Presence: Enhancing enterprise interactions

Hi, I'm Murli Thirumale, Group Vice President and General Manager at Citrix Systems, and I'm here to talk about presence, enhancing enterprise interactions. So let's start with a definition. Wikipedia says presence is a studio album by Led Zeppelin. Well in the current context for us, presence is really a set of technologies that allow users to indicate their willingness and availability to communicate.

So let's take a look at presence in the consumer world. You're all very familiar with IM and have frequently seen IM conversations or used IM where people indicate whether they're busy, available, in a meeting or on the phone through little icons on the screen.

When you get to the world of enterprise communications, things change significantly. In small organizations, people interact directly through communicating directly like I'm doing to you, human interaction. But as the organization grows and more and more users are added to the organization, frequently in different parts of the world, then people start using different forms of communications. Examples include voice, email of course, IM in the corporate world, but also people interact with applications using remote access tools. So you might have different apps that people interact with and people collaborate using tools like webinars.

So in this world, what does presence do to enhance communications? Well back when we were talking about direct human communications, we use our senses in direct communications. I can hear you, see you, read your body language and so on. The equivalent in the world of electronic interactions is presence. So, if I'm looking at voice, for example, and I'm using a phone and I'm out on the road, what would happen here is this technology, presence technology called Find Me Follow Me, where a call coming in to me gets redirected to my phone wherever I am. Email has some interesting examples now. Nowadays, there are email programs that have windows that tell you the presence of the user and if they're available and what number they can be called at. And what you can is click to dial and your corporate phone now rings and you're able to talk to that person.

There's a new type of presence called device presence that is increasingly being used. Let me give you a couple of examples in that world. In the world of chat, what happens is very often you're logged in on different devices. In this world, if you are logged in say for example not on your regular computer but on your Blackberry, what this would do is take your IM chat coming in and send it to your Blackberry instead of sending it to your computer.

Remote access is a great example of device presence. In this case, let's say you're coming in on a kiosk at an airport, what this would do is when you come in on your SSL VPN that may be presence-enabled, you're now coming into the app and the app now understands that you're actually not coming in on your regular computer and therefore it sends only the information that can be viewed but you can't download it.

And finally a great example, my personal favorite, is a webinar. Very often now there are people who give webinars when they need user feedback. One of the new webinar programs actually has feedback to the presenter that says hey, in your webinar that you are giving, 30% of the users now have switched and they're looking at their email instead of looking at the webinar. It's the modern day equivalent of electronic body language.

So let's talk about you and how you should be using presence. If you're an IT manager, what you should be doing is expecting and demanding these technologies inside your solutions from different vendors. If you're a vendor, you need to incorporate these new technologies of presence in your solutions.

And finally, if you're a user, you need to use all of your senses, including your electronic senses. So turn up the volume on that Led Zeppelin album and login to your presence-enabled solution and get productive.