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It is one of life’s ironies that a teacher often learns as much from the student as the student learns from the teacher. Certainly it is true from my experience, which stretches back over ten years to when I was first approached to lead a photography course at evening college – sure I knew my content (I hold a Diploma in Photography after all), but I had no idea how to deliver.

The hardest part in preparing for such a task was how to open up, knowing where to start. I was searching for ideas when I had that light-bulb moment: I’ll simply ask the audience to introduce themselves, and tell me what they were hoping to get from the course. Perhaps they had a recent addition to their family, or were planning an overseas trip, or had just been given a camera for their birthday and had no idea how to use it. Maybe they were retired and have now the time to re-visit an old hobby, or perhaps they were young and have dreams of being the next contributor to National Geographic (like I did).

Whatever it was they were all there for a reason, and if I knew that reason then teaching them something valuable would be easy (or at least; easier!).

However, their answers soon presented me with a new set of problems: all these people were from totally different backgrounds. I had labourers, doctors, sales-people, IT geeks, stay-at-home mums, retired grand-dads, students, bureaucrats – you name it, I had it! All these people were approaching this craft from different angles. I had the techos in the room who knew nothing about art or composition. I had the artists in the room who knew nothing about f-stops or shutter-speeds. I had the total newbies (or golden oldies) who knew neither, and (worst of all) I had the self-taught ‘experts’ who knew everything (or so they thought) but still couldn’t capture a decent picture to save themselves!

So I had to go back to basics; to make things simple, concise, and above all relevant. I tossed the camera user guide out the window and spoke to them in terms they could understand, words from everyday life – with plenty of examples to reinforce the message.

Fast-forward to 2010: my National Geographic dream never quite materialised, but photography has nonetheless been a fantastic hobby. Importantly though, the lessons I learned from my ‘baptism of fire’ all those years ago have been put to great use in my role at Avaya – and no I don’t mean taking the odd snap or two for the company newsletter. You see I’ve just been on a bit of a product road-show – IP Office R6.0 incidentally. And while the audience on this show were all relatively similar (sales people positioning UC solutions to SME) these guys had to deliver a value pitch to an incredibly varied audience, both from a vertical perspective (manufacturing, hospitality, retail, government, health, financial etc) and a role perspective (Business Owner, IT, Customer Service Manager, etc).

My light-bulb moment; let’s break this down to five simple areas that should articulate value for all business – no matter what the vertical:

1. The wallet. Whether it’s showing a rapid Return on Investment (ROI) or a demonstrable Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), it’s hard not to get the attention of a prospective customer by talking cash savings. It could be the elimination of external conferencing service provider costs, consolidation of trunks to SIP, or rationalising resources in the Contact Centre – an Avaya solution has some great tools to save cold, hard cash – and can do it fast.

2. Mitigation of risk. It sort of relates to point 1 above, but is often a discussion that’s left alone during the sales dialogue. A simple question: what would be the impact to the business if one site in the network had a failure to the communications server (perhaps an errant IT support person has unplugged the wrong cable in the rack)? What if the WAN went down and with it so too the queue announcements for the customer service centre? With the improvements in IP Office R6.0 (as an example), critical parts of the Avaya applications can be duplicated in an active-active scenario – meaning a business can keep trading and serving their customers without compromise to their employee’s productivity.

3. Provision of outstanding customer service. Avaya recognises that a great competitive differentiator is customer service. What you can’t measure you can’t manage, so we strive to deliver concise, granular, yet flexible information about the sales or customer care centre in an intuitive and integrated fashion.

4. Productivity of the workforce. Extend the features and services of the Avaya system beyond the physical boundaries of the enterprise. Whether the workers are highly mobile or need to work from fixed locations outside the business, deliver tools to enable them to do their jobs no matter what their location – while integrating it into other business tools to streamline process.

5. Making small business look and feel like big business. Compete effectively with larger business while using less resource. Enable customers to trade or engage using clever technology like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) when the enterprise is on holidays or asleep.

Funnily enough, all these value points marry up perfectly against the strengths of an Avaya IP Office solution:

1. 128-party audio conferencing can deliver a hard ROI.

2. Duplication of the Voicemail Pro application server and IP500 communications server in a Small Community Network can reduce risk.

3. Customer Call Reporter is a great tool for measuring customer service levels.

4. one-X Portal and one-X Mobile can keep employees in touch and communicate telephony presence wherever they are.

5. Voicemail Pro is a class-leading IVR platform with an intuitive Graphical User Interface (GUI).

It’s very easy for those of us who work in the ICT industry (yet another TLA – Information and Communications Technology for the uninitiated) to get swept away in the technology and forget about the value. In the post-GFC era (bugger; I did it again – Global Financial Crisis), it’s no longer good enough to purchase IP Telephony (IPT) or Unified Communications (UC) simply because it’s fashionable.

To coin/modify an old (well if you call ten years ‘old’) adage; even selling the sizzle over the sausage is no longer enough - the sausage’s sizzle has to convince me I’m hungry, satisfy my appetite, taste like Wagyu beef, and ensure I won’t be hungry again until the next meal while costing less than ‘on-sale’ mince!

Mmm (TLA for Homer Simpson) – sausage...

My prediction: Thursday December 24th, approximately 1:00 PM – in your office. It will go something like this:

A few of the sales team are hovering around the fax machine; fingers crossed, ever hopeful for those last minute orders. Tapping their fingers and getting impatient – not because the order may slip into next quarter if it doesn’t arrive, but that time is ticking away and they still haven’t picked up a gift for their significant other (incidentally, the other half of the sales-team is no-where to be seen; they had a round, err, meeting at the golf club as they already made their quotas in November – curse them!)…

The Managers (who only arrived at around 11:00) are already saying their goodbyes. One or two of them have brought their kids in for the (quarter) day to see what mum/dad does at work, which ironically is not much when you are a Manager - and even less on Christmas Eve! (author ducks for cover)…

And then it happens; just as everyone is saying their farewells and best wishes are being thrown about, the words “see you back on the 4th” rings an alarm bell in the receptionist’s head – if no-one is going to be here, how do we serve our customers?

It is at this point that thousands of VARs, SPs, and SIs the world over get flooded with phone calls (remember – they’re trying to wind-down too!) from frantic customers requesting assistance for diversion codes and temporary voice mailboxes– long forgotten as they’re only ever used once a year.

Now if you are an Avaya IP Office customer, I can make all that pain go away. And if you’re not an Avaya IP Office customer – I still have time to make that pain go away, but you’ll need to order now! (Did you like that Messrs Wells and DiLullo?!).

So here’s how it’s done: Avaya IP Office Preferred Edition has (among many other functions) the most amazingly flexible and intuitive, yet powerful self-service creation tool in the SME business - truly peerless in this category. It’s called Voicemail Pro (standard in Preferred Edition) – but don’t let the name fool you, it does much more than just voicemail. It’s a fully featured call vectoring and routing solution with an almost endless combination of call-flows right at your fingertips. Powerful, yet the visual nature of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) means that it’s incredibly easy to harness that power.

From the simplest of Automated Attendants to the complex nature of database Interactive Voice Response (IVR) with Text To Speech (TTS), Voicemail Pro can do it all – at a fraction of the price of a typical enterprise class solution, which many other vendors (but not Avaya) would require to match Voicemail Pro’s abilities.

So let’s rewind the clock: it’s Wednesday November 4th 2009 – the day after Melbourne Cup day in Australia. For those of you immune to horse racing (or Australian peculiarities), the Melbourne Cup is a horse race which literally stops the nation (for Melbournians it’s even a gazetted public holiday) with an estimated 80% of the country’s adult population placing a bet on (and likely watching) the race – but apparently it doesn’t stop the telephone ringing, so our hard-working receptionist is yet again lamenting the fact that everyone else in the office got to stop for three minutes (or if you’re in Sales; the stoppage was three days) to watch this historic two mile event, while she had to answer the telephone.

So come the morning after the day before, she realises that she better do something for the Christmas break, as no-one will be around to answer the phone. She takes a ‘punt’ (sorry for the pun) and calls her friendly Avaya Business Partner to see if they have anything which may help to respond to their customers when the office is closed.

And indeed they do. With Avaya IP Office Voicemail Pro one can easily set up a set of conditions based on time-of-day, day-of-week and so on. So calls can be routed based on these conditions to virtually any destination; an automated attendant menu, a dial-by-name service, an after-hours call centre, transferred to mobile, or a voice mailbox. The best part is that these conditions can be set up once and serve for years in advance, so no-one has to lift a finger come Christmas Eve or run around in a wild panic trying to find those call diversion codes – the IP Office with Voicemail Pro just does it seamlessly without fuss.

Of course should a fixed set of conditional based routing not be appropriate, IP Office Voicemail Pro has the ability to accept manual invoking of a call-flow – a really useful example of this is to set up an emergency call-flow from day one, which could facilitate a business’ disaster recovery policy. The call-flow lies dormant in the background during day to day operations, ready to be invoked. All of a sudden a health pandemic (or a horse race) strikes, dictating that all staff must stay at home for the short-term. Oh no! What about our customers?! Easily fixed; simply invoke the emergency call-flow policy within Voicemail Pro manually, easily done by the administrator over the telephone from the safety and convenience of home (or the track) with PIN protection - simple as that.

What if my business policies change and I need to change the call-flow? Simply open the Voicemail Pro client on your computer and use the intuitive GUI to re-create or modify your call flows, click to save and you’re done.

So there you go; a timely message on closed office planning ready for the holiday season.

Now you’ll have to excuse me; I’m off to find a bookmaker with whom I can place a wager on the 2010 Melbourne Cup – I can predict the future you know…

Oh, and may the holiday season be a safe one for all. See you in 2010.

Those of you who follow such things will know that Avaya recently held its annual Sales Conference at the epicentre of country music; Nashville, Tennessee. As I was travelling from Australia – a journey that took about a day in the air no less, I thought it wise to arrive early and do my best to get into the time-zone. Perhaps catch up on a bit of sleep the following day of my arrival so I would be at my freshest and keenest as I sat through the key-note addresses of Messrs Kennedy and Abbott – not to mention the insights from the other leaders of this great company…

I think that idea lasted about five minutes – just long enough for my room-mate (Mr Swanson; you have a lot to answer for) to suggest a road-trip down to Lynchburg, a county about ninety minutes away and host to arguably the most famous name in whiskey; Jack Daniel.

It took a tour of the distillery for the penny to finally drop on Avaya’s roadmap for IP Office, and before you ask; no I wasn’t in some kind of whiskey-influenced reflective state. That was to occur much later on the dance-floor of the Gaylord Opryland’s Fuse nightclub – and repeated (from what I am told) at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in the heart of Nashville (for the record; I am convinced that American bartenders have no clue what a standard measure entails), as Lynchburg is a dry county (yep, not even a wee dram (oops, wrong whiskey) can pass the weary traveller’s lips upon the obligatory gift-shop exit from the tour of Jasper Newton’s (Jack Daniel for the uninitiated) original ‘still).

So what was so inspiring about IP Office (and more importantly – how does it relate to Tennessee Whiskey)? The answer lays not so much in the technical aspect of IP Office’s future (sure there are some great enhancements coming down the road), but more importantly, the event represented a tremendous opportunity to network among SMEC peers from all corners of the globe - and see first-hand how the IP Office solution set is adapting for different markets.

Sound complicated? Let me explain it in the way it dawned on me; whiskey.

Did you know that whiskey is consumed and packaged in a variety of different methods for markets all around the world? I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t. I thought the ubiquitous ‘bottle of JD’ was the same everywhere - the famous ‘Old No. 7’ a one-size fits-all product.

Wrong, as I was soon to discover.

It all starts off the same – economies of scale are hard to ignore from a basis perspective for any product (a bit like IP500: one platform); a quality product, only the finest ingredients for the sour mash, the water is pure from a nearby stream, and the filtration process is done to a time-honoured tradition through ten feet of specially prepared charcoal. It then sits in a barrel for 4-7 years until it matures – a process which is measured and judged by the head-distiller (I wonder where one applies for that job…).

But the interesting thing is what happens next. Realising that whiskey is enjoyed differently depending on the region, it is packaged and marketed in different ways: The green label is for the domestic market only and is an entry-level product – manifested by maturing uniquely on the first level of the barrel house. Old No. 7 is a blend of whiskies matured from levels 2 through 6 of the barrel house and represents the most popular package – exported all around the world. Then there is a premium product (creatively called Single Barrel) which is derived only from the top level (7) of the barrel house – apparently the change of seasons influences the upper level the most. Lastly for only three markets (Australia being one of them, embarrassingly): they take all that painstaking attention to detail and time-honoured tradition – and then mix it into a can of cola! Somehow I think Mr Jasper would be turning in his grave!

Interesting stuff - now let’s relate it back to the SMEC market generally, and IP Office in particular.

My most impressive observation I have about the IP Office solution: the ability to adapt well to different markets right around the globe. For Europe, apparently the style of handset is very important – so Avaya has a unique handset to reflect those values; the T3. For the US, the ubiquitous grey handset is popular due in no small part to its paperless labels. For Australia, the 16xx handset with its key-system style red/green flashing lights is proving a hit.

But it’s not just the hardware on the desk; applications play an important role. New Zealanders are very quick to embrace integrated technology, so the DevConnect partnership is critical to provide an enhanced Contact Centre experience. Australia is less so, but is more interested in easy and intuitive reporting – which has seen Customer Call Reporter (CCR) popular with end-users. In India it’s all about CTI and database integration.

Trunking is also an interesting differentiator; the Kiwis appear to be leading the way with SIP, but ETSI ISDN BRI and PRI are still the big sellers in Australia. The Philippines and many parts of ASEAN and CALA still have a strong analogue legacy which needs to be supported. The US and Japan has T1 – while Europe (like Australia) still has ETSI PRI as the staple.

Supporting legacy equipment has always been a strong value proposition in certain markets. For example, the T3 handsets were incorporated some time ago to make the transition from the Tenovis platform much more palatable for the European installed base. Moreover, Release 5 for IP Office saw a whole swag of features introduced specifically for the German market aimed at consolidating customers using the legacy platform.

So what about the road-map? Without giving too much away, the SMEC Business Unit has some great things coming down the line to broaden and deepen the consideration rate of IP Office no matter what the market. The product will continue along its ‘easy to sell and position’ path to satisfy a sustained and growing channel focus - whether it’s SP, VAR, or SI. The ‘Defend and Grow’ campaign will be supported with product designed to exploit our large installed base of legacy SME equipment, and the introduction of browser-based applications we saw with Release 5 (CCR, one-X Portal for IP Office) will be further refined and enhanced. Lastly (but by no means least), the introduction of a new, intuitive web-based configuration and quoting tool will assist our new channel partners to hit the ground running.

All in all, a great conference – for me, the key take-away is the way that the marketing department has guided the SMEC business unit to make IP Office a truly attractive solution - no matter what the market.

Oh, and the whiskey tour at Jack Daniel’s wasn’t bad either…