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Synopsis:

Avaya Tech Talk host Guy Clinch interviews Valentine C Matula PhD Senior Director Multimedia Research at Avaya about one of the sessions Dr. Matula will be hosting during the upcoming IAUG CONVERGE2013 that is taking place at the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando June 3-7, 2013.

On Jun 05, from 02:00 - 03:00 ET Dr Matula (Val) will be presenting Avaya Labs Review of Consumer Technology Trends 2013: Taking Advantage to Improve Customer Service. During the session Val will highlight how to improve customer service and corporate communications by identifying and quantifying new trends in consumer communications technology, and then planning a methodical two to four year program to leverage these trends.

Dr Matula leads a team of scientists and engineers at Avaya Labs who are responsible for creating some of the most power solutions that are in service of Avaya customers. He is one of the most sought after speakers at the annual IAUG conferences generating standing room only crowds and among the highest marks for any presenter in formal feedback conducted at the conferences.

His talk at this year's event will include conversations about the drift from PCs, the shift to untethered devices, the change in 'customer service process' by consumers, the use of social sources, new simple video technologies, HTML5/WebRTC and updated info on voice quality.

Dr Matula will discuss how these technologies aid in the goal of providing "real help" when needed, using agent staff with more efficient means than just plain voice will be. He will review recent announcements from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show, as well as updated technology forecasts and their impact. Dr Matula will then provide relevant Avaya Labs Research demos of systems & projects with a "top projects" list outlined highlighting real business metrics including possible ROI values to a contact center.

Listeners of this podcast and attendees to Dr Matula's sessions at IAUG CONVERGE2013 will come away with a set of actionable tools, insights and advice from leaders in the movement to use technology to gain the benefits of telework for organizations and our society.

Join the conversation with your comments below!

Please note that during the IAUG CONVERGE2013, fellow APN Podcast host Mark Fletcher and I will be producing live interviews and content originating from Orlando. Please join us for a large amount of new content, industry insights and special announcements.

Thanks for listening to Avaya Tech Talk. You can subscribe to our episodes on iTunes, Player.fm and follow us on Twitter hashtag #APNpodcast.

In 2012, Avaya Client Services (ACS) embarked on a new management strategy to transform the culture of customer (or as we call them clients) care. It worked! In just one year, we saw the following phenomenal results from our efforts:

• Customer satisfaction score up 14%


• Net Promoter Score up 38%


• Employee engagement up 12%


• Web utilization climbed above 61% and call volume fell 39%


• Time to resolution shortened by 17%


• Issue backlog was cut in half

Avaya accomplished these performance leaps through revolutionary changes that brought together people, processes, and technology in innovative ways.

People and Processes
We have a vision that our ACS employees work on new problems only. What we found over the past year is that our employees are fantastic at solving new customer issues--issues that have no known solutions. In early 2012, a large percentage of customer requests coming to engineers were related to common repetitive issues that are more easily resolved via automation. ACS put a lot of effort into web, automation, and tool development to enable fast collaboration via the web on new customer issues. The vision of working on new problems really caught on with our employee base. Our agents on the web, on chat, on video, on the phone were energized to be working on these new issues vs. rehashing old ones. The corollary is that as soon as we solve issues we publish them immediately to our customer base and our partners. ACS invested in employee training on innovative approaches to resolving issues such as parallel outside-in and bottom-up diagnostic methods, which have proven to be very effective.

Understanding clients is an essential ingredient in providing an all-around excellent support experience. "Capsule teams" let clients interact with the same group of engineers each time. We encourage every employee to feel like they're a client advocate. The "Adopt a Customer" program enables employees to gain a deep understanding of a client's business. Promoting this high level of interaction is great for clients. Avaya measures the quality of every contact to minimize inconsistencies. Whenever a client interacts with a support agent, Avaya Speech Analytics is conducting real-time assessments so that Avaya can continuously identify opportunities for improvement in staff knowledge and professionalism.

Total outages are routed to the Avaya Emergency Response Team which has a goal of getting 85% of outages up and running in two hours or less. To accomplish this, Avaya made changes to the way cases were escalated. Now the decision is in a client's hands - when they click the "Total Service Outage" button on the ASW, the case is immediately escalated to the ER team.

Technology
Avaya dramatically improved the time it takes to resolve client issues by taking full advantage of Avaya Contact Center and Collaboration solutions. The first investment was in Avaya's knowledgebase to ensure it contained the wealth of solution articles required to solve all the "old" problems. Over 1,500 new solution articles are added monthly. Clients needing help accomplishing a task can tap into the large collection of new Avaya How-To videos and the ASW Product Hub, which brings all relevant resources together in one location.

A big leap forward was Ava the Avaya support avatar based on Avaya Automated Chat. Ava, covered in a previous blog, helps clients find known solutions in the blink of an eye. Ava has been able to instantly answer 40%+ of initial client inquiries and she gets smarter every day. If Ava doesn't find a known solution, she will bring an agent into the conversation via Web Chat, Web talk or soon Web Video (All based on Avaya collaboration solutions). Clients don't have to repeat information to an agent -- Ava saves a detailed history of the client's issue and attempted resolutions, giving Avaya technicians a head start in finding answers or creating a support request.

For complex issues agents can use collaboration tools to "swarm" or pull experts into a client conversation, instead of transferring clients between agents. Once an agent resolves an issue they will document the solution and within hours it is available in the Avaya knowledgebase for others to leverage. Clients also have the option for an agent to call them back. They simply ask Ava to submit a pre-populated support request, and Avaya Callback Assist saves their place in queue until an agent can call.

Avaya also invested in a host of tools to accelerate remote troubleshooting. Service Level Agreement Monitor and Secure Access Link eliminate time-consuming investigation by monitoring Avaya systems and providing secure access.

Transforming customer service at Avaya is part of an ongoing effort to redefine world-class service. Customers are reacting positively to the new vision. They're saying that they can easily find solutions on our website. They see the difference in the attitude of our team. They see the difference in professionalism. They see the difference in knowledge and collaboration.

The results are measurable improvements in business metrics, employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

Do you see ways that can enhance your relationship with your customer while improving your business model?

Pat Patterson

Follow me on twitter Pat_Patterson_V

Whether you are part of an IT organization, or one of our DevConnect technology partners, you will undoubtedly face the prospect of a major application redesign in the near future, as technology evolves from desktop applications to mobile clients, from server-based software to cloud- and PaaS-based architectures, or from thick-client UIs to browser-based experiences.

Witness Microsoft's recent challenges with the introduction of Windows 8. The elimination of the Start button has produced a backlash of almost comical proportions from the current Windows user base. And I'm still trying to find where some of the more esoteric Powerpoint, Word and Excel functions that I occasionally use can be found since the introduction of the Ribbon UI design in 2007.

But changing application design doesn't have to be painful for your users, according to the user experience experts at Macadamian.

Join DevConnect on June 5th at 12 noon EDT for a special "First Wednesday" seminar, How to Overhaul a UI Design Without Upsetting Current Users, featuring Scott Plewes, VP of user experience design at Macadamian.

Scott, along with Francis Beaudet, a seasoned interaction designer, will give insight on how to approach a major design update in such a way as to avoid alienating your end users.

Learn how to uncover what users love, and what works. And understand key research techniques that bring data-driven analysis to user experience design, moving design conversations from the realm of emotional opinions to fact-based decision points.

As with all our First Wednesday seminars, there's no cost for attending this free one-hour seminar. And if you can't make the live session, you can always check out the replay materials at your convenience.

The author examined the change in productivity (as measured in output per hour in the non-farm sector) over the past two decades - and found that growth in the 90s and early 2000s was strong, but has tailed off since 2004. Here is the data charted per the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis:

In a possible explanation for this downturn in productivity growth, the author quotes Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University:

Many of the inventions that replaced tedious and repetitive clerical labor with computers happened a long time ago, in the 1970s and 1980s. Invention since 2000 has centered on entertainment and communication devices that are smaller, smarter, and more capable, but do not fundamentally change labor productivity or the standard of living in the way that electric light, motor cars, or indoor plumbing changed it. These innovations were enthusiastically adopted, but they provided new opportunities for consumption on the job and in leisure hours rather than a continuation of the historical tradition of replacing human labor with machines."

A recent poll conducted by Avanade certainly supports Robert Gordon's view. Of particular note is the overwhelming adoption of consumer-oriented social technologies for enterprise social collaboration:

Interestingly enough, it appears that BYOD is extending beyond the device into BYOCT - our "Bring Your Own Collaboration tool" (if that terms catches on, please ensure to let me know).

Andy Hutchins, director of content and collaboration at Avanade UK had this to say about consumer social media platforms in the enterprise:

"But a key point here is in the capabilities of these technologies," he said. "Certainly Facebook and Twitter aren't integrating with wider collaboration activities. They're not integrating with documents, with organisational data, with the communications and directory services of an organisation. So you're not really connecting to bring an organisation together and connect its people and work with real data."

Bringing the right people together with the right information in the right context at the right time is the key to driving effective collaboration. And consumer-oriented tools are not designed for this task.

The question is - why do enterprise customers continue to adopt consumer social networking in place of enterprise collaboration tools? Is it ease of use that is driving early adoption? Or are individuals, per Robert Gordon's view - simply consuming on the job?

With individual productivity having been strongly impacted by technology in the 1990-2004, some visionaries argue that the future of productivity lies in enabling groups. Don Tapscott, renowned author (and speaker at last year's Avaya Evolutions show) notes in his latest TED talk:

The Internet is becoming a giant global computer. And every time you go on it, upload a video, do a google search, you remix something you are programming this big global computer that we all share. Humanity is building a machine, and this allows us to collaborate in new ways"

A recent article posted in Avaya's 2013 Collaboration Trends guide by Dr. Charles Law entitled "Do Collaboration Tools Boost Workplace Communication" looked at this topic is some detail, looking at the use of email, IM, Video Conferencing and Virtual Conferencing in the workplace.

"But should organizations continue to rely on text-based, asynchronous communication when research overwhelmingly indicates that there are better options? Clearly, there are better ways to communicate and collaborate if organizations are willing to evolve and adapt, and it is likely that successful organizations will do so."

While there is no easy answer to which tools the enterprise should adopt in driving better internal communication, it is clear that the search for higher individual productivity is daunting at the very least. With GDP per hour worked stagnating despite the introduction of game-changing technologies (social media, smartphone, apps, etc.) the future leaders will emerge as companies who better enable teams to communicate. How will your organization drive higher productivity through collaboration?

This morning while scanning the Twitter-verse for a story concept for this week's blog, I noticed Tweet after Tweet from @YRP that contained the hashtag #yrpnights. But what caught my eye, was the fact that these Twitter posts didn't originate from the ground. That's right, York Regional Police added social media to AIR2, their sleek 200k/ph Eurocopter EC120B tactical airborne platform, known to you and I as a "police chopper".

For quite some time now I've been a fan of @YRP, and there extensive use of social media to reach out to the public. Adding social media to AIR2, was probably just the next logical step that this department is taking to communicate with the public, and is a fantastic example of how Public Safety needs to reach out to the community using the modes of communication most comfortable with that community.

Obviously, taking to Twitter, will target communications at a wide community including our younger generation, but it will also reach a wide community who may not be active contributors on Twitter, but monitor various activities in real time on tablets and smartphones.

The more progressive governments have learned that community interaction goes far beyond their web presence, their Facebook page, and even their Public Information Office staff. The tools already exist to monitor and interact with communities, but there is no reason why that level of interaction needs to remain within the brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Today's culture has become immediate in nature and demands real-time information and updates on just about anything from emergency situations too large public events.

Sending live tweets from the helicopter crew provides a "virtual ride along" that would be almost impossible to re-create without the involvement of a camera crew, and the postproduction editing. All of that equals time spent producing, and not delivering content. Right now, by following @YRP and #YRPNights, you'll find a series of updates on what's happening around York, and you'll even catch some great night and day photography from their vantage point high above the city as well as the occasional infrared FLIR image.

This infrared technology detects differences in heat on the nearest surface to the camera. For example if a person is walking across the field the person would be displayed as high, as they are admitting greater amounts of heat than the field there walking on. One common myth is that helicopters and FLIR technology can see through windows into your home. This simply isn't true because glass is a reflective surface to infrared technology, and a person walking outside your window can see better into your home than the helicopter possibly could. Still this is a common question and included on their Frequently Asked Questions page located at http://www.yrp.ca/airfaq.aspx

I'll continue to follow @YRP, and we'll see if we can summarize the success of this program of reaching down from above with Social Media.

The Avaya Podcast Network launched a new landing page this week at http://Avaya.com/APN. It will be a one stop location for all APN content including the events that we attend, as well as our regular social media series including E911 Talk, Today in Public Safety, and Avaya Tech Talk with Guy Clinch (@GClinch).

If you're attending the IAUG Converge 2013 Conference at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Orlando Florida on June 3 - 7, be sure to stop by booth number 337 and visit. In addition to myself and Guy, APN producer and LatAm correspondent Guadalupe Hugony (@GuadalupeHugony) will be on hand producing interviews directly from the show room floor in both English and Spanish.

Want more on E9-1-1?  E9-1-1 Talk Podcast
Subscribe to my weekly E9-1-1 Talk Podcast here

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the semi-annual Technology Services World (TSW) Conference, hosted by the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) on the Avaya Mentor program, which I had also written about last August. This was a conference focused on services transformation and TSIA asked that I talk about how we at Avaya put together this video knowledge base, including challenges we faced. The breakout session was well attended and so I thought I would share this presentation with you here. Below is a YouTube video of me doing the presentation (not at TSW), which I've also summarized, along with more success metrics, for those who prefer to read.

As most of you have heard, the best example of using video to share knowledge is the Khan Academy. This non-profit's website has a free collection of over 4,000 educational YouTube videos, surrounded by curriculum, quizzes, and incentives like points and badges. The topics range from simple addition, which has 1.7 million views, to the French Revolution with 400,000 views. 

Khan makes a point of having its contributors avoid a teacher-at-a-whiteboard approach, opting instead for a style that feels like you're sitting at a table with a tutor, working through the topic on a piece of paper. This better aligns with the many of us for whom learning is a visual experience. Being able to see how to do something taps into something different in the brain than just reading about it. The intuitive simplicity of this approach has allowed the Khan Academy to eclipse MIT's own online education system with a total of 260 million views. 

Another good example is Jove, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, which helps speed up academic research through online video. When an academic team publishes a research paper, they include instructions so that peers can reproduce their experimental results and thus verify the research. Even to experienced lab researchers, understanding exactly what the authors of the research were trying to convey can be difficult, sometimes delaying the peer review process by months. Jove allows them to more easily include videos to demonstrate the procedure.

(Link)

By this point, I hope you are asking yourself why you aren't already using video for your knowledge base. Wouldn't your employees and customers benefit from your company's own Khan Academy? At Avaya, we found ourselves facing this question in the fall of 2011.

The President of Services challenged those of us in his extended leadership team to make our organization not just be successful in the market, but to be an organization that the analysts would write about. Put another way, it was no longer good enough to be lean and efficient; we needed to take the lead. 

Going All In

My proposal was to put together an Avaya version of Khan Academy. We would use video to expand on the company's existing knowledge-base-focused-support-model. We limited our scope to basic how-to videos designed to help those that install, maintain, and support Avaya products, be they customers, partners, or Avaya employees. These were to be short how-to videos, not anything that would replace the training that Avaya Learning develops. 

Like Khan, we would focus on videos that were more live screen capture than talking heads. Additionally, I proposed that unlike Avaya's existing knowledge base which is only available to our customers with a maintenance agreement, we would make the vast majority of our videos available for free on YouTube. By doing so, search engines like Google would be aware of this content, making it much easier for an engineer to find the answer to an Avaya-related question.

As we got started, getting buy-in from leadership was obviously important. A big part of that was that my team of engineers would need to reprioritize some of our work in order to make time for generating 800 videos in only 9 months. We had great support from Mike Runda, the leader of Avaya Client Services, who gave us the green light to move forward.

The Gear We Got

We evaluated a number of video production software suites and settled on Camtasia Studio. Camtasia gave us great features like the ability to use templates, splice video and audio in, as well as special editing features to highlight or zoom to certain parts of the screen. These licenses ran ~$150. Adding Camtasia required that we upgrade a number of our engineers' laptops to meet the minimum specs, an upgrade that everyone was excited to have a good reason for.

We also went with a high-quality $80 USB microphone called the Blue Yeti. All in all, that's about $230 per engineer. We felt it was important to maintain a common look and feel to these videos, so we built a template for Camtasia with legal and branding-approved intros and outros as well as standardizing on things like transitions. Due to our high quality standards, after reviewing the first handful of videos, Avaya's branding team gave us carte blanche to publish to YouTube without further oversight.

Getting Started

For topic selection, I was lucky to be starting with an amazing team of subject matter experts. Most had no trouble coming up with topics for videos. For those that did get stuck, the engineer would talk with the support engineers to determine the most common repeat scenarios that they encounter and find a way to use these videos to speed up resolution and/or prevent the tickets from being opened in the first place. 

As word got out about our videos, we also started receiving requests from internal and external users. We set a limit of 15 minutes for all the videos and encouraged them to be under the 5 minute mark. The length would really depend on the topic, and I would challenge the author of anything over 10 minutes to see if they could break it into more than one smaller video. To give you a feel for our topics, here are six that show off the variety covering hardware, software, different product portfolios, even our own customer-facing tools.

• Setting up the iLO3 Interface on the HP DL360 G7
• How to Setup Avaya Aura Session Manager
• How to reset the System Manager Web Admin Password
• Administering a SIP Trunk in Avaya Aura CM
• How to log in and run reports using the Avaya CMS Supervisor Web feature
• Avaya SAL and the Egress-based Connectivity Model

Quality Control

As the lead for this effort, the most time-consuming part for me was the review and approval process. It was very important to me that we has a very high quality product and thus I personally reviewed each and every one, sending back to the author a list of changes that I wanted to see. The bar was set high and a single review could easily take me half an hour. 

To help reduce the number of errors, I would frequently share an updated list of common problems I was encountering. This was important as some had a harder time with the learning curve than others, encountering more than 20 issues per submittal, and multiple submittals of the same video. It is worth noting though that while everyone got much better at it with time; some were submitting perfect videos on day 1 while others never quite got there. Some of my engineers were frustrated with me as they felt the bar was set too high for quality. If I heard any extra noise in the background, or if a transition wasn't crisp, I'd send it back. 

But our users noticed that quality and complimented us on it. I feel it was important to our success. After three months, I delegated the approval process to one of my top engineers, Bhavya Reddy. She was one of the best at producing error-free videos and thus I knew she could maintain our quality. Here's her video on setting up Avaya Aura Session Manager, which has garnered more than 6,200 views.

The purpose of this blog is to highlight the truth about the applications available today and call out some of the most important desktop and mobile video conferencing features.

1. Freely downloadable in the app store doesn't mean anyone can join your conference for free. Several vendors offer free mobile video conferencing apps in the iTunes and Google Play stores. But for many of those apps, you can't join a call without complex setup and licensing, and you often can't join a call due to firewall issues. Scopia Desktop and Mobile are freely distributable to anyone without requiring a user-specific license key. Competing solutions often require a user-specific (or, named user) license key even for casual or one-time users.

2. If you can't easily join the call, you may not join at all.
Many vendors' solutions require downloads, complex licensing and registration. Scopia video conferencing does not, and its embedded firewall traversal means you can join a call without calling in your IT team to assist. Just click on the link and join the call. Although you will want to test your speaker and mic if you're using a laptop. Scopia Mobile is designed to leverage your device's audio and video systems.

3. The benefits of video conferencing are severely diminished if you can only invite a select few.
A number of mobile and desktop apps offered today are based on proprietary technologies. Only standards-based solutions enable you to speak to connect to other vendors' standards-based systems (unless you add gateways and get a little creative). Proprietary solutions limit your connectivity to others, and gateways can add latency and produce a lower quality experience.

4. If you can't take advantage of audio, video and data-sharing, it's not really collaboration.
It's important to select a solution that enables you to join by audio, video and share content. If any of these three components isn't available, the quality of the experience is limited and collaboration is compromised. These features should be available on any device, whether you're in a conference room, at your desk or on the go.

5. The latest technologies don't matter if the solution doesn't leverage them.
Some of our competitors' desktop and mobile solutions don't leverage protocols like H.264 SVC, which helps to deliver a great video experience even over "lossy" networks. Scopia Desktop leverages SVC and both Desktop and Mobile work with NetSense. Exclusive to Scopia conferencing, NetSense is a bandwidth estimation and adaptation algorithm designed with unmanaged networks in mind, specifically the public Internet. With NetSense, call quality will remain as good as possible regardless of bandwidth availability and changes in bandwidth during a call.

6. It's not cloud-based just because it has the word "cloud" in its name.
In a recent blog, I talked about cloud-based video for SMBs. There are viable solutions in the market today, and we have partners offering hosted video. Make sure you are investing in a proven video solution that is offered either on-premises and through service providers.

7. Everyone says they offer easy-to use mobile video, but actions speak louder than words.
We'll prove it - request a demo on-the-fly on YOUR mobile device. I bet we can get you into a mobile video call in a matter of minutes if you have a camera-enabled iOS device or Scopia-compatible Android device. Just click here: http://bit.ly/10LzX21 to get started.

Have you tried desktop and mobile video? What recommendations do you have for those in the market today? What other "gotchas" should they consider? I'd love to hear from you.

Of course, smartphone ownership continues to grow. By the end of 2012, more than 50% of Canadian subscribers had a smartphone. Even more interesting is the rapid growth in tablet ownership, which quickly grew from sub-5% in 2011 to 20%+ in 2012.

And users appear to be getting more comfortable using the technology, with more people downloading applications for their smartphones and tablets. 70% of respondents are downloading applications. The average number of downloaded apps per device continues to sit at 12.

True to form, Canadians love talking about the weather and app use is no different - the #1 downloaded app type continues to be weather applications.

The forecast (pardon the pun) for the future of all this technology is clear - at the same time that consumers are arming themselves with more mobile technology and the knowledge required to leverage these devices, a Frost and Sullivan report released in January shows that mobile downloads of web meetings is growing rapidly - and is expected to double or triple in 2013 - with and expectation that ¼ of all online meetings incorporating video by the end of the year.

This trend was verified recently by IDC, who globally has seen a 32.8% year over year decline in large video infrastructure sales, but a 5% increase in personal videoconferencing solutions.

The shift in interest in traditional video conferencing to mobile video conferencing is also evident through analyzing changes in google trends:

Searches for Video Conferencing:

Searches for Mobile Video:

The bottom line is that the definition of mobile video conferencing is quickly moving from a cart on wheels to a smartphone app you can hold in your hand. Managing the transition to mobile video will be key to maintaining competitiveness for your business over the coming years. For more information on how Avaya handled our own transition to mobile enable video collaboration, check out the Wainhouse Research report here.

Listen now!

Download your copy:

Synopsis:

In January Joshua Millsapps asked "Is remote work, too remote?" In March, Marissa Mayer Yahoo's CEO caused a firestorm when she outlawed telework at the company. Debate rages across social media and other venues about the role of telework in today's economy. This is especially true for governments. The benefits of large scale telework programs can be immense: dramatic saving of costs, powerful positive impacts on the environment, fewer cars clogging our rush hour roads, increased quality of life for employee and other factors.

Implementing a program has its challenges. Managers need new tools. Cultures need to adjust. Equity among those who must come to the office and those whose jobs can be fulfilled without incurring the negative impacts of millions of unneeded cars on our roads consuming valuable natural resources and spewing tons of carbon into our atmosphere each day must be balanced.

In an ongoing series of conversations blogger and APN Podcast Network host Guy Clinch has consulted with a series of industry experts on the benefits, the challenges and the tools that are available to establish a successful telework program for government. In this most recent edition, Guy speaks with Rebecca Kay Phelps, Contact Center Segment Manager at Jabra.

Kay has over a decade of experience working with organizations that have successfully deployed remote contact center agents. Kay talks about what it takes to build a successful program, what managers need to think about when they dispatch workers to home offices, powerful practices that can help prepare employees for a successful transition and the tools and methodologies that managers can use to make sure the program succeeds.

Listeners of this informative series will come away with a set of actionable tools, insights and advice from leaders in the movement to use technology to gain the benefits of telework for organizations and our society.

Join the conversation with your comments below!

In April, we featured the five partners highlighted below. Review a few of their comments, then read the full interviews by following the links to our Facebook page. While you're there, join our community and "Like" Avaya DevConnect on Facebook. We welcome your questions, comments and new ideas.

AudioCodes is primarily focused on the development and manufacture of equipment and software for IP based voice networks. This includes media gateways, session border controllers, media servers, network management and monitoring software and more. They see the demand for high-definition voice and video for real-time collaboration continuing to increase, fundamentally changing the infrastructure that will be required. AudioCodes offers one point of contact, one technology and one source for professional services. Learn more...

CallCopy offers a suite of call recording and quality management solutions that are scalable, easy to learn and use. CallCopy was founded by entrepreneurs with decades of experience building and managing contact centers and focus on attention to each client's specific needs. In their space they predict a shift to more powerful and sophisticated use of business intelligence and analytic tools provided via online subscription that will be delivered to smartphones, tablets and laptops. Read more...

ListeningMethods provides in-depth IVR and end-to-end call analytics that reveal not just call center performance, but the total customer experience. They developed a solution that automatically identifies issues that occur at any point in the call which, once addressed, provides for operational cost savings, increased revenue and a better overall customer experience. They see the future ahead as one in which businesses have the ability to analyze the complete customer interaction to create significant advantages over their competition. Find out more...

OAISYS develops call recording solutions that are purpose-built to support voice compliance and quality assurance requirements of SMB and Midmarket customers. While deployed across a wide range of industries, they are especially active in the healthcare, financial and legal services, insurance and local government segments. Demand for cloud-based communications and data storage will increase as customers recognize the value of "big data" and the need to leverage analytics to transform it into meaningful business intelligence. Find out more...

Spectrum specializes in solutions to improve contact center agent, supervisor and manager performance. They offer multi-channel data reporting that includes chat data in addition to traditional call detail. Multi-device access and mobility are the watchwords for the future and Spectrum reporting is requested on a variety of devices as if they were standard office products. Companies want and need instant change and can achieve that with cloud based solutions. Spectrum understands the challenges and will work with customers to drive performance improvement. Read more...

So we're gonna try to change that at the IAUG Converge 2013 conference, with IAUG Ignite!, sponsored by Avaya DevConnect.

We've invited some of our leading DevConnect partners to share their passion on topics that span UC & Collaboration, Customer Service, Big Data and more through a series of 5-minute talks, presented in a Pecha Chuka-style format. That means each talk is 10 slides, and they automatically advance every 30 seconds.

Join us at IAUG Converge2013 on Monday, 3 June at 1pm for IAUG Ignite!, and hear all these these talks all in a single 1-hour session:

• Mine Your Motivator - Clouds To Rainbows, Paul Leatherman, Chief Technology Officer, CRI
• Delighted Customers And Self Service: 5 Ways To A Perfect Match, Gary Van Gordon, Vice President, Interactive Northwest, Inc. (INI)
• What your PBX Can Learn From Your Car, Paul Davis, Channel Account Manager, Metropolis
• Don't be Crippled By The High Infrastructure Costs of VoIP!, John Croce, CEO, Phybridge
• Why The World Won't Let Fax Die, Dan Aronson, Channel Development Manager, Sagemcom
• Turn An Under-staffed, Over-worked And Stressful Environment Into An Enjoyable Work Life, Detta Donahue, Manager, Marketing and Communications, Starfish Associates
• Amazing Things You Can Do With Avaya Experience Portal, Bob Cooper, CEO, Swampfox Technology
• Metrics Mash-up: Breaking Down The Barriers Between Real-Time, Historical And Call-Detail Reporting, Chris Rouse, Director of Marketing and Product Management, Symmetrics
• The Face Of Big Data, Steve McCullough, SVP of Sales, RMG Networks (formerly Symon)

Think of this as bringing a little bit of TEDx to IAUG - a chance to spend 5 minutes hearing from leading technology companies on ways that can help transform your business, change the way you think of day to day challenges, and create new opportunities to make the most of your existing UC, Collaboration and Contact Center investments.

As they say about the weather in Chicago ("Give it 5 minutes and it'll change..."), even if every topic isn't exactly your interest a 5-minute investment of your time may be well worth it after all, as you come away with some new insight or idea into many of the challenges facing your company today.

Do you agree with Mike's top 5?

Pat Patterson
Follow me on twitter Pat_Patterson_V

Traits of Great Communications service Providers
A checklist for what businesses should expect from their providers

• Single point of contact. Technology stacks are getting thicker and more often include elements from different suppliers. Think of BYOD and video as rapidly emerging examples. It will be increasingly important--and challenging--that clients have a single point of contact for problem diagnosis and resolution. Service providers will need either to develop the ability to work across platforms and vendors or to cede the role to someone else.
• "Know me." Few things are more frustrating for clients needing support than having to repeatedly describe a problem to different people. Instead, they want a provider to understand their environment, know what they have installed, recall the last questions they asked, and be ready to make the upgrades they want in the future. When you reach that level of customer intimacy--the ability, when a client says "know me," to respond, "yes, we do"--then support becomes more consultative. The best providers will become trusted advisors.
• Fast, accurate problem-solving. As technologies become more complex, problems are more likely to be systemwide rather than in a single component. They can emerge from the network, an application, an end user, or a configuration file--and from any vendor's product. Because of this, a product specialist often can't resolve a problem alone, but may need to involve a broad team of system architects and other specialists who have application or multivendor knowledge and capabilities.
• Breadth of service. This includes service-level agreements covering the entire gamut of vendors and aportfolio of offers spanning the entire continuum of issues that clients face. Breadth is key to providing you and the customer a future-proof roadmap, as well as the ability to tackle the issues that inevitably pop up. A useful analogy is a person who comes into the emergency room complaining of chest pains. Instead of immediately calling in a heart surgeon, the hospital staff performs advanced diagnostic workups to pinpoint the source of the chest pain and then quickly and effectively proceeds to the treatment that provides the best possible outcome for the patient. The same approach applies in communications support and management. In our experience, not many can do this.
• Drinking their own champagne. How much would you trust a communications service provider that only works with you via email or telephone? Wouldn't you expect them to effectively use rich forms of communication and collaboration in their daily business? For instance, video can strengthen customer ties by helping clients and the service provider get to know one another better. It can also be used to resolve issues. For example, on-site cameras can be used to diagnose physical hardware issues without a technician needing to be dispatched to the site. Or take avatars and 3-D immersive environments. Leveraging search technology and artificial intelligence, avatars can assist clients in finding known solutions to problems. Clients can then rank the solutions, service agents can review them, and the best ones can be detailed in articles made available to other clients.

By Michael Runda
Senior Vice President, Avaya and President of Avaya Client Services

I am not alone in my transition to video conferencing. A recent study by Infonetics states that PBX-based video drove a 47% increase in endpoint shipments in 2013, and that the overall video market is expected to grow at 6% compounded over the next 5 years.

As the world transitions to the world of video, we will need to adjust how we run our daily meetings to ensure we engage with others effectively. With that in mind, let me share some tweaks I have made to the way I structured meeting in order to maximize their effectiveness. Here are some of the things I do in my meetings to help them run more smoothly.

1. Add a personal touch

A month ago, I had the privilege of having a corporate coach talk about the importance of bringing a more personal touch to meetings. His suggestion: dedicate some time in your meeting to talking about personal items. This gives people time to chat the same way they would if they were in a room milling about before a meeting. Often times, when we structure our meetings, we get very focused on the task at hand and not enough on the people.
This can lead to very cold interactions for those that are at a distance.

Now, in my weekly team calls, I dedicate 10-15 minutes of every call to talk about what is going on in our lives personally. I have found that adding in time to talk about personal items focuses the team and actually reduces the length of the call, as people tend to focus on the most important items for the remainder of the call.

2. Virtual Coffee is Your Friend
You would never think twice about leaving your desk to go have a 5 minute coffee chat with a colleague. But when was the last time you scheduled a coffee chat with a colleague on the other side of the world? It's no wonder that we forge better ties with the people we see every day in the office - we ask each other about our families, friends, hockey, the weekend, etc.

I have found it extremely effective to set up coffee chats with people in other countries in territories, spending time talking about our lives. It is amazing how much it helps me understand another person's perspective on a tough issue when I understand more about their personal lives - their goals, ambitions, challenges, etc. It also helps me to uncover hidden strengths and knowledge that I can leverage when I run into my own challenges.

3. Quarterback the Call
While video adds a lot of value to your communications, I have found that people aren't quite used to how to interact on the medium yet. Often times, people want to jump right in like they would in person. While this enthusiasm is very much welcome - it can be confusing on a long call to know who has the floor to speak. If you are running the call, don't be afraid to be the quarterback. Take note of who is talking, and give the floor to individuals in turn so that they have a chance to speak.

Also, if your videoconferencing solution is like Scopia and includes a chat window, encourage your audience to add to the discussion by posting information in the chat window. This is especially helpful in sharing links to documents and tools during the call. As the quarterback, make sure to police the mute button. There is always someone on the call who dials in without a proper headset or audio connection - make sure to mute them as appropriate to keep the call flowing!

While I'm still learning the ins and outs of how to best use videoconferencing, I have found it to be a tremendous benefit to my day to day communications. I love arriving in distant cities and greeting team members that I can now recognize in person thanks to the power of having video at our disposal. Only 2 or 3 years ago, I would have struggled to put a face to a name, even for someone I interacted with several times a week. I don't ever want to go back to those days!

Do you have a videoconferencing tip to share? Add a comment below - I'd love to know what is working well for you.

Now Playing: Avaya TechTalk 010: Next Generation 9-1-1 Now!

How organizations and Government can obtain many of the values of NG9-1-1 today

In this episode of Avaya Tech Talk APNPodcast host Guy Clinch, engages in conversation with Tim Kenyon, President of Conveyant Systems, Inc. and Matt Serra, Sr. Director, Product Management at Rave Mobile Safety about how the government communication enterprise and commercial organizations can implement the promise of Next Generation 9-1-1 today. Guy, Tim and Matt talk about how much of the promise of NG9-1-1 is possible for government agencies today. Access to these capabilities can be achieved by leveraging existing investments to create an information rich public safety environment. The group talks about the implications for the Public Safety Answering Point and across the public safety chain of care. The group talks in depth about how unlocking access to exiting sources of information using tools from Conveyant and Avaya combined with new sources of information including Rave Mobile Safety's Smart 9-1-1 applications are dramatically enhancing the processes of delivering emergency in communities across the globe.

Listen now!

Download your copy:

Synopsis:

Tim, Matt and Guy talk about the current state of the 9-1-1 Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP), the call center that governments use to answer 9-1-1 calls from civilians. They describe the technologies and networks in place today and the many limitation these legacy technologies place upon public safety. The conversation then flows into Next Generation 9-1-1(NG9-1-1) and Matt, Tim and Guy discuss the dramatic changes that are envisioned by organizations including the National Emergency Number Association, the member driven group comprised of the people who answer 9-1-1 calls. Described is how NG91-1-1 will be different, what types of new sources of information will be available and how that may be used by public safety officials is touched upon.

The group then continues the discussion talking about how the promise of Next Generation 9-1-1 can begin to become a reality today. They talk about how the combination of Rave Mobile Safety's Smart 9-1-1, Conveyant Systems abilty to derive information from multiple sources and the 9-1-1 capabilities of the systems provided by Avaya can combine to deliver information rich communications to the Public Safety Answering Point today.

Matt and Tim talk about the 9-1-1 Over-the-Top method of delivering this information to the PSAP and how this technique overcomes the shortfalls of the legacy networks supporting the 9-1-1 system. The technique makes access to resources including:
• personal information granted to public safety by the individual caller;
• 9-1-1 information previously trapped in the databases of onsite communications system;
• Material Safety Data Sheets;
• Computer Aided Design diagrams;
• isometric building plans;
• links to real-time sources of information such as live video feeds from webcams;
• environmental sensors capable of indicating heat and the presence of hazardous substances; and
• other sources of information.

They talk about how this information is being made available to a large and growing number of PSAPs and how the information is extended even into the hands of responding public safety personnel. As Matt says, "We swing the doors of the PSAP open," by combining the data transport capacities of the Smart911Connect technology from Rave Mobile Safety with the rich information sources of information including data from the Sentry E9-1-1 Emergency Location Management Solutions from Conveyant that unleashed the comprehensive data found in the systems provided by Avaya.

Tim talks about his background coming from a family of Emergency Responders and the very lively discussions about having this level of information available. Tim talks about the power of having information in the hands of responders allowing them to do their incidence response, "As they are in route instead of waiting until they get there and trying to figure out what they are dealing with once they get there."

Matt follows up by describing how the data, once captured by the Smart 9-1-1 applications, can be pushed out to mobile data terminals in use by incident commanders and responders. Matt talks about the opportunities available from richer and more verbose information becoming available in the PSAP. He describes the possibilities of a call into a PSAP about a missing child not only being a verbal description but now including other data such as a photo of the child made instantly available. Matt talks about the enormous benefit of being able to transmit that photo into the hands of first responders in an instant.

Matt then talks about the challenge ahead to make Next generation 9-1-1 a reality. He compares it to the time and effort it took to establish the system for mobile 9-1-1 location accuracy, a process that took more than ten years. Matt points out that in relation to those challenges, the complexities of making NG9-1-1 a reality are significantly more significant. The good news is that organizations and government don't need to wait to begin to realize the promise of NG9-1-1. The combination of Rave Mobile Safety, Conveyant Systems and Avaya are making this realty today. Mat says we say to our customers, "Here are the things you've been thinking about, here are the things you've been hearing about, here's how we can get that to you today." Matt goes on to say, "In a very quick simple fashion, we can turn a PSAP up in a matter of days."

It is also important to be the good stewards, he continues. We do this by thinking ahead to Next Generation 9-1-1 so that the investments of today are the building block to the future. "We're going to be there for our customers not just now, but when they flip the switch to Next Generation 9-1-1, we'll be there for them then," said Matt.

Tim said the same is true at Conveyant Systems. "We stay abreast of the trends and where things that are going in 9-1-1."

The conversation ends with a short discussion about efforts that Rave Mobile Safety is taking in support of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing. Matt describes that if listeners visit the Smart 9-1-1™ website and register by completing a safety profile his company will donate one dollar for each new registrant to One Fund Boston supporting the support of the victims of the Boston Marathon bombings. Registration is free and the information you provide could result in improving the ability for public safety organizations to help you or a loved one who someday needs to dial 9-1-1 during an emergency.

Dear Listeners,

I'll be honored if you chose to follow me on Twitter @gclinch check out my professional profile on LinkedIn and subscribe to my podcasts: http://AvayaTechTalk.com.

Warmest regards,

Guy W. Clinch

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18 states in the US currently have legislation regarding multiline telephone systems or MLTS. For the most part, that legislation doesn't really have much teeth, as there are no penalties for noncompliance. The one exception to that rule is the state of Michigan who passed a law last year requiring businesses to remediate their 911 functionality by 2017, or they would be faced with penalties up to $5000.

WCAX Channel 3 in Montpelier, Vermont ran a story this past week highlighting a problem with schools and the states 911 system. In a recent interview, Rep. Joan Lenes (D-Shelburne) stated that the House and Senate Committees just recently learned that many of the states schools telephone systems have recently been centralized according to their town or district. When you centralize a telephone system, or flatten, consolidate and extend (FCE), you can create a 911 problem for users on the system.

Today's 911 network operates off of a very simple principle. A telephone number equals an address. When the 911 system was first built in 1968, that factoid was mostly true. However today, a telephone number is probably the least significant piece of information that equals your location. Just think of your cell phone. It doesn't matter what town you're in, or the county, or even the state. Your cellular telephone number is transported with you wherever you go.

The logical question one might ask is "why is this not a problem for cell phones?" The answer to that is the FCC mandated Phase 1 and Phase 2 location reporting functionality built into that network. In simple terms, special p-ANI telephone numbers are associated with each cellular tower antenna, are "borrowed" by the cell phone making a 911 call, and these numbers are able to have their location information dynamically updated by the cell phone carrier. Phase 1 emergency calls provide the cellular tower coordinates to the 911 dispatcher, and within a few seconds after answering the call, the network is queried by the PSAP, and if the specific XY coordinates of the device are available, they are returned to the 911 center in the Phase 2 data.

Similar functionality is available in the Enterprise, however it does bear extra costs in addition to the location discovery automation that's required in the enterprise network. Because of these extra costs, it is commonly used for remote VPN workers that are very migratory in their locations, and internally within enterprise networks other more cost conscious solutions are available.

But when you examine the map of the US that shows the states that require 911 remediation for MLTS PBX systems, Vermont is clearly marked as a state having legislation. If this is the case, why does this problem exist at the school systems? The answer to that unfortunately is that Vermont has one of the leaner pieces of legislation, and in fact, is a single sentence.

From Act 197 (S.311)
AN ACT RELATING TO
AN ENHANCED 911 EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM.
ß 7057. PRIVATELY OWNED TELEPHONE SYSTEMS

When an enhanced 911 system is implemented, any privately owned telephone system shall provide to those end users the same level of 911 service that other end users in the area receive and shall provide ANI signaling, station identification data and updates to enhanced 911 data bases under rules adopted by the board, except that the board may waive the provisions of this section for any privately owned telephone system, taking into consideration the costs and the public benefits of compliance, in accordance with standards and procedures adopted by the board by rule.

Although this is light on text, it does have some specific language that I happen to like. "Any privately owned telephone system shall provide to those end-users the same level of 911 service that other end-users in the area receive". We've seen language like that in other states, such as Massachusetts, however regardless of any of this, the important piece that's missing from this, and most other pieces of legislation, is the penalty for noncompliance.

I CAN'T DRIVE . . . 55
When you drive down the highway, and you exceed the posted speed limit, if you see a state trooper parked on the side of the highway, you intuitively slowdown. Do you do this because you're reminded of the National Transportation Safety Boards statistics on highway deaths caused by speeding? Probably not. You're worried about getting a $200 or more speeding ticket, and you're worried about your insurance premiums that are probably already too high. You see, we are very predictable creatures. And one thing that does motivate most of us, is a potential financial impact.

Going back to the state of Michigan, just the potential threat of a $5000 penalty five years into the future, provoked enterprises to look at their 911 configuration, and do something about it. The state of California heard testimony in their Public Utilities Commission workshop a few years back, and added in penalties for noncompliance in their recommendations. That potential law is circulating through the legislative process as we speak, and there are hopes that it will be presented for a public vote this year.

Rep. Lenes correctly stated that "sometimes it's not an expensive fix" and that the House committee has requested information from the schools that will be evaluated before they decide how they need to proceed statewide. In alignment with the California Public Utilities Commission estimate that 70% to 80% of PBX systems are not in compliance, she believes the same will be true for schools in Vermont.

Want more on E9-1-1?  E9-1-1 Talk Podcast
Subscribe to my weekly E9-1-1 Talk Podcast here

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911

To address that question, the authors worked to isolate the benefits brought on labour productivity through various technologies and productivity inputs. Their findings attributed growth to the following technology categories:

The analysis is interesting, as it reveals the drop off in all three types of technology over the past 8 years - hardware, software and communication equipment. Also worth noting is that contribution of communications equipment has remained the most stable driver of productivity over the past 40 years.

However, with all categories of technology driving less productivity increase over time - the article's poignant question remains: Is the Information Technology Revolution Over?
In a follow up commentary on the original paper, Chad Syverson of the University of Chicago provides some interesting insight. Comparing the IT Era to the original productivity growth sparked after the introduction of electricity, Chad provides an interesting look at the future potential growth in productivity that may yet come from the integration of IT.

To this point, a recent article in the Economist examined the research above, and found it took an average of 5 to 15 years for new advances in information technology to take root and have an impact to the overall economy. This suggests that the slowdown in productivity increases in the 2004 time frame is more the result of technology developed during the pre-mobile and social era, rather than new technologies being implemented today.

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise to those of us in the collaboration industry today. As we work at the intersection of Mobile and Video Collaboration, Social Media, Big Data and Cloud we know there is a fair bit of work to be done to provide holistic solutions that allow businesses to succeed. The good news is that there are productivity gains to be found, once new solutions that combine these trans-formative technologies come to the forefront and as workers come to adopt these new technologies into their day to day work cadences. Together, these outcomes will transform technology into true collaboration and innovation in the workplace.

From the Economist article "Has the ideas machine broken down?":
"Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy."

We question ShoreTel's methodology, its statistics, and its assertions. My Avaya colleagues Tim Johnson and Joe Scotto have created the following point-by-point rebuttal of ShoreTel's claims, which I share below.

NG911 promises to bring public safety into the 20th century from a communications perspective. In the legacy E911 network, we are limited to analog-based voice only communications, and the location data is tied directly to a telephone number, which in today's environment, is one of the last pieces of data that is relevant to a location of the communications device. In 2011, NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, published their specification 08-003 as the Detailed Functional and Interface Standard for the NENA i3 Solution. The specification built upon prior NENA publications including i3 requirements and architecture documents.

In version 1 of this document the i3 solution supports end to end IP connectivity with gateways used to accommodate legacy wireline and wireless origination networks that are non-IP. It also introduced the concept of an Emergency Services IP network or ESInet. The ESInet is an IP-based internetwork (network of networks) that is shared by all public safety agencies, and eventually provide coverage coast-to-coast, internationally, and ultimately around the globe.

The value behind the ESInet to public safety, is as great as the Internet was to the general public. It wasn't that long ago that data was not easily shareable between two points on the planet. Today, with Facebook, Twitter and the thousand other social media outlets, sharing data has become a ubiquitous part of our daily lives.

It only makes sense that social media, and the additional data that it carries, will become part of our public safety networks. Yet another reason that our current legacy E911 infrastructure is unable to perform its required task of connecting the general public with public safety using the forms of communication that are in common use.

This change in the data that we want to communicate with public safety, as well as the mechanisms in which we communicate that information, has created a technology gap between the people who need help, and the people that can provide that help. 2012 saw the emergence of several Personal Emergency Applications or PEAs (pronounced peas) trying to capture the popular App market. Unfortunately for the developers of these applications, they were quickly shunned by the emergency services community, as quite often the developers did not take into consideration the public safety side of the application. One particular application, CrimeWatch, provided users with a simple one touch interface for police, fire, and medical assistance. Not a bad deal for $.99, right? The only problem is, that application had no connectivity to the public safety network, and when a user used it, after entering in all of the pertinent data, it offered to dial 911. This horror story quickly circled the public safety community, and the application got an incredible amount of that press.

In another incident, concerns were raised about letters that were sent by 911 Emergency Assist (911 EA) to many PSAPs advising them of the launch of their product. The letter was worded in such a way that led several 911 administrators to believe this product was more than it actually was, and NENA had to step in and "assist" in addressing PSAPs training and how they are marketing their product.

[Ed. Note: A recent Google search on Crime Watch and 911 EA came back with dead links]

As the NENA i3 framework continues to evolve, version 2 of this specification adds in additional functionality and, among other things, the concept of additional data. Additional data about a 911 call can be provided in the form of a SIP URI that the public safety answer point can query for more details about a specific call event. One of the primary challenges of this topology is the sheer number of endpoints where that additional data can exist. To solve this problem, Additional Data Aggregators have emerged that provide common collection points and repositories that the public and public safety can access to store and retrieve additional information data.

One example of an Additional Data Aggregator is Smart911, by Rave Mobile Security. Another, is Safetown by public safety CAD system manufacturer, InterAct.

Although similar in nature, core differences exist between each solution. And with the lack of an industry "standard", there could be significant operational differences. In examining both solutions, the primary difference is: where the data is stored. Smart911 is made up of two components. The first is a scalable method for public safety to allow citizens to opt in to providing critical information. The second is a scalable and secure method for aggregating data from external sources and displaying it in the proper context during the call taking process. No matter where I travel if the PSAP uses Smart911, my profile will be available.

Safetown, on the other hand is tied to a specific computer aided dispatch or CAD system, and is typically stored locally. Although similar data is provided by both systems, the inherent problem is sharing that data across to regional boundaries or with different CAD systems within a single jurisdiction for example fire and police. Unless agencies share their network and data with each other, my personal profile data, although useful locally, is not available to other agencies outside of my area.

Not an issue for location specific data, as my home and office are fixed points, but my personal data is relevant anywhere I go in the US, or globally for that matter.

The purpose of this blog is not to compare these two companies against each other, or any others that are barking up this new tree of opportunity. The point that I'm bringing out is that additional data is going to become a big part of next generation 911 and that universal guidance on accessing that data is going to become a paramount problem for the 6100 public safety answer points, as well as training for the 200,000 911 call takers in the US alone. There simply is no room for vendor specific applications and processes. The collection, correlation, and presentation of this information needs to be standardized and promulgated throughout the industry.

Ask anyone at NENA or EENA; The emergency network in the US as well as the EU is on the verge of a radical change in technology. For most of us, social media, collaboration, video conferencing, and living in a "connected world" is of no consequence to our daily existence. Public safety on the other hand has been relegated to using 1970s technology for the last 45 years, and needs to play catch-up fairly quickly. Fortunately, the first wave of "connected citizens" are now of age and actively working in this industry. Many of them have even obtained positions in their agencies where their new way of thinking can make a radical change. Just as we saw voice over IP become the new paradigm in communications over the last few decades, next generation emergency services, and the vast amounts of additional data that will be brought along with it, will form the framework of the next paradigm of public safety communications.

How lucky are we to be able to watch its birth, and evolution?

Want more on E9-1-1?  E9-1-1 Talk Podcast
Subscribe to my weekly E9-1-1 Talk Podcast here

Thanks for stopping by and reading the Avaya CONNECTED Blog on E9-1-1, I value your opinions, so please feel free to comment below or if you prefer, you can email me privately.

Public comments, suggestions, corrections and loose change is all graciously accepted ;-)
Until next week. . . dial carefully.

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @Fletch911