Customer attention has shifted from “What is UC?” to “How do we buy and implement UC?” as seen at VoiceCon and Interop, on UCStrategies.com, and in consulting and analyst engagements. It’s hard to find a pure VoIP procurement – almost every RFP includes UC as the main theme or as a justifying application. The program for VoiceCon SF 2009 is evolving to address this with hands-on technical content.
And, as reported last December (“The Year in Review: Part 2”, ), UC case studies continue to proliferate, with over 800 cases UC cases visible. An increasing number are in the CEBP category, as the vendors provide increasingly rich APIs and their systems integration partners enable communications to optimize business processes (“CEBP Comes to Life”).
As a business strategy, UC will have to be front and center for the New Avaya. The company will have great products for IP Telephony in both large enterprises and SMBs, as well as for Contact Center solutions. But those are mature markets from which much of the value has already been extracted. Just making a bigger version of either company’s historical business seems to have little chance of producing a breakout or enough synergies to fund the investors’ expected return. Therefore, new value propositions will have to pave the way.
The New Avaya strategy will need to emphasize UC to create the revenue growth required for success, especially as non-traditional competitors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco Webex, Google, RIM and others move aggressively to capture the emerging UC revenue and profit streams.
There’s no doubt that the cloud offers some important benefits, many of which McMillan describes in his post. And there’s also no question that there are successful cloud-based services that enterprises are buying and using; Salesforce.com and Amazon’s EC2 come to mind.
But when it comes to porting over enterprise communications and IT operations, it seems that the key question is whether the cloud is a long-term play or merely a response to short-term budget belt-tightening. Timeshare systems disappeared and Centrex’s enterprise market share continues to shrink because of two inter-related issues: First, cost — enterprises found that the total cost of renting exceeded the cost of ownership of IT facilities, equipment and personnel. Second, flexibility and responsiveness – the owner of the cloud determines what capabilities will go into the cloud, when upgrades will occur and when new capabilities will be added. The pace at which an enterprise’s requirements change, however, won’t always fit with the cloud owner’s investment schedule.
*I think one of the biggest general misconceptions is - you have to have an IP-PBX to implement UC. The UC Strategies team recommends analyzing what UC application(s) you would like to deploy and then determining the requirements for call control. You may find that you can leverage existing TDM and IP PBXs. IBM’s strategy is to deliver a rich and consistent end user experience across multi-vendor environments by leveraging the customer’s existing equipment, whether TDM or IP PBXs.
*Sametime is not a Lotus Notes offering, i.e. it is not required to use Notes at all in order to use Sametime or SUT. I personally think this has been a big marketing challenge for IBM. Many think you need to be a Notes shop to implement Sametime. According to IBM, approximately 1/3 of new Sametime customers are Outlook/Exchange shops.
