Communication Enabled Business Process Use Cases

CEBP could improve Healthcare even more: Part 2

2011-11-29T15:27:00.003-05:00

The previous blog discussed how real time communications was improving the Pharmacy, Physician, Patient transaction process.

Here is the next step in the process improvement that hasn’t been nailed down yet. We need to use improved communication methods to improve patient care relative to medication usage.

In the US, policymakers are painfully aware of the fact that several unhealthy lifestyle conditions including diabetes and heart disease take up a disproportionate amount of health care spending.

Researchers at the CDC have gotten even more specific with a report that 4 drugs cause almost half of the emergency visits in the US.
According to researchers, nearly 100,000 hospitalizations every year are linked to adverse drug events such as allergic reactions and unintentional overdoses. Nearly half, or 48.1 percent, of those hospitalized were adults 80 years old or older.
“These data suggest that focusing safety initiatives on a few medicines that commonly cause serious, measurable harms can improve care for many older Americans,” said lead study author Dr. Daniel Budnitz, director of the CDC’s medication safety program. “Blood thinners and diabetes medicines often require blood testing and dosing changes, but these are critical medicines for older adults with certain medical conditions.”
“Of the thousands of medications available to older patients, a small group of blood thinners and diabetes medications caused a high proportion of emergency hospitalizations for adverse drug events among elderly Americans,” he added.

Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/health/according-cdc-four-drugs-er-visits/#ixzz1f1y6QKXw

Physicians, patients, and insurance companies have figured out how to improve the transaction process of filling prescriptions. We need to go the next step and use real time communications to improve the monitoring process.

One could imagine tying a regular automated daily phone call check in to any patient taking certain medications who meets certain criteria. Outbound messaging combined with very simple DTMF gathering of information from the patient would certainly help to lower the number of ER visits.
For more information on these topics contact us at www.marketlaunchgroup.us

CEBP improves Healthcare: Part 1

2011-11-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

Digging into a Health Information Technology press release I noticed an update on a HIPA compliance topic referred to as NCPDP Telecom D.0 (NCPDP D.0).

It took some research but this little bit of news reflects significant changes in the way that doctors, pharmacies and health insurance companies communicate with each other.

Specifically, it requires pharmacies and insurance companies to interact using real time communication standards rather than the previous batch information standards.

I know this sounds like esoteric stuff. Yet, think about your typical interaction with a pharmacy over the past year as compared to a few years ago. I deal with a very large regional drug store chain so they may be ahead of the curve.

1. If you need a monthly prescription refilled many pharmacies proactively call you to tell you it is ready. At worst, one need just call a number on the bottle and request a time to pick it up.

2. Annual updates or anything requiring your physician’s involvement can most often happen over the phone within 24 or 48 hours.

3. For the most part there is little or no involvement that is required between the patient and the insurance company regarding prescription drug processing.

4. I am also told that Drug Enforcement Agency work in conjunction with Pharmacies has been greatly improved. Unfortunately, due to the increase in prescription drug abuse this technology enhancement has been vital.

There are certainly still outlier scenarios but the vast majority of pharmacy/physician/patient interactions have become faster, better, and cheaper for all parties involved thanks to real time communications. Go to MarketLaunchGroup.us for more information on these topics.
Patrick Murphy

Why is the CEBP value proposition being stolen away from Telcos?

2011-11-02T10:43:00.000-04:00

# Martin Geddes: Telcos will not be the hubs of multi-sided markets in connectivity. Commerce platforms will give away access to drive transactions.

According to Martin, I’ve been looking in the wrong place for UC/CEBP inspiration. For background, one of the key opportunities in multisided Telco related markets has been CEBP.

Geddes is typically right on target. For the most part, the innovative activity is not coming from Telcos or telco inspired and dependent firms, it is or will come from companies that are focused on driving consumer or business transactions.

Several major examples have made news examples.
Amazon’s Kindle has come with wireless data connectivity as a free feature for years. Of course, the KindleFire is being positioned as a one stop commerce platform. Gaming stations have Unified Communications tools baked into their systems. In theory, Microsoft’s cloud initiatives dovetails nicely with their Skype acquisition. Given track records for Skype and Microsoft it is premature to make any real predictions about successful integration and collaboration efforts.

One can certainly see mobile content providers giving away or subsidizing the sale of low cost mobile entertainment, sms, communication devices to teenagers and young people globally under the assumption that all this demographics’ entertainment purchases will flow through their mobile entertainment, communication,commerce platforms.

Providing mobile phones to remote villages around the globe to encourage the use of mobile commerce via sms is already happening. Similar to credit card companies in the US over the last five decades, get the commerce platform in the hands of the consumers anyway possible.
It seems that the important innovations so far, are with consumer driven initiatives. Obviously some of these niches like gaming, app stores, and mobile payments are very big.

Are any of these innovations and the value they are creating being driven by Telcos? Not really, as Telcos continue to deal with commoditization issues the only differentiator over the last few years has been provided by Apple’s alignment with ATT.

So, from the Telco perspective, how do we bring more CEBP/UC style innovations directly to businesses?

The irony is this challenge is no longer a technology problem. The tools, talents, platforms or apis required to integrate most communications functionality into practically any business process are understood and affordable. Many Telcos have platforms that allow for new services and apis to provide innovative solutions to clients. Furthermore, the client use cases and return on investment calculations are already proven.

The challenge that has not been overcome by most Telcos and telco dependent companies is their view of the customer world is horizontal.The “most” creative Telcos and vendors may admit to several types of customers: consumers, business- class, and enterprise...alas small, medium and large is the same customer segmentation done by my local ice cream shop.

The challenge for Telcos and their vendors is one of organizational structure and culture change on the revenue generating side of each company. Sales and marketing teams in CLECs and the vendors that support them have to get hyper focused on industry verticals...or at least CEBP vertical solutions.

Here are two examples of vertically specific opportunities that would allow Telcos to move beyond the selling of commodity voice and data services.

Healthcare is the vertical with the most money sloshing through it in the US today.
1. The Federal government is providing $42,000 subsidies for physicians to adopt EMR technologies. Amazingly, few of the EMRs that I have reviewed have any real communications functionality embedded in their platforms. Here are two challenges to be solved by UC/CEBP.
First, making sure that patients don’t miss appointments has hard ROIs understood by everyone in healthcare. Secondly, the ability to securely transfer EMRs within and between healthcare organizations and physicians has lots of lags and drags in the process.

K-12 and Higher Education continues to see above average growth while serving the most connected of our generations.
2. Outbound messaging and surveying applications have become a standard requirement for most schools and towns within the last six years. Why couldn’t a CLEC provide school districts or municipalities partner with Student Information Systems or Municipal CRM platforms to provide outbound student/citizen messaging applications as part of the voice and data packages.

Identifying the right types of CEBP functionality to add real value for customers is a matter of focus. Regardless, it does come down to a fundamental question. Are the Telcos and all the Telco dependent firms really willing to think about customers with a bit more complexity than small, medium, or large. Then, are the best firms willing to align their sales and marketing organization to take ownership of this communications value proposition?

Was British Telecom's acquisition of Ribbit a success or failure?

2011-04-12T09:29:00.000-04:00

On July 29th, 2008 BT announced it had acquired Ribbit for $105 million dollars in cash. At the time I was working with Jaduka, a Network IP company. Although, we were a bit envious many of us saw this exit as validation of a wider industry vision that the global telecom companies were ready to reinvent themselves. The vision of inevitably becoming a dumb pipe provider had begun to shock a few global telcos into action. The concept of a Telco 2.0 world was beginning to take hold, so we thought.

Two plus years after the acquisition has been finalized, implemented, and accounted, can it be viewed as a success or failure?

From the financial standpoint of the founders and investors in Ribbit, it must be viewed as a success. It can be counted as a minimum 8x return on the total $13 million dollar investment. The company had only been started in early 2006. Ribbit was a text book Silicon Valley startup and exit.

The next questions are whether BT and the wider industry view the acquisition as a success.

Ribbit's founders, lead executives and much of the original talent at Ribbit are no longer employed by BT. Some would consider that loss of staff natural attenuation during tech company acquisitions. Entrepreneurs having achieved a liquidity event don't typically stick around large companies. However, it gets tougher for BT to defend the loss of their leading executive force behind the acquisition, JP Rangaswami. His team was seen as the leading evangelists for re-inventing the Telcos.

Some might say that a move to SalesForce can be expected for an executive most comfortable with the title of chief scientist. World class executives make moves all the time and JP's team was recognized as leaders by the industry. So, maybe the people side of the BT/Ribbit acquisition was always destined to work out like it has.

However, the BT phrase that I have heard used several times over the last few months regarding Ribbit is that it is being "internalized." No one seems to use the term and then follow it up with a jaunty phrase of congratulations. I know corporate speak is strange but it feels more like a pyscho-analytical term to me. Internalizing the Ribbit platform within BT suggests that it will be used as a self help tool kit.

I am confident that somewhere within BT accounting a credit and debit EBITDA sheet can justify the $105 million dollar acquisition. The Ribbit platform as a tool for internal development and the Ribbit soft switch as a no cost alternative to vendor supplied development tools and switches could be viewed as "internalized" assets with depreciation value. Given the US dollar exchange rate, any of us could come up with a financial equation that justifies the deal.

On paper, both sides can probably make claims that the acquisition was a financial success.

Does it feel like a success to the wider industry? Is Telco 2.0 style innovation being driven through out BT or the wider telecom industry because of this acquisition?

At this point in time, the primary BT/Ribbit failure is one of hopes, expectations, and vision. There are worlds' of innovation happening within the broader telco application industry. Can this innovation always be supported and leveraged by the giant global telecoms. No, of course not.
What are the factors that drive success or precipitate failure and can we control for them?

This post is one attempt to get more industry journalists, analysts or business school teams to take a deeper look at a few of the past technology driven acquisitions made by global Telcos. The success or failure of a particular initiative or acquisition is not the most important question. What are the factors required to drive Telco innovation? Can innovation really happen from within a Telco anymore?

Patrick Murphy
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CEBP offers our enterprise clients a way to surf the wave of social crm

2010-08-12T14:40:00.000-04:00

One of the major technology trends of the past few years has been the consumerization of technology adoption. Meaning, unlike in previous decades where the business market was the first one to adopt technology, consumer applications or devices are now the leading edge of technology.

This trend has resulted in consumers (all of us) pushing to make our employers and business relationships adopt the technology that we use most regularly. Social Media networks like Facebook and mobile sms tools like Twitter are great examples of consumer apps that are being pushed into the business community creating a social crm channel. Opening up these new tech empowered social crm channels has become a real challenge for businesses of any size.

Creating and sustaining a customer, vendor, friend, community communications strategy has real strategic and tactical complexities as well as opportunities. For large consumer driven enterprises, the massive scale attached to opening and managing multiple social crm channels can become mind boggling. There are two very good recent reports by Gartner and Altimeter covering these social CRM trends.

With many billions of customer service contacts each year at an average per call cost (domestically or off shore) measured at $5.00 adding tens of billions of additional consumer interactions requires new thinking and tools.

Of course, these new consumer channels need to flow through the businesses contact centers. Yet, this rapidly becomes a tsunami of real time communications and social media traffic that will test the capacity of any contact center. More vitally, consumer expectations have changed. Proactive responses into the consumers’ preferred communication channel is the new standard. The traditional metric of first call resolution within so many hours is dramatically out of step in a world of consumers posting their negative experiences to their networks of hundreds and thousands. The old saying that a happy customer tells 5 people and an angry customer tells 25 people about his experience needs to be exponentially updated.

To add even more complexity, an old issue , identity verification, becomes even more important as we add millions if not billions of consumer contacts into these channels.

CEBP solutions like VoiceSage can become an integral part of these solutions. Fortunately, VoiceSage’s ability to leverage telco grade database queries offers a fast and simple method to provide identity verification for any consumer facing enterprise. These types of data feeds are no longer a function of hardware but of programming interfaces.

I’ve previously touched on this theme of CEBP solutions as a glue technology. Social media and mobile technologies are the tools of choice for consumers. Connecting, pulling, leveraging these consumer tools with traditional enterprise contact center technologies is not being done well now. CEBP solutions can be used to connect these two distinct worlds.

CEBP solutions allow our enterprise clients to buy themselves time to open these new social media/mobile communication channels without drowning their business.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA

Could the CEBP market be as large as the postal service?

2010-07-12T12:41:00.000-04:00

The US postal service is once again running billions of dollars in deficits. Its total volume continues to decline by billions of pieces each year. The number of employee layoffs increases. The requests for rate increases and reduced services continues. A Newsweek post argues that this decline in the postal service is actually good for the economy.

My colleagues in the UK tell me about the rather unique tradition of regular postal strikes that tend to be timed to cause maximum disruption near holidays. To be fair, it can be argued that the Royal Mail may have turned the corner at least from a financial perspective if not with service improvements. Their total volume continues to decline too. Despite declining volumes, revenues, and technical obsolence postal services remain some of the world’s largest employers.

Despite these negative signs it is understood there are remaining social contexts and regulatory demands for ubiquitous mail services.Yet, that is really the only supporting argument. Many of the business related reasons for using traditional mail are obviously outdated already. For the majority of us the mail has become a test of our commitment to recycling rather than a useful government service. It is difficult to imagine a true transformation of something now popularly referred to as snail mail.

At the same time, we can look at the Telco industry (once also a government protected monopoly) and ask if it has a hope of evolving into anything more than a dumb pipe. The next question that comes to my mind may seem a bit unusual.

What if Telcos or possibly a major CEBP focused business process outsourcer decided they were going to directly compete for business revenue and functions that traditionally go to the postal service?

For major Telcos and BPOs the first question is whether the potential market is large enough. Are there billions rather than millions in potential revenue? The postal service is a perfect example of a two sided market that benefits from winner take all economies. Thus, the revenue numbers attached to just enterprise sent consumer mail are in the tens of billions of dollars in the US and hundreds of billions if not in excess of a trillion dollars globally.

The only major difference between the business functions provided by the postal service and CEBP solutions is in terms of the marketing function. At least in the US and UK, permission based marketing is the regulated and cultural standard for telco inspired solutions. A similarly enforced permission based marketing regulation would be the final nail in the coffin of mass mail marketers who rely on gross volume to generate single digit responses.

This “marketing” difference is not as clear cut in many developing countries that use affinity marketing as a means to subsidise mobile phone adoption and mobile payment transactions. Interestingly, I wonder if many of these same countries have as strong a history of government sponsored mail services compared to the UK and US.

This current marketing difference is more a problem of creative business models and culture than one of technology. Being able to proactively send a customer a targeted appreciated marketing message by voice or sms will become more common as consumers and retailers continue to get comfortable with social media and understand the value of creating opt in permissions for their trusted networks of friends and businesses. Marketing guru Seth Godin bluntly describes the difference in business models as smart versus dumb.

If one goes through the range of reasons why mail has traditionally been most useful for all industries VoiceSage’s clients have already found many more productive solutions through the use of our CEBP application. In many instances the client uses CEBP solutions to remove the need for postal mail entirely from their processes. In other cases the enterprise uses CEBP solutions to improve the experience of any remaining paper based communications. Our ability to provide just in time personalization while handling global scale allows our clients to generate ROI across both big and small business processes.

Our UK, Irish, and US based VoiceSage clients rely on CEBP solutions to provide logistics, collections, communications, and customer service business process improvements every day. With a Telco or BPO style strategic partner,VoiceSage clients in parts of EMEA could certainly tap the marketing power of CEBP quickly.

We have never thought of ourselves as competing with the largest postal services in the world. Maybe we should.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
July 12, 2010

CEBP, business intelligence, and real time enterprise transformation

2010-06-15T15:22:00.000-04:00

At various conferences and events VoiceSage regularly does a 15 or 20 minute presentation with a focus on how our CEBP application finds, unlocks, and creates "Value at the Edge" of our clients' businesses. Examples of this value creation can be found across many industries. What we mean is that using real time voice and sms communications with consumers consistently has a positive compounding effect within the enterprise. Good implementations are not just creating cost reductions in mailed letters or contact center volume. These better processes are improving cash flow, increasing warehouse space, reducing patient no shows, building industry leading best practices, and raising the overall value of our clients' brands. Working with many of the largest retail, utility, telco, insurance, financial services, healthcare, and government clients has shown us that this value is created over and over again.

What has caught my attention recently is how the VoiceSage CEBP application can be easily connected into other enterprise solutions in ways that create synergies and add value at an even faster rate than we have experienced so far.

I have had two recent gotcha moments where I figured out that our VoiceSage client experiences are the same every where. Reading the May 24th issue of Information Week, the headline asks "Are your Apps smart enough." Then it states "Until embedded Business Intelligence can tap into real- time transactions, decision support will be stuck in the past." At VoiceSage we have been referring to this lack of real time decision making and consumer communication as the "Lags and Drags" within the enterprise. Yesterday, I noticed a Tweet coming out of the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. It stated that conference attendees want to see more about business value creation and less about tools. Our mantra is we move business metrics.

BI tools or status reports from various enterprise software tools are notoriously bad at informing real time communications to the customer facing staff let alone moving beyond the walls of the enterprise directly to the consumer.
If we consider a single core business process that makes economies run like scheduling a meeting with the customer in person,virtually, or by phone it is easy to see the inherent weaknesses in major classes of enterprise software solutions including CRM, BPM, BI, HCMS, UC, and ERP.

How can we most effectively connect and directly communicate with the consumer and our staff,? More specifically, can an appointment be automatically made, confirmed, reminded or changed between a customer and an available, knowledgeable company representative? It sounds simplistic but it is not being done within most consumer facing business processes. Just by focusing on effectively and efficiently scheduling customer/client/patient meetings we have seen dramatic ROI.

The complete lack of embedded real time, interactive communication processes to leverage the consumer and mobile workers preferred methods( voice or text) is strikingly absent from so many other software solutions today. Obviously at VoiceSage we are working with vendor partners to change this now. Just as importantly, we approach every client with a direct question before we engage them. What business process do you want to improve?

Just as real time data is a requirement in the financial markets and media world, real time data combined with real time communication functionality is becoming a requirement when dealing with consumers. Consumers now expect proactive,personalized, interactive communications with their preferred brands.

By adding an ability to enrich real time communication using other "edge" data we can begin to see how business transformation may look over the next few years Furthermore, the massive investments and expectations being set in enterprise software are not going to be fully realized without the real time functionality and "Value creation at the Edge" that is provided by CEBP applications.

As a standalone application VoiceSage has proven its ability to move business metrics. Working across the enterprise suite of existing corporate software solutions VoiceSage can help unlock true business transformation.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA

CEBP solutions provide the right tool at the right time

2010-05-13T14:55:00.000-04:00

In at least 4 recent articles Communications Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) messaging was being used to push renewed enthusiasm for non CEBP product offerings. Several articles or posts in NetworkWorld and UC strategies provided a recap of the Unified Communications Summit which focused on CEBP messaging as a way to sell the value of UC solutions. Reduxonline also referenced CEBP messaging relative to needed BPM (business process management) product iterations.

Now, VoiceSage as a world class CEBP hosted application has been evangelizing the CEBP message, improving our enterprise clients' business processes, and focusing on creating hard and fast ROIs for many years.

Given the new interest in CEBP by UC, BPM and other solutions it is important to take a deeper look at how VoiceSage can be used by our clients or partners as an " over the top" application to provide the equivalent of glue or a lever for these other applications.

There are lots of ways the VoiceSage application can make up for current limitations in the standard UC and BPM suite of solutions. Here are two big examples.

1. SILOS
Interoperability between vendor specific UC solutions is a big problem that is dampening down the CIO enthusiasm needed to drive UC purchases. Interestingly, there is a new protocol being presented by Cisco and other vendors refered to as Viper or Verification involving PSTN Reachability. The purpose of this protocol is to find a simple, realtime method of recognizing if/when phone numbers within different UC systems can be recognized, authorized and reached. This would help to bring competing UC installations beyond the silo of the enterprise.

One of the hidden assets of CEBP solutions is, like Telcos, they have enormous amounts of data that come attached to telephone numbers. The vital, real time requirement to identify whether a phone number is working and attached to the right party is what the VIPER protocol requires. In its simplest terms the Viper protocol would act as a shared database that can be accessed by varied and competing UC solutions to authenticate numbers. CEBP solutions like VoiceSage already have this functionality and often possess a realtime database that rivals anything easily leveraged within even a single telco.

In the BPM world, if a human is required within a particular process, email tends to be the only notification option. CEBP moves BPM beyond the walls of the enterprise by leveraging voice and sms functionality while providing simple ways to pull consumers around the world into a process too.

VoiceSage's ability to quickly glue together or leverage other solutions in our work with the National Health Service or the world's largest business database firm provides just two examples of how our CEBP tool can strengthen other solutions.

2. SCALE
UC and BPM solutions are frequently limited in their scalability by being attached to standard server license or hardware focused business models as opposed to cloud applications. Furthermore, UC solutions can be limited by the IP or PSTN infrastructure of the enterprise they are serving. VoiceSage as a SaaS or Cloud Communications service provides a platform for our clients and vendor partners to overcome these real time scale issues. A spectacular example of the power of CEBP scalability is VoiceSage's work in bringing American Airlines on board within 4 hours to help respond to the volcanic ash cloud disruptions.

Our experience shows the vast majority of important business process improvements required by the world's largest industries involve communicating beyond the walls of the enterprise to thousands or millions of customers. BPM and UC solutions have a distinct disadvantage when the requirement is consumer scale at a truly domestic or international level. VoiceSage clients and vendor partners can scale up,down, or around the world to meet the real time needs of their customers.

UC, BPM, and other application vendors are certainly beginning to come to terms with their Silo and Scale challenges. In a world driven by the ubiquitous mobile device using sms or voice as the preferred method of consumer transaction, CEBP solutions can be used to glue other applications and leverage business processes immediately.

VoiceSage allows our clients and partners to improve their own business processes and at the same time better utilize existing software investments. When we talk about this internally we talk about "edge processes". It means we strive to understand how we can deliver improved business performance by using our transactional business model. This allows us to eliminate the capital expenses, eliminate large integration project costs, and eliminate the long wait to achieve ROI. In essence, we strive for Win/Win/Win business models that are by definition unbeatable!

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage

ECOMM 2010, San Francisco recap: CEBP vs. Platforms discussion continues

2010-04-26T14:38:00.000-04:00

Despite the volcanic eruption that shut down much of Europe last week, the US version of the biannual ECOMM event was certainly a success.

Although I have been following ECOMM since 2008 and VoiceSage has sponsored the 2009 EU event this was the first time I had the chance to attend.

ECOMM is three full days of presentations done in 12 to 15 minute bites. A couple of keynote speakers may be allowed 20 minutes but even they are subject to the time clock "gong". The goal of the event is to be a force in reshaping the world's telecommunications industry. The first two days of this event were primarily focused on Telco subjects that are current but may still be considered cutting edge by the main stream media.

The third day was dedicated to Augmented Reality which by everyone's definition is on the bleeding edge of technical innovations. My takeaway from Day 3 was a simple one. There are seriously talented people spending a lot of time and money in AR. Over the next few years we will see amazing results.

On Day 2, I had the opportunity to present the VoiceSage Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) story in a way that everyone in the room could appreciate. Our amazingly fast response in helping American Airlines deal with their passenger communications needs during the volcanic disruptions across Ireland and the UK showed the power of CEBP applications and Cloud Communications in general. The previous keynote speakers, including Martin Geddes, had all used the language of CEBP or touched on the topic briefly. I had the opportunity to drill into CEBP and differentiate VoiceSage as a leader in the space with our focus on moving clients' business metrics.

Telcos are looking for new ways to replace traditional revenue streams that are going away. CEBP applications clearly open up billion dollar business process optimization market opportunities. One variation on this theme is for Telcos to rely upon or buy API platforms that will open up their infrastructure to the innovation of the world's developers. In my opinion, the few winners and losers have already been decided in the Telco API space.

However, regardless of their size or scale, firms that view themselves as developer platforms miss the game changing opportunity to directly understand and impact clients' business processes in the valuable way that is available to VoiceSage or other CEBP applications. Replacing billions in old telco landline revenue with millions in developer api revenues is the tradeoff that many Telcos are grudgingly reviewing now. Replacing billions in landline revenue with billions in enterprise class CEBP revenue is a tradeoff that is also available to Telcos but will appeal to a wider variety of enterprise focused vendors too.

Thanks to ECOMM, this CEBP message is being heard widely and clearly.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage USA
April 26th, 2010

VoiceSage and CEBP make good progress in the USA

2010-04-02T09:59:00.000-04:00

We have made good progress over the past few weeks with VoiceSage’s launch into America. Mark Oppermann, VoiceSage’s Sales Director, spent a week with me traveling in and around Boston talking with partners and potential clients. We also had a chance to attend a Boston Celtics game!

One of the highlights of this visit was our chance to provide a keynote presentation called Social Media meets the Contact Center for the NECCF Spring event. This is a slightly edited version of the presentation that we gave to the folks in attendance. I am confident we will be seeing lots more of the NECCF community. Our practical message that VoiceSage helps enterprises move their business metrics using a variety of phone and web tool sets was very well received. The questions about great business cases were fantastic. The business challenges seem to be the same regardless of where we are in the world.

A second highlight was our meeting with members of the Dialogic team. VoiceSage has been a long time Dialogic customer and is now a member of their partner program. Dialogic has been an early advocate and enthusiastic supporter of the CEBP space. We look forward to working with them.

We always enjoy providing a bit of a promotion to the April ECOMM conference being held in San Francisco. I will be attending with colleague Paul Sweeney later this month. VoiceSage sponsored the ECOMM European event last Fall. This is always a fantastic gathering of thought leaders in the Telco industry. For those not able to attend in person, I would encourage following the event via several virtual back channels that are available.

VoiceSage is coming to America

2010-03-12T15:15:00.001-05:00

One of the VoiceSage company goals entering 2010 was to launch across the USA. So, I was excited to join VoiceSage a few months ago after seeing its fantastic success with the largest enterprise clients across the UK and Ireland.

In this CEBP, Cloud Communications or Telco 2.0 industry (pick your definition), that I've worked to grow and written about here in the US since it's inception, we have seen years of talk, research, and pointing towards a future filled with opportunities.

However, VoiceSage stands out as unique within the industry simply because it has been able to create real value for the largest and most demanding clients across Retail, Utilities, Government, Healthcare, Banking,Insurance, and the Telco markets. For a company of any size, anywhere, the VoiceSage client base in the UK and Ireland is impressive.

Over these first few months, our "soft" launch into America has been recognized by thought leaders across the industry. Here are a few mentions.

During the Telco 2.0, Orlando Executive Brainstorm conference in December, Thomas Howe's CEBP presentation to the crowd of Telco executives identified VoiceSage and Ifbyphone as the two leading examples of CEBP solutions in the world.

In January, VoiceSage was invited to join two CEBP panels as part of the ITEXPO's Cloud Communications Summit in Miami Beach. Here is a video link to one of our panel discussions.

In February, VoiceSage was mentioned as an industry leader in an interesting article about the difference between CEBP and Unified Communications by UC-Edge.

VoiceSage was invited to add our thoughts on improving customer experiences using CEBP with an essay in the Cloud Communications 2010 ebook being published later in March. This book has a stellar cast of industry participants and will certainly be required reading throughout the telecommunications industry.

The NorthEast Contact Center Forum asked VoiceSage to offer a keynote presentation during its March 23rd Summit near Boston. The theme is Social Media meets the Contact Center. We are excited to share client uses cases from a wide variety of our customers' experiences.

Finally, we will be attending and supporting the Spring ECOMM event in San Francisco in April. This event is certainly where the future of Telco gets talked about and launched. VoiceSage sponsored the Fall ECOMM conference in Europe.

With this progress, VoiceSage's launch across the US is just getting started. Be sure to look for regular VoiceSage announcements and updates coming soon.

Thanks
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
March, 2010

CEBP, Cloud Communications, and VoiceSage at the ITEXPO

2010-01-27T11:45:00.000-05:00

It was great fun to introduce VoiceSage at the Cloud Communications Summit during last week's ITEXPO. Despite the small room and limited advertising/publicity around the Cloud Communications Summit it was clearly a success judging by attendance at all the panels. The word is that Cloud Communications will have a much higher profile track at the next ITEXPO.

My purpose as a participant on two of the CEBP panels was twofold.
1. Introducing VoiceSage as a new player in the US market so that we are positioned to build off our great UK customer successes was met by positioning VoiceSage as a business metric/ROI moving, Enterprise class solution relative to other US firms.

2. Introducing CEBP as a concept and as a results driven, profitable practice area gained a boost too. My sense is that CEBP hasn't been covered at previous ITEXPOs in much detail.

There was an unscripted point in our discussion about vertical and industry specific CEBP solutions when I looked at our panel and then confidently asked the audience to name any vertical or industry. I said that our panel would be able to present a solid CEBP application across any industry vertical. There was no hesitation from the panel members.

This one moment convinced me that CEBP has certainly moved from a theoretical analyst coined concept to pragmatic client focused solutions over the last two plus years.

There is plenty of work left to do but I am excited about the progress made so far.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage

VoiceSage and CEBP gets noticed in Europe and the US

2010-01-05T13:29:00.000-05:00

My VoiceSage colleagues forwarded me this link from an event that we attended in France. At this investor conference Voice Sage was voted one of the most fundable international companies.

I am looking forward to meeting up with industry colleagues at the ITEXPO event in Miami January 20-22,2010.
I get to tell the VoiceSage and CEBP story during two different panel discussions facilitated by Thomas Howe during the Cloud Communications Summit on Wednesday January 20th.

Sincerely
Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage
Patrick.Murphy at VoiceSage.com

TELCO 2.0 and VoiceSage

2009-12-15T10:29:00.000-05:00

I attended the Telco 2.0 conference in Orlando last week. Congratulations to STL Partners and the sponsors for a successful event. The quality of the content and participants was very high. I would encourage a search for other blogging about the event.

Here is my too quick recap with my prioritization,questions, and my agenda notes.

1. Leveraging Telco Customer Data as a potential gold mine is a widely agreed upon strategy. Tactically, no Telco has the ability to do it without tons of effort. It is too hard technically, physically, and organizationally. Can others aggregate similar client data, cdr, learnings in a fashion that generate real, ongoing business intelligence? Can an overlay of Telco business intelligence or other sources of data be on top?

Atigeo and Sense Networks are working to add contextual insight to these efforts.

2. Changing industry language and message focus caught my attention.

a. Telcos are starting to talk about a new metric of measurement. Instead of ARPUs ( Average Revenue Per User) they describe ATPU ( Average Transaction Per User) or AMPU ( Average Margin Per User). STL Partners soon to be launched white paper with Tom Howe will highlight these new metrics relative to CEBP... we will be looking for that soon.

b. Within the conference there was an ongoing challenge to balance forward thinking strategic presentations with what is real. Of the 11 themes, CEBP clearly came across as the most real especially when using new ATPU or AMPU metrics. My bias is showing.

c. Moving the needle for Telcos requires new business initiatives that generate in excess of 100 million annual revenue within 5 years or less. During my conversations with Sprint strategist Brad Grau, he laughed and said that every business plan that came across his desk had a 5 year target of $105 million. Margin rather than revenue is the real discussion point.

Can STL PARTNERS send every executive in the Telco 2.0 ecosystem a copy of the Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen? This is a classic case study waiting to be written.

d. Vendors and Telcos alike love the big picture idea of 50 billion connected devices around the world by 2020. Independently, I heard calculations that there are 5 billion connected devices now. (2020 estimates ranged from 20 billion to 60 billion.) Verizon speaks of moving from 80-90% market adoption to 500% market adoption in their regions. The thought experiment is fun..what 5-10 devices will be networked in my life?

DAY ONE AGENDA

1. Strategy and Finance 2.0
STL explained the Two- sided business model. STL defined TELCOS' potential new upstream customers along these 7 verticals.

Developers, Retailers, Government, Media, Advertisers, Utilities, Financial Services

Did they steal the VoiceSage customer list!! I almost jumped up and shouted Bingo, matched them all! ( I would argue about developers being a unique vertical). Very cool for VoiceSage.

2. Media 2.0
The Bit Torrent founder showed up and talked about ways to prioritize traffic. Brave Man, Smart Man. It costs Telcos money to support online media. No one actually believes Telcos will make much money in this sector unless they buy content companies.....see CableCos.

3. Consumer Services 2.0= App stores for consumers
Few thought the Telcos will make money in this sector other than at the infrastructure level. It could provide customer stickiness. It sells devices that enable the broader ecosystem. Again, this conversation was focused on consumer apps. However, the discussion began to move the conversation beyond consumer apps to enterprise apps. Scott Adler of Amdocs did a nice presentation. That seems like a winning space for Telcos.

4. Customer Data 2.0: Telco goldmine?
Most everyone agrees this is a goldmine. However, Telco's can't mine it on their own. Lots of start ups being funded around this topic. Privacy is an issue.
STL will be hosting a Privacy 2.0 conference at MIT in Boston in February. This is an important topic for lots of very big companies in the Web world too.

5. Digital Advertising 2.0:
An advertising panel that talked about viewers and impressions etc..
STL did a case study on an sms search service that tried to show there was real money in this space.

6. Mobile Money 2.0:
Lots of good analyst work on this topic. I was impressed with Lopez research. Plenty of startups working in this space. Vendors making money in Kenya (Safariicom) and Japan (DocoMo NTT) after lots of investment from major brands were the focus of the STL presentation.

DAY TWO

7. Internet Access 2.0: Mobile Broadband
We all are using a lot of mobile broadband. New devices and pricing models needed. Telcos can't keep up with the demand and getting commoditized. Dean Bubley presentation

8. Voice and Messaging 2.0= Ask Thomas Howe for his CEBP presentation. Irv Shapiro's Ifbyphone presentation.VoiceSage was highlighted well by Tom and Irv. CEBP is a clear path to ATPU and AMPU. According to Tom, VoiceSage and Ifbyphone are the leading CEBP companies in the world.

9. M2M opportunities in Health= Machine to Machine communications
Lots of money and time being spent on device to device communications ( some people to people too) by Orange, Intel, and other Vendors. Big opportunity, Big Challenges. Money is down the road. I really liked the work done by Niels Helkov from Orange in this sector.

10. Cloud Computing= Joe Weinman from ATT came across as the smartest guy in the room. Really good presentation. I talked with him afterwards. Nice guy too. Read his many blog posts highlighted by GigaOm

11. APIs and Open 2.0:
Tom Howe did a great skit with Sanjay Jhawar describing a conversation between a Telco and an API Developer. Half the room was semi- insulted. Half the room was laughing. Sanjay's firm Ideas and Plans looks sharp. I know this API topic all too well.

Bottomline, the Telco 2.0 event in Orlando was the best conference I've attended in years.

Patrick Murphy
VoiceSage, North America

Voicesage and the future of CEBP

2009-11-16T12:16:00.001-05:00

Having joined Dublin, Ireland based Voicesage this month, I feel fortunate to be involved with a company that clearly is the future of CEBP.

Although under the radar in the US, Voicesage has been around since approximately 2002 working on the tough stuff. The SaaS application has gone through multiple product development releases. Thus, it is ahead of anyone else in our space already. There is no legacy application or infrastructure weighing it down. The UK client base already includes many of the strongest brands. These clients are committed to leveraging the Voicesage solution throughout their business since they have experienced business metric improvement over and over again

The business model is working quite well with revenue driving skyward over the last year despite the economic downturn. Profitability for a small angel/vc funded company is a good thing in these times. Voicesage has committed investors without the curse of having taken "too" much funding too soon relative to other businesses in the industry.

There is a nice balance of strategy and tactics blended throughout the company. The team drives customer value while behaving like a real business.

Finally, the advisory team (TBA) is made up of some of the most respected names in the business.

There is lots of work still to do. One of our first tasks is to publish use cases that show how the Voicesage application builds business processes and moves business metrics better than anything else I've seen in the CEBP industry.

Our North American launch will be done thoughtfully and in a timely manner. I do guarantee big things are coming.

Patrick Murphy
Voicesage, North America

The Telco API problem= 2 sided markets are winner take all

2009-10-07T15:48:00.000-04:00

I noticed several unique posts this week that seemed to come together in my mind. First, Voxeo made yet another strategic partnership announcement with Motorola and their VXML broswer. Secondly, Google and Verizon announced a strategic partnership. Third, Amazon payments api went mobile. Finally, my friend, Tom Howe started posting again with some comments about what he calls the Telco API problem.

Here is my answer to the "Telco API" problem posed by Tom.
In my CEBP status report,I compared ( with Alan Quayle) the success of the CEBP application vendors to the api/platform vendors. Tom reiterates the report's findings in that it is clear the application vendors as a group have been much more successful. VoiceSage is just my latest example of a CEBP application company driving real revenue, fantastic product innovation, and seeing crazy growth.

It is also clear to me that the Telco API/Platform opportunity is a classic example of a 2 sided network or 2 sided market. According to Harvard Business School research, one of the defining characteristics of two-sided markets is they tend to quickly evolve into winner take all competitive environments.

Now, the world of Telco is huge. So, the winner take all competitive environment may ultimately mean there are 2 or 3 dominant market leaders globally in the Telco API/Platform space. Here is the problem. One of those spots has been nailed down already by Voxeo.

Another winner's position may have just been nailed down by Google Voice if they can leverage the Verizon/Google partnership just announced. While this may fail due to egos, when it gets down to execution, the Google Android Verizon announcement gets my early bet for the second platform/api winner. Google is a platform. Verizon is a platform. Combining the two of them makes THE global platform. Google Voice is just one of many CEBP style solutions to come. Click to connect advertising and real time lead generation is being tested now.

In terms of who might be the final api/platform winner I am keeping my eyes open for the first player who wakes up and proactively integrates with mobile payment players especially Amazon. Will Ribbit/BT get there first? Adobe Flash ( a Ribbit tool set) is certainly pushing towards mobile.

So, this is the beginning of a debate. I say the Telco API/Platform winners have basically been decided. My guess is Thomas Howe believes otherwise. We both agree there is plenty of opportunity left in the CEBP application space. I've kept some of my powder dry to respond to Tom's arguments.

CEBP status report update= 4500 downloads and counting

2009-10-01T11:10:00.000-04:00

With a little help from colleagues across our CEBP industry my own minor concerns related to the CEBP Status report have all been addressed.

1. Distribution of the report
Alan Quayle's blog has some serious reach across the industry. He sent me an update that the report has been downloaded over 4500 times already. I was expecting less than 5% of that number...after a year.

2. Market Valuation
I was very hesitant to calculate a market value for CEBP. Eventually,I settled on an estimate from a very conservative perspective. I simply aggregated how much of the core communication functionality of CEBP is being used right now. However, the other side of the CEBP market valuation is, of course, the business process component. In a recent conversation with our CEBP colleague at Voice Sage, Paul Sweeney mentioned that he independently had taken that approach. His conservative estimate was based on business process solutions that CEBP is successfully addressing right now. By definition, these are the early adopters. The good news is that Paul's numbers and my numbers match. Contact VoiceSage and encourage Paul to blog about his findings.

3.Go-To Market tactics and adoption.
I just found out that a recent Gartner report states that CEBP applications and functionality are expected to be commonly found within the platforms/ecosystems of the Big 4 vendors(IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP). This clearly says that TELCO API functionality will start to get embedded in many, many premise based offerings let along SaaS solutions. More importantly, the leading consulting firms and integrators will begin to create CEBP practice areas as an extension of their current software practice areas.

4. Telco attention to CEBP
At the recent VON show, Thomas Howe blogged about a talk from Verizon that mentioned the importance of CEBP. My guess is that Verizon is starting to see the value add opportunities from the perspective of their largest clients. Selling CEBP's ROI, especially in this economy, is one way to get out of the commodity business.

It is certainly nice to receive validation from multiple sources. Maybe now I will admit to myself that I really do know what I'm talking about across the CEBP space.

Patrick Murphy

CEBP status report is now available

2009-09-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

Our CEBP status report is now available. It is a free report. Thank you to Alan Quayle for contributing content and his skills as an editor. If interested in the this report and any other future versions simply email one of us with your contact information. Join the CEBP LinkedIn group to contribute insights or follow the discussions. You can request the report by emailing me via gmail at pmcape.

Sincerely
Patrick Murphy

CEBP use case for Government

2009-09-18T08:54:00.000-04:00

I noticed this post from Voxeo. Awesome stuff.

This is a great write-up in the blog of the New York State Senate Office of the CIO, “Dialing in to the NYSenate OpenLeg API“, that outlines the great work that independent developer Mark Headd has done.
As the article notes, Mark has used the IMified platform to let people find out the status of legislation before the NY State Senate using:
▪ Instant Messaging Client (Jabber): opensenate@bot.im
▪ Twitter Client: Send a tweet formatted as a @reply to @opensenate
▪ Short Message Service (SMS): Send a text message to (315) 308-1943
▪ Regular Telephone: Call (646) 736-2439 (see note below)
Through whichever channel people want to use, they can now query the NY State Senate legislation database and find out the status of various bills. As the NY State Senate blog post author, Nathan Freitas, stated:
These services fit very well with the Office of the CIO’s vision for a fully mobile-accessible legislative body, where everyone from elected officials to their consituents can fluidly connect with eachother around issues that matter to them no matter where they are. Access of information via mobile phones also signficantly leverages the playing field when it comes to cost… a $99 iPhone is a pretty fantastic computing device.
Mark went into more details on his own blog in a post, “Leveraging the Government 2.0 Platform“, specifically noting that the exposure of an open API by the NY State Senate was the exciting part to him:
When governments make their data available in public formats, and expose APIs for querying such data, they are throwing the door open to outside developers to build useful things. That’s significant, and the NY Senate should get some major props for being among the first (if not the first) legislative body in the country to provide an API for their legislative information.
When governments make data available through an API, they are telling developers: “Use any platform or programming language you want to access our data.” The basic requirements for invoking an API like the NY Senate’s (or the District of Columbia’s 311 API) is the ability to communicate via HTTP and to parse XML, or JSON. Since pretty much every modern programming language and development platform can do these things, it creates opportunities for developers of all stripes.
But if APIs are platform and language agnostic, they are also modality agnostic – if the data exposed through an API is compact enough, there are lots of different ways to present this data to an end user.

Change is a good thing when you learn something.

2009-09-11T15:58:00.000-04:00

With this post about Thomas Howe resigning from Jaduka by Phil Wolfe of the Skype Journal, the many changes at Jaduka and NetworkIP are coming out.

From my perspective, change is a good thing. I'm not in any way predicting the demise of Jaduka or NetworkIP. As you can tell from the Jaduka website, we made several great Bus.Dev. announcements this summer. They are real. Before leaving Jaduka I collaborated with my good colleague Jack Rynes on a next steps plan. With a tight focus,a little luck, and good execution the plan will certainly bear some fruit. I want Jack Rynes and the rest of the guys left at Jaduka to succeed.

I've had three similar conversations this past week that might fall under the category of what Andy Wood ( Head of Consultancy Practice at UK based Affinity), refers to as Context Delivery or Event Driven Architecture.

What caught my attention is that CEBP tools sets and solutions are really starting to focus on the business process creation and logic sets as the path to building value added relationships with clients. From a business development perspective this really fires up my imagination.

Three plus years ago the biggest objection/question to overcome arguably was something related to SaaS versus premise based deployment. For many reasons that obstacle has been overcome.

I'm sure the client statement that sounds something like " what is your per minute or per message rate? Or can I get it cheaper?" is clearly at the top of the most annoying questions/objections in the CEBP space now.

My bet is this commoditization pressure goes away as soon as real innovation within the business process and logic tools of CEBP solutions hit their stride. These innovations become the tools that allow businesses to trial, implement, and iterate.

It is fantastic to see the CEBP space move rapidly beyond clunky, useful, but dumb tool sets towards applications and platforms that drive real change and learning for our clients.

I am not certain if "hanging out my own sign" under the CEBP.biz domain is a short term or long term move. I truly love working with smart teams of technologists and entrepreneurs both domestic and international. So, if there is any need for Go-To Market,Business Development, Sales strategy and tactical help in this CEBP /Telco 2.0 space lets schedule a conversation.

As the saying goes timing is everything.

Patrick Murphy
Principal Consultant for CEBP.biz

Voxeo Labs and Adhearsion are spreading their wings

2009-09-01T15:25:00.007-04:00

I had a terrific conversation with Jay Phillips and Jason Goecke about Adhearsion and their new gig with Voxeo Labs. Here is a press release describing the Voxeo/Adhearsion announcement this summer.

Having been introduced to the wonderful world of Open Source tools,projects, and communities during my time with a regional ISP and web development shop I have always been amazed by the creativity and brilliance found within many of these communities. As a Bus. Dev/Sales type I would scroll through SourceForge and look at projects to figure out how they might be valued by various types of customers. (Yes, that's about as geeky as a non- technical Bus. Dev. guy gets!)

So, I love the direction the VoxeoLabs team is driving. They want to create iterations on the Adhearsion/Tropo frameworks so that other communities of developers can take advantage of Voxeo services. Voxeo has done a fantastic job building a vxml developer community. Why not excite or encourage the Ruby community or other developer communities into leveraging the Voxeo network too?

It makes a lot of logical sense and Voxeo Labs will absolutely be able to leverage the existing Voxeo and Asterisk community to gain even more traction. They will absolutely see some real success!

However, there is a caveat. Others have tried and failed to build highly scaleable business models based upon open source efforts. This needs to be looked at clearly and honestly. It doesn't mean that LAMP,for example, isn't the most widely adopted web server platform. I think? There are real limitations to building a business off these types of projects or by simply opening up apis. Orange suggests their API developer community exceeds 50,000 members. Is the business model a success? Unfortunately, No.

In my mind, communications services continue to be valued by end users so FREE isn't an absolute requirement. But, profitability is severely constrained if you are limited to charging per port, per minute, per channel.

One of the points I have made frequently is that we will be seeing a land grab mentality very soon. The land grab is NOT simply for developers but ultimately for the enduser applications purchased by businesses or consumers. Eventually, communication services will be embedded and adding value to almost every application and business process extending itself beyond the company firewall or household PC.

The closer one gets to the end user is where the maximum value can be identified and monetized. When done well, CEBP solutions help us better communicate with and understand customers. Then, profitability is assured.

Patrick Murphy
CEBP.biz

CEBP research and lessons learned using Linkedin.

2009-08-25T13:47:00.006-04:00

I have been compiling content and writing a document on CEBP from a business development perspective off and on over the summer. The short term goal is to use it to educate our new partners. Obviously I hope to learn something too.

As far as I can tell since Gartner launched the term CEBP a few years ago there hasn't been a formal update on the topic by any independent analyst groups. Please let me know if I am wrong. Obviously, the failure of the premise based solutions by the big telco vendors shows the space may not be a ripe one for the analyst business model. However, we clearly know there are plenty of hosted services providing successful solutions to an array of clients globally. My report will sample both api or platform providers as well as application vendors. I am not making "magic quadrant style" technical comparisons. We are focused on lessons learned so far and effective go-to market strategies.

For those of you on Linkedin, I have a CEBP group that is open with a fascinating mix of people from around the world. Please request an invite. The fact that this Linkedin group is made up of people and firms with a truly global perspective has really caught my attention. It simply formed on its own with little or no attention from me. I promise to pay more attention.

I do try to prevent myself from limiting my perspective to a US centric approach and especially a Telco centric approach. So, I would like to make an offer to blog readers and Linkedin members of our CEBP group. If you are willing to answer a couple of open ended questions about CEBP I will include your attributed comments (with your permission) and share the complete report with you.

As you might guess if I make a public commitment to getting this CEBP report done I might actually finish it!

Patrick Murphy
Jaduka, VP Business Development

CEBP and Two-sided markets

2009-08-14T10:50:00.007-04:00

One of the truisms in the technology industry is that waves of technical innovations are followed by waves of business model evolution. The wave of Telco APIs, platforms, and communication applications clearly brought innovation to the industry. As I've stated previously, STL partners' theme of Two-sided business models represents the business model evolution.

An assumption I make is that Communications Enabled Business Processes is one if not THE most important tactic in helping Global Telcos to move toward Two-sided Business Models. Simply CEBP becomes a method for smart Telcos to not only maintain but extend their voice ( and sms) products rather than lose them to commoditization pressures. There are other important tactics available to Telcos including transactional processing but given that voice is the original cash cow it needs to be a priority.

The research on two-sided networks or markets shows this model can be very tricky to implement. To purchase background articles, go to Harvard Business Review

There are many complexities to putting the idea into practice but an HBS article by Eisenmann, Parker, and Van Alstyne identify three of the most important decisions.

1 .Get Pricing Right
a. subsidize quality and price sensitive users
b. secure marquee users or anchor tenants

2. Cope with Winner-Take All Competition
a. Will the market eventually be decided by one standard or platform?
b. Does this suggest a share or fight attitude with competitors?

3. Avoid Envelopment
Many platforms have overlapping user groups. Be aware of competition from outside your typical industry. Look for opportunities to extend.

Given the evolution of Jaduka and our parent company NetworkIP we are in an awfully strong position to enable two-sided networks. I can identify 2 possibly 3 other firms with strong positions too.

One of the arguments I have with STL's work is they do not adequately discuss the technical, regulatory, and cultural challenges a global telco will have to overcome in order to implement a successful two- sided business model. The academic research puts into context both the challenges and opportunities. In my opinion, the M&A or Strategic Partnership approach to implementing the two-sided network strategy will certainly gain traction.

There will be winners but not many.

Partnerships that push CEBP adoption

2009-07-28T14:41:00.007-04:00

Jaduka is in the process of announcing three new partnerships during these summer months. We have created interesting and unique technology enabling partnerships with Strikeiron, Appian, and Dialogic.

Over the last 5 months, we have carved out a role as a technology enabling vendor of CEBP functionality. Although there are competitors in our space who have gained quicker market traction by building and selling voice applications the longer and bigger view is that practically ALL apps will have communications enabled features eventually. We know that over time voice and sms features will simply become a prime (but disguised) ingredient in other software and many business processes.

Our three partnership announcements help to pave this path.

The Strikeiron offering is the most direct method of appealing to Enterprise developers interested in buying web service solutions from one trusted vendor.

Our Appian partnership provides one of the leading pure play Business Process Management solutions a simple and scaleable method for extending the business process outside the walls of an organization. BPM becomes truly effective only when the mobile workforce, customers, and preferred vendors can be brought in as needed. The virtual or physical walls of the company's office need not act as a barrier to communicating a business process.

Finally, our long time vendor relationship with Dialogic is ready to be leveraged in a highly creative manner. By offering a mix of Dialogic's premise based and Jaduka's hosted offerings ( powered by Dialogic) to the Enterprise client we can push the CEBP space even further.

There are more partnership announcements in the pipeline.

Patrick Murphy
VP, Business Development
Jaduka

The CEBP ecosystems begin to mature

2009-07-22T13:31:00.003-04:00

Within the past week or so, three interesting announcements show that the CEBP ecosystem is beginning to mature in fascinating ways.

1. Nuance purchased Jott. I find this announcement to be curious. I am a big fan of both companies. Jott has done a great job with their consumer and small business focused diary application that leverages a non Nuance based engine. Nuance is the dominant player in speech recognition technology. I haven't seen any serious analysis of why this is an intelligent move for Nuance or Jott. Competition from Google and Microsoft is one off the cuff answer. The VCs created an exit for themselves is another answer. I am interested in learning more about this deal.

2. Voxeo hires the Adhearsion guys
Since you can't technically purchase an open source project, hiring the founders is the next best thing. Again, all the principals in this deal are people I really respect. This could be a very smart move IF they don't get pulled into the trap of so many open source projects...the perception that everything is Free! Yes, I have reviewed Chris Anderson's latest book FREE.
However, getting pulled deeper into the per minute commoditization game will eventually destroy the valuation that Voxeo has tried to build up.

3. Jaduka announces relationship with Strikeiron.
This is the first of several announcements Jaduka will be making with Strikeiron. As I have mentioned previously many times, creating a developer strategy is just one phase in the 4 pronged strategy for a CEBP go to market effort.

From our perspective Strikeiron provides a dream channel for Jaduka's services to developers.
* StrikeIron is not only the largest provider of web services, but they have the largest number of Enterprises that uses these services
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into NetBeans, allowing our services to be available to the millions (4 million downloads last year!) of Enterprise developers already working on SOA and WOA applications
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into IBM’s Mashup Center, allowing IBM, its partners and customers to voice enable any application without costly and expensive integration efforts
* StrikeIron is pre-integrated into SalesForce, the largest SaaS provider in the world

Our little edge of the Telecom industry is starting to heat up.

Google helps to push CEBP and Telco 2.0 whether they know it or not.

2009-07-17T12:23:00.006-04:00

I use Google tools. However, I know that I am different than many corporate workers who are tightly tied into the technology platforms implemented by their IT departments years ago. Google Voice and Google Wave have been making announcements over the past month that should catch the attention of any consumer user. Enterprise users will need to wait a few quarters or release cycles.

What has been well documented by many analysts is the trend referred to as the consumerization of IT and the Enterprise application environment. The meaning is simple. All of us folks who fall in love with web applications (Google) or consumer hardware ( Apple) in our private lives want to leverage these tools in our professional lives. Unfortunately for CIOs meeting this consumer demand from staff for features and functionality within their world becomes very challenging.

So, CIOs do what they do best. They ask (demand) that their ISVs add these features into the existing software now! Vendors tell CIOs the next release will certainly have these features...and the dance begins.

From Jaduka's perspective, the Google Wave and Google Voice announcements are just the most recent wake up call to every software vendor to add real time communications functionality into your core offerings. If it is not in your feature list for the next version launch start advocating now.

If you are a Telco Service Provider then make sure you are reading these two blog post from Om Malik and Jon Arnold.

Momentum is building. Telephony is no longer an application that sits in its own unique device. It is the spice added to all applications.

Pat Murphy
Jaduka
VP, Business Development

Strikeiron as a Trust Agent and platform for CEBP developers

2009-07-09T11:33:00.008-04:00

We are in beta with Strikeiron right now but plan to announce a full launch next week.
Here is a link to our first service offering within the Strikeiron platform. It is a simple and easy to use notification service for developers. Please go in a try it out. A lot more will be coming in the not too distant future.

Obviously, Strikeiron provides very cool services from developers' perspectives. So many tools and data feeds are accessible from one company and platform. Strikeiron has evolved their business model over the past few years to build a focused catalogue of services offered by trusted partners. In time, my understanding is they will continue to "package" groups of services together that appeal to various vertical markets. So, for example, notification services and a do not call service might be grouped together.

In addition to their Trust Agent gatekeeper role in aggregating high value services for coders I am very impressed with their reach out to developer or even business analyst type communities. Take some time to surf through Strikeiron's efforts to enable large developer/analyst communities via NETBEANS integration, Excel LiveData methods, and even SalesForce templates.

Although, in my previous post, I mentioned Orange's positive efforts, at Jaduka we believe that telco services are not the main course anymore. Voice services or any telco services are an important ingredient but not the main dish. Strikeiron does a wonderful job of pulling lots of ingredients together and allowing developers to cook up whatever they choose.

Pat Murphy
Jaduka
VP, Business Development

Innovation and Change at Orange

2009-07-06T15:24:00.000-04:00

I received an email from Orange stating that their Partner guy Steve Glagow was leaving. Here is a bit of his summary statement.

The Orange Partner focus over the last five years has been about taking your applications to our customers. We have successfully launched Application Shops in the UK, France, Belgium and Spain, reaching over 50 million customers in just those 4 countries. In the near future, we will add more.
After 5 great years, it is time for me to say farewell. I have seen our community grow from a handful of dedicated developers to over 55000 today. I am proud to have been a part of it working with you.

I was always very impressed with the breadth and scope of the Orange API offering. However, I've seen the developer play as only one leg in a complete go to market strategy. For those doubters, remember Apple has made something like $30 Billion with their one device and less than $100 million on the Appstore. The Appstore is a rounding error for Apple. For another example, SalesForce doesn't even break out their App Exchange revenue numbers clearly. At best estimate looking at their professional services line item the AppExchange is less then 10% of revenue. However, for Apple and SalesForce, their platform strategy has clearly helped to make their core offerings dominant.

Yet, Orange has done a lot of things right. Although BT received the most initial praise as a Global Telco launching their own API strategy, from my perspective Orange's API offerings ended up far ahead of the pack.

Obviously, I don't have a crystal ball but the rest of the go to market strategy for Orange should include:
A. Becoming a technology enabling vendor with ISVs and SaaS partners.
B. Creating and leveraging the SI ecosystem attached to ISVs and SaaS partners
C. Creating two sided business models leveraging analytics with these various partners
D. Building workflows or integration methods to leverage other development tools more commonly used by developers.

There is a lot of operational sales, prod. dev, integration, bus. dev. and marketing work to move forward with these four legs of a go-to market strategy. Be assured, the Telco that does it first and best will maintain healthy margins, keep customers happy, and drive their competitors crazy. At least in the US, I plan on making Jaduka the winner. Across the EU, I was expecting Orange to win.

Patrick Murphy
Jaduka
VP. Business Development

CEBP pricing is moving beyond cpm

2009-07-02T10:44:00.000-04:00

From the perspective of a service provider like Jaduka and our parent Network IP, the bottom line reason for all this time and energy being spent on Communications Enabled Business Process is one of margin.

The phrase "Falling ARPUS" is one of those really weird pieces of jargon that is common in the Telco space. Because of competition, deregulation, and technological advances (VoIP, IM, Email) the cash cow of voice traffic has been getting skinnier and skinnier for Telcos all around the world.

We ran a quick but useful thought exercise earlier this week with our team. List out all the pricing models that we were aware of in this space.

To be clear, we are only focused on hosted CEBP using a transactional model for billing. With Avaya dropping their CEBP messaging and staffing, I am not aware of any vendor still trying to sell upfront licenses in the manner of the legacy software industry.

Per minute
Per call
Per leg
Per lead
Per record
Per seat
Per contact
Per hit

The cynical might suggest that the cost basis underneath all these different pricing labels is still a price per minute. Thus, we are simply trying to make some actuarial type guesses on usage. Yes, that is partly true. However, with good reporting, good communication with your clients, and a robust telco infrastructure underneath Jaduka the ability to make these usage estimates is not particularly risky. International interconnect or peering agreements are done every day and are based upon similar estimates of future usage patterns.

The more important point is that we are moving towards these new pricing labels in order to model the language our Enterprise clients use. Guess what, new packaging matters, it adds perceived value, thus margins are dramatically improved!

This isn't the end point in our drive towards value added pricing. The goal is to price our efforts based on the value driven by the transaction taking place during the call or message. Honestly, there is a lot more to learn on this topic. It is what the Two-sided business model strives to accomplish. More discussion needed.

If you don't believe me, put down that $3 bottle of water and think a little harder.

How the mighty have fallen

2009-07-01T12:24:00.000-04:00

If this post from GigaOm doesn't help you to understand why there is so much energy being put into niches like CEBP and the broader topic of Telco 2.0 then you are still buying buggywhips.

Given the major telcos focus on huge capex investments in wireless or fios and their current debt structures it is hard to see how the US players are going to continue to dominate. At least the European players are being aggressive in trying to reinvent themselves using new and competitive business models.

I would love to see a comparison of US Telcos now relative to US Automobile manufacturers a generation ago. As we have seen with GM it becomes a long, slow slide into bankruptcy.

More importantly, given that the telco hardware/software vendors tend to provide the forward thinking R&D work required by the Telco service providers it is hard to believe these service providers will once again get back into the R&D business.

This GigaOm article should be saved and reposted in 2019 as an explanation for what happened to the US Telco market.

CEBP, business analysts, and developers= lots of work can now get done

2009-06-30T14:07:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned this four step approach for business model evolution in our space previously. From my perspective, service providers like Jaduka ( or Orange or BT) need to move forward to build all four steps in order to create a robust, valuable Telco 2.0 style business.

Here are the four steps:
1. Empowering developer communities.
2. Enriching go-to-market strategies to benefit partners and clients.
3. Value-based transactional pricing versus commodity pricing.
4. Two-sided business model iterations.

On the first item, empowering developer communities, Jaduka has always been focused on providing tools to the broadest swath of enterprise developers. As an alternative example, our respected competitor, Ribbit has focused on providing tools for the Flash/Adobe developer community. With VXML vendors, they focus on their developer community. I can never argue with a strategy that requires true intimacy with a particular user group. These guys do a great job.

Jaduka's desire has always been to provide tools for a global development and business analyst community. Although, we are in beta now and plan to launch the service in early July I am thrilled to see that we will have the ability to extend our notification service to the Netbeans community ( many millions of downloads) and the Excel community. More announcements are in the works too.

To the Telco API industry players, suggesting that we have extended our notification service into Excel should make you pause. Why is that important, you may ask?

From my non developer background, Excel was the first platform that allowed business analysts to create business reports and processes with a tool set that relied on easily understood mathematical symbols and equations rather than arcane coding languages. It is certainly still the most widely adopted spreadsheet offering in the world.

With Microsoft's foray into the SaaS delivery model Excel Live has been turned into the business analyst's equivalent of a mashup platform allowing for Data as a Service integration.

Some would suggest that offering wider and more developer and analyst communities easy access to notification, conferencing, diary, or click and connect type functionality will simply result in commoditization. Let me be clear, our goal at Jaduka is NOT to commoditize but to package our functionality in many different manners. Then, it can be broadly and globally adopted. Granted having a full built telco infrastructure allows us to compete on price if we choose.

However, leveraging the global tools that enterprise developers and analysts already use is certainly a step in the direction of empowering the broadest number of developers and analysts.

Watch Jaduka Exchange in mid-July for a more detailed announcement.

Thanks
Patrick Murphy
Jaduka
VP. Business Development

CEBP: where it all really began= ClueTrain Manisfesto?

2009-06-19T10:42:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about the foundations of CEBP and give plenty of credit to the analysts at Gartner for defining the space. I hope to attend Gartner's CEBP Forums later this year.

However, the more I listen and talk to more experienced Telco industry folks the original thinking that began to drive Telco 2.0 style innovation comes from the ClueTrain Manisfesto.
These writings have been around since 1999.

That's enough history on the topic of CEBP from me. I will get back to posting use cases.

But, if anyone has a different perspective on the background of CEBP please fill me in.

Thanks
Patrick Murphy
VP. Bus. Dev. Jaduka

CEBP: where it all began

2009-06-18T13:29:00.000-04:00

I thought it would be important to make sure there is background knowledge available for those who are new to the space or have not seen the term previously.

From everything that I have been able to gather over the years it was a team of smart analysts at Gartner including Bern Elliot, Steve Blood and Bob Hafner who coined the term communications-enabled business process (CEBP). Now, obviously they didn't invent a technology and, at the time, they were hyper focused on one generalized use case (reducing human latency). For good or bad, they certainly coined the phrase.

There was plenty of strong work in both premise based solutions and hosted services going on prior to Gartner coining the CEBP space. Here is a link to a decent write up from 3 years ago. The phrase is only about three years old being publicized by Gartner for the first time on or about April, 4th, 2006.

Here is another link to the Gartner site for those interested in purchasing the original report.

Is CEBP the worst name ever for a technology space?

2009-06-17T17:38:00.001-04:00

This is a funny CEBP related post from Rich Tehrani of TMC. Yes, he may be correct.

However, when I compare CEBP to ERP, CRM, BPM, HCM, UC or SaaS I don't really feel so bad about being an avid supporter of all Communications Enabled Business Processes.

I refer to CEBP as a subset or child of the Telco 2.0 industry. It is closely related to many things from the UC industry. However, CEBP as a hosted SaaS or CaaS offering is much more scalable, cost effective, and flexible than CEBP's premise based cousins.

We may all die of acronym poisoning.

How to get started.

2009-06-17T16:56:00.000-04:00

I thought this was a relevant postt from STL partners. This is a summary of conversations held at Telco 2.0 in Nice, France.

Much of the post is common sense but it might be a useful reminder.

CEBP and Advertising

2009-06-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

I saw this terrific article on GigaOm discussing the micro economics of online advertising.

So, for those who have taken just a few economic courses the big picture idea from the article about the potential disintegration of the online advertising market (other than Google) is easy to follow. For those of you who have taken lots of economics courses follow the thread of comments for the granular details and arguments that exemplify why the general population tends to make fun of economists.

Seriously, I thought the article was great. Check out the author Mike Speiser and his archive . I especially enjoyed the attempts to cost average leads generated by Google and (non search) Yahoo. The author estimates Gooogle generates and average of 49 cents per lead vs. Yahoo's $2.93 for display advertising with costs of 30cents for Google and $2.17 for Yahoo. His argument is that the low cost producer will continue to gain market share. Remember in the online world a simple click though is considered a lead. We can agree or disagree with the numbers but I want to use them as a baseline to show the importance of CEBP driven advertising.

That's some background. Now lets get into the nitty gritty of CEBP and how it can leverage some of the $400 Billion spent globally on advertising.

There are generally three purposes for advertising.
1. Drive consumers to buy something now or very soon.
2. Influence the consumer's perception of a product, service or brand over time to drive decision based purchases. (Cars, Computers, B to B marketing)
3. Position a brand in the marketplace against competition. ( Premium, Cool, Safe, Reliable)

Our (My) experience is that Commmunications Enabled Business Processes can improve advertising efforts at all three levels.
1. Click to Connect functionality can drive real people ( and their phone numbers) to companies advertising. Google is testing this functionality with keywords that are high priced ex. $20 per click through and/or phrases that may have problems with click fraud.

2. Diary functionality is very useful on any product site or community aggregation site that brings consumers together for reviews. It is helpful in providing real time feedback "How's my driving on the back of trucks" or " Tell us about your meal and restaurant experience". It also helps build community around services or products targeted at segments of the population ...new moms looking for help and guidance on product selection, newly diagnosed patients using a drug. ( BazaarVoice)

3. Interactive agencies creating campaigns looking for cool or fun campaigns with an opportunity for a viral upside have successfully added voice functionality. MonkEmail, Tide, Transformers

Each specific advertising campaign is valuable to the client, agency, consumer,and CEBP vendor.
What isn't well understood is how over time the telco service provider could ethically collect ,re-use, or simply datamine the contact numbers driven through lots of these campaigns. To me, that datamining component becomes the linch pin to a true two sided business model for the Advertising vertical.