Let me share with you just a few insights on the content:

Opportunity

• Managed-service offerings, it’s the way to compete in the marketplace vs. commoditized services
• Hybrid cloud provides more flexibility
• Partnerships are key to minimize risk and leverage on each other’s skills
• Conferencing & Collaboration services provide additional areas of monetization

Challenges

• Lack of expertize in implementing & selling cloud services
• Regulatory issues & Data Sovereignty
• Scalability, Cost & Time to market

Does all this sound familiar? Enjoy the reading!!!

The hosting pack allows Operators to be able to provide Enterprise Voice type of services to their customers in a multi-tenant mode. This multi-tenant option helps you to make better use of the investments made on infrastructure; such efficiencies get reflected in a better commercial proposition for end-customers, allowing Telcos to extend their services across different market segments that they might have not been able to reach before, for example:

• Low Middle Market
• Small Business
• SOHO users
• Mobile Workers

With all of these different expectations and type of implementations from the diversity of customers, we can see how the data revenue is where the growth will be. As Voice continues to fall -both in fixed line and wireless voice-, Data is clearly becoming a core service for Operators, and cloud is moving from value-add to core service for Operators.

At the same time, as the Telco offers higher products/offers in the value chain, their ability to drive up customer retention as well as the ARPU increases, as Lync provides a new platform for Value-Added-Services.

We can reconfirm this trend by looking at the following indicators:

• Customers want an overarching communication infrastructure that includes multiple points of communication.
• Customers are trying to take advantage of cloud services so they don’t have to buy, implement, integrate and maintain on-premise gear.
• With service level agreements and attractive price points, cloud becomes an even more important option for customers and Operators.
• Cloud services generate a new recurring revenue stream that helps compensate for potential loss of traditional voice revenue
• SI becomes a growing necessity for customers and an important opportunity for Operators.
• Establishing and maintaining a proper communication infrastructure can be complex.
• Upgrading it wisely takes a lot of knowledge about how all the components work and how they integrate with each other.
• Decisions have to be made about what stays on premise, what goes into cloud. It requires developing a rational upgrade plan and the ability to successfully executing on it.
• All of this requires the sophisticated SI capability which Operators have.

With the release of Lync Hosting Pack, Operators are able to embark in a journey that can help them to extend their offers to new segments, becoming more competitive in the marketplace, delivering more value to their customers, while protecting their ARPU and customer base. 

If you want to read more about the hosting pack for Lync,click here.

To get started

The following diagram depicts the server architecture to support up-to 50,000 subscribers for a UC offering, it considers redundancy & high availability for all the server components of the solution:

This architecture is based on the following assumptions:

• Assumes Exchange MAPI experience (Activesync/RPC over https), Sharepoint Foundation capabilities (to start of), and Lync Voice services.
• Provides redundancy and high availability for the core services of the solution
• considers 50% concurrency
• supports mobile clients
• supports the following services: E-mail, collaboration, document management, presence, integration with IP/PBX (for VoIP services)
• includes the infrastructure for a self-service web-based control panel
• assumes software updates to be applied through Windows Server Update (WSUS)

Ramp up

As a partner, you need to consider a ramp-up period to reach such scale of subscribers, the following section outlines the HW configurations needed to scale up-to 50k subscribers, beyond this volume, the architecture would have to be revised.

As part of the infrastructure readiness needed to support UC services, the following has to be considered as well:

• Service Provider Cost
  • Core Hardware Components
  • Storage Costs
  • Network & Facilities
  • Operators
  • L1 & L2 Support
  • L3 Support
• Software Cost
  • Infrastructure Licensing Costs

The following table consolidates an estimated monthly Software cost*, to deliver UC capabilities based on the volume of subscribers:

* These are indicative figures; a SPLA Reseller should be approached to obtain the final quote. Please also note that these figures don’t include the incremental service cost per subscriber (e.g., Exchange, SharePoint, Lync).

Following you’ll have a summary view of the number of servers needed based on the volume of subscribers:

In the section below you’ll find a breakdown view of the specific Hardware Profiles & Software being implemented for each configuration.

Hardware profile – 5k subscribers

Hardware profile – 10k subscribers

Hardware profile – 50k subscribers

Final Thoughts

The growth of the knowledge-based economy and the service sector, together with pressure on IT departments to streamline processes and create operational efficiencies, means that Unified Communications is rapidly gaining ground as organizations seek to reduce IT costs and boost employee productivity. Hosted UC provides a common communication structure for businesses, integrating features such as presence (real-time staff availability), instant messaging, VOIP telephony and email through a single software system, making it easier and more cost-effective for employees to collaborate. This represents an opportunity for Cloud providers to deliver such capabilities on a subscription-based model and provides more value to the end customer; Telcos become the best enablers of these scenarios, as Voice is already a service they do provide, but with UC they could extend such capabilities to the IP/PC world, and fully embrace the transformation towards an ICT provider. 

Throughout this series, I’ve shared with you a summary of the MS offering and how it could be implemented. We are not done yet, this is just the beginning of the journey into UC cloud services. What matters now is how to drive sales and to recover this initial investment as fast as possible, with the right approach and vision towards Cloud, it should be an enjoyable & profitable journey.

Thanks for taking the time in following this series, I’ll share later on my views on how to GTM such services.

By working with Microsoft to deliver robust Hosted Unified Communications (UC) solutions you can be assured that you’re dedicating your most precious resources to the right partner, the right market, and the right solution at the right time.

Unified Messaging

One inbox for all the communications

With Microsoft Unified Communications technologies, email, voicemail, faxes, and calendar events can all arrive in one inbox. This means that customers can prioritize and code their voicemails and faxes just like any piece of email. They can even forward them, to one person or to many, with just a few clicks.

Programmatic path to compliance

With voicemail and faxes integrated into Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, any size of organization can apply the same programmatic journaling and archiving used for email to all of the asynchronous messaging. Retaining email, voicemail, and faxes in a central archive resolves many of the compliance issues businesses currently face.

Enhanced support for mobile users

Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 includes Exchange ActiveSync technology which delivers messaging to a variety of mobile devices, and a rich Outlook experience on Windows Phone Devices. Microsoft Outlook Web Access has been redesigned for greater stability and security, so users can stay connected via the Web.

Collaborating Together

MS SharePoint 2013 enables a company to easily create and manage custom team-focused and project-focused sites for collaboration. In addition, it is possible to deploy a company-wide intranet portal used to disseminate information and news across the organization.

Single Infrastructure for All Business Web Sites

Think of SharePoint 2013 Sites as a “one-stop shop” for all the business Web sites. It provides a full set of tools that employees of an organization can use to create any kind of site.

An Integrated Collaboration Platform

SharePoint 2013 Communities lets people work together in ways that are most effective for them. How? By providing great collaboration tools that anyone can use to share ideas, find people and expertise, and locate business information.

ECM for the Masses

SharePoint 2013 Content makes Enterprise Content Management (ECM) easy for everyone. Combining traditional content management, social capabilities, and powerful search, that is easy to use. 

Relevance, Refinement, and People

SharePoint 2013 Search helps people find the information they need to get their jobs done. It provides intranet search, people search, and a platform to build search-driven applications.

BI for Everyone

SharePoint 2013 Insights lets everyone access the business information they need to make good decisions. With powerful features like interactive dashboards and scorecards, people can use the information in databases, reports, and business applications to address specific needs.

Do-It-Yourself Business Solutions

SharePoint 2013 Composites provides building blocks that can be used to assemble, connect, and configure collaborative business solutions (from simple sites to complex applications). 

Presence

Communications at your fingertips

Presence unites all the contact information – including phone numbers, email addresses, and instant message – with the various ways in which employees of an organization communicate – via phone, conferencing, instant messaging and email.

Connect from anywhere

Presence information travels throughout the internal communications environment and is readily accessible. So whenever a contact’s name appears in an email, on a teamsite, or in a document workspace, it is accompanied by contact information. Presence integrates with Windows Phone devices, so real-time status and contact information is available when people are on the road too. This is possible due to the native integration of Exchange, SharePoint & Lync services.

Single sign on, single directory

When the subscribers log on to the service, they automatically log into Presence. Presence pulls data from Active Directory, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 and Microsoft Lync 2013 to put complete directory information and real-time availability at users’ fingertips.

Conferencing

Conferencing with a click

With Microsoft Lync 2013, building a conference call happens with drag and drop simplicity. Users can transform any conversation, whether is a simple phone call or even an instant message session, into a conference call or a videoconference on the fly.

Meet online with Microsoft Lync 2013

Lync 2013 supports the voice and video conferencing tools with a rich, online meeting environment. With Lync, users can make presentations, share files and work together, all in real time, so teams can meet and work no matter where everyone is located.

Conference calls that meet compliance regulations

Microsoft Hosted Unified Communications technologies deliver voice and video conferencing through Microsoft Lync 2013 via IP. This means that conference call audio and video streams are captured and logged just like an instant message or an email. Retaining every conferencing instance in a central archive can be an important business resource and resolves many of the compliance issues businesses currently face.

Voice

VoIP as you are

Microsoft Lync Server 2013 works with legacy telecommunications infrastructures. As a MS hosted UC partner you can deploy VoIP and can keep your current PABX or SIP trunking infrastructure, integrate it with Lync and provide a full VoIP solution to your customers.

Say goodbye to the # key

With VoIP, people manage the telephone the same way they manage email and the internet: with intuitive software. With Microsoft Lync 2013, telephone tools like call forwarding and conference calling are easier to use.

Simplified administration

The same Active Directory that underpins the rest of the IT infrastructure supports directory information and click-to-call functionality. Plus, Lync Server 2013 uses the same management tools as Exchange Server 2013,
so you don’t have to work in multiple applications to administer your communications infrastructure.

The best is yet to come. Now that I've shared with you an overview of the different services that MS Unified Communications entails, it's time to get a glance to what it'd take to setup such infrastructure, I've consolidated from my technical peers what would be the architecture required to setup this infrastructure, as well as, a view of the costs associated with this type of offers. The last article of this series will be released within the next week or so. Please feel free to leave your open comments and feedback.

Stay tuned!! 

To adapt to this change in behavior, MS has released the new version of the mobile client for Lync 2013, enabling an additional way to assist our Telco partners to deliver more value to the end user on top of their existing connectivity.

This is a mobile app for Windows Phone 8, let's take a look at some of the features:

• View colleagues’ availability in real time and select the best way to communicate – initiating an instant message (IM), email, voice or video call.
• Connect to Lync Meetings with a single touch, without requiring long numeric passcodes or conference numbers.
• Forward or simultaneously ring calls to your Enterprise Voice (Lync ID) number so you’ll never miss a call.
• Lync 2013 for Windows Phone provides transport layer security (TLS) and perimeter/internal network protection without requiring a VPN, so your communications experience is safer no matter where you are or what network you use.

As a Telco, you can provide Hosted Lync to your customer to address the needs for Corporate Instant Messaging, Video/Audio conferencing, in the PC, browser and phone. This capabilities can be delivered on a subscription based model as any other Telco service.

Overview

In a service environment, people need to collaborate in order to provide an outstanding customer experience based on the fast, efficient provision of accurate information. A growing number of organizations are adopting Unified Communications (UC), which integrates email, telephony, instant messaging, voicemail and web conferencing in a single system.

“The cloud” is a friendly way of describing web-based services that are hosted outside of an organization. When customers use cloud-based services, their IT infrastructure resides off their property (off-premises), and is maintained by a third party (hosted), instead of residing on a server at their home or business (on-premises) that they maintain. Many services they use every day are a part of the cloud— everything from web-based email to mobile banking and online photo storage. Because this information is located online or “in the cloud,” they can access it virtually anywhere, from a PC, tablet, mobile phone, or other device with an Internet connection.

What does it mean to "move to the cloud"?

A move to the cloud can involve transferring or replacing some or all of the office-based or home-based software, storage, or infrastructure systems with web-based services. For instance, if a customer uses disparate onsite or online servers and services for file sharing and storage, email communication, web conferencing, or other business productivity needs, such organization could choose to transfer some or their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud or replace it with cloud-based services in order to improve data organization and collaboration.

Hosted Unified Communications consolidates many business productivity services into a single cloud-based solution that a customer can choose to run in a way that works best for their business: on-premises, as a hosted service, or as a combination of on-premises and a hosted service. This type of offer also works well with most current versions of Office or comes with the latest version, and it provides business-class email, file sharing, conferencing, and much more.

Moving to the cloud allows small and large enterprises to take advantage of subscription-based software as a service (SaaS) products. Instead of installing software on each computer in their organization, keeping them all updated, and buying new versions of the product, they can buy a subscription to a SaaS product and be assured that they always have the latest features and capabilities of the software package, with no maintenance required on their part, for a low monthly fee. Hosted UC is an example of SaaS.

Unified Communications

Unified Communications is a set of technologies that allows everyone within the organization to communicate in an easy and effective way. Unified Communications consist of many technologies which enable a corporate employee to be able to communicate in a very efficient way; these technologies include email, voice mail, instant messaging, presence information, Audio/Video conferencing, IP Telephony and Voice Mail. 

Why Unified Communications? 

Through the years, communication between people was the most important aspect of any business. Communicating within the organization, with customers and partners ensures the business flow and keeps everyone in sync. With the growth of businesses to regional and even global, more cost and time effective ways to communicate became an essential need. Including presence and IM with the ability to share information without needing to go through multiple systems is becoming a must.

Unified communications saves a lot of time when it comes to interacting with people, saving few minutes a day results in saving a lot of time through the year which can be used to achieve more and be more productive. In addition to the superior mobility that allows everyone to be able to communicate from almost everywhere.

As a service provider, your customers can benefit from capabilities like Enterprise Content Management, Collaboration, Rich-communications, Business Intelligence, and Enterprise Search on a subscription-based model that otherwise, it’ll be challenging for them to embrace as they might not have the right infrastructure to support and enable such services.

Why Collaboration? 

Easing "collaboration" via the Web has lately been a popular theme for those seeking greater enterprise flexibility and resilience. We hear of collaborative teams, collaborative communities and collaborative commerce. The "c" word is used to describe everything from strategic alliances to internal and external partnerships. The concept of collaboration has become so diffuse that users have found it difficult to fit solutions to collaborative requirements. What’s
needed is a good working definition of collaboration that characterizes its variants, so that users will find it easier to select collaborative offerings that best fit their needs.

Literally, to collaborate means co-working or "working together." We offer a more-precise definition: "Collaboration is the process of working together toward a common purpose or goal in which the participants are committed and interdependent, with individual and collective accountability for the results of the collaboration, and each of the participants shares a common benefit."

The Four Pillars of Collaboration

• The participants have embraced a common purpose.
• Participants are committed to achieving specific goals and objectives supporting that common purpose.
• Participants are interdependent because they rely on each other’s roles, talents, resources, expertise, knowledge and other contributions necessary to achieve the specific goals and objectives.
• Participants are individually and collectively accountable for the results of the collaboration, yet share a common benefit.

Not sure if you remember our previous solution HMC (Hosted Messaging and Collaboration), this guidance included a piece of software as well: MPS, to facilitate the provisioning of APIs and provide a foundation for Control Panel vendors to develop self-service web interfaces for end customers. We have come a long way, evolving our approach and embedding such APIs into our products, facilitating the implementation and integration with control panel solutions.

For service providers, this represents less complexity to materialize an offer and a shorter Time-to-market for multi-tenant services. In the context of private cloud deployments, this is even more evident as our products provide web-based interfaces that the end customer/user can leverage to "self-administer" it's own resources/account (creation/deletion of accounts, DLs, policy management, etc.), leaving the maintenance and operations of the infra to the service provider.

Looking forward to partnering with you and see many more innovative cloud-based solutions in the market.

In other words, customers want to continue leveraging on hosting partners to colo their IT infrastructure, with the expectation of being able to manage it as any other cloud service (and not just renting for Real Estate). This brings new opportunities to cloud providers, as they could deliver more value by facilitating hybrid scenarios that can be "manage" through a single pane of glass.

To achieve this, hosting providers will need to enhance their management infrastructure, by automating provisioning, monitoring, dynamic allocation of resources, consumption tracking; all this being accessible over a web-based interface for a self-service experience. Moreover, the management of such resources shouldn't be confined to the IT infrastructure hosted at the provider's Datacenter but the customer's infrastructure as well. This will help customers to transition their IT workloads to the cloud more seamless and with less resistance.

Depending on the level of control and flexibility that Service Providers will like to have to address hybrid scenarios there are few solutions in the market. One of them is System Center 2012 with its capabilities for Cloud & Datacenter management, SC2012 enables Service Providers with tools to incorporate private, hosted, and public cloud computing resources, while still satisfying the unique business needs of their customers. It organizes existing IT assets (network, storage, compute) into a private cloud that is seamlessly integrated with hosted and public cloud services: System Center 2012

There is an article that provides some data points that came out from a survey conducted by Internap Network Services: Enterprise Innovation. Enjoy the reading!!

......

Third time's a charm!!

It's been 5 years since my last post, there have been many experiences to share that I felt compelled to blog again. I've been working with Hosting & Telco partners in APAC, primarily enabling them with MS-based hosting solutions, going through the complete life-cycle of a new offer (simplifying): conceptualization, feasibility analysis, business case, implementation & GTM. I'll keep sharing some of the previous learning and current experiences with my Telco partners, that could help to give some ideas to deliver more value to customers consuming Cloud services.

Cheers,

AMG

You can have access to the bits of the solution from the following location:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C9CBBC69-4AE4-450D-AF5E-F49E7C701CF4&displaylang=en

Or for those who are interested in developing on top of MPS (i.e. self-service portal, namespaces, increase the business logic of the current APIs, etc.) there is a SDK available as well for developers to consume:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=CE3FC537-86AE-4802-9A05-43E2A27A4B45&displaylang=en

The documentation to migrate from previous versions is still pending, but it will be released soon. If you have HMC 4.0, you shouldn't expect too much of impact in your APIs or portals already implemented. If what you have is HMC 3.5 or earlier, you should consider a similar migration path like to HMC 4.0 with the addition of migrating LCS to OCS 2007. Don't forget to consider these migrations paths while deploying the solution.

If you want to know more about these features, check out the following set of online videos which presents the capabilities of Windows 2008:

Windows Server 2008 Deployment Overview - Michael Niehaus, Tim Mintner
The 10 Most Important Things About Failover Clustering  - Jim Teague
Power Management: Windows Server - Stephen Berard
Dynamic Partition: Windows Server - Davis Walker
Windows Server Longhorn - Iain McDonald
Windows Server virtualisation - solution scenarios - David Hitchen
Windows Server 2008 Kernel Advances - Mark Russinovich
Active Directory Domain Services in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 - Stephanie Cheung
Virtualization in Windows Server - Mike Neil
Managing Windows Server 2008 with Server Manager - Dan Harman
Using Group Policy with Windows and Windows Server 2008 - Mazhar Mohammed, Derek Melber
Microsoft.com: Employing Windows Server 2008 and Internet Information Services 7 - Paul Wright, Brad LeRoss
Living the Longhorn Life: What's Up With Windows Server 2008 - Mark Minasi

Feel free to share with me your views and comments.