Hi, I'm Murli Thirumale, Group Vice President and GeneralManager at Citrix Systems, and I'm here to talk about presence, enhancingenterprise interactions. So let's start with a definition. Wikipedia sayspresence 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 theirwillingness 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 orused IM where people indicate whether they're busy, available, in a meeting oron 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 directlythrough communicating directly like I'm doing to you, human interaction. But asthe organization grows and more and more users are added to the organization,frequently in different parts of the world, then people start using differentforms of communications. Examples include voice, email of course, IM in thecorporate world, but also people interact with applications using remote accesstools. So you might have different apps that people interact with and peoplecollaborate using tools like webinars.
So in this world, what does presence do to enhancecommunications? Well back when we were talking about direct humancommunications, we use our senses in direct communications. I can hear you, seeyou, read your body language and so on. The equivalent in the world ofelectronic 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 thistechnology, presence technology called Find Me Follow Me, where a call comingin to me gets redirected to my phone wherever I am. Email has some interestingexamples now. Nowadays, there are email programs that have windows that tellyou the presence of the user and if they're available and what number they canbe called at. And what you can is click to dial and your corporate phone nowrings and you're able to talk to that person.
There's a new type of presence called device presence thatis 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 differentdevices. In this world, if you are logged in say for example not on yourregular computer but on your Blackberry, what this would do is take your IMchat coming in and send it to your Blackberry instead of sending it to yourcomputer.
Remote access is a great example of device presence. In thiscase, let's say you're coming in on a kiosk at an airport, what this would dois when you come in on your SSL VPN that may be presence-enabled, you're nowcoming into the app and the app now understands that you're actually not comingin on your regular computer and therefore it sends only the information thatcan be viewed but you can't download it.
And finally a great example, my personal favorite, is awebinar. Very often now there are people who give webinars when they need userfeedback. One of the new webinar programs actually has feedback to thepresenter that says hey, in your webinar that you are giving, 30% of the usersnow have switched and they're looking at their email instead of looking at thewebinar. It's the modern day equivalent of electronic body language.
So let's talk about you and how you should be usingpresence. If you're an IT manager, what you should be doing is expecting anddemanding these technologies inside your solutions from different vendors. Ifyou're a vendor, you need to incorporate these new technologies of presence inyour solutions.
And finally, if you're a user, you need to use all of yoursenses, including your electronic senses. So turn up the volume on that LedZeppelin album and login to your presence-enabled solution and get productive.
