Mark Adams - A brief history, Part 2

Added by Mark Adams, 12 months ago.

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Continuing on from my initial blog..

At the time there were very few manufacturers of Audio Conferencing Bridges, mainly US based. Spectel were unique in the fact that they were headquatered in Ireland. The Analogue bridges that they provided were excellent and could accomodate up to 8 Lines in a single 4 U Chassis. The initial market for conferencing bridges in the UK had been very bouyant as they were sold for Chat-Line applications, as always sex sells!

By the time we entered the market the chat lines had become illegal so we sold the bridges to large Global Financial organisations. The bridges were great. They were simple, reliable and provided good audio quality.

I did such a good selling the systems for Spectel that I ended up being offered a job as their General Manager for the UK. I took the job. It was fun as I had to set up a new operation for Spectel in the UK. They were based in Dublin so I had to travel there frequently and enjoy the Guiness. That was very tough.

I didn't stay with Spectel too long as their new digital product was coming to market, but they were having huge problems developing the software. These facts made it virtually impossible to sell!. (The software issues did get resolved and in October 2004 Avaya bought Spectel)

However another conferencing company Latitude Communications had opened an European office and they offered me a job selling MeetingPlace, whcih was and still is, the world's best on network conferencing system.

MeetingPlace was unique in that the conferencing bridge was designed from the ground up to allow users all the functions that they had in a face to face meeting in a virtual meeting.

The original system was designed before the internet was pervasive! This meant that users were permitted enormous control via a standard touch tone telephone, such as the ability to lock the meeting room, mute participants and start recording. As the internet matured users could access the system via the web and even take part in web conferences. MeetingPlace would also integrate into the new groupware products such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook. (There was a time before Microsft dominated the groupware business)

MeetingPlace was very well recieved and became the conferencing product of choice for many global corporations. In fact at one time 10% of all global Audio Conferencing took place on the MeetingPlace platform.

One of the corporations that was using MeetingPlace was Cisco and paraphrasing the words of Victor Kyam - They liked the product so much they bought the company. The acquistion meant that my skills became valued by Cisco partners and I moved to a Partner to become Line of Business Director looking after a collaboration practice.

This brings us to the present day. Collaboration has now become one of the most valuable subsets within the Unified Communications group of technologies.

Unified Communications isn't a single product; it's made up of various solutions and capabilities.Many components, such as IP telephony, have been available as stand-alone products for a number of years.

By integrating some or all of these different components organisations can stillachieve benefits, without having to totally revamp their networks and applications, whether it'sa conferencing and collaboration solution, presence-enabled communications, or mobility forremote workers.

IP Telephony - extends consistent telephony services to all employees, whether they are atHead Office locations at branch offices or working remotely.

Contact Centres - intelligent call handling, and self-service applications make it easier forcustomers to engage by telephone, web, email, text or interactive TV.

Messaging - mission critical e-mail and enterprise instant messaging enable employees,partners, and customers to communicate easily, collaborate efficiently, and respond in real timeto ongoing business demands.

Presence - now built into a number of applications and devices, from traditional instant messaging clients to Microsoft Office applications, portals, mobile devices, e-mail and telephones. The power of presence enables real-time communications that increase organisational efficiency.

Voice, Video and Web (Rich-media) conferencing - the integration of voice, video and webconferencing with standard desktop tools to enable meeting participants to interact in lively discussions, view other participants online, and share documents.

Unified Communications requires orgainsations to revaluate any investment decisions they are going to make in the communications area. The main reason for the second look is that any investment decision must be made to ensure that the particular product that is being purchased and implemented will have the ability to integrate with other communications investmenst being made in the future. It is pointless buying Video Conferening systems that can't integrate into their IP Telephony environment at some point in the near future.

One other interesting point is that the hard Return on Invrestment that Unified Communications can deliver today is generally gained from the Legacy Technologies such as Voice Conferencing, and Video conferencing that show very quick returns and can fund the investment in the larger Unified Communications platform.

Comments

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Brian Cox, 10 months ago

Hi Mark The Spectel analogue conference bridges were 3U and had 10 ports, nice to catch up with you the other day. I didn't receive your contact details so if you could send them again I will be able to pass them on to my client. Brian Cox