No, no, no, it’s not namaste. Nemertes. Nemertes Research, that is. But your confusion is understandable, because Nemertes is a guru — a guru for the Virtual Workplace. And if you’re in IT, you should be putting your corporate palms together and bowing right now.

The hot-off-the-virtual-press nine-volume Nemertes benchmark called “Building the Successful Virtual Workplace” reveals some startling facts.

Organizations of all sizes looking to increase the number of devices they use over the next year have an average growth rate of 421percent. The top revenue-earners of $1B and above are laying out about $5000 a year to kit out their staff with mobile capability, a little more for PDA users and a little less for wireless laptop users.

And since companies are investing top dollar to enable employee mobility, Nemertes is offering a Feng Shui Eye for the IT Guy or Gal whose challenge is how to craft a mobility strategy that can handle this burgeoning potential mess of users and applications.

So ground yourself, take a deep calming breath and listen up.

When I asked Nemertes analyst Johna Till Johnson about virtual workers using mobile technology, she explained that the benchmark first addresses getting your terms straight.

“People assume a virtual worker is a telecommuter. But we say that’s not so. You’re a virtual worker wherever you are as long as you’re geographically separate from the colleagues you need to interact with.” In other words, make sure you count all your virtual chickens, stationary or moving about because that’s part of step one.

Step one is to figure out whether you are a virtual workplace and how many virtual workers you have. How much of any day are they or do they need to be connected or disconnected?

Step Two involves figuring out what flavor of mobility technology could make them more efficient, including in order of preference but varying by need: VoIP, some combination of mobile voice and data devices, collaborative tools and real-time knowledge sharing tools and some kind of presence capability.

Johnson defines presence capability as “a meaningful definition of where your colleagues are,” the meaning being whether your technology make key colleagues immediately available to you when you need them to do your job. “The whole goal of presence capability is to avoid any delay at contacting someone, to stay completely out of voice-mail and e-mail hell.

“If you’re a salesperson and you need tech support to close a sale, you don’t really care if Bob in tech is on his break or talking to his daughter on the company phone. You need to know that they’re not at their desk but they are reachable by cell phone.

“The meaningful definition of where they are is not necessarily where they are but that I can reach him or the next person who can meet my need,” she continues. “The key component in Onstar, any flavor of GPS, or IM is that they all have at their core a presence engine that will strongly or weakly indicate where a person is and how to contact them.”

Step Three is to look closely at costs. The benchmark gives detailed cost analyses, but the general principle is to start with the mobile technology that will give you the biggest bang for your buck. And, oh, there’s one more thing. When I asked Johnson what surprised her most in the results of the quantities of research the benchmark represents, her answer came back sharp and fast:

“The degree to which companies are spending money to mobile-enable their workers and don’t know it. What we did was capture the size of a mobile budget and then we looked at the number of mobile-enabled workers. The trick is that most of the mobility budget is coming outside of IT. Companies as a whole are spending far more than they realize. IT can only see a piece of it so the cost is sneaking under the radar screen in terms of size.

“Spending a lot of money that you haven’t really thought about can obviously mess up your planning and investment, but more to the point, IT needs to proactively become aware of mobility and collaborative applications and solutions that are getting deployed by someone other than them,” Johnson says.

“If your sales force happens to mention, ‘Oh yeah, we’re rolling out SMS on all of our PDAs,’ you need to know that if you’re in IT. You need to ask, How much are you paying for that? Why are you using SMS? Have you thought about using IM over VoIP instead?”

Just in case you wonder if the NSA is watching you, let me clue you in on your real not-so-secret sharer.

Forget your electronic diary, your business deals and double deals, and the fifth wife you’re hiding in the apartment around the corner. Harris Interactive researchers have homed in on one of your most tender and intimate moments. And they understand you so well, they’ve coaxed you into telling all.

Harris figured out that the whole point of screwing your backside into that delicious squinchy spot on the couch — the spot from which you can both read the subtitles and reach the beer on the coffee table — is that you are settling in for a few hours of uninterrupted detachment from your real life.

You know, that real life in which real human beings call you, some good (buyer for your house), some not so good (third wife). And just as you have completely identified with that stud on the screen — whom you didn’t look like even ten years ago — just as he is boldly going where you’d like to go, the phone rings.

Is it the call you want, or the call you don’t want?

Wouldn’t it be nice if your caller’s name flashed across the TV screen, letting you if it’s worth your while to break up your happy little moment of…revery. Not necessary, not vital, not even something you’d necessarily want other people to know you’re lazy enough to use, but wouldn’t it be nice?

According to Harris’s study for Targus, it’s nice enough for two thirds of “all US adults” to tell the Harris Interactive researchers that they’d like that to happen and for half of them to say they’d like it enough to pay for it.

That’s a pretty special moment. According to Targus, about $5.00 special. So who could cash in on that moment?

The next most special moment involves the thing you think is Caller ID on your cell phone or other mobile device. Your cell rings and you look at its display: there’s your fifth wife’s name and number. You decide to let it go to voicemail and wait to hear the message until after you’ve mailed the check so your voice will have that strong ring of conviction when you tell her it’s in the mail, that same ring of conviction that worked in the fateful back seat of the car when both of your voices rang with a different emotion.

But it’s not Caller ID that’s throwing that warning up on the little display. It only shows up because said wife’s number is already programmed in your cell’s contact list. You just get a number with no name or even a restricted number notice if your cell’s contact memory doesn’t already have your caller’s information.

Harris crunched some numbers on this one, too. If nearly two thirds of Americans are couch potatos, nearly 80 percent are at least “somewhat interested” in having real Caller ID on their mobiles. And half of them would go so far as to offer cash, with the figure hovering around $4.00 for the same level of Caller ID they have on their landline phones.

Now, unlike some wireless carriers who view caller name delivery to mobile phones as an expense item with no payback in revenue, Harris is saying different. And that could be very good for TARGUSinfo.
TARGUSinfo’s Caller Name Services has telecom companies supply the full name associated with a caller’s telephone number for consistent Caller ID display on any communications device, including phones, wireless devices, PCs and TVs. It’s also amassed a repository of upward of 250 million caller name records. Therefore TARGUSinfo is pretty much alone in being able to offer a caller name solution that aims at the those very special moments Harris pinpointed.
To check the survey or TARGUSinfo’s prices and per-subscriber pricing models, go to www.TARGUSinfo.com.

Now that the cell phone is your fifth most reliable appendage — Viagra notwithstanding — you naturally want to be able to access and do everything else with it, like contact and deploy your weightier less-portable electronic footprint. Transmedia is in the ring for you with GlideMobile — its new information management system that’s designed to let you reach and use every file on your PC, Mac and Linux computers, personal and professional.

It also seeks to remove the need for secondary mobile computing devices like, for a timely example, the much touted iPhone. GlideMobile’s advantage lies in its technological end run around the desire of hardware manufacturers to want you to buy more hardware.

Even if you slept on the pavement to cop the iPhone, Transmedia is betting that you’ve merely added another device to your existing collection of phones and, er…all that other stuff requiring a wheeled Timu briefcase.
“If you buy a device like the iPhone, the odds are you’ll still need your Blackberry because of keyboard and format incompatibilities,” says Donald Leka, CEO of Transmedia.

“Many people already have an iPod. With the addition of the iPhone, you could end up with things like two or three MP3 players. Your BlackBerry doesn’t let you easily get to your Mac. GlideMobile is basically software that lets you buy less hardware and pick only the hardware you want without sacrificing any of their capabilities. It serves things up to you on your phone in the correct format.”

Glide’s browser-based software means you need no installed software. You access Glidemobile from your cellphone browser at http://www.GlideMobile.com and voilá — now your cellphone is your PC, just like that.

Depending on the sophistication of your handset, connecting to Glide’s media sharing platform makes it possible for you to edit and buy photos, create and convert documents to Word and PDF formats, and share files from your collection of computers from whatever undisclosed location you and your handset are in, including your car or the plane.

The core of Glidemobile today is that it’s all browser-based through your phone, according to Leka.

“What it does is let you bypass a lot of the restrictions imposed by the carriers and lets you access your advanced functions. You can create and publish Web sites from your phone. You can share multimedia — say four or five movies — let’s say one hundred MBs from your phone. GlideSync lets you synchronize your contacts, calendars, bookmarks, photos, music, video, and documents from your desktop to your phone.”

By July 31, GlideMobile will expand its browser-based application suite with local BREW and Java applications for download to your handset with local file syncing and media playback, photo and video capture.

“Right now, in order to use Glide on your cell phone you have to have a network connection,” Leka explains. “But say you’re on a plane and you don’t have that network connection. With Glide’s upcoming local applications, you’ll continue to be able to work.

“Coming up, you’ll be seeing mini-spreadsheets and other productivity applications. Over time, we want to recreate and make all those applications available locally on the phone for those times when you don’t have a network connection. That way, you’re never left out in the cold.”

And if your undisclosed location will support a party and your handset happens to support streaming media — namely, a T-Mobile Wing, Samsung Blackjack or Palm Treo — you can really be happening because GlideMobile turns your phone into a music or video jukebox. Oh, and right now, you get two gigabytes of storage free when you sign up.

To see a list of the many handsets GlideMobile supports, go to www.GlideMobile.com.

Voxilla.com: Why is the Avaya merger such a big deal?
Abramson: First of all, I don’t think it is that big a deal. Who bought Avaya? Two private equity groups — Silver Lake and TPG Capital — bought Avaya out because because they believe that there’s hidden value in the intellectual property Avaya has, the market share Avaya has and their ability to use that so they can go out and buy up other companies and that they can make a stronger company which Avaya couldn’t do as a public company because it’d have to reveal everything it’s doing.

As a private company than Avaya can do more than as a public company because it won’t have to report things that are material, like buying up other intellectual property or making transactions. As a private company, it can avoid the scrutiny of the public markets and of its competition. There are good market advantages if all of your moves on the chessboard can’t be watched from an outsiders’ perspective and predicted. Public companies behave very predictably.

This kind of consolidation is a change affecting the whole telecommunications industry.

Voxilla.com: What specific opportunities will this create for Avaya?
Abramson: They’ll be able to not have to report earnings which takes a lot of pressure off. They’ll be able to not have to focus on pleasing Wall Street. They’ll be able to do some more things with carriers than they could before. They’ll be able to work with greater fortitude in the enterprise market they were after. It will possibly allow them to acquire other companies more easily. They’ll be able to enter into agreements that won’t have to become public by nature — things like that.

Just so you know, I think the Avaya merger is just one more example of the private equity market looking for value in companies that are underperforming because of management neglect and poor management. You’ve got a lot of companies that are poorly run that have very high paid executives who have lost touch with where the market is going.

As a result, the large money institutions, whether private or public since a lot of your investment banks now play on both sides of the fence are manifesting a growing dissatisfaction with the leadership and the direction that companies are taking. So there’s more and more efforts in the financial world to take a stronger degree of input and control at the management level through private investment. Then they put their own people in and they put the ship on the right course and they navigate along. It’s a very happening- all-the-time story in every sector.

Avaya is a failure.

Voxilla.com: So can this merger save Avaya?
Abramson: Avaya was a failure. They continue to see their market share erode, despite what they may have claimed. Companies like Cisco have a much clearer easier to understand business model — you know what they’re about.

From the late 90s, early 2000s, Avaya was seen as this whoop-de-do great company, spawned from the lineage of Bell Labs. But Cisco cleaned its clock across the board.
Avaya’s acquisition strategy was faulty. Its sales strategy was questionable. Its technology was not necessarily always the best. Its pricing model could be questioned. Most recently, they had to go out and buy Ubiquity to keep up with the Cisco dynamic software.

It’s just like Lucent having to merge with Alcatel in order to save itself because other than its patents, it hadn’t done anything. This is just companies being fat and lazy. Meanwhile you see Wah Wei coming out of China to clean everyone’s clock for them.

The only real return on investment was for private equity to come in and take them out of the public eye and put some real management in and hopefully right the ship and get them going in the right direction.

So the merger is probably the best thing that could have happened to Avaya. Avaya was a company that was going nowhere fast. This is potentially the best thing that could happen for them. It could save them, but we won’t know until we see the direction the company will take over the next nine months. It will hopefully change.

Voxilla.com: How does this change the market?
Abramson: In the PBX enterprise telephone equipment market, it gives Avaya some room to reemerge as a different player. It gives them six to nine months of breathing room and runway. It takes them out of the scrutiny of the Wall Street sell-side analysts. It leaves Cisco, Mitel and Nortel in the public sector of companies but at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything yet. We won’t know what those changes will be until the new Avaya management announces its going-forward strategy.

This is a tough one because Avaya’s such a blob. I never viewed Avaya as a player, as a force, and you also have Microsoft looming in that office telephone system space in a lot of different ways. It’s a good time for a company to figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.

http://andyabramson.blogs.com/
http://www.avaya.com

Voice-on-the-Go is endangering a species: that galvanizing stock figure of our times, the driver yakking on the cell phone. You’ve seen him, you may even be her. If so, Voice-On-The-Go wants to render you extinct.

The first time I waited behind a car with an AM I LATE vanity plate, watching its power-suited driver cradle her cell to her ear in the now familiar gesture, was also my first and only road rage incident. The second the light turned green, I goosed my horn, an act of automotive aggression unprecedented in thirty years of timid driving. I’m a nice person — really — but she brought something out in me I never suspected was there.

And not just in me but in legislatures. Hands-free and eyes-free driving laws prevail in over 50 countries—the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, India, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand—and the number of US states and cities includes New York, New Jersey, California and Washington DC. Many more states have legislation pending and recently, DWTM, Driving While Text Messaging, was banned.

The Toronto-based mobile voice solutions provider takes care of all that by taking your driving hands and eyes completely out of the picture. Voice-On-The-Go lets you receive calls and search your contacts to place calls — look officer, no cell phone!

Then you can listen to your e-mail in-box summary, delete the spam and messages from ex-wives, open the e-mails you want to hear, and compose your replies thoughtfully before deciding whether to send them or not — look, no BlackBerry! Oh, and because you can also review and add to your calendar, you can change that vanity plate to NEVERL8.

“Although we used some off-the-shelf things like Nuance,” says company president Arnison, “our implementation is unique. People call into a central hosted or ASP that ensures high recognition. It works for individual consumers, and there’s a secure full enterprise system for businesses as well.”

Since 2001, Voice-On-The-Go has worked out on many of Internet voice technology’s problematic aspects — difficult voice recognition, for example — and on making their products extremely user-friendly.

Voice-on-the-Go’s secret sauce is its use of technology that enables rich applications. “It has rich techniques for making perfect connections on voice calls very fast even if the user has 10,000 e-mails or contacts,” according to Arnison.

For the tech-at-heart, these include VXML2.0, which enables very rich applications with context jumping, inlying and external grammars, and ECMA scripts. From an application point of view, VXML provides realtime access to corporate e-mail systems and to PIMs.

Hooking up requires no voice training or special hardware or software downloads. You just use a local access number in North America. And because of its two billion-plus global market, it can talk to you in English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian and German, not to mention it uses for the physically disabled and visually impaired. Right now, they’re offering a thirty-day free trial.

What’s more to the betterment of life as we know it, however, is that you can use it without drawing the attention of the law or the random hatred of people who see you. You’ll just look like any other person talking to himself in the car.

http://www.voiceonthego.com