Lorie Buckingham, CIO of telecom solutions provider Avaya, talks about the promise of unified communications for its more than one million business customers around the world. She also discusses her passion for technology and strategy for integrating innovative communication technologies.
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Now you recently came to Avaya from Visteon, which is an auto parts maker, what is it about Avaya that attracted you?
Lorie Buckingham: Well, Avaya was just seems to be at the right place for me at the right time. What I love to do is work with the executives, understand the strategy and how to enable that internally, which of course I'll be doing with Avaya, but at the same time we're really working on how we voice enable business processes and accelerate how people are able to perform their businesses so I play a strategic role in how to demonstrate that in Avaya and how to work with our customers and help develop future products. So I love that dimensionality.
Now who are Avaya's customers?
Lorie Buckingham: Over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 are our customers and they're global so it's just a fascinating set of customers.
We often hear today about this notion of unified communications as a very important factor in boosting productivity, beyond e-mail, beyond the kind of slow snail mail that people have been using, Internet enabled. How do you see your role as CIO impacting product development at Avaya?
Lorie Buckingham: Well, we call it Avaya by example, so if you can imagine, two things, and there's several, but the focus is once you have your converged network of your voice and data, you can just build off of that, and one of the things with unified communication, I really think about how you optimise what the individual does. So things that we do in Avaya is make that happen and put that together, either broadly for all of Avaya or sometimes what I call "capability hubs" where we put things together and see how they work. As we all know, people have multiple devices so you start working on "how can you find a person through one number, no matter what device they're using", and things like, you walk into your office and you're on your cell phone, it automatically switches over to your converged network and so you optimise the cost and the person doesn't have to worry about it. So it's really getting to the point where the person can use any device they want and we're just trying to take that to the edge at Avaya, and the person doesn't have to work hard at it.
I know you've only been at Avaya since January [2007], what are your top IT priorities?
Lorie Buckingham: I really have 3, the first thing I'm working on is I'm going to optimise IT, so you know our own base at Avaya, and through that I believe I can improve service, take out the cost and just do some pretty incredible things that we haven't been able to do before.
What are some examples of where you are able to optimise, and take out cost?
Lorie Buckingham: the way we've grown, we have our history from our parent company, but we really are a startup company so things like we're going to optimise our wide area network, our telecom, we're going to consolidate our data centres globally, we're going to go on our servers, we're going to go from a proliferation of servers to standardisation, consolidation and virtualisation. And I think that's where you can take in all the latest technologies, take down costs, improve performance for the company, what I call pretty hardcore IT things, the second thing we're doing is we are putting in new systems for Avaya, and we call these new frontier or the new building blocks because we are transitioning from more of a hardware company to a software company, you can imagine the difference. You deliver new software products online as opposed to someone delivering it on trucks. So everything is different about those operating models so we're creating an all new solution set for that. And then the third which we had mentioned a little bit is Avaya by example, both on the existing environment and some of the new solutions we're putting in, we're looking at everywhere we can accelerate our business processes, leverage unified communication more, my objective is by the end of 2009, it'll be so pervasive and advanced that Avaya, my personal objective is that I will be so far ahead of any customer that we can be an incredible showcase.
You have competitors such as Cisco, how do you use IT to get competitive advantage versus your competitors.
Lorie Buckingham: I think the sweet spot between us and our competitors like Cisco, is we come from a huge voice background, and if you think about it, once you have your converged network, we're talking about unified communication. I would say the next piece that I'm personally very focused on, is communication enabled business process.
Could you explain what that is?
Lorie Buckingham: Yes, what happens today, people have their transaction processing systems, they have the current systems in place and when something happens, let me give you an example: your inventory is getting low in a line, and if you have that on a system, it might notice that, it might send an email to someone even. But that means that that person's got to be sitting there looking for that e-mail, once they read that email, contact everybody to get it resolved. When you voice enable it, what happens is, the system that you have today sees it, it knows it can go through some of our products, it can see who is on call now to fix it, or who would be the person, especially if you're global, what time of day is it and everything, it automatically calls the person wherever they are on whatever device they want and explains to them "this is the inventories low" and can say "do you want me to call the supplier and order more?" or "do you want me to conference in someone else". All through communication you can conference people in, you can decide and go, no more do you have the lags. We have a customer that took 4 hours, it happens in 10 to 15 minutes what used to take a 4 hour lag, we're doing some internally. So you can imagine, instead of having emails, and sending notes to people, just calling somebody explaining to them and letting them just tell you what the action is, it just accelerates your organisation without making people work harder.
So it's your philosophy that voice is still the prominent medium of communications even though we're seeing people use instant messaging and twitter, and all these other kind of web tools.
Lorie Buckingham: Yes, I think people will use them all, but the thing about voice is that you can work with everyone around the world, they don't have to know your technology, they don't have to be on the same thing, and yes, people like to talk to each other, we're fast, you get 3 people on the line you talk to each other you solve it, so I think voice is incredibly powerful.
In terms of your overall strategy, what are you thinking about in terms of your data centres, not just taking cost out, but trying to replicate some of the functionality that you see from your customers?
Lorie Buckingham: We have some outsourced data centres and we have some of our own and one of the things that we're doing on our strategy is really getting to a world class data centre that's our own, we'll always have outsourced work that we do and we have good partners, but one of the thing we want to do is have a showcase data centre that's green, with the right servers running all our products. We have labs today, but really that's running Avaya, and just keep taking that to the next level. You know in a different industry you might say, ah, you might outsource the whole thing, it really doesn't matter to me, but we really feel when it comes to everything about communication and how that connects up to accelerate our company, we need to own that, we need to be able to showcase that, so it makes us divvy up what we put where in different ways and think a little bit differently about it. I think the other piece is that underneath it strategic solutions will be standard solutions that you buy that other companies have, you know the big names, SAP, etc and several of the big names and not necessarily one, so that we connect our products up to solutions that you know customers have and it just takes one step away from them in using our products.
Now, when you talk about the connectedness of technology and obviously Avaya is in that business, you see a connected world and obviously you want your products to power that connected world, I would just like to ask you, where do you like to see that connected world going in terms of the kind of user experiences that will be different in what we have today?
Lorie Buckingham: When you start thinking about the connected world, I think that the easiest thing is to look at young people, when it is all said and done and you want to have devices embedded in everything and if there are handheld devices and ones what you wear that look like jewellery, you can have whatever device you want and use whatever service, so I think that is very interesting. I think the other thing that is fascinating is how the virtual world connects with the real world and you start looking at what is going on, my son is in college and he builds computer games and I tell him I want me avatar in a game in the future and I want to be able to join but you look at Second Life and things that are going on and I think sometimes as adults we would think, would we really integrate with that and would we really use that, I absolutely believe that those lines are going to blur and we are going to connect with people in all different ways and unless we pay attention to that in our lives we will get left behind, because I just think it is powerful, it gives everybody ways to integrate and connect with everybody else, anyway they want too and maybe its okay if you want your avatar to do it instead of yourself personally, I don't know, maybe that is just fine.
Well, you are going to have to give your avatar an IP address and a phone number.
Lorie Buckingham: Actually I would love that personally, you see my avatar but they can talk to the real me.
