The Big SIP

Right now, a lot of businesses are looking to SIP to save money by using a single IP pipe to their provider- like SNET- for voice calls and reducing or eliminating recurring network charges. But that’s really just the start. The current uptake in SIP services is an indicator of what the future holds: SIP is big.

You may have already heard of SIP. And if you haven’t, the chances are good you will very soon.

SIP is a communications protocol that is becoming extremely popular. How popular? Consider this: Infonetics (www.infonetics.com) reports that in 2011, telco companies saw their revenues from SIP-based services jump 128%. So, even if you are not yet thinking about how to use SIP in your business, the chances are good that one of your competitors is ahead of you.

Very simply, SIP—the initials stand for Session Initiation Protocol—radically simplifies communication between people, places, devices, applications and services. Just about anything that can be tagged with an IP address can be connected via SIP. It simplifies how quickly people can connect and collaborate. And it eliminates the need for a lot of phone lines and extra hardware. In fact, many S-NET customers have reported a return on investment (ROI) of 6–12 months by investing in SIP-based solutions. 

But what makes SIP so revolutionary is not simply its ability to save money. SIP changes how you think about using communications in your business.

 Here are six SIP scenarios. See if any apply to you:

You have multiple business locations. Each one must have a local phone number. But you want calls to those locations to get routed to a central service center where they can be more efficiently handled by people with the time and training. In the past, to get this kind of capability you might have had to rent 800 numbers and/or extra lines that sat unused most of the time. SIP gives you the best of both worlds: local presence and the cost efficiencies of centralization.

You have a mobile phone, several e-mail addresses, a bunch of landlines and a slew of IM contact names. You are tired of giving out all your contact information. With SIP you won’t have to: SIP establishes an “address of record”—an AOR—that provides a single, unifying identifier as your “public address.” People can reach you without having to know each of your unique device addresses or phone numbers.

You find it annoying to keep letting people know about your availability, i.e., “for the rest of the day, call me on my mobile.” Let SIP do this for you. SIP can make call-routing decisions for you by checking your calendar or seeing when you last checked your e-mail or used your mobile phone.

You are handling a conference call from your hotel room, but have to check out and want to keep the call going on your mobile. Or, you are on your mobile, but need to view a document and would like to transfer the conference call to your tablet. SIP makes all of that possible.

You operate a customer service operation using agents working from home. You want them to be able to serve customers using e-mail, instant messaging, Web chat, video, or a phone call. Rely on SIP to make it happen.

You use various programs in your business to keep track of sales, inventory, production scheduling, etc. When a problem arises, i.e., a shortage in a particular part, you would like to have a click-to-conference button on the program itself so you can quickly see who is available, initiate the call and share the application. SIP makes that possible. In fact, many applications using dynamic linked libraries (DLLs in Windows and shared libraries in Linux) are ready to be connected using SIP.

This Winter is going to be Rough - Do you have your Communications Continuity Plan in Place?

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According to their website, The AccuWeather.com Long-Range Forecasting Team is predicting another brutally cold and snowy winter for a large part of the country, thanks in large part to La Niña... yet again.

La Niña, a phenomenon that occurs when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific are below normal, is what made last year's winter so awful for the Midwest and Northeast. Monster blizzards virtually shut down the cities of New York and Chicago. Last winter was one of New York City's snowiest on record.

La Niñas often produce a volatile weather pattern for the Midwest and Northeast during winter due to the influence they have on the jet stream. The graphic above shows the position the jet stream typically takes over the U.S. during La Niña.


So, besides dealing with a lot of snow and ice, what does this mean for your business and how are you preparing for it?
Here are some valuable thoughts on what you should be doing for communications continuity planning.
1.Employees: Do you have a method to notify employees about snow days – when not to come to the office? It may sound mundane, but if you don’t, then the costs can be significant as soon as hourly employees start clocking in on days that the business is closed.
Suggestion: A written policy that is communicated to all employees about snow days that includes:
Will they be announced by an email or by a phone tree?
Who will be sending the email or making the calls?
When will this be determined?
How will at home employees be compensated?
What work activities are they expected to do from home?

2. Customers: How will you notify your customers that your business is closed?
Suggestion: A written policy communicated to your key sales staff
Will you announce via an email or phone tree?
Who will be sending the email or making the calls?
How will your automated attendant greeting be changed? By whom? Saying what? When?

3. Practice Beforehand! Don’t wait until your first snow day to practice implementing your plan. You should have a dry run
If you are using emails to communicate to your clients, make sure that the database is accurate. Make sure that the phone numbers for employees are accurate.
Make sure that you can change greetings.

4. Recommendations: Did you know that IP based systems and can enhance your ability to function on days when you can’t get to the office? S-NET Hosted Solutions can enable your work at home employees to log in remotely and work as if they were in the office. When combined with remote login capabilities on your network, your employees can work – answering calls, dealing with clients as if they were at their desks.

It looks like it is going to be another long, hard winter. We know what to expect – but the key is getting ready in advance. I remember the story about an out of work actor who finally got a one line part in a play. He had to say “Hark, I hear the cannons roar”. This actor practiced his line- on the subway, walking to the theater, in make up. Finally, he gets on stage, hears a loud BOOM- and yells “What the hell was that!?”. Moral of the story: Don’t wait until Mother Nature drops a foot of snow overnight. Make sure you have a plan that has been practiced and works!

Collaboration & Teamwork: A Real Problem or Marketing Hype?

Collaboration is a hot, business buzzword today—very hot. It seems everyone is talking about better ways to speed team work and decision making.

But is this hype from consultants and companies selling solutions? Or is there real fire behind the smoke of all the collaboration talk.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest the latter. Yes, people have always “collaborated.” We have always had “teams.” These are not new ideas. What has changed is the environment in which collaboration and teamwork take place. And that makes all the difference. Here’s why:

Mobility: The workforce today is incredibly mobile. As much as 40 percent of U.S. workers now have jobs that could be done from outside the office at least part of the time. Not being face to face on a regular basis changes the nature of collaboration: visual cues, informal interactions—things which have always speeded collaboration and have always been take for granted—are now problematic.

Multitasking: Multitasking has always been a challenge as in the oft-quoted aspersion of someone not being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. But again, the reality today is different: many people work on a task while monitoring a feed of information, participating in a conference call, responding to IM and e-mails, etc. Yes—at a certain point all of this multitasking becomes a joke and unproductive, but the reality is that some variation on the above is today’s reality. In fact some people might not even consider what was just described as “multitasking.” All of this has huge implications for how information gets presented, how we get someone’s attention, how decisions are arrived at, etc.—all key elements of collaboration.

Context: How we view and respond to something depends in large part on the context in which it is presented. A physical office is a context. A face-to-face collaboration over a conference table is a context. A detailed report—with an introduction, background, supporting points, a conclusion—is a context. But in a mobile, multitasking world dependent on e-mails, IMs, tweets and more, we find ourselves constantly moving quickly in and out of different situations in which we often have very little context. As the title of a humorous book once put it, “We are in the context of no context.”

Racing from place to place, juggling multiple tasks and starved for context—that’s a big part of today’s work environment. That’s why collaboration is not just a buzzword and why supporting effective workforce collaboration is a critical part of any business strategy today.

I want my ____ at work!

I want my ____ at work!
Fill in the blank with my: iPad, my Android phone, or my Galaxy Tab…
Every morning, when my kids lived here, I would call them downstairs for breakfast. My youngest (a.k.a. Mr. Charming) would try his luck daily. “But, Dad, I NEED COCOA PUFFS”. “No, son”, the prematurely curmudgeon (a.k.a me), “you need breakfast”. It seems like the same thing is happening today in the workplace. Everyone – and based on the lines outside the Apple stores recently, that can’t be much of an exaggeration- wants to bring their iPad (or iPad2) to work, use their iPhone or Droid instead of the company issued phones, not to mention a Mac. The Motorola Xoom is a hybrid that maybe even defies categorization – and I am sure that if you own one, you want to bring it to work. This creates a number of headaches. I would strongly suggest you consider the following issues:
1. Data security- when an employee can access data from your company, is that data going to be secure on his device? Can someone else breach his security on that device and access your data?
2. Are you paying for needless surfing? With the new AT&T pricing plan for Internet access, using the iPhone or Droid can cost you a premium if you exceed the total amount of data usage on your plan. If your employee wants to use a smart phone and you are paying for the mobile plans, make sure your plan matches the increased usage that comes with a smart phone – before you agree!
3. Is that Droid safe? Can it compromise your network? There have been malware cases reported by users whose smart phones use the Droid operating system. If you let the phone on your office network- is your network secure?
4. Are the new toys/devices going to increase productivity or increase distraction? Last year the mantra was reducing costs. Now, the new mantra is improving productivity.
5. If one of your top people- C level – brings their device to work, are you going to have the infrastructure in place to meet their expectations? Do you have enough wireless access points? Enough bandwidth?
6. Continuation of above. If one of your top people brings their device to work, are you (and your staff) going to have to contort your systems to enable the device(s) to work on it and meet their expectations? Case in point- if they get a smart phone, does your voice messaging client work with their device? Are there apps for that device that require additional (unplanned) expense?
7. Are the devices that are coming to work going to be (today’s) influencers in your upcoming (tomorrow’s) IT decisions? If “John” in sales brings his iPad and the VP of marketing decides that everyone needs one, will your budget get blindsided?
8. If you are using SaaS applications – do you have enough licenses?
9. Is your staff going to have to support devices that they are unfamiliar with- and be made to look “less than”?
I don’t have answers for you – but I think that there is no “one size fits all” solution. However, you should consider these nine issues before the barrage of devices hits you!