Author: MacAdmin

Doesn’t seem that long ago that Parallels Desktop 9.0 was out – nor VMWare Fusion 6 – does it? My guess is there’s VMWare Fusion 7.0 just around the corner…

Anyway, I wasn’t massively convinced by the upgrade to Parallels Desktop 9.0 – it didn’t readily offer me that much over the previous edition? Seemed upgrade money for no real benefit. Also, I ran into quite a few issues after the upgrade to 9, including:

Issues with iSight Camera and Parallels Desktop 9.0
Pauses & USB Connections/Disconnections

…which to be fair were fixed in updates after a couple of months.

So what about 10.0 then? Is it worth the money? Well, very early to say but initial suggestions tell me it very much is – but not necessarily for new functions and features as such, more for two key impacts of the upgrade, namely:

Memory Footprint. This seems far improved in 10 – the same virtual machine on my late 2013 MBP Retina shows some 60% (!) less memory consumption after boot (which in my setup starts Outlook, Lync and a few other things). To be fair to Parallels, they state about a 10% saving – but on my work machines it was far larger.

Battery Life Impact. This version seems to have a far less demanding load when running on battery.

Just the above two key affects are a driver for me to upgrade – probably with the battery life one more so. I tend to avoid using virtualisation when on the move due to this impact, but the loading now seems more than reasonable, adding more functionality when mobile.

Parallels also state that this version is compatible with OSX 10.10 Yosemite – to be fair, I’d not really ran into any issues using Parallels 9 on Yosemite either, but hey, who knows.

Performance also seems to have taken a bit of a boost – and a real, noticeable one too. I wasn’t convinced with the claims of increases in performance with 8-9, however 9 to 10 really does seem to make a difference. Certainly in Office applications anyway – I’ve not noted any real performance increases with startup/shutdown or snapshot operations, but these were all very fast anyway. They state that there’s a 50% performance improvement….But who knows how valid that is – but I would agree it is faster.

The Windows 7 look is still there, and it still uses Stardock.

Some of the new features seem a little gimmicky – like the optimisation for example. All it seems to do is adjust the number of processor cores and RAM allocated to a machine? Not sure if there’s other optimisations in there, but I couldn’t really see it doing much more.

There are some other neat touches to – for example running Outlook in a VM now shows on the Dock and indicates the number of unread messages in your selected mailbox, much like you would see in Apple Mail or in AirMail.

Control Centre seems to have been tidied up too – everyone in one place, a little neater.

One thing I do quite like is that all of a sudden coherence seems more usable – it’s smoother, and it’s less obvious you’re virtualising something. I don’t often use coherence, but I may do now.

Anyways, early days – will report back after some more reasonable usage. Video below shows a run through on my late 2011 17” Macbook Pro.

While I’m predominantly a techy, I do get very actively involved in our sales cycles for products and services around the Unified Communications solutions. Exposure to this sales cycle has led me to question the whole convergence story – or rather where we are on that story.

Convergence was/is a big thing – sticking to UC/telephony the move from TDM to VoIP was a significant one, and offered many benefits to companies from leveraging existing investment in infrastructure to providing better and more usable services for users.

For a while pretty much every tender that passed through my area was UC focussed – companies just weren’t looking to replace a phone on a desk with another phone on a desk. They wanted something functionally stronger, and able to offer more flexibility in usage topologies to the service consumers.

This took the shape of telephony (of course), voice conferencing, integration to Email platforms, Instant Messaging/Presence, web conferencing etc. All the stacks that we’re all (in UC anyway) fairly conversed with.

What’s becoming apparent (or maybe I’ve only just really thought about it) is that there are distinct sets of companies out there that don’t want UC. What they want is telephony – and they see VoIP as a way of getting that cheap telephony. They’re not readily interested in all the feature rich capabilities delivered by UC&C. They want phones on desk, for their users…and they want them cheaper. They often (appear) to view telephony and VoIP as cost expenditures to be eroded, rather than as an investment platform to drive productivity.

So is UC & telephony diverging again? Did it ever truly converge in the first place? It’s an interesting concept – and one that matches some vendors more than others. Take Cisco for example. While I don’t have the figures to hand (I’m sure I could Google it) they state that they have more than 100K+ collaboration customers world-wide, and that 95% of Fortune 500 using Cisco UC. That all may well be true, however some 75-80% of that is dial-tone…and dial-tone isn’t UC is it?

I’m not particularly picking on Cisco here; it’s just the main competitor to Microsoft that came to mind.

This divergence or selection of telephony or a UC platform is a challenging space for Microsoft to compete in. For a pure telephone-on-a-desk topology that doesn’t want or need the higher functionality offered by the Lync platform then pricing becomes an issue – vendors such as Mitel, Avaya & Cisco have the opportunity to deliver a more competitive offering.

Of course trying to ‘step up’ a VoIP Telephony platform to UC is where things start to become harder, and it certainly affects that competitive offering. More product and licensing is needed, often with associated infrastructure.

I suspect 2014/15 will see some significant change the UC/Telephony arenas – Microsoft is gaining ground on the traditional vendors, and Microsoft’s competitors are also upping their game. Of course competition is good – it drives innovation doesn’t it? I suspect we’ll also see changes in the cloud delivery (I got so far without saying cloud…go me). In my experience our clients seem happier to consider cloud when contemplating functionally rich UC (or Contact Centre) type services, but less so for pure VoIP telephony.

I can envisage that pattern starting to change – VoIP as a service is quite a compelling one in its own right if its delivered, priced and modelled correctly, and the service users are fully aware of the capabilities of the platform.

Whatever happens, UC & VoIP is a fascinating area of the technology market to work in. It changes quickly, and offers a lot of innovative products and services in its overall stack. I like that, it keeps things fresh & new.