I like to think of “templates” when I see how I can extend a business process using voice. It helps me think faster. Voice templates are examples of voice based solutions and remind me when I can use voice to solve a particular problem. For instance, if you are faced with the problem of communicating information to the general public, voice is a great way to accomplish that task. Another example would be to use voice to carry data outside the firewall to support remote workers. My latest one? Decision support systems.

Decision support systems deliver context sensitive data to a decision maker in real time. Here’s an example: you are a manager of a technical support team, and a new trouble ticket comes in. The trouble ticket is escalated to a second level support, and you’ve got to figure out which of your support team has to handle the issue. You can use voice to reduce the human latency in the process by calling all of the available support managers. When one picks up, the call would announce that a new second level ticket was just entered, and the subject was “user interface crashes on install”. As a manager, you could then decide that Vitaly is your best engineer for that, assign the task to him, then hang the phone up. Or, you might know that Vitaly is on vacation, or swamped, and assign it to Bill. By presenting data along with an opportunity to decide on the path, the process minimizes human latency.

This scales and manages well too:

• By fanning the call to multiple managers, you manage individual schedules among your management team.
• If no one answers, you can call later on in the day. Multiple tickets could be presented sequentially in the same phone call.
• The solution doesn’t care where the manager is: she is freed from her desktop.
• The solution plays nicely with existing infrastructure.

When viewed in the context of other great voice attributes, decision support is an excellent feature that voice can carry.

We were honored that our work with Voice Mashups was recognized as being one of the top innovations in the industry at the recent Spring VON conference. The fact that our firm was the only finalist representing New England let alone Massachusetts really surprised us.
Of the 12 companies recognized, nine are based in the US. Three of the nine are California based.

Here is the winners list with corporate headquarters.
WYDE Voice LLC -Long Beach CA.
Speakanet A/S- Denmark
Vertico software- Germany
Agito Networks-Sunnyvale, CA.
Citrix/EasyCall- Fort Lauderdale, Fl.
Broadsoft – Gaithersburg, Maryland
SightSpeed- Berkeley, CA.
TeleCommunication Systems – Annapolis, Maryland
D-TAC – Thailand
Envysion- Louisville, CO.
Synchronoss Technologies- Bridgewater, NJ.
The Thomas Howe Company- Osterville, MA.

Obviously, this is just one data point when discussing the dramatic changes taking place within the telco/service provider marketplace. But, I (almost) feel for our friends in the VC world. Looking for innovation can rack up a lot of frequent flyer miles.

Spring 2008 VON has come and gone, and it’s time to sit down in the lobby of the Fairmont in San Jose, get a glass of the house Chardonnay and wait for the JetBlue flight back home. On the one hand, many people were commenting how dead the show was, but my other hand can’t hold the amount of good leads I got from the show. As they say in Boston, all politics are local. So, here’s my experience, the good, the bad and the ugly:

The Good

• Not only were we honored with a VON Innovator’s Award, we were named an Editor’s Top Ten Pick. More than that, we were the only professional services companies named at any level. We thank the VON Editor’s for this honor; we won’t disappoint.
• To say that we are proud to be a Broadsoft Partner and featured in Broadsoft’s Marketplace doesn’t capture our feelings. I’ll have a separate announcement about this in a few days, but we truly believe that Broadsoft’s market leading platform will become the defacto standard for voice enabled offerings from the carriers. So, for all you Ruby fans out there, I wrote a ruby gem for Broadsoft that I’ll post to whoever wants it. Mike Lauricella, the marketing lead on the program, has done an excellent job putting this marketplace together, no doubt under the vision of uber-marketer Scott Wharton.
• The un-conference was three times larger than last show, and many people who attended reported to the Pulver staff that it was the best part of the show for them, including Chris Fine from Goldman Sachs and Brad Templeton of the Electronic Freedom Foundation.
• My sessions on Communications Enabled Business Process, Web 2.0 service creation, Social Networking and on Voice Mashup templates were well attended – thank you so much to everyone who showed up. For nearly all of these presentations, it was my first time giving them – your questions and attention will make them so much better next time.
• Oh my goodness, Andy Abramson’s Wine Dinners will go down in history as classic events.
• The Broadsoft booth was hopping. I mean hopping. Serious traffic in there. Thanks to the booth staff who supported me.
• Seeing (nearly) all my friends, but especially you phone geeks with a dozen phones in your pockets, with another in your left hand taking a Qik video, while drinking with your right. You know who you are… you resemble the remark.
• Being present at the un-conference when Ken Camp asked Sheryl Brueker to marry him. You never saw that at a conference, now, have you?
• As I said before, a two-inch thick stack of leads.

The Bad

• People commented on the VON show’s attendance, and it did seem like the numbers were down. My protestations about the stack of cards aside, I would have flown out here to meet one good guy. I met about two hundred more than that. The disturbing parts for me are two-fold : how people mistake quantity for quality, and how quick they are to predict a show’s slide. If you’ve been around a while, you know this show’s got more lives than a dozen cats. Count on it.
• Russell Shaw’s empty seat at the table.
• Service providers need direction and advice on how to compete and grow in this new market. If the VON show doesn’t give it, no one will. I’m going to tweak the leadership of the show to concentrate less on technology, and more on business strategy.
• Too many people who should know better say that our emerging market is mature. Come’on. Wake up. You’re annoying me.
• During one meeting, my eyes were opened to the fact that most of the people whom I think are doing the crazy good stuff (Troy Davis, David Troy, Jay Phillips, Mark Spencer) are much younger than those tasked with leading the conference. I think we better include before they exclude.

The Ugly

• Me after Andy’s wine dinner. There’s video, but I’m not going to help you find it.

Jeff’s right – there’s a VON blur. I’m still trying to sort out exactly how I’m going to find time to respond to the literally handfuls of cards in my pocket. Say what you want… my biggest piles of cards are from VON. Always.

So much to blog about… and I will when I have the moment. If you’re at the show, I’m in the Broadsoft booth on and off today. Happy to announce that both Broadsoft and ours truly were named in the Editor’s Top 10 Picks in the Innovator’s Award Ceremony last night. Like I was telling Scott Wharton last night, the innovator density is pretty high in the Broadsoft booth these days.

David Greenfield wrote an excellent report discussing SOA and UC convergence. His article also blends CEBP under the UC umbrella. He does a great job reviewing many of the major platform players and their approaches to the marketplace.

However, this paragraph caught my attention and flew in the face of our own client experiences .

” Communications- enabled apps come in an out of fashion every few years. What’s new this time is the SOA approach. Making UC just another service within the SOA environment keeps apps flexible and dynamic. We believe UC can help individuals collaborate more effectively, but proving ROI is difficult.”

To be fair, the article does point out that most of the platform apis handle web services. It does not stress how important that new capacity is for end users, the IT department, and for the enterprise as a whole. It is the yeast that makes the bread.

Our experience helping enterprise clients think through, develop, and deploy real projects clearly shows ROI can absolutely be the driving factor when deciding how/where/when to deploy these types of solutions. Yes, it is true, rather simple sounding mashups that blend in data or smooth out business processes may become the secret sauce behind a successful CEBP implementation. Simplicity is OK with most clients. They seem to like the fact that helping them improve customer experiences, save, and make money is at the root of these solutions.

As we have discussed over and over again, the real value to clients when discussing CEBP is that it is NOT a one size fits all solution. Clients quickly realize these offerings (whether platform or hosted) provide dozens and hundreds of unique opportunities to impact their business processes, customers, and staff positively.

I’m speechless. The shock and sadness I felt when hearing of Russell’s passing will be hard to shake. I imagined that my life would include his presence at trade shows and events for a long time to come. At dinner, Andy Abramson and his wife Helene, Lee Dryburgh, Jim Courtney, James Body and I drank a toast to a comrade, and spent an hour on earth that Russell didn’t get to spend. I found myself searching the faces of others in my community, with a growing realization that this scene repeats for each face. Tough.

Hug somebody important to you tonight. There’s a finite number of times you’ll have a chance to do that. We’re not going to forget you, Russell. I didn’t know you well enough.

Thank you to everyone who came out to hear me speak on the opening day of Ecomm 2008. A couple people have asked me to post my presentation from the Paprika : Voice is a Spice talk, so here I’ve put it here.

The premise of the talk is that voice is a lot like a commodity market that tries to grow by changing the commodity, not the ways it’s used. For instance, I used paprika as my example, and suggested that if a paprika CTO faced the same problems as the telecom market, the response might be to produce paprika soup. (Yes, I picked paprika because the idea of paprika soup is nauseating.) For all the higher value paprika soup has over just plain paprika, no one wants it. I used corn as an example of success, which for all kinds of good and bad reasons, is a commodity that supplies a good percentage of products in the average grocery store, including it’s inclusion as an ingredient (corn flakes), a drink (high fructose corn syrup), a food additive (Coke food coloring and flavoring) and even as what cows now eat in the feedlots (even though cows eventually die because they cannot digest corn well… they simply keep the cows alive long enough using anti-biotics and then kill them.) Corn is a commodity, but is now dominant in our diet not because we eat more corn, but because it’s used in so many ways to make other products better or less expensive. Relating this back to paprika, the proper response isn’t to pretend that paprika is the important part, but to find other recipes that would benefit from it’s rich, red color.

Mashups are a very compelling architecture by which we can add voice into other applications. I gave examples from logistics, health care, financial and IT help desk applications, none of which are voice applications, but all of which can be made better with voice. As a business side effect, all of these applications currently serve problems that enterprises pay for. As businessmen, all we need to do is to convince them that the voice mashup solution is better than the current solutions, and from my research, it currently is.

In the end, we will undergo the same transition as the agricultural market. In the last one hundred years, we have moved from a nation of farmers to a nation of cooks. I see the future of voice as an identical transformation.

The bottom line is this: voice is truly a commodity, and to expand it’s reach in the world, we need to treat it that way. Our attempts to innovate voice through additional features reduces it’s value as a commodity. We need to turn our attention away from voice application innovation, and instead concentrate on making other applications better with voice.

I’ve had the ridiculous pleasure of sitting in the audience at the eComm show this week. I’m trying to write some mashup software for the show next week (more about that soon), but I just can’t seem to keep my head down in my laptop when people like this keep distracting me:

Martin Geddes: For those in the the know, Martin is possibly the most insightful analyst in the Telco 2.0 space. Martin’s talk about the future of carriers was excellent, and an excellent preview to his conference next month in England. Martin’s invited me to speak, and I get the distinct sense that I better have my A game on. Martin’s talk focused on a new, two-sided business model for the carriers of the future, where the fundamental roles of carriers was akin to a logistics company.

Dean Bubbly : Dean’s another analyst, but he eats, sleeps and breathes wireless. Dean’s talks and analysis on the current and future wireless markets made me feel like I had a lot to learn. My sense was, I wasn’t alone. Dean’s analysis of Rich Miner’s talk is actually better than hearing the original talk, which in itself was quite good.

Dr. Dawn Nafus : What a wonderful talk from this Intel researcher. Dawn’s presentation was full of her results from real-world presence and context research, all of which I found completely fascinating. My favorite? Apparently, our conventional wisdom of when people are busy is exactly wrong. We are more likely to be interrupted when we are at the computer or on some other activity… not less.

Irv Shapiro : Irv’s company, ifbyphone, looks to me like the phone mashup service provider that’s closest to getting it. His presentation was right on, his message clear, and the ifbyphone business model looks like it might be a winner. Pay attention to them.

Simonie Wilson: Simonie Wilson brought a much needed injection of voice design rationality to our discussion. A great example of how the technology we need exists… if we were to just design it in the right way.

And I haven’t even the time to talk about Jonathan Christiensen from Skype, Marc Smith from Microsoft, Blaine Cook from Twitter, Nitzan Shaer from Mobivox or Mark Rolston from Frog Design, because today’s completely full of more people to distract me.

I’m really screwed.
Thomas S. Howe – http://www.thomashowe.com
Next Generation Telephony Consulting
howethomas@aol.com
(508) 364-9972

The ECOMM presentation where we compared Voice to Corn grabbed a good deal of attention and comments. We will make sure to post the presentation later next week.

Most of the comments have been favorable with bloggers getting the analogy that corn is the oldest of commodities that has been gaining in importance and value as it gets added to new products. It is everywhere and in everything.

We can do the same thing with voice.

The only negative feedback that we’ve seen had to be tongue in cheek, I hope. The writer didn’t like the corn analogy since that industry is governed by regulations, subsidies, and monopolistic tendencies. And the telco world is not?

If you saw Tom’s “Voice as Corn” presentation let us know what you think.

Here’s some quotes from some of the speakers… thought you’d like to hear them.

• Companies were tought in 1930 that firms should be vertically integrated because integration costs were so high. With the light weight programming models provided by SOA and mashups, that’s clearly different.

• Marc Adler : Citigroup : In order for citigroup’s efforts to be successful, all silos have to be broken. Current expert analysis is so siloed that only the ten people who have it can use it. SOA allows others in the group to subscribe to the data to use. Updates to volatilty curves for example. It allows any application to subscribe to the analysis of any other application, and in a controllable and predictable way. The challenge of SOA is to subscribe to anyone publishing data. As an example, risk data can be published for real time analysis and decisions based on the current risk profile.

• Jonathan Rochelle : Google : Is Google Docs only for small companies? Google isn’t going to be doing a lot of mashups, but will be a platform for millions of mashups. Google started concentrating on consumers as people – moved to people as workers. Small to medium businesses have it easy, but demanded Google to create apps. Making the productivity argument, which is one of the line items that people are starting to add, which haven’t been there. People used to bring work experience home… now the tide is changed, where people bring the productivity back to work.

• Michael Ogrinz : Bank of America – Do you believe that corporate portals are still relevant? No, I don’t think so. The model is close to the TV model, where it was network control. The core of the problem is that the power users pick what content is important to them. The notion that the corporation figures out what is appropriate for dissemeniaton, that stays. Finally, we have content creation users that have this build in modicum of development experience, now can have other avenues to publish that data on pages, widgets and other things like excel spreadsheets, phones, etc. Talk about the long tail, and the IT department not serving users – they will serve the platform that the users need to make their own mashups.

• Ogrintz : If you want to do a mashup about leading indicators, booking a flight on the top eight flights looking for trends in seats availability. (Research example.) Anyone can do this, so these are examples of where anyone can get this – so data is not private. This is more about your ability to analyze, not the availability of data.

• Adler : All of the banks have been hit by fines from exhanges because we let data seep out. Reuters will charge a user if they can see it, even if they don’t use it. The interesting things is “how do we entitle the data”. We can use those market quotes in dervied data, avoiding the costs of displaying real time data, but still make it valuable. No solution for this yet, but something we need to work out.

• Rochelle : Need to simplify the SLA platform will be an acceptable method of handling trust issues. Use Web 2.0 for services based architecture to simplify that process, you’ll get much higher rates of acceptance.

• Moderator : GS said SAS will become pervasive in the coming years? True? All : Duh

• Ogrintz : SOA is so super well supported, it’s why you don’t hear from it. The reason for the rise of the Web is because the IT department sucks. The IT departments can handle a browser, and that’s all.

• Rochelle : FoxPro,Dbase was over because they could get it done better than the IT department could. They basically suck. That allowed people like Google to get around the IT department and go straight to the users.