Gurdeep Singh Pall Delivers the Goods During Microsoft  Keynote at VoiceCon 2010 Orlando

Gurdeep is is the Corporate VP of the Unified Communications R&D group at Microsoft.  I had the distinct pleasure of working with Gurdeep when I was at Microsoft.  He’s not only an incredibly technical and passionate leader, but a great speaker as well.  I always make a point of taking extensive notes whenever he presents, because of the wealth of information and key talking points that he delivers.

Here are my notes from his VoiceCon Orlando keynote presentation.

On-Demand Presentation Recording:

You can watch the keynote here:  http://tv.voicecon.com/

• Register and go to Live TV. 
• In the video window, click Menu, and navigate to on-demand presentations for VoiceCon (March 2010, Orlando)

Statistics Presented in the Introduction Video:

• 1 in 6 US households don’t have fixed line phones
• US mobile phone users send 1.7x more texts than phone calls on average (I expect this is much higher in UK/Europe)
• The statistic rises to 10x among teenagers
• 70% of mobile phone calls originate from cars
• 4 million “millennials” enter the workforce each year
• The most popular online destination for the millennial demographic is social networks
• 300 million people use Windows Live Messenger to make voice calls
• In December 2009, AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate the regulatory requirement to provide landlines to households
• “The next generation is here”

Introduction:

“The only thing that is constant is change”

Computer and phone have been separate, and over the last decades, computers kept getting faster and faster, but phones have  the same

The average information worker only spends 40% of time at their desk.  (So most communications systems are designed for 40% of use?  What about the other 60%?)

Microsoft Has Just “One” Idea: 

If we had to design communications system, starting anew, without being tethered to the past, how would you go about designing that system? 

How do you take software to create a communications system like that?

Microsoft had a luxury:  They could be disruptive because there was no legacy business to protect.

OCS Today:

70% of "fortune X”( ? – didn’t catch the number) companies have OCS today

Microsoft and entire industry led the transformation from mainframes to PC’s.  The ethos was: don’t buy hardware, software and services and software from a single vendor, build an ecosystem

“Mainframe era economics plagues the PBX industry.”

New Wave 14 features Demo:

Jamie Stark did a great job showing new features of “Communications Server Wave 14”.  I was happy to see that they skipped past the typical “Presence is dialtone” explanation and embedded presence in Outlook.  This is a very powerful message, but one that this particular audience has all seen before.

Demo highlights:

• Location awareness
• E911 services – powered by the location awareness (Location is carried in the SIP channel and sent to a public service providers in the cloud.)
• “Visual Voice Mail” type voice mail UI – directly accessible in Office Communicator
• Click to convert to Voice Mail to text via Exchange UM  (cool feature: each transcribed word is a hyperlink that will jump to the right place in the audio playback.)
• Contact Card & Skill Search  This is an interface directly into the SharePoint index of skillsets and information
• Call Admission Control

Case Studies

This section was followed by a great demo from Clarity Consulting around a hosted Call Centre solution they built on OCS 2007 R2.   

There was also a customer presentation from AT Kearney, a business consulting company with 3500 employees and 47 offices.

• Replaced legacy PBX with OCS R2, extended for mobile users
• Improved employee work/life balance and lowered TCO
• 300k IM / day
• 450 – 500 video calls / day
• Anecdote: OCS federation with clients like Best Buy enables secure & compliant communication (both data and voice) at no extra cost.

Gartner Magic Quadrants:

For four years in a row, Microsoft has been a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for UC, and Microsoft is also a leader in the following MQ’s: 

• Enterprise Content Management
• Social Software
• Information Access Technology

Gurdeep’s Predictions

In next 3 years

• 50% of voice calls will be more than voice
• 75% of apps will be communications enabled

Quote: "The success of UC will be like salt in food.  It’s always there, an important ingredient, but you never see it."  (referring to the fact that it will be embedded into applications by default).

My Takeaways

I think the big takeaway is that Microsoft is leading in Enterprise Collaboration.  Voice is becoming an increasingly a smaller part of collaboration, and while still critically important, must fit seamlessly into the bigger picture of real-time (synchronous) and non-real-time (asynchronous) collaboration.  This, along with seamless mobility, are the most critical factors to consider when developing a UC strategy within an organization.

-John Lamb, Modality Systems