Before I left for Enterprise Connect this week, I had completed nearly a dozen pre-briefings and tweeted that I expected to see themes including cloud, collaboration, interoperability, mobility, SMB, social, and video. All those topics have been covered and re-covered — and they have often overlapped. As I attended sessions, visited vendors on the floor, and met on-on-one with unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) vendors and service providers, I heard echoes of my late 2008 report, “The Broad Opportunities In Managed Services,” where I highlighted tight credit, rapid technology change, and uncertain business volumes with creating unique opportunities for managed services from onsite management through the then new concept of software-as-a-service (SaaS). This brought cloud and as-a-Service topics to the front of almost every conversation and announcement. Vendors are pursuing this opportunity that we continue to see growing in our surveys, with only 3% of IT buyers in North America and Europe reporting that they currently deploy or manage their unified communications in an as-a-service model; but 23% are interested in doing so in the future.* Vendors from CallTower to AT&T (although neither was at the show) are offering services, and several new cloud announcements were made at the show.

You may have noticed that I was, along with the other 1,100+ professionals at Forrester, out of the office this past week. We were all together in Boston talking about our success in 2010 (I can’t talk about that — you’ll have to wait for official results to be reported next week) and more importantly about Forrester’s Vision, Values, Strategies, and Tactics to help make our clients successful. We spent time both looking inward, thinking about how we think we can do better, and scanning the horizon by asking key clients who map themselves to each of our roles to talk about what they do every day and how they are recognized and rewarded within their own companies.

I left the meetings feeling jazzed that we were truly achieving success by putting our clients first and that we had a plan to extend and accelerate our ability to positively affect every leader and every decision. I also left the meetings with that tension all analysts get in their gut: What will this strategy look like in the future? How will our values change the market’s perception of Forrester? How will we be able to translate these intentions into actionable tactics to help each and every one of our clients? What better way to test the ideas than to ask you, dear readers, what you think; so, what do you think? Are we just drinking our own Kool-Aid? Or do we have the “five-hour energy” that every one of our clients hungers for to refine their strategies and accelerate their performance and success in the market? Please weigh in with your opinion of Forrester and our strategy — as well as your suggestions on how we can best help you to succeed — in the comments section.

Today, Microsoft begins life as a real competitor in the enterprise voice space. It has slain dragons (like enabling call access control and E911), faced mighty jousters (Miercom has called Lync a resilient, feature-rich, scalable UC system in their review), and emerged triumphant to compete for enterprise accounts looking for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions. Microsoft has amassed an impressive list of early adaptors — of both Office Communications Service Release 2 (OCS R2) and Lync — that includes large and small deployments with varied features/capabilities enabled.

Lync required Lighthouse accounts to use a wide array of services at significant scale, so I expect to see big accounts like Marquette University and the Dominican Republic Ministry of Education join current OCS enterprise voice users like Shell, Intel, AT Kearney, and Sprint on Microsoft’s “Customer Success Stories” page. In talking to many early adopters, I heard very few complaints about voice quality or reliability of the solutions, and:

1.      Almost every firm using Lync is connecting employees together using Lync AND other Microsoft products.
2.      Improved voice quality and reliability drives customer satisfaction and makes Microsoft’s story more credible in delivering UC&C solutions.

Lots of sleek new touchscreen and tablet devices have launched this year. Where many information workers and consumers see nifty new devices with high-resolution screens and multiple wireless interfaces that enable Web surfing and greater ease of use, I see a new class of device. I call them collaboration devices because I believe that they are especially suited to collaboration tasks that today’s information worker must perform with increasing regularity while on the move. There is an open space in the market for these devices caused by the colliding market forces of an increasing need for employees within a company to quickly and efficiently communicate and the increasing likelihood that these employees will not be in the same location. Most companies today (approximately 60% according to Forrester’s Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2009) are adopting Web conferencing, and information workers are increasingly mobile and distributed — a device that can be on the go and connect to communications and collaboration tools easily will be highly valued. These devices feature slick, usable interfaces and unique connectivity capabilities. Many of these devices run on Android, creating an opportunity and a challenge for Android to enter the business applications market. Android-based devices will fall short of any collaboration aspiration until the marketplace offers standard enterprise Web conferencing tools — where are my Cisco WebEx, AT&T Connect, etc., clients for Android?

I see three categories of these devices :

When Cisco first announced its intent to acquire TANDBERG in October of last year, I talked about how that acquisition was about much more than just video. I still believe that this single event represents the beginning of the converged (audio, video, and Web) conferencing era; but the combined company has indeed been on a streak of video activities. In 2010, Cisco has made more than a dozen video-related announcements about new products and capabilities, including TelePresence Exchange hosting by partners, the Cius HD video-capable collaboration device, new interoperability capabilities delivered via its proposed Telepresence Interoperability Protocol and Intercompany Media Engine, new home DVR capabilities delivered by Cox using Cisco set-top boxes , the Flip SlideHD video camera, video networking for NBC at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, as well as the use of telepresence by ESPN at the FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

 On top of all this video activity, I was recently briefed by Cisco about its new business solution for video (Cisco Prosumer Video) based on the Cisco Flip MinoPRO video camera, and I was struck by two things