Verizon Combines the Power of 4G LTE with the Cisco Cius Tablet to Improve Mobile Enterprise Collaboration

NEW YORK – July 13, 2011 –

The ancient Greeks relied on them. So did Moses when it came to accomplishing one of his most significant deliverables. And now businesses are equipping mobile workforces with tablets of their own to boost productivity and speed customer service.

To meet this newest trend in tablet use, Verizon is combining the power of its 4G LTE network with the Cisco Cius™ to help customers decentralize and accelerate decision-making for better business outcomes.

The Cisco Cius will be available to Verizon enterprise and government customers around the world later this summer, and those located domestically will be able to combine the device with a Verizon Wireless 4G LTE mobile hot spot. Designed for the enterprise, the Android-based Cisco Cius combines voice, video, collaboration and virtualization capabilities on one device.  When powered by Verizon's 4G LTE network, mobile workers will be able to easily use bandwidth-intensive video applications - including between devices - for more effective collaboration.

"Mobile applications over intelligent high-speed networks will continue to eliminate barriers in the workplace," said Mike Smith, vice president for Verizon enterprise communications, network and mobility sales. "We're forecasting a perfect storm where advanced enterprise tools such as the Cisco Cius mesh with the speeds made possible by 4G LTE to make the virtual office a more robust reality than ever." 

Putting Tablets to Work

In general, industries such as retail, financial services, healthcare and government can employ tablets to change the pace of their business.

Retail:  Sales associates can employ tablets while out on the floor to look up product and inventory information for customers, in addition to processing transactions on the spot. Financial Services:  Bankers and financial advisors can take advantage of the video capabilities of tablets for face-to-face meetings with clients, saving the time it takes to meet up at physical locations. Health care:  Medical professionals can use tablets to collaborate on patient care and speed critical decision-making. Government:  Tablets can increase productivity of government users - from military to civilian government field workers to emergency first responders - allowing them to enter information or share it quickly with remote offices to complete the business of government more efficiently.

Through Verizon's Managed Mobility portfolio, enterprise customers can securely deploy a wide range of devices to employees.  Capabilities include device management; expense tracking management; lock and wipe features for protecting sensitive data; and mobile delivery of popular business and consumer apps from the cloud.  In addition, the company offers a full suite of professional services to help organizations create policies and design mobility programs to suit varied requirements. 

Verizon is a global network communications leader in driving better business outcomes for enterprises and government agencies.  Verizon delivers integrated IT and communications solutions via its global IP and mobility networks to enable businesses to securely access information, share content and communicate.  Verizon is rapidly transforming to a cloud-based "everything-as-a-service" delivery model that will put the power of enterprise-class solutions within the reach of every business.  Find out more at www.verizonbusiness.com.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, NASDAQ:VZ), headquartered in New York, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers.  Verizon Wireless operates America's most reliable wireless network, with more than 104 million total connections nationwide.  Verizon also provides converged communications, information and entertainment services over America's most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers seamless business solutions to customers around the world.  A Dow 30 company, Verizon employs a diverse workforce of more than 196,000 and last year generated consolidated revenues of $106.6 billion.  For more information, visit www.verizon.com.

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Verizon Unveils One of the Industry's First Cloud-Based Unified Communications and Collaboration Offerings With a Mobile UC Client

NEW YORK – February 28, 2011 –

With today's workforce becoming more global and mobile, the need for employees to remain connected to corporate resources and to each other has never been greater.  To help meet this need, Verizon is introducing innovative capabilities that enhance and advance unified communications and collaboration solutions for businesses and government agencies.

The new capabilities are:

Unified Communications & Collaboration-as-a-Service, one of the industry's first cloud-based commercial UC&C offerings.  It enables businesses and government agencies to facilitate enterprise adoption of UC&C in a fixed or mobile environment, with predictable per-seat pricing.  New capabilities include seamless call transfers from fixed to mobile phones and the use of "presence" technology, such as instant messaging, to initiate audio, Web and intra-company video conference calls, both in and out of the office. Mobile UC Client, which is designed to extend business telephony solutions to mobile handsets. It is available with a docking station that enables workers to replace their traditional desk phone with a single mobile device that can access advanced UC&C features, whether workers are in or away the office.

"We're putting our leadership in cloud, UC&C and mobility to work for our customers," said Farooq Muzaffar, vice president of enterprise network and communications solutions with Verizon. "It's all part of our 'everything-as-a-service' strategy to help our customers achieve better business outcomes by making information and collaboration available virtually anywhere, anytime."

The new offerings, available to U.S. customers this spring, will be able to work together to deliver a comprehensive cloud-based UC&C solution, or they can be purchased separately to meet specific business requirements.  Visitors to the Enterprise Connect Show, taking place this week in Orlando, Fla., will be able to view demonstrations of Verizon's new Unified Communications-as-a-Service offering, featuring the Mobile UC client, which has been named a finalist in the Best of Enterprise Connect competition at the trade show.

Cloud-Based UC&C Takes Flight

Verizon Unified Communications & Collaboration-as-a-Service combines popular applications from the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution within Verizon's high-IQ network and data center infrastructure to quickly and cost-effectively provide UC&C capabilities to multiple employees across an enterprise.  Since the dedicated enterprise applications reside in the cloud, organizations can activate employee subscriptions to some or all of the available services, as needed, and pay for the services on a per-user basis.

The state of West Virginia is among the first customers to test-drive an early version of the solution, helping Verizon to determine the specifications for the version that will be commercially available.

According to Eric Schoch, Cisco's group director, Voice Technology Group, "Through the Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution, Cisco is enabling Verizon to provide cloud-based solutions that offer unmatched levels of deployment flexibility without compromising capabilities.  By working with Verizon, we're able to help them quickly and cost-effectively offer comprehensive unified communications and collaboration solutions to their customers."

Later this year, Verizon will roll out a hybrid offering - also based on a per-seat subscription model -- for customers that still require a fully dedicated environment and want both a cloud- and premises-based solution.   A December 2010 Gartner report, "UC 'in the Cloud' and On-Premises: Examples of Hybrid Solutions," notes, "Many enterprise planners think of cloud and on-premises options as mutually exclusive; however, increasingly, enterprises are deploying elements of a UC solution functionality as a blended hybrid of these two options."

UC&C to Go

Verizon's Mobile UC Client solution provides a fixed and mobile, single-device solution, and offers a variety of features including single reach and voice mail numbers.  In addition, the other new offering, Unified Communications-as-a-Service, can be accessed on a variety of smart phones and tablet devices from other providers to support a wide range of business requirements.

Verizon also offers a suite of Managed Mobility solutions and professional consulting services to help customers develop and employ the best strategy and path to UC&C and mobility for their specific organization. Specifically, Verizon can assist enterprises in the transformation from their current environment, and support integration with existing capabilities in addition to customization.

Verizon is a global leader in driving better business outcomes for mid-sized and large enterprises and government agencies.  Verizon combines integrated communications and IT solutions and professional services expertise with high-IQ global IP and mobility networks to enable businesses to securely access information, share content and communicate.  Verizon is rapidly transforming to a cloud-based "everything-as-a-service" delivery model that will put the power of enterprise-grade solutions within the reach of every business.  Find out more at www.verizonbusiness.com.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, NASDAQ:VZ), headquartered in New York, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to mass market, business, government and wholesale customers.  Verizon Wireless operates America's most reliable wireless network, serving 94.1 million customers nationwide.  Verizon also provides converged communications, information and entertainment services over America's most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers innovative, seamless business solutions to customers around the world.  A Dow 30 company, Verizon employs a diverse workforce of more than 194,000 and last year generated consolidated revenues of $106.6 billion.  For more information, visit www.verizon.com.

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Introducing Web 2.0 Collaboration to your business

Every business relies on collaboration. Whether it's between colleagues, the management and other staff or with external stakeholders and partners we all have to work with other people. And anyone that's worked in systems development knows that the more interfaces you have between systems results in an exponential increase in complexity. The same applies when getting groups of people to work together.

For five years, I worked in the Australian utilities industry. Broad consultation, involving potentially hundreds of stakeholders were a fact of life. Essentially, the process started with a small group of experts drafting a paper. It was then released to the world for a limited period of time where comments were sought. At the end of that period, the comments were collated, workshops were held with stakeholders to go through the comments and produce a revised document. It would then be released again for a second, and hopefully final, round of comments before being approved and released.

Although the process worked, it was long and linear. If someone wanted to inject something for comment along the way, the process didn't allow it. The scope for injecting new ideas was limited as the process was limited to specific items under consideration.

Dr Mark Elliot completed his PhD in 2007, looking at large multi-user collaboration systems. That work led him to creating Collabforge. In particular, the impact on Web 2.0 processes meant that new ways of collaboration between large groups of geographically dispersed people were possible. This changed the way governments, in particular could interact with stakeholders.

His work started looking at the development of the City of Melbourne's strategic planning process. “This ended up re-engineering the city's 10-year planning process for collaborative participation and a collaborative outcome. This wasn't just about opening up the consultation process but also the consultation mechanisms. This lead to a wiki-type of method” Elliot said.

One of the big challenges for Elliot wasn't a reticence to look at new technologies but trepidation in how to use these new tools. Companies said to Elliot that they knew “that they needed to think about social media and Web 2.0 but we're really not sure where to start. It's relevant to us but we're not sure what applies”. So, a great deal of Elliot's work goes into talking with senior decision makers and taking them on the journey. When he first started, clients would often commence by asking for a specific technology rather than looking at the broader issues.

“It was probably one of the biggest challenges we faced early on as the conversation often started with an assumption that companies were asking for a piece of technology when, in fact, what they're asking for a reworking of the whole process and how the technology marries up and how it;s going to be supported by their culture, values and norms” Elliot explained.

Elliot's approach is to start by getting key stakeholders together into a room for a scoping exercise. “This is for us to throw up the big opportunities and for them to respond and generate a collaborative dialog”. This is a change scenario which brings up a bunch of change management considerations, innovation considerations and the need to deal with business as usual as well”.

One of the biggest challenges with introducing a new technology is that there's often an attachment to the old process. So the temptation is to try and fit the new technology over the old process. “There's an aspect of action learning or learning by doing in order to understand the impacts of the new technology and what it can do. We specifically engage in three different spaces: tools and technology, business and social process and people considerations such as culture, values and norms. We walk through all of those to tease things out” said Elliot.

The cultural issues are interesting, and something all CIOs need to face. The newest generations of employees are coming out of an education system where computers were ubiquitous. Elliot explains that “it often gets looked at in terms of 'digital natives' and 'digital immigrants'. There are definitely patterns such as Gen Y just expect to collaborate and share by default. For Gen X, they tend to be the bridge between baby boomers and Gen Y. Baby boomers see all this sharing as adding complexity but they see that their new staff want this”. Although these are clearly generalisations, Elliot's observation is that the senior managers, who are typically baby boomers, need that they need to plan for these changes.

Key points

1 – Introducing new, disruptive technology means looking at business processes critically and not just trying to shoe-horn the tech over the existing process.

2 – Start by identifying the problems, not the solution.

3 – The biggest hurdles are unlikely to be technical. It's managing the change with the people impacted that requires the greatest focus.

You can follow the writer on Twitter at www.twitter.com/anthony_caruana

This was first published in May 2011

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