During the past few months we have attended numerous product briefings and presentations for unified communications products and solutions from companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Ericsson, Nortel, to name a few.
Depending on the company, each one of them has their own unique definition of ‘unified communications’. The definitions vary and seem to depend on their viewpoint, i.e. computing, data network or telecom specific.
My definition of unified communications is being able to compose, listen, send or receive messages to other people, disregarding the device that I am using at the time.
That being said, one of our observations is the amount of time, effort and investment being put into this ‘new technology’ area by all of the major players. We have not seen this much investment in marketing for a new technology since the early 2000’s when the early adopter were investing heavily in educating us all about VoIP.
The traditional telecom manufacturers have had unified communications solutions around for many years. In fact, I used unified communications back in 1998 while at AT&T Solutions. The solutions were running on a Lucent and Microsoft platform, connected to our various voice and email applications.
The benefits on a personal level were amazing and the organizational benefits were worth the time, effort and investment incurred by the ability to share information on a global level from any location and device, whether desktop, laptop or cellular phone.
So what’s different this time?
What’s different now is that we have traditional computer software developers like Microsoft and data manufacturers like Cisco investing heavily in both the marketing and education.
They are spending massive amounts of money in advertising, events, media and pre-release customer trials to help their customers learn and understand the benefits that unified communications can bring to their organizations.
Who will install and support these solutions?
One of the common questions we ask during these industry sessions is who within the channels will install and support these unified solutions? It takes a broad range of technology skills, knowledge and experience to successfully implement unified communication solutions (both on the vendor and customer sides).
Most of the time the vendors don’t answer the question directly, but say that they are investing heavily to educate their channels to develop the skills to be able to install and support unified communications solutions. Many of the vendors tell us that they are reaching across traditional boundaries of computing, data and voice to cross-educate so that the channels are capable and prepared to supply and support the new products.
From our experience and research on the telecom side, traditional telecom dealers, carriers and integrators, are struggling with reduced margins, shortage of talented professionals and increasing cost of sales. They need to move up the technology chain and ‘own the client’ and their technology spend wallet.
Who will win the channel war?
We need strong, financially viable channels that have the ability to deploy and support technology solutions that help Canadians gain the productivity benefits that IT can and should deliver.
These marketing investments are creating awareness and understanding within the potential customer base of unified communications. We, as industry consultants and suppliers, now have to help our clients develop the strategies, skills and business cases so that the technology can be successfully deployed and ensure the solutions deliver the promised productivity benefits.
Let’s hope the customer and channels both win!
If you would like to know more about FOX Groups’ research and studies on telework, network investments and environmental impacts, contact Roberta Fox at 905.473.3369 x 1001 or [email protected].
