IBM

Patton's SmartNode Products Certified Interoperable with Lotus Sametime

Melisa LaBancz-Bleasdale — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 22:07:56 +0000

Patton is a multi-national organization that designs, develops, and manufactures electronic communications equipment for network access, connectivity, VoIP, triple-play and video surveillance that is making consistently big waves in the Unified Communications (UC) space. At ITExpo in February, they announced, in alliance with the Elastix project – an open source UC distribution project – that they had released a mutually certified UC solution.

Now, Patton (USA) and Patton-Inalp (Switzerland) have announced that IBM has tested and certified the company’s SmartNode VoIP gateways, VoIP routers and IADs for interoperability with the Lotus Sametime unified communications (UC) platform.Why is this important? With SmartNode VoIP routers, Patton says large enterprises can control capital expenses while implementing UC by integrating existing public branch exchange phone systems and PSTN connections into IBM’s Lotus Sametime platform.

Sametime was designed to remove the seams between email, voicemail, instant messaging, wired and wireless phones while providing presence status, Company officials said that this enables workers to avoid such time wasters as looking up contact information and calling people who aren’t available. Moreover, SmartNode gateways offer immediate access to the world of UC for organizations using traditional analog or digital phone systems. Working together, the companies could feasibly create an even better connected world.

Their specs boast impressive any-service-any-port (ASAP) capabilities that can deliver any WAN service on every industry-standard telephony interface that is currently in use. Built to be highly scalable (SMBs all the way to enterprise-sized organizations), SmartNode scales from 2 to 120 concurrent VoIP or fax calls, and supports SIP, H.323, ISDN, and POTS telephony plus T.38 and SuperG3 FAX over TDM/PSTN and IP/Ethernet services simultaneously.

Company officials said that most IBM-certified VoIP equipment is less scalable in terms of interface types, port counts, and number of concurrent calls. SmartNode enriches IBM’s Sametime solution with advanced telephony features. Therefore, it upgrades a legacy solution in all the right ways.

These features include integration of PSTN trunks and legacy PBX systems into Sametime/Telephony Control Server (TCS); VoIP and data survivability via PSTN access/breakout/fallback and IP link redundancy; PBX backup against IP trunk failure to the IBM TCS; secure VPNs with IPsec-encrypted voice.

Additional features include any-to-any least-cost call routing and dial-map planning; routed Internet Access with QoS for toll quality voice; traffic management with voice prioritization; and more.

Some Thoughts on Lotusphere

Michael Osterman — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:53:33 +0000

Lotusphere, IBM’s annual conference for all things messaging and collaboration, was held last week in Orlando. It was my fifth Lotusphere—always a good and informative conference held in a place that gets a bit more sun than our home base of Seattle. Here is my two cents on this year’s conference:

I did not see attendance figures, but the show seemed busier and better attended than last year. The keynotes were very well attended, particularly the Monday morning session that began with Kevin Spacey’s appearance, and the exhibit floor was packed at times.
The focus of the conference was on social business—using social media as a means of growing business, enabling decision making and making business more efficient. I really liked the focus of beginning the communication and collaboration discussion with personal interaction instead of technology, in large part because it aligns with the way that I think technology should be used in the context of how people interact.
People tend to exhibit enormous levels of inertia—they are resistant to change and tend to do pretty much what they want in the workplace regardless of the technologies or policies that are in place. Using that tendency and adapting the technology around the way that people are going to work anyway is more effective than implementing technology and then trying to mold people around technology or work processes. That seemed to be one of the foci of the event, and one that resonated with me quite well.
Also interesting was a rather frank admission from Jon Iwata, IBM’s senior VP for marketing and communications, that IBM’s senior management did not initially embrace the notion of social business. When it was first introduced, the naysayers outnumbered the proponents, citing the risks of lawsuits, losing intellectual property, the loss of key personnel to poaching by competing firms, etc. It took quite a bit of effort to achieve the acceptance of social business by key decision makers.
There was quite a bit of emphasis on the cloud as you might expect with IBM’s push of LotusLive and other cloud-based offerings, including LotusLive Symphony—a direct competitor to both Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. The online version of Symphony, expected to launch later this year, will be an interesting adjunct to the growing base of cloud offerings from IBM.
Ed Brill, Lotus’ director of messaging and collaboration, noted that Notes/Domino is holding its own in the market—not growing its share relative to other offerings, but not losing share either.
Lots of emphasis on smartphones and tablets—the new RIM PlayBook was featured prominently. IBM is developing for a variety of platforms, but seems to be putting most of its efforts into the Android, Apple and RIM smartphone and tablet offerings. On a side note, I saw more iPads than at any conference I have been to recently. This was the first conference at which I used an iPad almost exclusively—extremely impressed with its battery life despite significant use.

In short, Lotusphere was a very useful conference and, as always, is on my short-list of events to attend each year.

Some Observations and Thoughts from ARMA

Michael Osterman — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 18:11:09 +0000

I attended the American Records Management Association (ARMA) Conference and Expo in San Francisco this week—as always, an interesting show with lots of interesting content. Here are some of my thoughts and observations relative to email archiving and electronic content management, two key focus areas for Osterman Research:

There were several traditional email and content archiving vendors exhibiting on the show floor including EMC, IBM, CommVault, Iron Mountain, Symantec, Autonomy and Daegis (formerly Unify and AXS-One), among others. While it’s not surprising to see email and content archiving vendors at a show focused on records management, my discussions with some of them indicated that they were expanding their traditional focus beyond IT and legal and more towards records management as a whole.
Iron Mountain sponsored an interesting lunch session on the future of records information management. The guest speaker, well-known author Geoffrey Moore, presented an interesting view of the future of records management. The gist of his point is that records management is evolving more into collaboration management, and that defining content that should and should not be preserved will become more difficult over time.
Lots of focus on SharePoint for records management and a lot of exhibitors supporting the iPad.
Not surprisingly, the mood at this year’s ARMA seemed quite optimistic as we seem to be pulling slowly out of recession: lots of show floor traffic, happy exhibitors, growing interest in e-discovery and a general increase in the sophistication of the records management practice.
I was also struck (probably too strong a word) by the seeming convergence of records management and IT. At the excellent MER conference in Chicago a couple of years ago, there was a gulf that seemed to separate records management and IT in how they want to manage information, particularly in the context of archiving—I got much less of that vibe at the ARMA conference, indicating that the disciplines are converging and that companies are focusing more holistically on the practice of retaining and producing electronic content.

All in all, the ARMA conference should be on the short list for those interested in the archiving, information management, content management and related markets.

Microsoft vs. IBM and the iPad

Michael Osterman — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:03:27 +0000

Mary-Jo Foley has written an interesting piece about Microsoft’s lack of attention on the iPad, seemingly more interested in the future of Windows-based tablet PCs. That’s certainly not a surprise on a number of levels, not least of which is the fact that Microsoft obviously has much more to gain from seeing widespread adoption of tablets running Windows than they do simply selling applications for an Apple product. Obviously, Microsoft is doing very well without supporting the iPad, given this week’s report of $5.4 billion in net income during the first quarter.

That said, the contrast between Microsoft and IBM in the context of their support for the iPad is notable. At this week’s Information on Demand (#iodgc) conference, for example, the iPad was featured prominently in demonstrations of accessing backend databases, analytics tools and other capabilities focused on data management and access. IBM has performed substantial research on how people use tablets, smartphones, etc., including how they access them while in bed—many users, for example, keep their smartphone or iPad on their nightstand so that they can do a quick review of the next day’s activities before retiring, and so that they can get a quick view on overnight sales, email, etc. when they wake up—obviously activities for which the iPad is well suited.

Building on the Concept of Big Data, What about Little Data?

Michael Osterman — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:36:25 +0000

I am flying back from Las Vegas as I write this, returning from IBM’s annual Information on Demand (IOD) conference. As always, the conference provided lots of good content on all things information management, from email and file archiving through data analytics technologies and data mining practices. The primary theme of the conference—information on demand—stresses the importance of accessing data, creating information from it, learning from it, and then using that information to do everything from increasing sales to reducing the lethality of war injuries.

One of the key themes at the conference was that of “Big Data”—the practice of mining insights from vast and sometimes previously uncorrelated data stores. Given that most information stores are as yet untapped, not correlated with other data stores, or are severely underutilized in the context of useful data that could be mined from them (and given that Gartner estimates 988 exabytes of data will be created in 2010), the Big Data concept is one that organizations should consider very seriously. As but one of the myriad examples of useful data stores, consider Twitter: your customers and prospects may be talking about your brand and those of your competitors on a regular basis—if you could correlate this information with sales data, weather events, competitors’ campaigns or other relevant information, you might be able to gain insights you had never previously discovered.

That got me thinking about the concept of “Little Data”: the data that your organization has stored in the email archive (you really should have a true archiving system) or on file servers or in local PST files or on users’ desktops and laptops. Email stored for a long period of time contains a wealth of information about your customers, your prospects, your employees’ morale and other information that your company or individual employees could put to very good use. For example, a new marketing manager could analyze the past two or three years of archived email correspondence with her predecessor and learn a great deal about your current clients, including why they buy, how they buy, what campaigns they respond to and which they don’t, when they buy, etc. You could find out why prospects don’t turn into customers and if there is any commonality in their behavior. You might be able to correlate content between your staff and key customers with monthly sales reports or competitors’ offers or other relevant happenings. The email that might be useful could be direct correspondence with customers or it might be the emails or reports that field sales personnel send in after a client meeting.

Of course, poring through vast quantities of data will be extremely time-consuming and so will necessitate the use of some sort of analytics tools to help in the process. However, the intelligence and insight you might gain from the exercise—even if it’s as simple as analyzing the frequency of keywords used in emails from your 100 best customers over the past year—might be well worth the effort.

A Messaging News Webinar Brief on Unified Communications Best Practices

Stephanie Jordan — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:06:48 +0000

In this Messaging News Webinar Brief, Eric Young of FaceTime Communications discusses the gap between perception and reality when it comes to web 2.0 usage in the Enterprise.

View the full webinar here.

New ShoreTel UC Product Aimed at Small Business Market

Stephanie Jordan — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:38:17 +0000

Interested small- and mid-sized businesses can look forward to a unified communications (UC) offering coming later this quarter. Originally debuted at Lotusphere 2010, and formally launched at VoiceCon late last month, ShoreTel and IBM have partnered to offer ShoreTel for IBM Lotus Foundations.

According to the companies, the unique UC and collaboration offering combines a small business appliance, presence awareness, instant messaging, emailing, calendaring and IP telephony in an “out-of-the-box” solution.

“As unified communications and modern collaboration tools continue to deliver significant productivity and cost advantages to larger enterprises, ShoreTel is committed to delivering brilliantly simple solutions that also allow our SMB customers to quickly realize these benefits,” explains John W. Combs, chairman and CEO of ShoreTel.

Combs goes on to say that early deployments among customers with limited IT resources, including Raleigh, N.C.-based EnVision Solutions LLC have shown positive results and offers enterprise-class functionality in one easy to install, manage and use appliance.

“A large part of our business is conducted via telephone or through electronic communications like email, IM, and through interfaces such as portals and Web conferencing,” explains Douglas Henderson, president of Envision Solutions. “The ShoreTel and IBM Foundations integrated solution not only provides us with the continuity of communication essential to our business, but it has reduced our ongoing costs and greatly enhanced the way we communicate. With the ShoreTel business communication system, we have no single point of failure so that if any one office is struck by a disaster the entire company still maintains phone capability without interruption. No one in our company is ever in a black spot and unreachable, including when we are on the road or telecommuting. Although we are a small company, we have the same needs and expectations from our IT infrastructure as any large company. The ShoreTel and IBM Foundations solution has provided us with all these capabilities in a solution that is simple enough for us to manage without outside help and at a price that actually reduces our ongoing operational costs.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Last week Messaging News held its live Webinar—Unified, Secure and Compliant: Best Practices for Unified Communications. We discussed how UC platforms extend the communications borders of the modern corporate enterprise, increasing productivity while driving down costs, among other topics. The archived Webinar is available to view on our site.

IBM’s IOD Conference

Michael Osterman — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:07:07 +0000

Spent two days at IBM’s Information On Demand (iod2009) conference in Las Vegas and was quite impressed by a variety of things. Among them:

The Smart Archiving initiative that brings together a variety of technologies from various groups around the company to offer the most comprehensive approach to content archiving that I have seen to date.
The focus on content analytics across a wide range of areas. In the context of archiving, for example, IBM’s Content Analyzer can scan file servers and other data sources for information and provide deep analytics to determine what needs to be archived as a precursor to the archiving process itself. An important feature of this is the ability to analyze content from a variety of structured and unstructured information types to find patterns, anomalies, etc. in the data.
A significant commitment to cloud computing across virtually every area in the company.
Some interesting approaches that are being taken to expanding the uptake of LotusLive, as well as some new capabilities that will be introduced in 2010.

Plus, the conference was very well attended and seemed at least as crowded as last year’s, if not more so—always a good sign for any large conference.