Vantage 2013: Another fine vintage

Today’s post comes from Norv Leong, Director of Product Marketing at Actiance.

Just like any popular restaurant, Microsoft continues to deliver sumptuous dishes and please its customers.  Let’s take Microsoft Lync as an example.  According to Microsoft, Lync revenue grew 45% in its Q4 2012 and, even more eye-popping, was the 822% growth in hosted Lync Voice in particular.

Goodness all around, but it’s all for naught if you’re in a regulated industry and/or subject to a lot of potential litigation, where having records of everything is absolutely critical.  What counts is that you have a management solution in place that can capture and monitor Lync communications so you stay out of regulatory and legal trouble.

Think of it as a wine pairing.  Meals at restaurants are almost always enhanced with a glass of fine wine (or perhaps a craft beer for you beer lovers out there).  It complements the meal and ensures a holistic experience.

That’s where we come into the picture.  Actiance has been and continues to be the gold standard with respect to its varietal of wine, namely, the management of unified communications platforms.   Rather than get complacent and rest on our laurels, we’ve actually done the opposite.  We’ve managed to make an awesome product, even awesomer!  (Not sure if that’s a word, but today it is.)

With the release of Vantage 2013, Actiance has set the bar even higher for ensuring compliance and security for the leading UC platform on the planet.  Just taking a look at the latest features included in the release and it’s a no-brainer why financial services companies, technology firms, and government agencies all turn to Actiance to meet their governance requirements.

Let’s start with the obvious:  support for Lync 2013.  Vantage picks up right where it left off in Lync 2010.  Vantage supports the monitoring and capture of Lync IM, Persistent chat, and now Voice.  Dodd-Frank and PRA/FCA (for our UK friends) regulations are driving demand for Lync voice recording solutions, and Vantage is the cleanest solution in town to do just that.

Next up is real-time Jive capture.  UC may be growing leaps and bounds, but the enterprise social software space is growing even faster.  Jive’s the poster child of the space, and Vantage 2013 adds real-time capture support so you don’t miss a thing.  The social space is dynamic, and it’s important not to miss any key postings, deletions, and edits that a regulator, auditor, or attorney would find of interest.

Finally, you’ve got direct integration with Symantec Enterprise Vault, the beast in the email archiving space.  By integrating directly with EV, customers can retain the invaluable metadata so crucial to quickly understand the essence of conversations in a social world.  With all the blogging, commenting, replying, and sharing going on, it’s imperative to have a tagging and archiving workflow that retains as much context as possible.  Without it, your legal and IT costs can blow through the roof.

So, Actiance provides benefits on several fronts – from UC to collaboration to archiving.  With governance headaches out of the way, a compliance officer or general counsel can sit down, relax, and enjoy that glass of Vantage 2013.

If Paul the Octopus Can Do It…

For you football (soccer as they say here in the US) fans, you’ve got to love the uncanny talent and skill (and maybe luck, too) of Paul the Octopus.  He’s the eight-legged oracle who correctly picked all the World Cup 2010 matches, including the final one resulting in Spain being crowned el campeon at the quadrennial event.

I’m not Paul (nor an octopus for that matter, although my colleagues do call me interesting names from time to time), but I’ll take a stab at offering my predictions on what may unfold in 2011 on the technology side of the pitch.  2010 was pretty exciting (think iPad, Facebook, Foursquare – and the boss wants me to mention that England retaining the Ashes was pretty big, too), but 2011 portends to be at least as innovative and disruptive.

Mordor Won’t Go Away
The Lord of the Rings trilogy pitted good versus evil.  This couldn’t be more apropos for technology as well.  There are those who are good, and those who are bad.  The latter are folks who are ever persistent in their attempts to hack computer networks in search of credit card numbers, passwords, personally identifiable information, or avenues to unleash the new virus they just created.  It’s a continual game of cat-and-mouse that never seems to die.  It’s like Jason of Friday the 13th fame meets Groundhog Day.  Different dung, same day.

Look for these cybercriminals to continue to exploit vulnerabilities in social networks to deliver their malware.  The popularity and trusted nature of users’ relationships with each other on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are perfect platforms for evildoers to ply their trade.  Unified communications platforms like Microsoft Lync, OCS and Lotus Sametime are also ripe targets for new forms of malware, especially since many of these platforms support federation, which opens up corporate messaging systems to the outside world through IM applications (e.g., Yahoo IM and Google Talk).  Because many of these communications channels operate in real-time, the spreading of malware can happen very quickly and very globally.

Oh, behaaaaave…
You didn’t think the regulatory bodies were just gonna sit around and let their respective industries run amok with respect to social media, did you?  Mwha ha ha (that’s the evil laugh I’ve been practicing).  The coming year (I’m furiously rubbing the crystal ball here and looking wise) will see the introduction of more regulations specific to social media and these new communications channels.  It’s not just about email any more.  There’s Skype, Twitter, Facebook, Google Talk, corporate IM networks, and the list goes on and on.

The financial services industry was the first to issue social media-specific guidelines, and the FDA began to hold hearings way back in 2009 to solicit opinions and advice on what to do for social media.  The energy and utilities sector has FERC and NERC regulations that can be interpreted, if not explicitly, to encompass social media.  Even the government, the poster child for rigidity and glacial-paced operations (oh boy, I really am going all out to get myself some form of government monitoring on this blog, aren’t I?), is starting to step up to the plate, as evidenced by the State of Florida and the US Department of Defense each releasing guidelines on social media usage and record retention.  So, the trend is impacting all levels of government – local, state, and federal.

Smartphones:  My New BFF
Look around everywhere, and people are texting away, playing games on the subway, or listening to some tunes on the beach – all with their smartphones.  It seems everyone has an iPhone or a Droid these days, and who can blame them.  These little gizmos are so loaded with features and intelligence that it’s hard to put them down, hence, BFF.  It’s like having MacGyver in the palm of your hand.

From shopping to “checking in” to online dating, mobile phones have come a long way since the days of the “brick” phones.  The globalization of the Internet and the rate of mobile adoption in every part of the world reflect the ongoing opportunities within this technology space.  With so many business applications moving to the “cloud”, this opens up new potential markets for vendors looking to secure or manage communications via smartphones.

Partly Cloudy Forecast
We’ve already begun to see many businesses offer a hosted version of their software.  Though the “cloud” concept has been around for awhile, 2011 may see a surge in customers opting for hosted solutions.  With the widespread use of real-time collaboration tools, like Microsoft Lync and Cisco Webex, it’s very easy these days to hold meetings over the Web without needing to travel to a customer or partner site.  This also makes it easier to accommodate remote workers, too, who may not want to travel to or live near corporate headquarters.

Especially in times where IT budgets are strapped and qualified IT professionals are difficult to recruit and retain, the cloud computing model has a compelling value proposition.  When taking into consideration ROI and security enhancements, the model has more in its favor than at any time in its past.  Such a confluence of factors bodes well for 2011.

Well, I’m not sure if I’ll do as well as Paul the Octopus, but, like all the World Cup participants, it’s all about soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying the ride.  What are your predictions for 2011?

Facebook Chat and Unified Communications

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting blog post by Mike Gotta, a principle analyst for the Burton group. I’ve been mulling it over and wanted to share my thoughts – but let me give you a recap first.

 

Gotta writes about Facebook’s use of Jabber/XMPP for Facebook Chat and how he thinks this will impact enterprise organizations that are planning to roll out corporate instant messaging/presence platforms that are based in SIP/SIMPLE. Short term, Gotta does not expect Twitter’s nor Facebook’s use of XMPP to impact business decisions, but he predicts that XMPP in the near future could lay the groundwork for Unified Communications in the enterprise.

 

Gotta makes a couple of observations about IBM and Microsoft’s position in the UC market. Here is an excerpt from his post:

 

For IBM, I would expect someone from IBM’s unified communication and collaboration team to realize that this is a great marketing opportunity. At some point, I expect IBM to aggressively pursue interoperability between Facebook’s XMPP system and the Lotus Sametime Gateway. 

 

For Microsoft, this news presents them with a problem – they are in a position that is almost impossible to defend. There is absolutely no technical reason why the current Microsoft gateway does not support XMPP today. It is simply a political decision (in my opinion), by the folks at Microsoft as they compete with Google. Granted, GTalk does not have the market share of other public networks (Yahoo!, AOL), but even so, the strategy is clearly not customer-focused at all.  

Gotta makes a good point, but I’m not convinced the onus lies with the Microsoft gateway provider.  The Microsoft gateway doesn’t support XMPP… ok, so what?  You can make the case that Facebook (in which Microsoft invested $240 million) and other sites will need to add a SIP gateway to support connections from OCS.  It’s not a mandate, but one or a few sites may take the plunge and make themselves easily accessible to the millions and millions of (eventual) OCS users — the others will have to follow suit.

Or Microsoft bites the bullet and adds XMPP support to their gateway but restricts it so that can’t connect with their arch-rival Google.  That’s possible.  But again, will a company looking at OCS say “Gee, sorry I liked the solution but chose Sametime instead because it can connect to Twitter”?  Maybe that day will come, but not any time soon in my opinion.