UCStrategies Experts Discuss Avaya Flare

In this podcast, the UCStrategies Expert team discusses the recent announcements from Avaya, which include the Avaya Flare Experience.

The expert panel includes Jim Burton, Dave Michels, Blair Pleasant, Michael Finneran, David Yedwab, Marty Parker, Art Rosenberg, Nancy Jamison and Steve Leaden.

For more information on UCStrategies.com about Avaya's announcement:

• Avaya's Flare for Video, by Blair Pleasant
• Avaya's Non-Tablet, by Michael Finneran
• Avaya Introduces New Solutions For Business Collaboration, by Robbie Pleasant
• Multimodal UC Collaboration - Now Includes Video for Desktop Conferencing, by Art Rosenberg

UCStrategies encourages your comments on this podcast. Please see the "Comments" section at the bottom of this page to contribute.

Jim Burton: Welcome to UCStrategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton, and I'm here, as usual, with the UCStrategies expert team. Last week, Avaya made some important announcements, and we are here to talk about that. We had gotten some introductions to those announcements last year at VoiceCon when Brett Shockley got up and gave a demo, along with Kevin Kennedy. So without further ado, I'm going to pass this over to the team, because they have lots of interesting comments to make. And Dave is going to start off with some comments about his observations about the announcement itself. So, Dave, over to you.

Dave Michels: Thanks, Jim. What I was surprised about with the announcement, was how fast the news came and how fast it went away. There was one of the articles I actually read that said that everyone was talking about it, but that was news to me and it didn't seem like it got much buzz. There wasn't much buzz around the build-up of the announcement and there certainly wasn't much after. There was a bunch of news on that Wednesday and Thursday, right after the announcement, not what you would call news, but what you would call coverage. But it's really dropped off since then. What they announced was of course, an experience and a tablet, and I know that we will be discussing more about the experience, but let me focus in on the tablet a little bit.

I think the tablets are going to be a hot item in general and I am glad to see so much excitement around a new device in the communications world. But I think that Avaya may have missed the boat on this one a little bit. And I think they know it too, which is why they are working so hard not to call it a tablet. And I don't know why they don't call it a tablet. It looks like a tablet, it acts like a tablet, it's the size of a tablet, it's running Android. But they don't want to call it a tablet. I guess it's not a tablet because it's $2,000 and it will be in a class by itself, based on that alone.

I also found the naming really confusing. The name I believe is "Communicator" and just Monday I had blogged that Microsoft was dropping the name "Communicator" with their Lync rebranding and I commended that. I thought "that's great," because just about every UC company out there is offering a product called the "Communicator," from ShoreTel, Mitel, Cisco...I think NEC's got a Communicator...everybody's got one. And so, I was kind of happy to see Microsoft drop that; it's not a meaningful name anymore and then just two days later, Avaya announces they have a "Communicator." At least, I think that what they announced. I am not even sure, because the articles that I read basically said that their product might be called a Communicator, or some articles said we don't know the name of it. I went back to look at a press release from Avaya and it doesn't give a name it's very confusing to me what the product name of this pad or non-pad actually is. So, that's my first take on it. Blair, what do you think?

Blair Pleasant: I thought it was a very big announcement and I think the video device itself, was sort of secondary. To me, what was really important was this whole Flare experience. And there's a lot of confusion around, is Flare the name of the device, or is it something else? Having a name for an experience is definitely going to be challenging and it's already causing a lot of confusion. But Flare really was what impressed me the most about this whole announcement.

So from what I saw from the pre-briefing and then the actual event, Flare really is about making communication and collaboration simpler. And I loved the user interface and the spotlight, this concept of being able to drag and drop contacts into conversations and conferences simply by dragging the contact cards into the spotlight. It really does look very simple to do. And also, every contact card has information and history showing the communication history you've had with this person. So it really provides context, which is another thing that's very important. So you can see if you sent an IM to someone, or files that you've shared; and everything is in one place, which I like.

And another thing that I liked is that through directory matchups and social networking, you can bring in other people from outside the enterprise. And most of you know that I'm really excited about social networking. So I think the integration of social networking into this Flare experience is going to be very important.

On the downside, we've only seen demos of this whole Flare thing on the new video device. And the device itself was purpose-built for Flare. So we don't know yet what the experience will be like on other tablets like the iPad and on other mobile devices. So if it's the same as or similar to what we saw on the Avaya video device, then it will be great; but I don't know if that's actually going to happen or not.

One thing I didn't hear about as much as I would have liked during the announcement was more about how Flare is going to be used for CEBP or a business-communication enabled business processes. It really focused on the UC user productivity aspect, but not so much on the UC business process. So I would have liked to have heard more about that. Michael, there was a lot about mobility, what do you have to say about that?

Michael Finneran: Well, I don't know. I'm with you; I thought the video parts of the announcement were more interesting. Though tablet is certainly a hot market and something that's going to grab interest; but as a tablet, the thing they came out with is pretty hard to swallow. The talking price they were using is $2,000, which is more than twice what anyone's looking to pay. They've got the wrong Wi-Fi interface in it. You look at the battery life specifications and you're talking about three hours. We haven't seen much about the Cisco Cius, but I can't imagine they missed the target by that much. So as a tablet, as far as I'm concerned, this thing doesn't even come close. But as a desktop video phone, the question is, do we really need a desktop video phone at this stage of the game? David, I know you were also into the video part of this.

David Yedwab: Yes, thank you, Michael. I think it was very interesting that Avaya has finally closed the loop, and is bringing video into their UC suite as one of the modes-one of the multi-modal ways-that people can communicate. Certainly, other vendors in the industry, most notably Cisco, have been saying that video is going to be taking over the world, for the past year or so. And Avaya is certainly acknowledging that video is growing in importance, and is playing in the space more aggressively than their previous OEM relationships with some of the other vendors; although, some of the portions of the video in this announcement are OEM from others. The fact that ease-of-use of video in the client-and that's a whole other subject that I'll just touch on briefly-is the fact that we now have dueling clients from all of the vendors in the industry. Let me pass it on to Marty.

Marty Parker: Thank you for the observations, folks. I also was on the road last week, so I did not get to be there in person; but I'll compliment them on the creativity that is evidenced in Flare. Yet I would ask the question of whether either the Flare solution or the Quad solution from Cisco is really competitive. The kind of things that Flare talks about need to have more context than I'm seeing provided. And it is actually IBM and Microsoft who seem to be out in front on that conversation, because they are working in either IBM Quickr or Microsoft SharePoint workspaces.

So an attorney, for example, gets a call relative to a matter from a client, if they are calling from within the workspace, only the content relative to that matter is going to pop up on their desk; which is the right way to do it, not everything related to that domain name. So there's a lot of work to be done if the telecom vendors want to compete in the collaboration space, which is a 10-year-old, fairly mature and sophisticated market.

The last thing I'd add is that it's clear that behind the scenes, with the system platform approach-the further progressions on the system manager, the Aura system manager management tools and so forth-that Avaya is really trying to retain control of the revenue and the maintenance, follow-on maintenance streams for the overall system, including some hardware. And I think that that emphasis is, in part, reflective of their drive to get back to profitability, as evidenced by the Forbes article last week indicating that they'd been losing in the range of 10% on revenue in the first nine months of this fiscal year. So I think it's a challenge right now. I'm glad the creativity's occurring in the market, as people have said, but I think bringing it into context and making it profitable is the big challenge right now. Art, do you want to add anything to this?

Art Rosenberg: Yes-my reaction was the way they had designed things looked like it was more for a contact initiator. In other words, you want to contact someone, you put this spotlight and you can move people in and look. What was missing-from a multi-modal communication perspective-from both sides of the fence, you've got to look at well what does the recipient get out of all this? If someone wants to get a hold of me and they do whatever they do, what do I do? What are the tools that I have? I didn't see that discussed. And I kind of think that that's got to be part of the experience for a user, no matter where the user is located; whether it's in the organization, whether it's outside the organization, and, god forbid, if a customer who you have absolutely no control over, but you better be nice to him.

Blair Pleasant: I think that's a really good point, Art; I actually blogged about that. With the spotlight aspect, in the demos they showed how you can just drag and drop people into conferences or put them over into a sidebar and then bring them back in. But it didn't show what the experience was like to those participants who were being dragged around to different conferences.

Nancy Jamison: Hi, this is Nancy. That's funny, actually. I am going to add on to what Blair has been saying about the experience. I think this market's so tight now, especially now that we have those-someone pointed out, we've come full circle of bringing in the video and the collaboration. But the branding has to be spot on, and I'm not quite understanding naming an experience. I think that's going to be hard to market. I don't understand Flare and Aura together as branding. I like the fact that we are going towards names, but in this case the name-it's not a, let's say, shining experience in getting people to understand what it is. And so I think they're going to have a difficult time with that.

Art Rosenberg: I think one of the problems that always comes up is, when you bring in all this new technology-you have the price is right and the it works and everything else-but how you do educate end users for using them and stuff? And if you don't have a good name that's descriptive enough, it's not-

Nancy Jamison: It might get lost.

Art Rosenberg: Yes.

Steve Leaden: Hi, this is Steve Leaden and it was very interesting. I happened to have been at the launch for Flare and actually thought in a futuristic kind of, trends kind of fashion, if you will, as I was looking at it from a "Day 1 / Rev 1" kind of viewpoint as well. Just very briefly what I could see was that it's really an all-in-one video device and it has with it in its native format phone, video, presence, IM, Chat, SMS text, as well as social networking. So, when you pull up a user profile, you pull up one of your colleagues; it will give you telephone, cell phone, email address, SMS text, as well as social networking identifiers; this way you can pretty much get in touch with them in a collaborative way on any kind of level.

The other thing it does, is it has small tabs on the right side that allows you to look at corporate directory, your favorites list and other kinds of common lists to identify people within your company very quickly. It will also give you an instant snapshot of any person from a presence fashion, if they are on the phone, if they are away from the desk, if they are on vacation, if they are on the video com or whatever it might be - that's all quickly identified too.

It has a very slick interface; they basically showed me and I actually played with it. I could bring two colleagues into the center kind of screen of the portal off the spotlight and as I am bringing two colleagues together, almost like an iPad kind of sweep, it's dual kind of function - bringing one colleague and then the second. It quickly comes up with the question; do I want to do a conference or a transfer? I say "do a conference" and literally it makes the call and brings both parties together along with myself - very effective.

From what I understand, too, you can run multiple video conference or audio conference meet-me sessions in various formats and you can go in and out of the room, you can have side bars with people...again, the interface is what I would call very friendly. It also can come with a handset add-in. It was featured as wired at Day 1, but will have a local wireless capability. It will also have three 3G add-ins, so which makes it as the potential of a desktop replacement. So, even though its price point is fairly expensive at the moment, at the $2,000 mark, which probably won't get a whole lot of traction in the market just yet...but from my perspective, it's now a flat screen softphone with a handset. It's also a video phone; it's everything, I think really, the desktop of the future, I think. It's a real baseline for where it could be viewed as that. So, I think its price point begins to come down as competition enters the picture. The fact that Avaya has come out with a device early in the process, I would say, it could be very game changing for them. But again, price will be the all-important consideration to get market penetration as we go forward.

So, from a bottom line point of view, a little bit in the early stage, but I think in five years from my viewpoint, I think we will see this as a very common device as a total replacement to the desktop set, especially when price point gets to be manageable. So forward-thinking wise, in five years we will see this as really the device of the future. Kudos to Avaya for coming out with a device like this and we will see what the next releases look like.

Dave Michels: This is Dave Michels. One other thing that I thought was interesting; both Cisco Cius and this new tablet from-whatever it's called-from Avaya, I thought it was interesting that both companies have decided to use Android as the operating system. Both of these companies have reasonably proprietary backgrounds, and they're using a free open source operating system. I think that's very interesting. And then also last week, Cloud Telecomputers introduced a new version of their Android-based IT phone. And I'm beginning to wonder if we're going to start seeing Android appear on the desktop phone as well as these tablets.

Jim Burton: We'll have to keep an eye out for that one, Dave. Well, if there's nothing else, thanks everybody and look forward to talking to you all again next week. Have a good week.