2011 has been a fantastic year for the Anana team. We have met all of our internal and external targets on all fronts. I couldn’t be happier! 2011 has been a year of incredible innovation and execution. In preparing ourselves to continue our activities into next year I thought I’d take a moment to capture the key-highlights of our year. Also, perhaps, the activities that have driven us through 2011 and a solid pointer into the momentum for 2012. I’ll try and end this piece with a forwards looking view to predictions for next year.

Anana delivers solutions across two main lines of business. Our first of course is our Enterprise Contact Centre solutions unit.  How has this unit performed this year?  Not ignoring our ‘business as usual’ integration work, here are a few of our key milestones in the year;

1. We delivered a global virtualised contact centre solution for a household Brand. The heart of it was a SIP based solution, featuring the Genesys Voice Platform. Powered by Nuance Speech recognition, the Anana Speech Applications Framework (for VoiceXML and driving the Speech Recognition) its key highlight was service offerings in 17 countries supporting 12 languages concurrently.  Truly trans-continental call manipulation and custom telephony desktop and computer telephony integration
2. Our Anana Briefing Centre (ABC), a £1.4 Million (Sterling) investment went from concept to reality. The ABC is a state of the art demonstration and workshop facility that has allowed Anana, our partners and in some cases our ‘competitors’ to “Show” rather than “Tell” the 21st Century Customer Interaction Management capability of Genesys.  I think the most remarkable testament to the validity of the ABC is that our shortest lifecycle from first-view of the “Art of the Possible” to contract award for a large Bank in the Middle-East, who even flew all the way to the Centre for a Saturday workshop was 6 weeks!  By far though, the most telling thing that it has done, is to give our existing, as well as knew clients the confidence they need to proceed; and the ability to do so in record time-frames. Contact Centre projects are typically 18 months long; even in the pre-sales and sales lifecycle. 2011 saw our customers engaging, buying and deploying in weeks!  A high confidence in execution and delivery is a good place to begin new ways to engage!
3. We delivered the first Genesys Social Engagement projects in Europe, both with Tier 1 service providers that saw the first phases of true cross channel and multi-channel customer service go from concept to reality, including web-chat, email, Facebook and Twitter as customer service capabilities beyond inbound and outbound voice. We then went on to win a 3rd engagement in as many weeks with a Bank for the same blended eServices and Multichannel Customer Service capability.  Most remarkably we were asked to deliver one of these solutions, on premise for a Pilot in only 10 days.  We did it!  One of them is delivered in a hybrid Cloud; with Anana running all the technology, yet providing Desktop based access to Genesys Interaction Workspace over Xenapp.  Very cool stuff.
4. We delivered new mobile applications that bring customer services directly to the consumer smart-phone; including some cool concepts like reversing the role of the Contact Centre wallboard; showing customers how many agents were available for each media type so the customer could chose the means of engaging that made most sense and avoided delay.  This delivered customer service efficiency for both the customer and the customer services team.  A true win:win situation. The mobile app featured customer initiated ‘please call me back’, live text-chat and the ability for the customer themself to review their entire cross channel interaction history with their provider in real time.
5. We extended Genesys Social Engagement with several new features including Social Influence scoring and originate Tweet from the agent desktop without requiring a customer interaction and manipulated the Genesys solution to support Arabic language for Social Media interactions. Coolest use case derived was using Social Influence scores determined in eServices transactions to route Voice calls based not only on the assigned customer segment in Voice but their underlying Social Influence.  Let this be a sign of things to come!
6. We delivered new innovation in a hybrid self and assisted service customer service application for SMS.  A customer would interact with an automated Knowledge Management (FAQ) system by asking a question in SMS. If the customer then responds to the suggested response with another question, we take the ‘history’ of the self service interaction and offer the customer the opportunity to chat with an agent.  The customer continue’s to engage via SMS, but Anana technology takes those SMS interactions and delivers them to “web-chat” agents in the contact centre.  This is a twisted cross-channel conversation of course! The CSR is on a web-chat interface, and the customer is on an SMS interface; yet both can chat happily back and forth! This is an exciting blended technology capability; allowing the Enterprise to train once for Web-Chat in customer service, but extend other media through the same interface.  Not a big deal when you have to train 5 agents of course! But, what about the overhead if your busy hour team is 9000 agents strong?
7. We concluded our first Social Media and Customer Services contracted Business Consulting project that is already delivering the execution foundation for a significant project for one of our partners in early 2012.  This is new ground within the Genesys partner, Value Added Reseller (VAR) and Systems Integration Market.
8. We won some very large contracts in ongoing Mission Critical Customer Service platform and solutions support that give our customers assurance of Customer Service solutions availability 24x7x365 – the key thing is these mission critical support contracts are about yesterdays legacy technology support whilst in evolution to IP and SIP and Anana support operation has a hand on both at the same time.  Our customers are crossing the PSTN/TDM to SIP valley.  Anana is the bridge that is helping them to cross safely and with surety
9. We completed a very nice high-net-worth banking integration for one of the UK’s most prestigious Banks that integrated 1990′s mainframe with 2010 customer service platforms. Boy, I’d so love to say who it was for and why!
10. The Anana team stood side-by-side with Genesys and Alcatel-Lucent showcasing, demonstrating and tackling industry analysts and events all most if not all Contact Centre events in all themes eServices and Social Media related.  This included a humbling invite to showcase Genesys’ own technology to its European sales teams in Cannes in late summer.  That for me is the strongest vote of confidence in thought and market leadership with some of these leading themes.

In the service provider and Carrier Telecommunications business we had a great year too!

• Anana was selected out of the entire ecosystem of global “Applications Enablement” partners to assist Alcatel-Lucent at the IMS World Forum in Barcelona. It is an absolute honour for Anana to be aiding and abetting €17Billion company in showcasing their own capabilities to Global Audiences
• We completed the integration for its4u – the Anana Social Media and Voice Mail solution that links the dial-tone at the voice messaging event with the subscribers voice prompts.  Replacing the old and rather stagnant Voice Mail experience with one where the caller hears the latest Social Media updates of the mailbox owner before leaving a message.  This is a hybrid solution using Anana speech applications framework and the Genesys Voice Platform, Nuance Speech Recogntion, Ivona Text-to-Speech and the Converged Messaging System (CMS) and Messaging Applications Broker from Alcatel-Lucent.
• Anana has been formally selected by Alcatel-Lucent as an applications partner for innovation with the Converged Telephony System, the CTS (5420) and the IP Multimedia Subsystem with Alcatel-Lucents Agility API sets.  We are working closely together to showcase extreme innovation in manipulation and subscriber controlled telephony with integrated Voice User Interface, Graphical User Interface (web 2.0) that will be shown to the world for the first time at Mobile World Congress early next year.  This is really exciting stuff, but can’t talk about it too much yet!  Again we are offering a hybrid technical solution that uses the best in breed core Carrier equipment in the IMS core from Alcatel-Lucent, with the Genesys Voice Platform (for media in VoiceXML and call control in CC-XML).  Imagine a web2.0 dashboard with all your friends in it; like your own social dashboard. Click and drag your friends onto the ‘conference table’ and you’ll all be instantly on your own conference party line.  Sound Cool?  That’s just a small snippet out of the technology we are building in this space.

Looking ahead to 2012

Should I be bold and predict what I think are going to be the key things going on in the Contact Centre markets in 2012?  Perhaps; let’s see how accurate these turn out to be;

• Permira acquisition of Genesys Telecommunications labs will manifest itself through intense market engagement and focus on the key current drivers in Customer Service. These will be;
• Intense investment in Mobile Applications for Customer Service and Customer Interaction Management as such a high proportion of the consumer markets are now armed with smart devices
• eServices power-play for email, SMS, web-chat, web-callback and Social Media to rapidly evolve. Why? I think the Enterprise will learn very quickly in 2012 that they have to listen and engage WHERE their customers are trying or preferring to reach them, and secondly, they have to LISTEN and ENGAGE where customers are talking ABOUT them – both of these will work in harmony to force the enterprise to offer a holistic and channel intenstive customer service capability
• We will see a general increased focus on the role for customer services and customer care as it relates to Social Media as a paradigm. The enterprise will recognise for its full effect the “New Voice of the Customer”. 2011 saw the early adopters begin to define best practice and physical and technical capability to execute. 2012 will be the year where the rest of the market realises how far behind they are falling and how fast they will have to move to catch up. Not as a special business practice; but as a wholly and deeply integrated customer service capability in the core of the incumbent customer operation
• Twitter will relax their 1000 tweets a day and 250 direct messages a day limits for certain enterprise entities – making it possible for BRANDS to offer customer service on Twitter. 2011 saw the Enterprise facing a tough problem. 100,000 customers are tweeting at us with customer service queries but I can only respond to a maximum of 300 an hour, and even then only 1000 in any 24 hours.  This is a huge problem in late 2011 for those engaging in “Social Customer Service” and I hope and trust that Twitter will offer BRANDS the ability to execute in 2012
• Facebook will be less about BRAND broadcast and become more a platform to ‘engage’ with the customers who “LIKE” the brand
• Google+ likely to become the second Social Platform
• Our customers will be asking us to integrate YouTube and YouTube comments into customer care
• Anana is going to spend a lot of time and energy helping the Enterprise align and bring together the three key drivers of “customer engagement’
• Marketing & the Brand
• Online and Digital Strategy
• Customer Operations, Customer Service and Customer Care

On that note, Merry Christmas to to all our Customers, Partners and friends, and best wishes for 2012! If 2012 is only half as wild as 2011 it will still be a great year! Let’s see how the predications shape out through the year!

Anana and Alcatel-Lucent Team for “Applications Enablement” and the “High Leverage Network”

For the last year or so Anana has been actively exploring the theme of “Applications Enablement” within our partnership with Alcatel-Lucent.  We have been very busy already in creating new applications and capabilities by mixing technologies across the Alcatel-Lucent portfolio with Anana innovation; creating new products and solutions on the way.  For example;

Social-Media enabled Voice Messaging – its4u
A marriage of the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Messaging System (CMS), the 5100, Messaging Applications Broker (MAB), the 5150, Genesys Voice Platform (Alcatel-Lucent Enteprise) and Anana Speech Applications Framework.  The result; a cool new voice-user experience for voice-messaging and voice-mail! (See here for more details)

Generic Voice Messaging Applications Solutions
In the process of exploring Voice User Interfaces and Graphical User Interfaces for Unified Communications in voice messaging we also received many invitations to team with Alcatel-Lucent and its Carrier Teams to enhance existing Voice Messaging experiences in many markets around the world.  Some of the other mashup’s we’ve conducted here include the linking of the Anana Speech Application Framework, with Web Services and the Alcatel-Lucent Subscriber Data Manager (SDM), the 8650 and the Data Grid Suite (8660 and 8661).  This unifies the management and exposure of messaging applications, subscribers, profiles, OSS, and Unified Comms through Subscriber Data Manager.  Why is this so cool?  Well, for a start, it provides the Carrier with the most flexible and innovative voice mail solution; whilst at the same time making the application, features and capabilities available to any 3rd party application developer! This is “Applications Enablement” in Action!

4G-LTE HD VideoIVR and VisualIVR
Anana worked with Alcatel-Lucent to marry the capabilities of the Genesys Voice Platform (the worlds best IVR platform, don’t believe me, believe Garnter, who cite it recently for the 7th year running as the best IVR platform in the world!) with 4G-LTE. Anana created a high definition VideoIVR application which Alcatel-Lucent 4G teams use in “Innovations Days”, demonstrations, and Trials.  An example of one of these applications is available on our main website here if you’d like to see it!!

Alcatel-Lucent IMS Applications Enablement
Anana has been exploring “Applications Enablement” with a broad-exploration of themes to express Anana Applications Framework alongside the Alcatel-Lucent Converged Telephony Server (CTS – 5420) and its range of SDK’s and API’s.  These SDK’s and API’s have proven themselves extremely interesting in allowing a huge range of fantastic “Applications” and “Capabilities” on the IP Multimedia Subsystem network.  Anana worked for several weeks with Alcatel-Lucents IMS Ecosystem team to whittle down 24 applications innovation idea’s into a range of 7 ENHANCED SERVICES applications that really light-up the IMS core under the theme of “Unified Communications” ; all applications idea’s we created together bring together the capability set of Alcatel-Lucents IMS in a BOX capability with a rich Voice User Experience, a very broad Graphical User Experience whilst totally unified to the “Telephony User Interface”.  In other words; GUI+VUI+TUI=Killer Apps!

Back to the theme of this post!  As a result of these activities Anana just received a formal invitation to support Alcatel-Lucent at an IMS Customer Roundtable at the IMS World Forum, Barcelona in April.  Anana is one of of a small select group of Applications Enablement Partners that have been invited by the ALU IMS Ecosystem team to assist in stimulating discussion and debate on the “role for IMS beyond initial fixed broadband voice deployments”.  I bet you are dying to know what the 7 key application templates are that Anana is working with Alcatel-Lucent on!  I’ll tell you later on when the entire momentum of our IMS activities become less “sensitive”!!  A hint of an example is;  Unifying Enterprise Collaboration Software such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook/Collaboration with the IMS core and Speech Recognition for application capabilities like “Click to Call from a contact in a local address book – click on the contact in the email or the contacts and your phone will start ringing, when you answer the network has dialled the target number for you with other cool features like ‘instant easy conferencing with or without video” …… [Thats just one of the minor features of the Anana Application Framework and I'm not going to tell you anymore at the moment!!]

Summary
Applications Enablement and the High Leverage Network are real!  I spent a couple of years whilst working at Alcatel-Lucent across the Applications Software Group (ASG) and the Enterprise Division (with Genesys and Motive) on marrying together idea’s, concepts and capabilities with Alcatel-Lucents rich portfolio of solutions. I really enjoyed doing that!  I’m having even more fun now doing it on the Partner side of the equation.  Stop talking about what can be done; and just GO DO IT!!