use of Open standards, such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and VoiceXML, to support simpler integration into business applications such as CRM, ERP, billing systems, and others than was previously attainable by computer telephony integration (CTI).
The use of CTI libraries has been the basis of most communications and IT integration functions for years, but it requires a significant, relatively complex and expensive integration task. However, CEBP developments now utilize popular ubiquitous unified communications (UC) suites such as Microsoft's Lync (or Office 365 UCaaS), Cisco's Jabber or IBM Sametime to form the base communications technologies for mashups and tactical applications that facilitate and automate business processes. Integration with these common UCC tools is making CEBP more available to any type of enterprise, yet the business processes for using CEBP aren't well understood, standardized, nor well-productized, which is a recipe for "sliding into the Trough of Disillusionment."
CEBP solutions are generally being considered as an integration exercise rather than a self- contained product. Major communications infrastructure vendors tend to support some particular aspect of CEBP. These solutions can act as an effective UC utility that provides familiar and reliably deployed communications for use in CEBP applications. Different IT vendors have their own characterizations of CEBP, with their own names for products, solutions and methodologies. Avaya calls its solution CEBP. Its Agile Communication Environment (ACE) is a service-oriented architecture (SOA) solution that is widely used by CEBP application integrators. Microsoft's product is called communications-enabled business applications (CEBAs). Cisco's is called collaboration-
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enabled business transformation (CEBT). Genesys describes its Intelligent Workload Distributor (iWD) product as business process routing (BPR). Interactive Intelligence uses Interaction Process Automation (IPA) as a tool for its communications-enabled business process applications (CBPAs). CEBP will likely remain the generic name for the capability and practice of facilitating various disparate communication modes into automated support for business processes.
CEBPs will rely on broadly deployed UC in order to function well. Progressive adoption of CEBPs is a general, but clear, trend that may be usefully applied in some particular industries but has weak interest in many other sectors. A recent increase in adoption is occurring now that users can easily establish a conference session from an application and it becomes second nature as a habit. This may be a critical point of inflection for CEBP maturity. The market penetration of CEBP solutions is now likely to rise more consistently than in the past, but mainstream maturity may be as late as 2020.
User Advice: In the near term, organizations should consider how communications may be used (even in rudimentary ways) to automate or support business processes. By taking this step, enterprises can evaluate the prospective use of communications to enable and facilitate operational processes. This step will also help an enterprise refine its view on which UCC vendors may be best placed to support their emerging CEBP applications.
The delivery of effective business processes is arguably the most powerful outcome that IT can bring to any organization. CEBP will thrive where UCC is broadly deployed and treated as an essential tool. Best practices are beginning to emerge based on the use of CEBP component technologies, which includes messaging, mobility, voice integration and alerts that can automate and tightly link IT and communication applications. Organizations that fit "mainstream" or "late adopter" technology adopter profiles should target well-bounded pilot projects capable of giving measurable results when evaluating "starter" CEBP projects. Intensely competitive, high volume, labor-intensive or fast-moving businesses have become the early adopters of CEBP as a practice, because they can create significant measurable customer service, productivity and process performance improvements, rather than just minor incremental advantages.
Businesses must first understand the importance of UCC components as an essential infrastructure, architecture and utility for CEBP and the role of CEBP as an aid to radically improve customer service and productivity. Those responsible for particular business processes should determine which business operations will benefit from CEBP, and how the enterprise's communications and IT platforms can support them.
Business Impact: Process productivity improvements will result mainly from the automation of handling exceptions to business rules and reductions in the human latency and delays associated with most business processes, including reduced total cycle times, improved accuracy and ease of use.
Gartner recommends that enterprises view CEBP as a set of technologies and best practices rather than as a distinct product or solution set. Businesses will need to review their mix of IT platform providers and the communication infrastructure partners expected to be used in the long term, and
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evaluate their CEBP capabilities. Specifically evaluate partners' plans for providing communications natively from within IT applications.
CEBP has the scope to be highly beneficial to businesses as a general tool or as an environment for conducting commerce in many vertical industries and customer service situations, but it does not appear in the market as a conveniently bundled set of IT and communication solutions. Business process analysis and integration is required.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: Appian; Aspect Software; Avaya; Cisco; Convergent; Cordys; Datria Systems; Diamante; Enabling Technologies; Evangelyze Communications; Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories; Geomant; IBM (Lombardi); Interactive Intelligence; InterCall; IPcelerate; Radianta; Savvion; SAP; Send Word Now; Siemens Enterprise Communications; TOA Technologies; Wortell
Recommended Reading: "Who's Who in Communications-Enabled Business Process Application Developers and Consultants"
"Popular Unified Communications Suites Are Changing the Nature of Communications-Enabled Business Processes"
"People, Processes and Content Are Forming a New Synergy"
"Critical Capabilities for Contact Center Infrastructure 2012"
"Leveraging Four New Ways to Integrate Business Processes and Communications"
Mobile Unified Communications Analysis By: Bill Menezes
Definition: Mobile unified communications (mUC) is the integration and presentation of UC components (such as single number, presence and status) on enterprise wireless devices. The focus is more on the applications and services versus network infrastructure. Many of the applications found and used on deskphones have become available on mobile smartphones and tablets.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Enterprise adoption of incorporated mUC elements varies by region, but is limited to date. Challenges in building the business case for mUC by IT organizations continue to slow the pace of enterprise adoption. However, vendors and telecom service providers continue to introduce or update mobility features for their UC products or services and develop support for emerging solutions, such as browser-based Web Real-Time Communication. With enterprise adoption of Internet Protocol (IP)-based voice systems, more enterprises have the option to integrate wireless device support. Current generation smartphones
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already can use messaging, presence, voice and other mUC functions from vendors such as Microsoft (Lync) and Cisco (Jabber). Most of the functionality of mUC is integrated into IP telephony systems, and changes in licensing methods no longer make it more expensive to use a mobile phone than a desk phone. As a result, mUC will become a standard, integrated capability across most vendors supporting UC, making this stand-alone technology obsolete before plateau.
User Advice: As smartphones become the primary communications device for the enterprise, integrating the mobile phone into the corporate network provides significant value to users and the company. Work closely with users to identify business functions and roles that can benefit from mUC, and educate users about the opportunities. As the enterprise telephony plan emerges, evaluate users' mobility requirements and their needs to integrate wired and wireless communications into a single device. Address the needs of your mobile users first, and then evaluate support presence/status and click-to-conference call applications that will improve use and productivity, as well as IM and presence status that are frequently used on the desktop. Look to incorporate mobility into next-generation IP telephony projects, and encourage employees with company-owned mobile devices to use mobile applications in place of desk phones. Include the possibly expensive cost of wireless office coverage in the planning, if it does not already exist.
Business Impact: mUC has enormous potential to change the way companies plan and support communications services. As a capability to extend enterprise voice system functionality to mobile devices, consolidate wired and wireless services, and eliminate desk phones, mUC can transform how vendors support communications for mobile users in the enterprise.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: AT&T; Avaya; BlackBerry; Cisco; Motorola; ShoreTel; Tango; Telepo; Verizon Enterprise Solutions; Vodafone
Recommended Reading: "Mobile UC: Extending Collaboration to Smartphones and Tablets"
"Let Your Users Decide Between Using Smartphones or Desk Phones"
"Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications"
"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America"
"Predicts 2013: Success in Leveraging UC Will Be Easier With a Unified IT and Business Strategy for Collaboration"
Cloud UC (UCaaS) Analysis By: Daniel O'Connell
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Definition: Cloud unified communications (UC), also known as unified communications as a service (UCaaS), is provided over multitenant or virtualized infrastructure that is owned, maintained and hosted by the service provider. Users/organizations pay a per-user, per-month fee. UCaaS is the cloud delivery alternative to premises-based UC. As such, it supplies equivalent functions, spanning integrated:
■ IM and presence
■ Telephony
■ Messaging (voice mail, email with unified messaging)
■ Conferencing (Web, audio and video)
■ Mobility
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The pioneers of cloud UC are the applications specialists. Such companies typically focus on cloud UC and have at least ten years of experience. Example providers include: ShoreTel, West, Thinking Phone Networks, Evolve IP and 8x8. Many of these firms have internally-developed platforms.
Success of the applications specialists has spurred UCaaS market interest across a spectrum of larger industry participants, including:
■ Communications service providers — AT&T, BT, Orange, Telstra, Verizon, Vodafone and Telefonica
■ System integrators — CSC, Fujitsu, HP and Xerox
■ Technology vendors — Avaya, Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Mitel
The arrival of platform solutions from major vendors like Cisco, Microsoft and Google has accelerated brand awareness. UCaaS users continue to express interest in:
1. Mobility integration with smartphones and tablets
2. Combined UCaaS/cloud contact center functionality
Existing UCaaS deployments remain focused on small or midsize businesses. However, the continued maturity of the Google, Microsoft, and Cisco platforms are accelerating enterprise demand. Most deployments are below 3,000 employees. The bigger communications service providers and system integrators are now starting to support services across North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. Assuming these initial global implementations fare well during 2013, we would therefore expect greater multinational corporation UCaaS adoption in 2014.
User Advice: Businesses below 100 employees should carefully evaluate cloud UC. These companies have limited IT skills and are open to cloud UC from applications specialists.
Highly distributed midsize (100 to 1,000 employees) organizations should also strongly consider cloud UC. The cloud delivery relieves these organizations from the complexity and expense of supporting remote sites. Midsize customers are also attracted to integrated cloud UC/contact
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center functionality. Their contact center requirements are not overly complex and can therefore be supported with generalized solutions.
Starting in 2012, cloud UC has become a viable option for midsize organizations in the 1,000 to 5,000 employee range. This is especially true when the employee base is concentrated in a single country. These companies are open to working with applications specialists, but ideally, prefer working with a stronger brand.
The final cloud UC frontier is for larger organizations above 5,000 employees. Outside of the public sector, these organizations typically have their personnel distributed across multiple regions. Selected cloud UC providers have been rolling out global cloud UC infrastructure during 2013. Global deployments add an additional layer of complexity that will be tested in 2013 and 2014.
Gartner has observed significant variation in the delivery quality of cloud UC providers. Some have resolved it — spanning sales, marketing, deployment, and operations. Others have not devoted enough resources or adjusted their business model to excel at cloud delivery.
Business Impact: Cloud UC enables organizations to outsource the delivery of email and telephony services, and secure a rich set of integrated functions spanning IM, presence, messaging and conferencing.
CFOs are attracted to UCaaS because it:
1. Transfers capital expenses to operational expenses.
2. Helps businesses become more agile in response to growth, retrenchment and acquisitions.
3. Supports disaster recovery with replicated data centers.
Businesses opting for UCaaS believe that UC functions are becoming commoditized and, hence, suitable for cloud delivery. This enables organizations to reduce costs, focus on core competencies, and reallocate IT staff to focus on competitive differentiation.
The infrastructure licensing policies of major vendors like Cisco and Microsoft favor single-vendor (or at least dominant vendor) solutions. UCaaS is therefore well-suited to organizations open to single-vendor solutions and that have a highly distributed workforce. UCaaS users will need to undertake a process of vendor rationalization to eliminate redundant suppliers.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Adolescent
Sample Vendors: AT&T; BroadSoft; BT; Cisco; Google; Microsoft; Optus; Orange; Siemens; Telefonica; Telstra; Thinking Phone Networks; Verizon
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America"
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"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
"MarketScope for Unified Communications for the SMB Market, Western Europe"
"How to Add Business-Grade Telephony to the Google Cloud Unified Communications Ecosystem"
"Best Practice: Pricing for Unified Communications as a Service and for Outsourced UC"
Climbing the Slope
Emergency/Mass Notification Services Analysis By: Roberta J. Witty; John Girard
Definition: Emergency/mass notification services (EMNSs) automate the distribution and management of notification messages to multiple endpoints. Secure message distribution can be done via a Web portal, a mobile device app or browser, or the vendor's call center. Use cases include emergency/crisis events, business operations notifications, business-context-based alerting, IT service alerting, reverse/enhanced public emergency calls, and public safety.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Critical incidents today range from localized events, such as a fire or power outage, to regional and catastrophic disasters, such as earthquakes (as in Chile, Haiti and Japan), hurricanes/tsunamis (as in Metro NYC, Indonesia and Japan) and terrorist attacks (as in Mumbai, London and the U.S. on Sept. 11). They don't have to cause major physical damage to have a major business interruption — for example, the 2010 Iceland volcanic ash event, and the 2009 to 2010 H1N1 virus. As a result, organizations are increasingly implementing EMNS, thereby building a stronger crisis management program. The EMNS market is price-competitive at the basic capabilities level. As customer needs and use cases change and expand, so, too, will this market. The majority of implementations are hosted by the vendor (97.6%), and are priced using a per-contact model.
EMNS products have attracted many specialty audiences, resulting in a large field of many small vendors and a few large, multiproduct vendors. Gartner's current vendor list contains more than 60 vendors, and it keeps growing. Consolidation is expected and needed over the next five years. Potential mergers and acquisitions of EMNSs include vendors in the following markets: facilities management; physical security; fire safety; crisis management; environmental, health and safety; disaster event information analytics/situational awareness; and business continuity management (BCM) planning.
No vendor has an offering that supports all use cases. There is some vendor overlap between the EMNS and communications-enabled business process markets (see "Hype Cycle for Enterprise Communication Applications, 2010") through an EMNS product application programming interface (API) for integration to a triggering business application. We are also seeing purpose-built offerings such as customer communications management (see "Hype Cycle for P&C Insurance, 2012") and multichannel marketing communications (see "Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management"). We expect that organizations will continue to need multiple tools to achieve all use cases.
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Many enterprises initially bought an EMNS without doing an in-depth analysis of their needs, within one use case or across all those in the enterprise. Therefore, some have been disappointed with their current vendor, and are looking to switch to one that supports their future needs. Currently, this switch is not terribly difficult because there is minimal integration with in-house applications — for example, enterprise directories and human resources applications. Therefore, the switching costs are low. However, as enterprises integrate the EMNS tool with more applications in support of additional use cases, take on a stronger crisis/incident management focus within their overall BCM programs, and implement a BCM software suite, the reason, ability and cost to switch to another vendor will become much less attractive.
The position for 2013 remains the same as in 2012 for the following reasons:
■ The number of vendors is still expanding.
■ The direction of new features is still open to interpretation — a few vendors are moving into the situational awareness market but the adoption of these tools for that purpose has barely been embraced by the customer base.
■ The use cases within the organization are expanding. However, if these tools expand, their capabilities to embrace nonemergency messaging are uncertain (see "Magic Quadrant for U.S. Emergency/Mass Notification Services" and "Market Analysis in Depth: EMNS Magic Quadrant").
User Advice:
■ Understand all the notification use cases needed by your organization to ensure that you are making the best use of your investment.
■ To do a valid pricing comparison, require all vendors on your shortlist to use the same pricing model, or require them to convert theirs to yours.
■ Choose a vendor that has experience in your vertical industry to better align their offering to your business operations.
■ Choose an EMNS vendor that has customer support services located in the same or adjacent time zones as your firm's, as well as language support for your operating locations, and review operating locations as well as language alignment.
■ Choose an EMNS vendor that has data center operations located in different geographic locations from yours to prevent the same event from impacting you and the EMNS vendor, as well as for privacy protection considerations.
■ Select an EMNS vendor that supports your organization's mobile technology and social media integration strategy, and has device-specific applications that align with that strategy.
■ Service interruptions can happen to any organization, including EMNS vendors. If you want 24/7 availability of a service, then validate your needs against the EMNS vendor's capability and delivery of that capability via a documented SLA. Know that 100% uptime guarantees typically
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only mean a reimbursement of fees paid by the customer to the vendor, if the vendor does not maintain that uptime guarantee.
■ Carefully plan your enrollment procedure to ensure that all people who need to be contacted are included in the service, and that their contact information is current and complete.
■ Carefully plan the type, number and content of notification messages, because:
■ Recipients of notification messages may ignore notices if too many are sent about the same event.
■ Carrier-based character restrictions on text messaging make the formation of a meaningful message challenging.
■ During a regional disaster, don't overload the telecommunications infrastructure with needless messages.
Business Impact: The interest in and need for EMNSs — which are critical for managing and improving an organization's crisis communications capability — continue to grow among governments, public and private enterprises (regulated or not), educational institutions, and operators of critical infrastructures, because crisis communications are becoming a best practice and a requirement for some industries (for example, higher education and part of U.S. fire code NFPA 72). The business benefits of using an EMNS tool include:
■ Key personnel can be notified in minutes, and large numbers of nonkey, but affected, personnel can receive critical information about the event.
■ Management can focus on critical decision making and exception handling, instead of message delivery.
■ Human error, misinformation, rumors, emotions and distractions — which are so often found during a crisis — can be better managed and corrected.
■ A documented notification audit log can be provided for real-time and postevent management.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Amcom Software; AtHoc; Blackboard; Cassidian Communications; Cooper Industries; Emergency Communications Network; Enera; ERMS; Everbridge; Federal Signal; FirstCall; Global AlertLink; MIR3; NY-Alert; Omnilert; Rave Mobile Safety; Send Word Now; SunGard Availability Services; West Communication Services
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for U.S. Emergency/Mass Notification Services"
"Market Analysis in Depth: EMNS Magic Quadrant"
"The Emergency or Mass Notification Service Market: Now and for the Next Five Years"
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"Toolkit: Emergency and Mass Notification RFP Template, 2011"
"Spam Filters Could Cripple Your Emergency Notification System"
Rich Presence Analysis By: Bern Elliot
Definition: Rich presence is the ability to aggregate and publish presence and location information from multiple sources. Presence can include information, such as status, from applications, devices and networks, as well as from external sources, such as location services. Rich presence is distinct from standard presence, which is usually applied to information from a single source, such as instant messaging (IM) presence.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Most leading unified communications (UC) vendors now offer rich presence as an integral part of their UC solutions; however, organizational, social and technical adoption barriers remain. As a result, rich presence technology will continue to grow at a moderate rate. Social barriers include questions about:
■ What could be considered personal information
■ How information could be used to control workers
■ Could the information be used for criminal activity
■ Could the information be used to invade personal privacy
■ Could the information be used to deliberately mislead others
In addition, some users don't want to change their communication methods, and there are organizational patterns that do not encourage desktop collaboration.
Organizational barriers include concerns about privacy, security, identity and administrator policy. In many cases, these will vary by organization.
Technical barriers largely involve opening up vendor presence services to allow third-party integrations. A proposed Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard will extend the presence states — rich presence extensions to the Presence Information Data Format (PIDF). Vendors compete in some of these areas, rather than agree to a common approach. There are also scaling issues; if not properly managed, then networks can become inundated with presence status change messages. Finally, there are ways to describe similar states that make it difficult for applications and users to share presence status, especially among organizations.
Two standards are used to support presence — XMPP and SIMPLE. Most leading solutions allow integration with either, although XMPP is the more commonly used standard.
An example of presence might be a presence indication of "on the phone," which could aggregate all the user's voice devices: desktop phone, mobile phone, remote office phone and voice over
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Internet Protocol (VoIP) devices. An alternative example is a virtual meeting, which might have the presence status of "in session," if the following conditions are met:
■ A quorum of participants is logged in
■ The session chair is logged in
■ The recording secretary is logged in
An example of physical equipment presence is mobile defibrillator equipment in a hospital, which has "available" noted. In this example, it is useful to know whether the equipment is available, as well as the location of the equipment.
User Advice: Enterprise planners should investigate how to leverage their presence services to improve employee productivity in structured and unstructured tasks. Presence services could be used to speed workflows and improve business processes. When considering new UC and collaboration investments, planners should review how they will integrate and leverage enterprise or third-party-hosted presence aggregation services.
Presence services can also be leveraged in contact centers. Information about individuals with common skills or responsibilities can be formed into a collective group presence, which can be used to display the availability of anyone in the group. For instance, at a travel agency, the aggregation of presence information from all users into a group presence might display information such as the current estimated waiting time for service, or the skill levels of the available service agents (e.g., five minutes for voice service in English, eight minutes for voice service in French or immediately by IM), thus facilitating more-effective interaction with the group.
Presence solutions can also be integrated with applications that aggregate and transform information about context from multiple sources, including community, identity, process and the environment.
One potential area of concern is that presence information about individuals, such as location and availability, may pose real or perceived infringements on privacy. As a result, planners should carefully consider the privacy implications of any deployment. It may be worthwhile to develop a corporate policy for use and to obtain a review of this policy from the corporate legal team.
Business Impact: Rich presence technology can alter established business processes in significant ways by integrated context with business processes.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Alcatel-Lucent; Avaya; Cisco; Google; IBM; Microsoft; Siemens Enterprise Communications
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
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"MarketScope for Enterprise Instant Messaging and Presence"
Rich Media — Live Streaming Analysis By: Joe Skorupa
Definition: "Rich media — live streaming" refers to the live, streamed, one-to-many delivery of digital media, especially video and audio, to desktops or room systems in an organization.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The primary use for live streaming of rich media has been to enable business executives to provide live presentations to their employees. Increasingly, middle managers are leveraging this capability. In some companies, live meetings are regular events, for example, quarterly updates. Other companies use them to convey important news, such as a merger or an acquisition.
Although the deployment of live multipoint streaming over the enterprise network has been limited due largely to constraints on access network bandwidth and lack of multicast distribution, interest in the capability is rising. Usage is growing as network bandwidth costs for links to small branch offices and home offices drop and as multifunction WAN optimization controllers incorporate support for stream splitting for one-to-many streaming media. Improved codecs with adaptive bit- rate delivery and greater compression rates have also helped. Emergence of stream splitting in software-only, peer-assisted-delivery products has dramatically lowered the capital expense for live streaming. Many organizations leverage their investments in videoconferencing rooms or telepresence suites as a way to avoid investment in a stand-alone studio.
A key driver is executives' desires to improve communications. This increased in importance during the economic downturn and continues to grow in acceptance. In some cases, video and audio is streamed to large high-bandwidth sites, while audio alone is provided to other sites. In other cases, bandwidth-constrained sites receive a low-resolution version of the video and audio stream. Generally, for content like training and demonstrations, non-real-time streaming from local caching or streaming servers is used. This approach provides good quality and is far more cost-effective. Widespread adoption of live streaming depends on the availability of cost-effective branch-office access circuits.
User Advice: Evaluate the total cost of deploying live streaming video, including WAN bandwidth upgrades, WAN and LAN multicast protocol enablement, quality of service (QoS) upgrades, and the construction and operation of a production studio. Live multipoint streaming often requires a multimillion-dollar network upgrade and a massive increase in operational expenses, although per- assisted solutions have significantly reduced the required capital expenses for many configurations.
The driver for deployment is often the desire of senior managers to communicate with their staffs, especially during times of economic upheaval. Senior managers should be presented with a full evaluation of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a range of options, including live streaming of differing quality and, for comparison, stored video playback with audioconferencing for Q&A sessions (typically less expensive than live video). When increasing access network bandwidth is
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impractical, satellite connections may be used to provide broadcast high-bandwidth connections for streamed events; however, these connections can be expensive if not used over many locations.
TCO will be a major consideration for senior executives and, therefore, a significant part of the cost- benefit analysis. This analysis will enable the budget owner to decide what the company can afford, and what is "good enough." It will also mean that IT managers won't try to justify a significant expense if it will provide only marginal IT value.
Look to Microsoft (with its Windows Media File format) and Adobe (with Flash) for streaming servers and desktop players. Flash is also popular for creating presentations because it offers a rich set of capabilities and is bandwidth-efficient. HTML5 is expected to play a larger role in this market.
Multipoint live and stored streaming scalability can be provided by streaming or caching servers from Adobe, Blue Coat Systems, Cisco, Microsoft, Polycom, Qumu, Riverbed Technology and VBrick Systems. WAN optimization controllers from Blue Coat Systems, Exinda, Ipanema Technologies, Riverbed Technology and others can provide QoS for live streaming content. Kontiki and Ignite Technologies provide peer-assisted software-based delivery mechanisms. Portal/content management software is available from Cisco, IVT, Polycom, Qumu, VBrick Systems and others.
Business Impact: The primary use of this technology is to communicate enterprise information in presentations by executives. It can also be used for training purposes.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Blue Coat Systems; Cisco; Ignite Technologies; Ipanema Technologies; Kontiki; Microsoft; Polycom; Qumu; Riverbed Technology; VBrick Systems
Recommended Reading: "How to Deliver Rich Media, Including Live Video, to Your Company Now"
"Apply Analytics to Your Internal Video Share Usage to Maximize Its Value"
"Metadata Will Improve the Return on Your Video Investments"
"MarketScope for Video Content Management and Delivery"
Open-Source Communications Analysis By: Geoff Johnson
Definition: Open-source communications describes networking components such as communications applications, appliances, servers, tools, network management, security and LAN/WAN software that are used through an open-source licensing process, such as the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Open-source communications are used in smartphones, enterprise and
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telecom carrier networking, collaboration, email, routing, switching, IM, directories, firewalls, network management, IP telephony, VPNs, and malicious software (malware) management.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Networking open-source software (OSS) is found in all functional areas of communications. Hundreds of open-source solutions are available to address a wide range of communications requirements, but every technology application is at a distinctively different stage of maturity. Most enterprises are oblivious to the widespread use of OSS for communications, because their network services are typically delivered by network infrastructure suppliers or system integrators who apply a veneer of proprietary software to the OSS to make it their commercial and proprietary property, rather than a pure OSS solution (which must be shared with the open-source community that made the base application available, as discussed below).
The smartphone market has become the highest-profile example for use of open-source communications. Google and the Open Handset Alliance's (OHA's) release of the Android Open Source Operating System has become the dominant source of community-based mobile phone software development, which has created numerous global-scale competitors and has become the most popular operating system platform for users.
Other open-source solutions include:
■ Open-source solutions for contact centers include SugarCRM for customer service, Vicidial for contact routing and outbound dialing, and GNU Bayonne for interactive voice response.
■ Solutions for unified communications include VMware Zimbra for email, calendaring and collaboration, as well as various Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) OSS clients.
■ In the communications service layer are SIP servers (such as SIPfoundry), PBXs (such as Digium's Asterisk) and IM/presence services (such as Jabber, acquired by Cisco).
■ Open-source solutions occur in system services (with tools such as Eclipse), databases (such as MySQL), Web code (such as Apache), directories (such as OpenLDAP) and OSs (such as Linux).
■ In network security, examples of OSS include Shoreline Firewall, antivirus protection from Clam AntiVirus, intrusion detection systems (such as Snort software) and VPNs (such as Openswan). In LANs and WANs, open-source routing providers include Vyatta, as well as ImageStream and Cirpack in carrier switching.
■ The Nagios system and message-oriented middleware (MOM) are prominent in open-source network management and infrastructure monitoring.
The communications industry's maturity in handling the details of OSS licensing (which is at the heart of open source and defines what can be done with the open-source code) has improved significantly. For carriers and enterprises, the use of OSS is best handled by the industries' network integrators to manage the risk and provide enduring support for a stream of derived products. Open-source communications will continue to be used routinely as a tool to aid widespread and rapid product development, and to reduce the time interval to get solutions to market.
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User Advice: Enterprises must understand how OSS development and distribution works from the legal and technical points of view. They must consider how OSS communications solutions may be applied in their business context, and how OSS and proprietary communications may effectively interoperate with their chosen communications suites. Although synergies between OSS and proprietary communications solutions are possible, interoperability is never a certainty, and some developer risk always exists.
Evaluate vendors that produce solutions with OSS communications components, as well as proprietary solutions that may compete with OSS solutions or complement them. Expect network suppliers, system integrators and distributors to offer both closed- and open-source solutions. Be prepared to pay reasonable costs for integrating solutions from both realms for enterprise use.
A sound methodology for evaluating OSS solutions is to include them in bid lists and to determine which open-source communications will operate best in the business's own context. Define and mitigate the legal and developmental risks of OSS, particularly in licensing and support. Understand that OSS is not the same as "free software" or "open standards," and that, as a direct user of OSS, your organization has legal responsibilities to the OSS developer environment that provided the original code. Most enterprises should focus on using supported, packaged OSS solutions from network integrators, rather than creating solutions themselves. The solution developers and integrators can amortize their costs over a large client base, but individual enterprises cannot. The cost savings from the use of OSS communications can be significant for large-scale, widely distributed office or infrastructure environments.
Most communications vendors, OEMs, independent software vendors and distributors are already engrossed in developing, customizing, distributing and applying OSS in enterprise networking in some form. There are many types of licenses, and enterprises should thoroughly investigate the commercial and OSS distribution restrictions that apply. They should use software from licensees that are "OSI Certified Open Source Software."
The following directories give sources for OSS communications, collaboration and content applications:
■ Enterprise Open Source Directory
■ The Ohloh Guide to Open Source
■ SourceForge.net
■ Freecode
Business Impact: Users and suppliers of communications applications need to understand the real or imagined advantages of OSS communications software for their business purposes, and the overall costs and benefits that apply to their projects. Enterprises may find that OSS is good for low-cost IT and operational technology (OT) trials, but less valuable, too immature or too risky in production environments that are mission-critical and require significant support over a potentially very long life cycle. Suppliers should determine particular solutions for each opportunity based on the optimal use of OSS in their products and services, and the support of OSS throughout their entire network life cycle.
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Several of the business models used in OSS may be operating at the same time. Not-for-profit OSS organizations (for example, Apache and Python) are the typically referenced models. Vendors or enterprises with a common interest may pool their efforts and share expenses in developing communications solutions. Suppliers may use OSS as a base product to create revenue from a feature-rich version of the OSS product and charge license fees for extended/enhanced versions. The growth of Google's Android OS is an example of how rapidly an OSS offering can be adopted. Expect such vendor-led OSS OSs to be used not just in mobile devices and media tablets, but also in Web-integrated TV and videoconferencing.
Each technology's open-source communications solution has different value propositions and different levels of complexity. Therefore, to manage risk, enterprises must understand the business models of the OSS vendors, and the conditions attached to the specific communications products they are working with. Enterprises should seek assurances from cloud services providers that their use of any OSS is in full compliance with their original legal and commercial conditions, and that the end user does not inherit unstated responsibilities.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Debian; Digium; Google; HTC; Kerio; LG; Mobicents; Motorola; Nokia; Red Hat; Samsung; Serval; Sony Ericsson
Recommended Reading: "Open Source Communication, Collaboration, and Content Management: Cutting-Edge Innovation, Low-Cost Imitation, or Both?"
"Five Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing Open-Source Software"
"Introducing the Open Computing Framework: A Unified Approach to Assessing Openness Across IT"
SIP Communications Analysis By: Bern Elliot
Definition: Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a communication protocol specified by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). It's the first real-time communication protocol to enable multiuser sessions, regardless of media content. SIP enables a new generation of communication services across the Internet, as well as over fixed and mobile IP networks. SIP enables communications to be initiated and managed, and its key channels include voice, video and instant messaging (IM).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Standards and applications are still evolving, but it's clear that SIP will be the default open protocol for communication. It is widely supported by leading communication vendors; however, some implementation differences remain, so portability is not ensured, and it must be validated. Many enterprise communication vendors and carriers prefer to
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offer their own proprietary protocols or proprietary variations of SIP. Best practices for SIP deployments have not been fully defined for many environments. SIP trunks are now being offered by many leading telecom providers, and they are likely to be supported by the WebRTC standard, which further establishes its role as a key standard.
User Advice: SIP is a useful way to enable interoperability among communication platforms and services. It is useful in contact centers, as well as in unified communications (UC) deployments, where multiple vendor communication products must be integrated.
SIP trunking is effectively an Internet Protocol (IP) replacement for public switched telephone network (PSTN) trunking that can be delivered over Internet connections or private networks, such as Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) and Ethernet. Service providers offer SIP trunks in more- granular increments than Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) Primary Rate Interface (PRI), requiring enterprises to subscribe only to the desired capacity of concurrent calls. A border element, such as a session border controller (SBC), often resides between the enterprise and the service provider, as well as in the core of the service providers' voice over IP (VoIP) platforms. Although primarily used for voice, SIP trunks can also carry other media.
Ensure that vendors offer SIP as a contact control option in their platforms, and ask vendors to specify what interoperability testing they have performed. This will make it more likely that different vendors' SIP products will interoperate.
Business Impact: SIP enables communications to be integrated with each other and with business applications more easily. The result is that communications-enabled business processes (CEBPs) can be developed in which the applications initiate and control communication sessions. The result will be more-effective work processes, better use of collaborative and multimedia applications, and a more-agile enterprise communications infrastructure.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Alcatel-Lucent; AT&T; Avaya; BT; Cisco; IBM; Microsoft; NEC; Orange; Polycom; Siemens; Verizon
Recommended Reading: "The Top 10 Reasons to Centralize SIP Trunks and Start Saving"
"Toolkit: RFP Template for SIP Trunking Services"
"Session Border Control and Session Management: Why Enterprises Need Both"
Internal Peer-to-Peer Communities Analysis By: Mike Gotta; Jeffrey Mann
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Definition: Internal peer-to-peer (P2P) communities provide a forum for employees in an enterprise to share their insights, interests and contributions about a shared practice (e.g., knowledge exchange), topic of interest (e.g., how to improve customer service) or shared experience (e.g., employee onboarding). Internal communities are typically not project- or task-oriented or operationally focused entities, which are better served by team workspaces or specific collaborative applications. (This area was previously named "Internal Community Platforms.")
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Communities can come in several forms. Communities of practice (CoPs) generally focus on a specific domain with members who share common practices around that domain. Communities of interest (COINs) are interdisciplinary communities in which members have heterogeneous backgrounds. Communities can have many different behaviors and themes. For example, ideation communities act differently than learning communities. Internal P2P communities have been well-established in companies for quite some time, but dedicated social software support for them emerged later.
Communities can use narrow functionality, such as wikis, discussion forums, group spaces and email, to maintain contact among members. Dedicated internal community platforms combine these services and add specific community functionality, such as member profiles, activity streams, management of members, moderation, and the ability to monitor and discover other communities. Maturing microblogging and activity stream technologies (e.g., Chatter, Yammer and Tibbr) have given rise to communities that are more conversation-centric than document-centric. Ease of use with intuitive and responsive user interface techniques, along with easy access from mobile devices, leads to widespread user adoption. Many organizations are exploring the use of external P2P communities in conjunction with internal ones, where employees use internal communities to coordinate and support their external, client-facing communities.
User Advice: Communities are a powerful means for employees to become better engaged in the organization and improve their performance. Communities can help employees feel that they have a "voice" and that their contributions will result in improvements to the organization in terms of process, culture or management practices. Communities can have a range of formality and structure, but they should provide a sense of shared purpose or reason for coming together as a collective body.
Managers should expect that most people will simply observe, rather than actively contribute; however, observation is important and should not be dismissed. An explicit community manager role is often a worthwhile investment. Community managers help start communities, keep them cohesive, help with new member outreach, develop agendas, resolve conflicts, and work with management on community issues. Managers must have the confidence to avoid overengineering and controlling their communities in ways that stifle participation. Governance policies and controls can discourage the most egregious missteps. Communities need space to grow, develop their own norms and etiquettes, and self-correct bad behavior.
Managers should ensure that employees have time to participate in communities, and that workers are acknowledged and recognized for their contributions. Enterprises should seek out successful communities and learn how they keep their members enthused and engaged, and how they affect
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the business replicate their best practices. Communities can exist in online-only spaces or in hybrid online/offline contexts.
Business Impact: An organization with vibrant communities can better capitalize on people's natural desire to seek solutions to problems and is more likely to achieve a deeper level of experiential learning. Communities go beyond simply providing knowledge about a subject or topic. They provide a means for members to benefit from the expertise and experience of peers, to become more than competent and to achieve mastery.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Atos (blueKiwi); Cisco; IBM; Igloo Software; Jive Software; Microsoft; NewsGator; salesforce.com; Socialtext; Telligent; Tibco Software
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace"
"Empowering Grassroots Is Critical to Social Collaboration Success"
"Predicts 2013: Social and Collaboration Go Deeper and Wider"
Unified Communications and Collaboration Analysis By: Jeffrey Mann
Definition: Unified communications and collaboration (UCC) describes the combination of unified communications and collaboration technologies. Enterprise collaboration vendors were previously fairly distinct from those for enterprise communications, with software companies like Microsoft and IBM dominating the former, and telephony and networking vendors making up the latter. This distinction has blurred because Microsoft and IBM offer voice and telephony features and vendors like Cisco, Avaya and Siemens have made moves toward the collaboration market.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Because UCC represents the merging of former, distinct marketplaces, there are significant hurdles to overcome when considering it for enterprise use. Vendors have been jockeying for position to gain influence over end users, leading former partners such as Microsoft and Cisco to become fierce competitors.
Vendors have been aggressively adding functionality to their product suites that overlap or compete directly with other products brought in-house for completely different reasons. For example, Microsoft's Lync is still used primarily as an IM and (secondarily) Web conferencing platform. However, it also includes voice and telephony functionality features that many organizations have already acquired from other vendors. Enterprises must decide whether to accept the overlap, drop the incumbent supplier or live with more than one provider and integrate the different functions. Social technology is the next potential area of unification as activity streams and enterprise social network functionality overlaps with or incorporates IM and other communications capabilities.
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Over the past decade, disparate organizational functions have been merged together in a sometimes turbulent mix, with either two disparate IT sub-departments, or an IT department (typically charged with collaboration and end-user productivity) and the communications infrastructure group (responsible for telephony and networking) being restructured into a single operating unit. End-user organizations are coming under pressure as IT sub-departments responsible for communications increasingly conflict with the others that are responsible for collaboration. We regularly hear customers complaining, "Why are they bringing in new voice services when we already have that covered?" or conversely, "Why won't they let us use the cool facilities built into these tools?" These tensions will have to be resolved and new market "norms" established before it becomes clear what the balance will be between UCC and unified communications in the marketplace. Vendors are several years into this effort, so this technology is moving quickly along the Hype Cycle.
Collaboration vendors will have a hard time achieving the required quality and robustness of traditional communications vendors as they add these capabilities to their products. This is similar to how communications vendors are finding it a challenge to understand UI issues and how people work. For the moment, seamless UCC remains an aspiration for most suppliers. However, the potential benefits of UCC make it a worthwhile exercise. Shifting seamlessly between a variety of communications and collaboration modalities increases productivity and end-user satisfaction.
Consumerization is also driving user expectations in this area. Facebook, Google, Apple and Skype can mix communications and collaboration, so why can't enterprise vendors?
User Advice: Ensure that the different IT sub-departments involved are aware of each other's plans and are communicating effectively. Creating a joint task force to develop a UCC strategy made up of communications, network and collaboration people, as well as representatives from management and lines of business, has proven to reduce interdepartmental friction.
Separate the organizational and budget politics from an evaluation of the benefits of enhancing users' communication and collaboration capabilities. Users need some of both. For many users it may generally be better if they are more integrated (unified) than not. A UCC project can produce both benefits and unintended drawbacks. In some cases, it could needlessly disrupt current and effective work practices, add complexity and may be seen as unnecessary, costly and a waste of human and technical resources. In other cases, it can improve communications, augment work performance, increase effectiveness and help disparate virtual teams excel. Some employees may do better with, and some better without, UCC. Do not treat this as an all or nothing proposition for every user — show tolerance. Allow some degree of overlap and redundancy if it provides beneficial or is more convenient. Determine the right capabilities road map for various user segments and work the organizational and budget politics into a separate parallel path.
To become more familiar with the possibilities and prove the value of UCC, first look for groups of users who already understand the potential benefits and business cases that provide the clearest path to a measurable return. These test cases can help build the case for more widespread deployment.
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Business Impact: Users expect to be able to employ an integrated set of collaboration tools, escalating to the highest value combination of interactive services — both inside and outside the firewall and including fixed and wireless networks — for the business task at hand. Presence services will be a vital unifying tool, enabling users to right click on a name and invoke a variety of collaboration mechanisms. Shared team spaces will provide temporary and persistent repositories for interactions. These capabilities will be available as a complete stack from some vendors — which currently only provide point solutions — as they expand their offerings. Standards-driven integration will make even more combinations possible, beyond relying on a single vendor's product stack.
The value to organizations will be realized in several ways. First will be the simplified and more effective use of the increasingly broad range of collaboration and communication options. Second will be the improved ability of individuals and groups to accelerate reactions to market events. Third will be efficiency gains from the contextual embedding of communication services into applications at points where, for example, process disconnections occur and human intervention is necessary.
Identifying the potential value of UCC is easy. What organizations will struggle with is quantifying the benefits and calculating ROI. Companies may need to eschew traditional ROI mechanisms and look for alternative, less quantifiable means to justify UCC investments, such as process cycle acceleration, faster problem remediation, increased information awareness and the inclusion of more internal and external resources in planning processes.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Avaya; Cisco; Google; Huawei; IBM (Lotus); Microsoft; Siemens Enterprise Communications
Recommended Reading: "What You Need to Know to Succeed in the UCC Market"
"Single-Vendor or Multivendor UCC: Which Approach Is Best for You?"
Unified Communications Analysis By: Sanish KB
Definition: Gartner defines unified communications (UC) products (equipment, software and services) as those that facilitate the interactive use of multiple enterprise communications methods. This can include control, management and integration of these methods. UC products integrate communications channels (media), networks and systems, as well as IT business applications and, in some cases, consumer applications and devices. For a detailed description, see "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications."
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The UC suite has matured to a level such that leading technology providers enable users to move through the communication modalities of IM, voice,
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video and Web conferencing as an integrated set of capabilities through common desktop and mobile clients. Most suppliers can offer a complete (or near-complete) set of UC functions with their own technologies, but the need to coexist and integrate with partners and competitors is essential for many organizations to evolve their UCC strategies without a rip-and-replace approach.
The adoption of UC by enterprises continues to increase; however, new delivery models, such as UC as a service (UCaaS), are emerging, and some enterprises are considering hybrid environments.
User Advice: Evaluate your existing communications infrastructure, and develop a strategic UC migration path so that communications equipment and software can be updated or acquired systematically as part of a broad UC vision. This approach will also enable enterprises to have a strategic vendor selection process and avoid overbuying the licenses and other communications equipment during the UC implementation.
With the emergence of UCaaS, users have the option to consider the hybrid environment of in- house and cloud solutions. In some cases, this may mean using a single vendor's platform for both the on-premises solution and the UCaaS solution, while in other cases, it may mean blending different vendor platforms.
Using the RFP process, enterprises should spell out their UC requirements, as well as evaluate their UC integration provider's expertise and implementation capability in the multiple-vendor UC environment.
Business Impact: UC improves the ability of individuals, groups and enterprises to communicate and collaborate through both real-time and non-real-time media. This is typically reflected in speedier responses to events, reduced human delays in business processes, and the improved availability of accurate information. The integration of suitable UC solutions into enterprises' major IT applications can improve the efficiency of employees and workgroups, as well as leading to better productivity, especially in labor-intensive organizations. UC is poised to act as a utility that facilitates the use of communications to automate the IT applications used to deliver business processes in an approach that Gartner characterizes as communications-enabled business processes.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Aastra Technologies; Alcatel-Lucent; Avaya; Cisco; IBM; Microsoft; NEC; Siemens Enterprise Communications
Recommended Reading: "Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
"Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications"
"SWOT: Huawei Unified Communications and Collaboration Business, Worldwide"
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"SWOT: Microsoft, Enterprise Unified Communications Business, Worldwide"
"Use These Three Best Practices to Provide Unified Communications With Best-Effort Networks"
"Competitive Landscape: SMB Unified Communications, North America, 2012"
Video Telepresence Analysis By: Sanish KB
Definition: Video telepresence is a form of immersive video communications that creates the impression of being in the same room as other conference members. Participants appear as life- size individuals on large plasma, LCD or projection screens, with multiple cameras and microphones to pick up individuals or pairs of individuals. Immersive telepresence suites are designed and configured by a system supplier to provide layout, acoustics, color tones and lighting that maximize the perception of realism.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Most videoconferencing solutions are now capable of running high definition (HD) video resolution at 1080p (progressive scan) lines of resolution, and the technological differences between immersive and nonimmersive forms of telepresence have become blurred.
The immersive telepresence use case has become limited, being primarily focused on supporting group meetings among internal users, with occasional clients and partners via intercompany exchanges. However, the market has moved more toward personal (or executive) video deployments, which trade some of the immersive cues of large screen and lighting for the convenience of being in the user's own office. Demand for immersive systems has declined, to be replaced by growing demand for personal systems and soft-client solutions. Vendors are now focusing beyond interlinking telepresence rooms with other videoconferencing endpoints, because a key focus now is on enabling any unified communications soft client to connect. H.264 SVC is the key technology mechanism being used, and most vendors either have adopted this or have the intention to do so in the near term.
Gartner client interest suggests that immersive telepresence adoption is limited to larger organizations and specific vertical industries, including financial services, banking, pharmaceuticals, telemedicine, high-technology manufacturing, consumer products and motion pictures/ entertainment. The hospitality and managed office industries have rolled out a limited number of telepresence suites for pay per use in their conference centers, but this market lacks the scale to become viable on a stand-alone basis.
The refocus of investments into personal video and away from immersive telepresence is decreasing the overall scale of the addressable market for immersive systems and speeding the time at which these types of solution reach obsolescence from a mass-market perspective.
User Advice: Telepresence can deliver a more immersive, higher-quality group videoconferencing experience than a traditional room-based or desktop videoconferencing solution, albeit at a substantially higher cost. Organizations should consider video telepresence as part of their broader videoconferencing strategy (to include room-based solutions, desktop, tablet and mobile
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videoconferencing requirements). However, they should identify the real business requirement for high-end telepresence solutions over regular HD room-based video solutions. Most mature telepresence deployments have a ratio of one telepresence system per 10 regular room-based videoconferencing systems.
Business Impact: For regular telepresence users, travel cost reductions and improved productivity will provide a business case with a relatively short payback period, often less than 18 months. To achieve this kind of ROI, telepresence typically demands a utilization rate of more than three hours per day, which is three to four times what most organizations achieve with traditional, unmanaged videoconferencing.
The cost of some immersive endpoint solutions has fallen to about $35,000 per screen/codec (so a three-screen environment will cost around $100,000), but the costs associated with infrastructure are significant, and the networking and managed-service costs will typically double the capital investment in the system over a three- to five-year period.
Public utility services are still not widely available, limiting the benefit they bring to enterprises needing to extend the reach of their own telepresence footprint. A key benefit of telepresence, even over other forms of video communications, is its ability to displace the need for travel by highly mobile executives. From an environmental perspective, this can help reduce Scope 1 and Scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions. However, to lower travel costs and emissions, additional governance, policy and behavioral measures are required, particularly top-down mandating of video as an alternative to face-to-face meetings.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: Avaya; Cisco; LifeSize; Magor Communications; Polycom; Teliris Telepresence
Recommended Reading: "MarketScope for Telepresence and Group Video Systems"
"Survey Analysis: Video Communications Stands Among the Top UC Technologies but Is Not Yet Pervasive"
"Market Trends: Videoconferencing, Worldwide, 2012"
"Why Reach Is the New Quality in Enterprise Video"
"SWOT: Vidyo, Videoconferencing and Personal Telepresence Solutions, Worldwide"
"SWOT: Polycom, Video Communications Solutions, Worldwide"
"Cool Vendors in Unified Communications and Network Systems and Services, 2013"
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Rich Media on Demand Analysis By: Joe Skorupa
Definition: "Rich media on demand" refers to streamed delivery of prerecorded rich-media content — enterprise information, presentations and training — to desktops or handheld devices.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Interest in delivering rich media on demand continues to grow. Many enterprises have concluded that training — whether it addresses products, policies or procedures — is more effective when delivered using a mix of video, audio, animation and other rich media. Additionally, rich media is increasingly used for corporate communications, such as reviews of quarterly results and strategy updates. Rich content is also frequently made available as podcasts for download. Increasingly, this includes employee-generated content via "enterprise YouTube" capabilities.
In many cases, non-real-time delivery of content is delivered from local caching or streaming servers, to overcome limitations on access network bandwidth and because it is much more cost- effective than streaming from a central site. In some cases, the cache is on the client device PC, tablet or smartphone, rather than on a shared device. This is particularly the case for mobile employees, who rarely work from a corporate office.
Organizations are increasingly turning to peer-assisted, software-only mechanisms as alternatives to hardware-based approaches. Peer-assisted delivery is typically procured as a software-as-a- service offering, and, in as little as a few days or weeks, can be deployed globally to hundreds of locations. Rapid deployment, combined with a near-zero capital expense model, makes this approach especially attractive. It can also provide offline access to content.
This market is quite fragmented and is served by a combination of large vendors, including Adobe, Cisco Systems and Polycom, and niche players, including Ignite Technologies, Kontiki and VBrick Systems.
User Advice: Consider how streaming media fits into your overall employee outreach and training strategy. A complete, rich-media strategy must encompass content creation (tools and formats), delivery infrastructure (servers and caches, streaming appliances or peer-assisted software delivery), video content management/search, desktop players, and compliance and governance. In addition, the content delivery infrastructure can serve as the basis for live streamed content if, and when, the required WAN upgrade is accomplished.
Look to Microsoft (with its Windows Media file format) and Adobe (with Flash) for streaming servers and desktop players. Flash is popular for creating presentations because it offers a rich set of capabilities, is bandwidth-efficient and offers players for Windows, Mac and Linux desktops. Microsoft's Silverlight is an alternative to Flash for Windows and Mac clients. HTML5, championed by Google and Apple as an alternative to Flash, will play an increasingly important role as a format of choice. Apple does not support Flash on its iOS (iPhones and iPads). Some sites, notably YouTube and Vimeo, and browsers, which currently include Mozilla, Opera, Google and Apple, offer support for a prestandard draft version of HTML5.
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Scalability can be provided by streaming or caching servers from Adobe, Wowza Media Systems, Riverbed Technology, Blue Coat Systems, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Exinda and others. WAN optimization controllers from Blue Coat Systems, Exinda, Ipanema Technologies, Riverbed Technology, Silver Peak Systems and others can provide a specifiable quality of service for streaming stored content. Peer-oriented distribution solutions from Kontiki and Ignite Technologies are viable alternatives with much-lower capital expense levels and often with much-shorter deployment times. Portal and content management software is available from Rimage (Qumu), Cisco Systems, Polycom (Accordent Technologies) and others.
Business Impact: This technology improves delivery of electronic learning and corporate communications.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Adobe; Altus Systems; Blue Coat Systems; Brainshark; Cisco; Ignite Technologies; Kontiki; Microsoft; Polycom; Qumu; Riverbed Technology; Wowza Media Systems
Recommended Reading: "How to Deliver Rich Media, Including Live Video, to Your Company Now"
"Apply Analytics to Your Internal Video Share Usage to Maximize Its Value"
"Metadata Will Improve the Return on Your Video Investments"
"MarketScope for Video Content Management and Delivery"
Entering the Plateau
Mobile Social Networks Analysis By: Monica Basso; Brian Blau
Definition: Mobile social networking services enable individuals to use a mobile device to connect to their social communities through one or more available mobile channels. Members share experiences, interests, presence information and personal content either via social network apps or through socially-enabled mobile apps. Mobile adds new capabilities to social networking, such as location-related services (for example, check-in) or visualization mechanisms (for example, augmented reality that overlays contextual information).
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Mobile social networks and activity streams are proliferating in consumer and enterprise markets. The business opportunity today is, with 4.6 billion mobile users worldwide, to offer context-aware services for social interaction and collaboration through devices such as feature phones, smartphones and tablets. These are the tools
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predominantly used by people to stay in touch with their real communities. Providers include a variety of startup players, but acquisitions from larger IT players are ongoing and further consolidation is expected in this fast-moving mobile landscape that is quickly redefining the mobile social experience. For example:
■ Enterprise-focused social networks, such as Yammer, Socialcast and Socialspring, are used as real-time collaboration tools to support the mobile workforce. For example, they enable salespeople to access, collect and share geolocated customer information on devices. VMware acquired Socialcast in 2011, and Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012.
■ Pure-play mobile social networks — as well as those based on the ability to check in, such as Ban.jo, GyPSii, MocoSpace, foursquare and Path, some of which originated the mobile social revolution — forced companies like Facebook and Twitter to roll out check-in services of their own. Instagram's $1 billion acquisition by Facebook in 2012 redefined the mobile social landscape and achieved what no other was able to accomplish: a successful launch and exit of a pure-play mobile social network. It has reset business parameters in the marketplace by placing a premium on the value of mobile social users.
■ Leading social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and RenRen are accessible through optimized clients for most mobile platforms. The same applies to community-oriented services such as YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn and Tumblr. Facebook acquired the picture-focused mobile social network Instagram and location-based social networking service Gowalla in an apparent talent acquisition to help bolster its mobile development efforts.
■ Mobile players federated with Web-based social networks like Facebook include Mobimii and Mobikade. They offer some blend of services in this area.
■ Mobile messaging apps such as WeChat, Nimbuzz and KakaoTalk are also seen as social media because they support social sharing of content such as stickers and game referrals. These platforms are becoming alternate discovery platforms for apps and have ramped up in adopters.
■ Megaplayers in the Internet and mobile industry launched different initiatives to enable social networking experiences on mobile devices. For example, Google with Google+, Yahoo with IntoNow, and Skype with its mobile client on many devices. Apple offers community-based experience with applications such as Game Center (Apple's game network), which is accessible on iPhones and iPads.
■ Carrier players: Some providers partner with mobile carriers to give the carrier's subscribers access to their mobile communities through a link on the default page of mobile phone browsers (for example, Jumbuck Entertainment and airG).
With such a crowded market, consolidation was inevitable, and the Instagram and Yammer acquisitions will spark more interest. Startup companies will fight to gain brand recognition and grow subscribers (perhaps through partnerships with bigger players), mostly on a regional basis. Social networking companies will target a multichannel audience with context-oriented services. Internet companies will consolidate multichannel social networking services.
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Today's biggest social network, Facebook, claims that more than 65% of its 1.1 billion active users by May 2013 currently access its services through mobile devices. Adoption of social networks is expected to grow rapidly among mobile users, and by 2016, the number of mobile social network users will reach 1.5 billion.
User Advice: User organizations should explore mobile social networks to find opportunities for innovating their communication styles with employees, clients, partners and markets (for example, to enable salespeople to collect and share geolocated information about customers in real time). Mobile social networks also represent great opportunities to engage with end customers and establish new forms of marketing and advertisement. However, organizations need to evaluate emerging risks in the areas of IT security threats, legal liabilities and reputation.
Business Impact: Mobile social networking is likely to affect many vertical sectors, particularly where organizations deal with large client or user communities (such as the retail, education, healthcare and government sectors) or have larger distributed workforces in sales or other client- facing activities (such as the pharmaceutical, transportation and utility sectors).
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 5% to 20% of target audience
Maturity: Early mainstream
Sample Vendors: Ban.jo; Facebook; GyPSii; Instagram; MocoSpace; Myspace; Path; Twitter; Yammer
Recommended Reading: "Yammer to Give Microsoft Needed Dynamism in Enterprise Social Networking"
"The Emerging Market of Mobile Social Networks Offers New Business Opportunities"
"Social Trends Are Influencing the Adoption of Mobile and Web Technology"
"Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance"
"SWOT: Facebook, Worldwide"
"SWOT: Twitter, Worldwide"
"Forecast: Social Media Revenue, Worldwide, 2011-2016"
"Market Insight: How Consumers Socialize On the Go, The Rise of Portable Social Networks"
Mobile IM Analysis By: Monica Basso
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Definition: Mobile IM refers to the use of an online instant messaging application, including presence and buddy lists, on a mobile device and a wireless network.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: The adoption of mobile IM has progressed in different regions. Standards such as the Instant Messaging and Presence Service (IMPS) protocols from the Open Mobile Alliance initiative and Cisco Jabber on the Internet drove interoperability, despite multiple IM approaches and products.
Most smartphones ship with preloaded clients to connect to instant messaging services — either proprietary or public. A variety of mobile apps are available in app stores: Apple's devices are equipped with iMessage, BlackBerry devices with BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) and Windows Phone devices with a Windows Live client. Android devices have a range of messenger apps options including BeeJive and imo.
Alternatively, users can download mobile IM clients to connect smartphones with a variety of Internet IM services, such as Windows Live, Yahoo, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and ICQ. Mobile IM clients are also available to connect smartphones with private collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft's Lync (previously called Office Communications Server [OCS]) and IBM's Sametime. Particularly in younger generations, BlackBerry Messenger is increasingly used as a substitute for SMS in order to avoid SMS charges. WhatsApp Messenger is another messaging application for smart devices, where presence is not such an important element, but is always on within the phone. Skype is also successful as a mobile IM application.
Mobile operators offer subscribers the mobile IM services built on proprietary infrastructures or integrated with Internet IM systems through specialized platforms. Examples include Cingular with Microsoft Network (MSN) and NTT Docomo i-mode with MSN and Yahoo, as well as Telefonica O2 with ICQ in Germany. Mobile carriers have been concerned that mobile IM adoption might affect their lucrative SMS businesses by providing an alternative for personal messaging. This has limited their commitment to this technology; however, mobile IM represents a complementary tool to SMS and voice for mobile personal communications and may drive further consumption of any services, as shown by some deployments. Younger people's increasing tendencies to use mobile IM with social networks will progressively put demand on carriers to support open mobile IM services. Key mobile operators — such as China Mobile, TeliaSonera, T-Mobile, Telefonica, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM) and Vodafone — are exploring this approach.
While mobile IM services originated in the consumer space, they are now progressively expanding into the enterprise market. In addition to public services, enterprises increasingly deploy corporate IM and presence on smartphones — particularly through the mobilization of Microsoft Lync through mobile communicator clients.
Social networks like Facebook and Twitter get massive usage via mobile devices and are progressively substituting the traditional tools for mobile personal communications. In the long term, this trend will affect mobile IM adoption and allow it to be superseded by mobile social networks before they reach 30% market penetration. In the short term, though, mobile IM is gaining a second life thanks to "new" chat services like Line and WhatsApp.
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User Advice: Carriers should pursue integration with established Internet IM systems, enhancing them with SMS for converged messaging experience, to face the growing competition of device- native IM services and the disruption brought to the SMS business. Internet IM providers should make carrier-independent mobile interfaces available to their IM services to enable their subscribers to access the service with mobile devices, as well as with computers. They also need to make sure their mobile IM services integrate with email and social networking.
Enterprises should leverage the presence of mobile IM capabilities on devices that consumers own and are using for work to enable new forms of real-time collaboration for their mobile workforces.
Business Impact: Mobile IM will have a broad impact on organizations with large mobile workforces because it is an enabler for enhancing real-time collaboration. For cloud services providers (CSPs), mobile IM is an opportunity to deliver a comprehensive offering around personal messaging in addition to SMS and multimedia messaging service (MMS). However, it is also increasingly a threat as applications such as WhatsApp Messenger and BBM continue to cannibalize the SMS revenue stream.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: Apple; BlackBerry; IBM; Line; Microsoft; Palringo; WhatsApp
Recommended Reading: "Competitive Landscape: Mobile Messaging Chat App Providers, 2013"
"Market Trends: Worldwide, The Evolution of Mobile Communication Beyond SMS, 2012"
"Mobile Carriers Should Embrace Internet-Based Instant Messaging Services"
"Findings: Mobile Messaging Becomes Part of Unified Communications and Collaboration"
"Wide Array of Communications Overwhelms Users"
Location-Aware Technology Analysis By: Monica Basso
Definition: Location-aware technology includes sensors, RFID and Near Field Communication (NFC) tags, GPS/global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), and various methods for detecting or calculating the geographical position of a person, a mobile device or other moving objects, such as unmanned aircraft systems.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: More than 13 types of location-aware technologies exist, and Gartner expects more to emerge during the next few years. For example, one active area of research is peer-to-peer location systems, and other emerging areas include wireless LAN (WLAN) signal strength mapping and beacons.
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GPS/GNSS receivers are key enablers for accessing navigation and other location-based services as external receivers or embedded capabilities in mobile devices. At this point, the U.S. GPS dominates. GPS has become a standard technology for many mobile devices: By the end of 2013, nearly 100% of devices with open OSs will have GPS in mature markets, and 80% will have GNSS in relative markets. Meanwhile, the European system (Galileo) should go live in 2013, and the first Glonass phone (based on a chipset from Qualcomm) was launched in Russia in May 2011. The intention is to provide global coverage by 2020. The emerging Chinese system (Beidou) has some satellites launched and provides coverage in China already (see "2012 Strategic Road Map for Satellite Navigation").
For high-accuracy location, assisted GPS (A-GPS), from Qualcomm's SnapTrack, is a variant of GPS, combined with information from the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) network, and successfully deployed by CDMA network operators in the North American and Asia/Pacific regions. CSR's Cambridge Positioning System's Enhanced GPS (E-GPS) for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and wideband CDMA networks put together Enhanced Observed Time Difference (E-OTD) and GPS capabilities to achieve high accuracy in indoor and outdoor environments. CSR and Motorola created an open-industry forum to evaluate and foster E-GPS technologies, joined later by Agilent and Spirent Communications. Hybrid solutions will be used to optimize applications.
High-accuracy location technologies for private Wi-Fi networks enable location services within buildings and hot spots. A different technology is Skyhook, which uses the access point ID in private and public Wi-Fi networks to detect a wireless device location and displays it in maps through Internet services. Technologies based on ultrasound (Ultrasound Positioning System and Indoor Positioning System) have been adopted by Sonitor Technologies to locate and track movable equipment and people in hospitals.
Through 2014, there is a risk of degraded GPS performance. Some GPS satellites started failing in 2010, because replacements weren't launched and they were at the end of their planned life. The EU's alternative, Galileo, has longer-term deployment plans.
In terms of obstacles, we believe indoor positioning is still emerging and fragmented, while privacy concerns may still affect adoption.
User Advice: Users will need multiple technologies, because no technology works everywhere or is suitable for every situation. Users should:
■ Evaluate the potential benefits of location-enabled products to their business processes, such as personal navigation devices (for example, TomTom and Garmin), as well as WLAN location equipment that automates complex processes, such as logistics and maintenance.
■ Monitor the availability of high-accuracy services and products (such as digitally augmented satellites offered by mobile operators and service providers in their regions), because these could represent viable tools to support the mobile workforce, as well as end-user customers in a business-to-consumer model.
■ Evaluate software that synthesizes sources from multiple location-based services, such as Yahoo Fire Eagle or other brokers, in order to improve precision or other functions.
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Organizations in businesses that require GPS/GNSS should monitor performance to identify degradation and should explore alternative systems (if they're lower precision) as a fallback.
Business Impact: Although the market will see consolidation around a reduced number of high- accuracy technologies and their hybrids, the geolocation service ecosystem will benefit from a number of standardized application interfaces that deploy location services and applications for a wide range of wireless devices and apps.
As an increasing number of devices include location sensing, organizations should look for ways to improve their business process by using location-aware technology.
Benefit Rating: High
Market Penetration: 20% to 50% of target audience
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: Cisco; CSR; Ekahau; Polaris Wireless; Qualcomm; Skyhook; Sonitor Technologies; TruePosition
Recommended Reading: "Location Technologies: Sensors, Tags, Beacons and More"
"Tracking People, Products and Assets in Real Time"
"Forecast: GPS-Enabled Devices, Worldwide, 2004-2011"
Mobile Search Analysis By: Sandy Shen
Definition: Mobile search enables people to search for information on mobile devices. It uses location data, images and time of day, among other things, to make results relevant to the user's context. In addition to searching the Web, mobile search plays a role in in-app searching; it can be customized for particular apps — and specific content and formats — and is usually limited to a service provider's content library.
Position and Adoption Speed Justification: Generic keyword search on mobile devices has matured to the point that it now rivals online search. This is thanks to mobile-optimized indexing and the availability of full Web browsers on mobile devices.
Mobile search technology that uses contextual information about the user is still developing — the combination of the data acquisition capabilities of mobile devices and online processing power offers almost infinite possibilities. Already, image search enables users to get information about products and places; local guide apps return results based on the user's location; some shopping apps use not only GPS feeds but also indoor location data; augmented reality delivers layered information based on the view from a mobile device's camera; some mobile advertising apps recognize the audio the user is listening to and offer related information. In addition, voice-based mobile search technology is mature, though examples of "virtual assistance" — such as that offered
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by Apple's Siri — are very few. These examples only scratch the surface of contextual search, but they give some indication of how things could evolve.
User Advice: Companies should:
■ Incorporate technologies that can increase user interaction and deliver more relevant information based on user context.
■ Explore new technologies that may confer a cutting edge. Examples are image and facial recognition, the use of bar codes on product posters to bring users to online sites, and the use of location data to deliver geofenced offers.
Business Impact: Companies can use mobile search to increase traffic to their websites and increase interest in their products.
Communications service providers (CSPs) can expect higher data traffic and more content purchases if customers use a CSP-sponsored mobile search service.
Some types of organization, such as restaurants, hotels and retailers, are better placed than others to exploit mobile search-based advertising.
Benefit Rating: Moderate
Market Penetration: More than 50% of target audience
Maturity: Mature mainstream
Sample Vendors: Amazon; Apple; Baidu; ChaCha; Google; Microsoft; Nuance; Samsung; Shazam; Yahoo
Recommended Reading: "What Mobile Advertising's Growth Means for Marketers"
"Forecast: Mobile Advertising, Worldwide, 2009-2016"
Appendixes
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Figure 3. Hype Cycle for Unified Communications and Collaboration, 2012
expectations Context-Enriched Services Mobile Collaboration Client Transcoderless and Software-Based Cloud Collaboration Services Videoconferencing Infrastructure Expertise Location and Management Communications-Enabled Business Processes Ensemble Interactions Location-Aware Technology Context Delivery Architecture Location-Aware Applications Mobile Unified Communications Presence Federation Mobile Search Open Source in UC Components Mobile IM Hybrid Unified Communications and Collaboration Rich Media on Demand SIP Communications Cloud UC Context-Enriched Content (UCaaS) Unified Communications 4K x 2K TV Displays Open-Source Location Intelligence External Communications No-Email Initiatives Community Platforms Open-Source Software in IP Telephony Unified Communications and Collaboration Private Cloud Communications Rich Media — Live Streaming Web Real-Time Communications Web Customer Service Suites Inter-company Multimodal UC Video Telepresence Rich Presence Internal Community Platforms Emergency/Mass Notification Services As of July 2012 Peak of Technology Trough of Plateau of Inflated Slope of Enlightenment Trigger Disillusionment Productivity Expectations time Plateau will be reached in: obsolete less than 2 years 2 to 5 years 5 to 10 years more than 10 years before plateau
Source: Gartner (July 2012)
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Hype Cycle Phases, Benefit Ratings and Maturity Levels Table 1. Hype Cycle Phases
Phase Definition
Innovation Trigger A breakthrough, public demonstration, product launch or other event generates significant press and industry interest.
Peak of Inflated During this phase of overenthusiasm and unrealistic projections, a flurry of well- Expectations publicized activity by technology leaders results in some successes, but more failures, as the technology is pushed to its limits. The only enterprises making money are conference organizers and magazine publishers.
Trough of Because the technology does not live up to its overinflated expectations, it rapidly Disillusionment becomes unfashionable. Media interest wanes, except for a few cautionary tales.
Slope of Focused experimentation and solid hard work by an increasingly diverse range of Enlightenment organizations lead to a true understanding of the technology's applicability, risks and benefits. Commercial off-the-shelf methodologies and tools ease the development process.
Plateau of The real-world benefits of the technology are demonstrated and accepted. Tools Productivity and methodologies are increasingly stable as they enter their second and third generations. Growing numbers of organizations feel comfortable with the reduced level of risk; the rapid growth phase of adoption begins. Approximately 20% of the technology's target audience has adopted or is adopting the technology as it enters this phase.
Years to Mainstream The time required for the technology to reach the Plateau of Productivity. Adoption
Source: Gartner (July 2013)
Table 2. Benefit Ratings
Benefit Rating Definition
Transformational Enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics
High Enables new ways of performing horizontal or vertical processes that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise
Moderate Provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise
Low Slightly improves processes (for example, improved user experience) that will be difficult to translate into increased revenue or cost savings
Source: Gartner (July 2013)
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Table 3. Maturity Levels
Maturity Level Status Products/Vendors
Embryonic ■ In labs ■ None
Emerging ■ Commercialization by vendors ■ First generation
■ Pilots and deployments by industry leaders ■ High price
■ Much customization
Adolescent ■ Maturing technology capabilities and process ■ Second generation understanding ■ Less customization ■ Uptake beyond early adopters
Early mainstream ■ Proven technology ■ Third generation
■ Vendors, technology and adoption rapidly ■ More out of box evolving ■ Methodologies
Mature ■ Robust technology ■ Several dominant vendors mainstream ■ Not much evolution in vendors or technology
Legacy ■ Not appropriate for new developments ■ Maintenance revenue focus
■ Cost of migration constrains replacement
Obsolete ■ Rarely used ■ Used/resale market only
Source: Gartner (July 2013)
Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.
"Understanding Gartner's Hype Cycles, 2013"
"Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications"
"Toolkit: How to Develop an Effective Unified Communications and Collaboration Road Map"
Evidence Each technology analysis given in this Hype Cycle has been prepared by subject matter experts who have drawn on the body of research published in their discipline as Gartner research deliverables and also used external related secondary research sources.
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For the most forward-looking technology analyses, analysts have typically drawn on their ongoing monitoring and research interest in new intellectual property developments and the work of numerous vendors' research and development teams as they participate in global standards-setting institutions.
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