Inside DiVitas

Doctors say Mobile Unified Communications is a must-have

DiVitas CEO, Vivek Khuller, recently spent some time with a medical intern at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, NC demonstrating how the DiVitas Mobile UC solution works. This morning we received an unsolicited blog submission from that intern, which includes insight about how Mobile UC is a must-have for physicians.

By Sam, Medical Intern

After meeting with you a few weeks ago and trying out DiVitas, I was thinking about your mobile phone technology and how I could have both my cell and work numbers on my one-and-only mobile phone. It is such a practical concept. I really think DiVitas is a great idea for doctors because we are so mobile as a profession that it doesn’t make sense to be tied to any one phone number (home, cell or office). Doctors are rarely seated in front of a deskphone.

What happens is doctors get calls from the answering service at home or on their cell phone all the time. They call that patient back, but often the patient doesn’t answer because they don't recognize the number. Instead they screen the call first, and then call the number back. The problem is doctors often call after-hours when they aren’t seeing patients and so they are less busy. But this means they are calling from their cell phone or home phone. Doctors don’t want to give patients their home number or cell number, they want to be called on their professional line, which is the office number. But with the phone technology today, they have had little choice: They either call from home/cell phones or don’t call patients back (and obviously the latter isn’t an option).

Worse yet, if doctors and patients don’t answer each other’s calls (because phone numbers aren’t recognized), they get into a game of phone tag. And phone tag is just such a huge waste of time, nobody wants to play that game – personally or professionally. If doctors were to use DiVitas phones with single-number reach, they would be able to answer the phone anywhere, anytime and phone tag would be a thing of the past.

I think it'd be great to tell doctor's about this so they can use your product on their cell phones. I know I will want to use it when I am done with residency.

FMC is just one piece of Mobile UC, but it's an important one

This response was posted to the comment section on NetworkWorld and clarifies points made in a recent article about FMC technology.

By Vivek Khuller, DiVitas Networks

DiVitas agrees that FMC alone isn’t worth the effort, hence the reason behind our development of a Mobile UC solution, of which FMC is just one component. Following are our responses to issues raised about FMC in John Cox’s NetworkWorld article.

NWW POINT: “Wi-Fi/cellular convergence, to let your cell phone call over a WLAN or cellular network, is more complicated…”

DIVITAS COUNTERPOINT: If we can land a human on the moon in 1969, we can definitely make a voice call work on WiFi in 2008. What makes VoWiFi challenging is lack of adequate WiFi and cellular coverage – not the technology itself. Another item that is non-trivial is seamless roaming between WiFi and cellular networks. This is because there is no standard way to handoff calls between such networks. DiVitas has solved the latter problem in a very unique way and made it very easy for people to roam between these networks without dropping calls.

POINT: “It’s hard to find agreement on what the term FMC even means, or on how it relates to the even more confusing term of ‘unified communications.’”

COUNTERPOINT: Actually, FMC and how it integrates with UC is very easily explained – FMC is a component of Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) that pertains to the convergence of fixed (anything non-cellular including WiFi) and mobile (anything cellular) networks. Mobile UC pertains to providing access to various communications applications, such as phone, voice mail, IM, Email and contacts using a single mobile device. If you combine the two together, you get equal and seamless access to Mobile UC features over any fixed and mobile network.

POINT: “But FMC, however defined, comes at a cost …”

COUNTERPOINT: Of course, everything in life comes at a cost. You have to spend money on a car and gas if you wish to get from one place to another. The key question is if the cost is worth it. Yes, one has to spend money on Mobile UC. However, if it helps us save more money than we spend, e.g. by leveraging WiFi to reduce cellular bills, then it is worth it. Additionally, if it helps us become more productive by making us more accessible and responsive, and thereby allowing us to make more money, it is a technology that would be worth investing in.

POINT: “FMC is going to cost money and make the wireless network much more complicated. You have to become, in effect, a carrier. And you have to engineer your WLAN for a new metric: call capacity."

COUNTERPOINT: FMC would only marginally add to the cost of WLANs that companies are already deploying to provide wireless data access. Yes, the companies would have to spend a little extra to engineer their networks for “call capacity.” However, the incremental investment is not exorbitant, and it definitely would not make companies into carriers.

POINT: “… mobile carriers generally are reluctant to do anything that drains revenue from cellular minutes, so don't look for them to push FMC down your throat …”

COUNTERPOINT: It is a misconception to think there is some dependency on carriers for deploying a Mobile UC solution. There is none, and carriers’ lack of activity in this space has no negative effect on solutions that are available today. If anything, carriers benefit from Mobile UC deployments among enterprises because it means they gain increased handset adoption within organizations and the data plans that go with them. It’s a much coveted opportunity to penetrate business users.

POINT: "To scale this up [to the enterprise], you have to create a 'PBX in the sky' and surround it with policies that allow the employee to use the handset for personal and business tasks while automatically and reliably separating the charges accordingly … "

COUNTERPOINT: Nope. There is no such need to create a “PBX in the sky”. Simply use the standard corporate PBX. The flexibility of the Mobile UC client allows mobile users to selectively choose the corporate or personal cellular number on an ad hoc basis, keeping the billing of the two numbers completely separate.

Micro-blogging for business using DiVitas – à la Twitter

By Nancy Colwell

Why should Twitter micro-bloggers be the only ones who to get be more productive? And why should micro-bloggers be the only ones having fun while doing it? They send their short, bursty micro-blogs (“twitters” I suppose) to their social network of other Twitter micro-bloggers. This lets them communicate what they are doing, where they are going, what the weather is like at the beach, etc. I even read recently about how a kidnapping victim in Iraq saved his own life by micro-blogging his whereabouts via text messaging (he was eventually found and saved).

But business users can Twitter too. Just swap the phrase, “I’m at the beach” with “I’m in a meeting,” and voila, you’ve got micro-blogging for professionals. Add DiVitas Mobile Unified Communications, with its Instant Messaging and presence features, and you’re in business (literally) with a robust micro-blogging option.

Given this trendy new application for our Mobile UC solution, for a few months now, everybody at DiVitas has been engaged in a fierce game of micro-blogging. Our CEO (Vivek Khuller) started it, and a lot of us have become somewhat addicted to it.

Now, micro-blogging isn’t normally a game. It’s really just a new, popular form of blogging that allows people to write mini text updates about themselves, and then broadcast this info via text messaging, Instant Messaging (IM), email, MP3 or the web.

The website Twitter has helped make micro-blogging popular among consumers. But in our case, we use the Presence feature on our DiVitas phones to update co-workers about what we’re doing at any given moment. Presence and IM are part of the Unified Communications (UC) package of goodies that come with our Mobile UC solution. We’re just putting these apps to creative use … à la Twitter.

So what’s the game – or really the challenge – with micro-blogging at DiVitas? To be as quippy and creative as possible with your posts.

Looking online right now (it’s 7:15 am), I can see that Vivek is taking an early morning run. I know not to bother calling him – he’s running. But I can IM him with confidence that he’ll see the message when he’s done with his run.

Of course “taking a run” isn’t especially creative, but with Vivek, it’s the sum total of his posts for the day that usually earns his top (micro-blog) dog status. He’s great at giving us a blow-by-blow micro-blog of his day, and he’s always on the move. Last week he posted a restaurant tour during his trip to Europe, meal by meal. One of the more interesting posts was “heading to Pigs Ear,” which is apparently a trendy eatery in London.

At this early hour, I can also see that Vivek is the only one “available” right now – the Presence feature on the DiVitas phone lets you broadcast your availability, indicating whether you are available by “voice”, “voice and text”, “text only” or “not available.” It seems the rest of DiVitas is either focusing on getting into the office, or perhaps snoozing after a late night at work (there are quite a few offline folks who have posted “zzz ...” which is code for “gone to bed.”

Some recent Twitter-like micro-blogs by co-workers that come to mind: a reminder to take public transit because it was a spare the air day; another one about baseball from a Giants fan who claims to bleed orange and black (he likes to pick fights with the lone Dodgers fan among us); and several with basic-but-helpful messages indicating whether they are on the road, working from home, in the office or back in the U.S. after some overseas business travel. Two of my favorite mico blogs to date are “Tiger Tiger” by our VP of engineering (I discovered that this is is a hip restaurant in London). The other one was “Ran the dish now tired” two weekends ago by one of our avid runners.

The thing is, you can write whatever you want, you can change it as frequently as you want and if you’re the creative type, you can follow the Twitter lead and be as creative as you want. I’m going to change my Presence now from “blogging on micro-blogging” to “hitting the shower.” I’m not sure what I’ll post next. The pressure, the pressure …

Mobile UC gets spotlight thanks to Cisco MSE and Microsoft Echoes

By Nancy Colwell

For two weeks in a row now, the big guns – Microsoft and Cisco – have stirred up massive interest in the Mobile UC space with their respective Mobility Services Engine (MSE) and Echoes services platform.

With its MSE announcement, Cisco is partnering with an eFMC vendor in order to offer seamless roaming with its mobile solution. Meanwhile, Microsoft is tackling the logistics of juggling multiple phone numbers with Echoes, which endeavors to do away with the need for phone numbers all together. Microsoft’s Echoes platform will integrate the functions of mobile phones and email into a single system that enables people to contact one another based on name rather than email or phone number.

Seamless roaming, elimination of phone-number-juggling … it all sounds very familiar. That’s because DiVitas Mobile UC has offered automatic, seamless roaming between WiFi and cellular networks from the outset. So we are big believers in seamless roaming – the FMC component of Mobile UC.

And DiVitas is all about making mobile workers reachable by a single phone number and reducing the number of inboxes that need to be managed. Removing this human latency issue will result directly in a more efficient workstyle and increased productivity.

It’s good to see biggies market the heck out of FMC, elimination of phone-number-juggling, and the business needs driving these technologies. It simply validates what we have been doing all along, and helps educate the market about the business justification for solutions like ours.

With that, we would like to say, “Welcome to the party guys.”

For more information on DiVitas Mobile UC, please visit our website at www.divitas.com

Mobile UC is economic- and business-justified

By Rich Watson

Mobile UC (of which FMC is a core component) actually leverages a company’s existing WLAN and PBX investments, which leads to a faster ROI because it helps offset the initial costs of these systems. Letting companies leverage existing investments to create faster ROI is a very compelling element of economic/business justification.

Additionally, companies are adopting Mobile UC for another key purpose – which also leads to an economic/business justification – and that is increased productivity through single number reach. A more productive worker saves, or generates, more money than employees who take longer times to do their jobs, or return calls to customers/partners/colleagues. Yup, enterprises love that increased-productivity stuff (probably as much as they love ROI). And we have the customers to prove it.

So DiVitas stands by its argument that by making mobile workers (1) continuously available (via voice, email or IM), and (2) at the least cost possible (by leveraging WiFi, thanks to FMC) and (3) more productive (by being more available to respond to customers/partners/colleagues), companies that deploy Mobile UC improve the bottom line.

This response was posted to the comment section on NetworkWorld and relates to a contributed article that we recently wrote.

For more information on DiVitas Mobile UC, please visit our website at www.divitas.com

Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) to carriers: Let’s make love not war

Rich Watson

Trade show panels can be very lively, and the Convergence: Technologies and Strategies panel at this year’s Interop Las Vegas was no exception.

It was a full house and there was a steady stream of questions coming from the audience i.e. “When are products available and how do they differ?” DiVitas and an enterprise-FMC vendor we shared the stage with were quite vocal about our respective solutions approaches, while our counterparts (Cisco and Strata8 Networks) were pretty quiet. Cisco barely said anything, and oddly, didn’t even mention its Interop announcement with Nokia on Mobile Unified Communications.

For its part, Strata8 didn’t get far with its argument, but it did spark quite a reaction from the enterprise contingent. Speaking on behalf of the carriers, Strata8 argued that deploying femtocells to improve in-building cell signal would ultimately lighten the load of the enterprise. The logic behind that statement? Mobile communications would be improved and yet the carriers would be doing all of the heavy lifting because they would manage the mobile infrastructure.

Strata8 also implied that Mobile UC’s enterprise approach to mobilizing the workforce is too complex.

The enterprise contingent countered that argument, saying that an enterprise approach makes more sense because it takes away absolute control from the carrier. Essentially, Mobile UC is a real business tool vs. just an extension of the cell phone.

As for complexity? Mobile UC’s mantra is just the opposite (it reduces complexity). Adding Mobile UC to your WLAN environment is just an incremental adjustment to what you already have. Adding this on top is simpler than you think.

While the theme of the panel maintained a distinct carrier vs. enterprise tone, in the real world, there is a lot more to be said on the positive side about the carrier’s role as far as Mobile UC goes.

There is a golden opportunity for carriers who partner with companies like DiVitas, and this opportunity goes well beyond just voice & email. I’m talking about two new killer applications called Mobile Presence and Mobile IM.

These virgin technologies are key components of Mobile UC – and they both require a data plan. This translates into a new revenue stream for carriers, which have nearly saturated the market for mobile voice and email.

Here’s the logic behind this one. Presence is the broadcasted state of availability, and it helps people make better decisions about how and when to contact a colleague, a customer, a partner, etc. And if two people are available by IM, they are able to communication efficiently, in real-time. Give Presence and IM a mobility component, as we’ve done with the DiVitas solution, and you have one very powerful tool that businesses need today, and which must be delivered over a carrier’s data network.

People don’t want to waste time playing telephone tag, so Presence and IM (and that data plan) will get used a lot. Hopefully this opportunity will ring true for carriers soon, and we will begin to see more public displays of partnerships than adversarial sniping among carriers and Mobile UC vendors.

Location-based Mobile Unified Communications: Babes lost in the woods

By Rich Watson

A major pitfall with Location-Aware-based Mobile Unified Communications (Mobile UC) is that it tends to confine your roaming to a campus that has been Location-Aware-mapped (In a mapped environment, the exits of the Location-Aware environment have been identified). Once you step off campus, and out of corporate WiFi range, the Location-Aware capabilities are no longer enforced, and you impact the key advantage that Location-Awareness has to offer: extending battery life.

WiFi is notorious for over-taxing dual-mode phone batteries, and Location-Aware, in theory, intends to help extend battery life. BTW, Environment-Aware technology has a similar design goal, and they both achieve this by minimizing the frequency of accessing the WiFi radio.

The catch: The Location-Aware approach is not without sacrifice.

For example, Location-Awareness may assist you when you are roaming from WiFi to cellular (i.e. leaving a building). However, it’s actually a hindrance when you are trying to roam in the other direction – from cellular to WiFi. This is because your smartphone isn’t getting the Location-Aware help it needs to connect with a WiFi network, so your phone must work extra hard by constantly seeking a WiFi signal. If this process is too frequent, it will quickly run down the battery. At the same time, if it’s too infrequent, “finding” a WiFi network will be delayed, and this threatens to increase use of cell minutes.

In addition to sometimes hurting, rather than helping, battery life, Location-Aware solutions are blind to hotspots (mapping the office is one thing, but mapping every Starbucks is probably not so practical).

What this means, for example, is that your Location-Aware phone knows when it’s left the corporate building, and thus it roams to cellular. But it isn’t immediately aware of the available WiFi when you walk into a hotspot like Starbucks. You could be sitting on a couch for a long while with your Chocolate Frappuccino before your phone ever realizes there’s WiFi to be had (the application must actually invoke a scan periodically for the WiFi driver to wake up and look around for an access point).

Even a roam back onto campus could be delayed … remember this type of solution is primed for leaving WiFi, not entering a WiFi zone!

In contrast, an Environment-Aware solution like DiVitas is always at the ready when it comes to roaming. DiVitas continually seeks the optimal connection – whether it’s cellular, your corporate WLAN, your home office WiFi or hotspots such as Starbucks and an airport. And it does this with the least impact on the battery-life possible.

An Environment-Aware solution is always monitoring the phone’s environment, and it isn’t limited to location. In doing so, DiVitas scans for WiFi once about every 60 seconds, which is sufficient to quickly locate a WiFi signal, but not so often that it will run down the battery.

What does this mean to us DiVitas users? We can communicate via smartphone when we are in the office, at home, or at a hotspot such as Starbucks, the airport or on a busy city street covered by metro WiFi. We know we are constantly connected to the optimal, available network, whatever that may be.

Being environment-agnostic makes the most sense…the device behaves the same in any environment.

Mobile Unified Communications, WiFi, FMC, GSM, CDMA … Can You Hear Me Now?

By Rich Watson

A really interesting question came up via email in response to a recent NetworkWorld article on DiVitas, and we thought it would make for some good blog material. (See Mobile UC: The ultimate end game)

Email: Who is doing the mobile unified communications with CDMA? I have met with [another vendor] and they tell me it is only available via GSM. 

• Our response to the statement in this email: So not true!
• The answer to the question in this email (and why the previous statement isn't true): DiVitas Mobile UC most definitely supports CDMA.
• Our question to this other vendor: Why would you limit your solution (and your sales) by ignoring millions of subscribers? Why not just create a huge pile of money and have yourself a big bonfire? We are baffled by this squandered opportunity.

On a more serious note, it’s true that CDMA is the orphan cellular network, given that most of the world today uses GSM. It is estimated that CDMA has only 270 million subscribers worldwide (including half of the U.S., which is the largest country using CDMA). Compared with GSM, which is estimated to be over 1 billion, this is just a drop in the bucket.

But regardless of which number is the highest, there are apparently still enough (millions) faithful users in the U.S. that CDMA-based Verizon and Sprint are making a healthy living. (Note: CDMA may be primarily U.S.-deployed, but it’s a really big country). And the average American doesn’t have a clue which network-type they are using anyway. They just want the best deal on a reliable service.

Yes, other enterprise-based solutions and carrier-based FMC solutions have totally ignored the lonely CDMA networks. But DiVitas hasn’t. Conversely, our vendor- and carrier-agnostic architecture embraces all kinds of wireless services, and even supports mixed (GSM and CDMA) network sites.

Some day in the near future a CDMA-FMC consumer will be able to say “can you hear me now” over any wireless network – WiFi or cellular!

Beware, Location-Aware (FMC) Part 2

By Rich Watson

In my last blog, I talked a little about the shortcomings of location-aware technology, especially as it compares with DiVitas’ more flexible environment-aware approach to seamless roaming. We’re going to continue with this topic because of some recent questions we’ve received about the differences between location-aware and environment-aware technologies. For example, we were recently asked if a location-aware solution is better for organizations that want a detailed map of their environment for management purposes.

The answer? Creating a detailed map of your WLAN is critical for reliable mobile communications (especially one based on seamless-roaming), but tying that map to the “roam” itself is not a good idea. And here are 3 reasons why:

DEAD ZONES

Location-Aware: No matter how hard you try, there will always be dead spots (i.e., no coverage) within a WLAN network. These “dead zones” result from under-coverage (by design) or geometry of the facility that can shape (or misshape) the Radio Frequency (RF) environment. Because these areas do exist within a building or on campus, the Mobile UC application must be able to accommodate for this situation in providing the best voice quality.

With location-aware roaming, dead zones become a major problem because this technology doesn’t have the intelligence to roam to cellular when a phone passes through one of these dead zones. Roams that are solely dependent upon on location-based logic will fail because, in a dead zone, the current Access Point (AP) would have no associated location-mapping and the client would assume it was within a contiguous WiFi space. In this case, the WiFi signal could go to zero without a guarantee of cellular coverage and the call would drop. By the time you enter a “dead zone”, it’s too late.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution like DiVitas responds dynamically to changes in the RF neighborhood. It constantly monitors voice quality and will automatically roam to cellular-mode if the WiFi call degrades, regardless of the user location. Dead zones are not a problem in an environment-aware solution like DiVitas; they are just a normal cause to roam to cellular.

OVERLAPPING CHANNEL CONFLICT

Location-Aware: APs often experience overlapping channel conflict - an occurrence that happens when two APs configured to the same channel are located side-by-side. When this happens they can either null each other’s signal out or induce interference, blocking communication. Again, as with dead zones, a location-based solution is not able to roam to cellular when it experiences a loss of signal so the call will drop.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, an environment-aware solution such as DiVitas detects any loss of WiFi signal or degradation of voice-over-WiFi quality. In either of these situations, it will automatically roam to cellular. This means calls won’t drop.

Antenna Sensitivity

Location-Aware: Many location-aware solutions don’t properly account for antenna sensitivity differences between devices. This means one phone may pick up a WiFi signal that another phone cannot, and the phone with the weaker signal will fail to roam to cellular. Or it might roam at an inappropriate time … like when it shouldn’t. (Spending more time in cellular means more money spent on cellular minutes). This muddies the concept of location-aware roaming because the ability to receive the signal – and place or maintain a phone call – is dependant on where a person (with a handset) is standing in the building relative to an AP, and it depends on the RF-sensitivity of the device. Performing a location service with one device may induce undesirable handover behaviors with other devices…even from the same handset vendor.

Environment-Aware: In contrast, environment-aware solutions detect any changes in signal strength, and automatically roam to cellular when a signal is lost or call quality degrades beyond acceptable.

For more information on DiVitas Networks, please visit our website at www.divitas.com

Beware problems facing Location-aware FMC

We recently received the following comment/questions (see FMC, Mobile Unified Communications & DiVitas) following one of our posts:

I recently read an article with one of your competitors claiming their technology "takes advantage of location." The implication was that other FMC vendors don’t do this and so now I’m curious to find out more on this topic. I have three questions right now that I’m hoping you can answer.

1-Does DiVitas offer location-aware services?

2-If not, why not?

3-What do you offer instead (and how is it different/better)?

I am a VoIP purchasing decision-maker at a major provider network (healthcare) and planning an FMC deployment in the near future. But I’ll confess that I’m having a hard time convincing myself this location-aware thing is really “real”, much less a deciding factor when choosing among FMC vendors.

DIVITAS RESPONDS:

By Rich Watson

Basically, a location-based service is implemented to discover the “edge” of the WiFi network coverage. Within a company facility, WiFi access points are positioned to ensure wireless accessibility while the user is inside the building (or on the campus). Once outside of a company facility (off premise), mobile communications services must rely on cellular coverage. FMC embodies the concept that allows a user to roam from a WiFi network into a cellular network without dropping the call (and in reverse). With a location-based system such handovers are triggered by a user passing beyond a marked edge Access Point.

DiVitas does not offer a location-based solution, but for a very specific reason. While the concept is appealing, location-based solutions are faced with several operations challenges in providing smoother WiFi-cellular roaming. The base presumption is that once installed, the coverage map of the WiFi doesn’t change. The building “exit” location is manually mapped regarding the near Access Point ID and signal strength at that point. As long as nothing is changed that affects the RF characteristics in that area, things are fine. However, adding new Access Points, changing transmit power, or even moving office cubicles or filing cabinets around may change the RF coverage! With any such changes, the location-based information must be manually re-configured, and it must be closely monitored and managed.

There are reasons to roam to cellular beyond just crossing the edge of the network. Any time the voice connection viability is jeopardized by RF congestion or interference, a roam to cellular should be invoked. For example, a wireless voice connection may be initiated when the signal strength is strong and congestion/interference is low. But if a high-bandwidth wireless application is launched, those RF characteristics radically change and will deteriorate the experienced voice quality. At this point, the handset should roam to cellular, even though the user is located well within the bounds of the WiFi coverage area, in order to ensure maximum call quality.

DiVitas has taken a more reliable approach to implementing cross network management: environment-aware services. DiVitas has implemented this sophisticated architecture to always ensure that the user has the very best voice quality experience by monitoring the total RF environment in order to make roam decisions. Because RF can be dynamic, irrespective of location, being able to respond to the real-time RF changes provides DiVitas a real advantage over location-based solutions and obviates any manual configurations of the location maps.