RCPmag.com MARCH 2015 Redmond Channel Partner 1

PARTNER’S GUIDE TO

the New Maturity of Lync

SPECIAL PULLOUT SECTION

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By providing and updating an SDN API, Microsoft is enabling alliance partners to help Microsoft create a more robust and manageable unified communications environment.By Scott Bekker

As a company, Microsoft isn’t as forthcoming these days about how those Microsoft Lync unified communications (UC) deploy-ments are going. There was a time

a couple years ago that Microsoft executives couldn’t stop talking about the hockey-stick-like growth of their up-and-coming UC platform.

But don’t let the absence of Lync from the last few earnings calls and lack of public bragging from Redmond’s executive suite fool you. Microsoft is currently intent on convincing investors that all those cloud and mobile device investments are paying off. In the background, Lync is chugging along at an accelerating pace, according to channel partners engaged with the product.

Case in point—enterprise collaboration company PGi, an Atlanta-based publicly traded company, in

February acquired 75-person Lync specialist firm Modality Systems Ltd.

“In our account base over the last few years, we’ve seen increasing momentum toward unified communica-tions in general and Microsoft Lync in particular,” says Sean O’Brien, executive vice president for strategy and communications at PGi. “Catering to the large enterprise, Lync is a force to be reckoned with in the market. We’ve seen a lot of opportunity, and embracing Lync is a key tenet in our strategy.”

Modality Systems, with its pure-play Lync focus, O’Brien says, has been “growing like a weed.”

In fact, Microsoft’s large emphasis on cloud is actually helping drive deeper engagements in Lync, according to Luke Kannel, a unified communications engineer with NACR, an Eagan, Minn.-based global integrator of business communications solutions with a substantial managed services practice around Lync.

“We’re seeing significant enterprise voice growth, primar-ily due to customers owning the licensing for them in [the Enterprise CAL], and with the new model [Office 365 Enterprise E4 SKU], there’s about a 10 percent upcharge,” Kannel says. The E4 SKU, which includes enterprise voice, is $22 a year versus $20 for the E3, which doesn’t include enterprise voice. “With enterprise voice deployments, we’re probably seeing 4x growth in the last year and a half.”

Bojan Simic, president and principal analyst at TRAC Research, has been following UC for years and is seeing Lync get deeper in accounts, as well as broader. “Before we used to hear about the Ciscos and Avayas of the world. Microsoft has made a ton of progress being top of mind. It’s usually a good sign when you have a lot of [vendor] companies doing the management and saying

“ With enterprise voice deployments, we’re probably seeing 4x growth in the last year and a half.”

Luke Kannel, Unified Communications Engineer, NACR

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M AT U R E LY N C

Lync deployments are going to be their focus in 2015 because they’re seeing a lot of traction,” Simic says.

All the success that partners are seeing comes with a new set of problems—although they’re generally good problems to have, it’s a sign of the maturity of the product family. For one thing, voice implementations lead to much greater customer scrutiny of the quality of the service. Suddenly Lync isn’t just a lot of interesting new collaboration capabilities that evoke gee-whiz reactions and a shrug if there’s a hiccup. If a customer is making a business call using a Lync client and experiences a bad connection, they know what their phone service was supposed to sound like. For another thing, as Lync matures and organizations consider using more of its functionality, partners find themselves knee deep in complicated legacy environments with legacy PBXes alongside Lync software.

In his research, which includes surveys of hundreds of Lync custom-ers, Simic sees three recurring problems that customers need help with as they deploy enterprise voice in their environments:

1. Companies are often running 20 to 30 business-critical applica-tions on the network. Adding Lync can start causing problems with other applications, or the other application requirements may not afford Lync the bandwidth required to function properly.

2. The native tools in Lync don’t provide enough information to fully judge the quality of calls or to isolate the source of call-quality problems.

3. Customers need real-time analytics that can predict where network problems might occur that could affect call quality and that help them avoid those issues.

Microsoft hasn’t been standing still in the face of the new generation of problems. Recognizing that its tools are incomplete, the company released a first version of a Lync software-defined detworking (SDN) API in December 2013.

As Jamie Stark, Microsoft senior product marketing manager for Lync, said at that time, an SDN approach was a great fit for UC infrastructure. “In any UC implementation there are dozens of network elements—from routers to reverse proxies, intrusion detection systems to application delivery controllers, firewalls to session border controllers—that all need to be provisioned and configured correctly for optimal media flow. Instead of having all of these elements configured discretely, SDN provides a model for a single policy-based method of operations, where the application tells the network what needs to happen,” Stark noted in a blog post announcing the API.

Microsoft intended for the API to provide a data stream of informa-tion to SDN controllers about media flows with use cases to include diagnostics, automatically provisioning Quality of Service (QoS) and orchestration. Third-party vendors jumping on the first-generation

API included Nectar Corp. for its diagnostics and Aruba Networks for wireless access and priority.

In October 2014, Microsoft released an update, Lync SDN API 2.1, with more vendor partners on board. By then the list of companies leveraging the API had expanded to Meru Networks, Extreme Networks Inc. and HP Networking.

Tom Tuttle, vice president of the Microsoft practice at Nectar, talks about the kinds of problems that the data from the Microsoft Lync API combined with Nectar diagnostics tools can start to solve.

“They’re the call problems we had when VoIP was first introduced, a lot of echo. It’s not like the challenges are unique to Microsoft. The problem is the lack of visibility into helping identify what those problems were,” Tuttle says. Lync gives administrators data from a Quality of Experience (QoE) database, but the information is an average. “You could identify a session and the average looks pretty good, but it’s good for three minutes and so bad for the last 30 seconds that the user terminates the call.”

The baseline Lync product also doesn’t provide any information about the network components the call traveled through. The API, however, provides data that a third-party like Nectar can analyze.

“If you’re able to leverage that API effectively, you’re able to see, for example, that as it entered the datacenter it was good, and somewhere in the carrier-partner cloud there’s a problem. You’re at least able to eliminate and rule out what it wasn’t,” Tuttle says.

NACR’s Kannel has used those Nectar tools on behalf of customers of NACR Ovation Managed Services for Microsoft Lync. As NACR was putting together that managed services offering for Lync customers, the company needed to choose whether to leverage Microsoft System Center Operations Manager or use the Nectar Unified Communications Diagnostics (UCD) tool.

“Lync has synthetic transactions that allow us to test if something is wrong. [Operations Manager] adds additional management and reporting on top of that. The Nectar differentiator is pinpointing what actually went wrong,” Kannel says. “The Nectar solution gives us the ability to pinpoint that it was this router hop that caused the problem. It could take days in the past, but we can probably do it within 15 minutes with the UCD solution.”

As alliance partners like Nectar and Aruba use the Microsoft SDN API to plug significant functionality gaps, the Lync platform gains a SH

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“ If you’re able to leverage that [Microsoft Lync SDN] API effectively, you’re able to see, for example, that as it entered the datacenter it was good, and somewhere in the carrier-partner cloud there’s a problem.”

Tom Tuttle, Vice President, Microsoft Practice, Nectar Corp.

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maturity that allows partners like NACR and Modality Systems to take Lync to the next level.

John Lamb, president and co-founder of Modality Systems, characterizes the API work as one part of an overall increase in credibility for the Lync ecosystem. “There are tools out there for doing real-time monitoring and management for doing analytics, and the special case solutions like call recording, call center, vertical solutions, have really stepped up. We’re seeing some big players who are established in the PBX world get into Lync, and that’s really helped,” Lamb says.

Where to next? Current Lync channel partners see several types of deployments as opportunities for the near future.

NACR’s Kannel spends a lot of time in the Avaya legacy customer base. In that world, the value proposition is most important. “Cost avoidance is No. 1,” he says. With Lync, and Microsoft’s strength in adding software collaboration bells and whistles, those customers start seeing the value of the other pieces later. “The flip side is the

value-add in collaboration and desktop sharing, instant messaging, and presence,” he says.

TRAC Research’s Simic notes that customers are less inclined than they were a few years ago to view UC as an a la carte product set where they pick one feature from one vendor and a different feature from another. “One of the things that has changed in the enterprise is people are thinking about UC now as a more integrated solution than a bunch of capabilities that they can get from different products,” he says. “They’re understanding more and more how to use it across the value chain. Earlier you had people using Lync to communicate internally, and they had internal processes aligned with how Lync works. We’re seeing now more and more using it to communicate with customers, and using it to communicate with partners across the whole ecosystem of companies involved with that business.”

That realization of the value of an integrated whole, however, doesn’t change the fact that legacy investments must be supported. “Hybrid seems to be a common word,” Nectar’s Tuttle says of customer conversations. “You may have an enterprise make a decision that they’re going to continue to migrate in a direction. Let’s say the direction is more collaborative, trying to take advantage of a whole UC suite. What we find is that it’s not like they’re trying to turn the ignition

off of one car and turn another one on. It’s very much, ‘We are going to try to migrate into this.’ They’re making sure the infrastructure design is solid. Interoperability becomes top of mind. It’s not going to be this flash cut.”

Simic agrees that the flash cut isn’t realistic for a big subset of customers, but he believes the advantages of a unified system will continue to nudge them to a single major supplier over time. “More companies are taking the approach of rip and replace using a specific UC solution, even if they don’t do it right off the bat. Down the road, they always figure out it will actually cost them more in the long run if they try to patch things together than if they do a new installation and start things a new way.” •

Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.SHU

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As alliance partners like Nectar and Aruba use the Microsoft SDN API to plug significant functionality gaps, the Lync platform gains a maturity that allows partners like NACR and Modality Systems to take Lync to the next level.

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