The removal of the traditional barriers between IT and telephony presents a raft of opportunities for SMBs and the enterprise sector alike. But it also reveals a sales challenge for IT resellers and systems integrators that will require them to demonstrate a tangible ROI to potentially cagey customers.
Two worlds collide
Voice convergence represents the union of two traditionally disparate communication streams – analogue-based voice transmissions and digitally transmitted data – in a manner that has opened up cross-media opportunities in a workplace environment. The collaborative possibilities between programs and communications systems are virtually limitless, with new opportunities developing as convergence continues. And according to CEO of Vadacom Igor Portugal, it’s a process that began in the late ’90s “with the internet becoming such a huge part of our everyday communication tool set”.
“At the same time, the view of call centres in large organisations was changing from a cost centre more to a strategic part of the enterprise,” adds Brendan Maree, ANZ Country Manager for Interactive Intelligence. “Today, from the vendor side, convergence is the accepted standard. Most major vendors now only offer converged solutions. There are still small players that sell point solutions, but they are now the exception as opposed to the rule.”
The reseller challenge
The diffi culty in the convergence of the IT and telephony realms is that most resellers are well versed in the IT but not necessarily the telephony. As such, there’s a supposed knowledge gap in the Unifi ed Communications space that is causing some confusion as to how resellers should pitch voice-convergence solutions.
“There are technology people that have come from an application background, there are people that have come from a network background, there are people that have come from a telephony background and they’re fundamentally different cultures,” explains Alan Register, Unifi ed Communication and Collaboration Specialist at Cisco.
“IT resellers absolutely approach this with their IT hat on, and there are a number of differences between their IT sales and telecommunication sales,” agrees Vadacom’s Portugal. “In the IT area, IT people traditionallydon’t sell products; they sell their services. The sales force that knows how to sell telephony systems, they know how to sell boxes but they don’t necessarily know how to sell services.”
It poses an interesting conundrum for resellers that have typically come from only one of the disciplines required in order to be suffi ciently IT space. One possible and logical solution, according to Maree of Interactive Intelligence, is for resellers to further educate their sales staff. “We have a couple of partners that are data players only in Australia,” he explains. “We have, to date, been very successful with one of them, and the reason we’re successful with one of them and not so the other is because this one has actually invested in getting two people trained. They actually went out and got someone who was Cisco networks and telephony. The ‘phone guy’ is now actually selling applications that are entrenched into the business processes. Therefore, the market that we’re in is defi nitely not the PABX and voicemail market. The market we’re playing in is more applications.”
Microsoft’s Director of Corporate Communications, Nic Romaniuk, suggests that where up-skilling is not possible, resellers should look to partner with telephony specialists. And further to enhancing that knowledge of the voiceconvergencespace, many vendors suggest that resellers become more active in formulating a Unified Communications solution and demonstrating a real ROI specifi c to each client.
“From the reseller point of view, the challenge to them is to go in and understand the real business issues that their customers face and then present a solutionand present the capabilities of the solution to the customer, highlighting to the customer the customer the actual business benefits," says Cisco's Register.
“If a reseller is trying to sell or pitch the benefits or the cost-effectiveness of a solution like that, they really need to do their homework and understand what the customer’s costs are currently,” says D-Link’s Zealand, Maurice Famularo. “It really needs to be customised. It has to be presented in such a way where the decision maker, who’s going to be signing the payment, really needs to understand that there is a saving to be made.”
Avaya’s Solutions Director for South Asia, Rod Maxwell, agrees that simply providing services that perform certain actions just doesn’t cut it anymore when it comes to resellers. Those The Channel interviewed suggested resellers ask themselves if there are potential cost savings for the client, and whether workload can be reduced and process improved by deploying UC. The reseller’s added value then comes from having an indepth understanding of their client’s business.
Constant innovations
In a space that constantly experiences all manner of technological developments, Avaya’s Maxwell declares that convergence itself continues to be the single biggest innovation. The capability of a single device is increasing, providing communications across SMS, voice, email, web forms and web interaction. “I think that’s starting to have a very big directional push for vendors.” Other technology, such as Skype and Google Voice, is also driving businesses in this direction. Vadacom’s Portugal sees Skype not as a threat, but as a huge opportunity that “can enable customers as a part of that communications suite”. “I think the integration with some of the new mediums of communication that people choose to use – Google Voice, Skype, and then the social networks like Facebook and Twitter – it’s a medium that businesses will be more and more willing to tap into and more and more interested to tap into. I think the convergence with those networks is where a lot of innovation is happening.”
Similarly, presence functionality in modern Unified Communications solutions is an innovation that is considerably improving the contact experience.
“Presence is now an important part of the daily routine for all workers with a converged infrastructure,” says Maree of Interactive Intelligence. “Presence enables people inside or outside the organisation to know where be done and how or if they can reach you.”
The PBX is dead
Moving from innovation to legacy, one of the relics from the world of telephony as we once knew it is the term ‘PABX’ (Private Automatic Branch Exchange), often simplifi ed to ‘PBX’ (Private Branch Exchange). Historically this referred to a dedicated analogue phone exchange within a company, and the continued use of the term has sparked debate.
Some Unifi ed Communications vendors cling to the term when referring to their server-based systems for simplicity’s sake, finding it easier to explain to customers. Vadacom’s Portugal even contends that the role of contemporary, server-based systems is effectively the same as their historical counterparts. He also notes that the PBX is seen as a more mission-critical system than even an email server, as voice communication is in real time and an outage of a phone system is unacceptable. But while the term PBX (particularly IP PBX) is still commonly used with regard to contemporary Unifi ed Communications offerings, other vendors have ditched it, feeling that modern systems offer much more than the term PBX suggests.
“It’s almost an unnatural, uncomfortable word to say these days; we just haven’t said it for so long,” begins Avaya’s Maxwell. “I think the traditional PBX as you’ve known it is clearly on a very fast downward slope and will ultimately disappear.”
Romaniuk agrees with Maxwell that the continued use of the term PBX oversimplifies the functionality and ease of use that current Unified Communications servers provide. “A PBX isn’t really going to give you presence or enable the collaboration play around that. [Unified Communication] reduces that sort of human latency – that step between [application] and voice. PBXs have forced us to become middleware; we are the interface between the PC and the phone.”
Traditionally, the boxes had no other role in the communications infrastructure other than what they were built for, but today the function of delivering the next call to the proper place or serving as a connection point for a phone is now an application and not just a stand-alone server, explains Maree of Interactive Intelligence.
Spending to save
Businesses are understandably reining in their expenditure, thanks to the much-discussed economic climate, which is making life diffi cult for resellers and systems integrators.
“We’re sort of caught between a rock and a hard place right now. I think the whole economy’s like that,” begins D-Link’s Famularo. “You want to be able to do this to save money, but you have to spend some money because you realise that what you’ve got isn’t going to be capable of supporting it.”
Initially, this poses a problem for those considering making the leap to a true Unifi ed Communications solution; while there is an immediate and obvious ROI for investing in the technology, there could also be a potentially off-putting initial outlay. “Depending on howold your network is, you may have to make some modifi cations to some of the switching to incorporate the ability to segregate networks within the network, [but] typically, the infrastructure’s going to save you quite a bit of money in the long term,” says Famularo.
“Customers are starting to realise these benefits,” adds Zeacom’s Business Development Manager and Sales Manager, Zlatko Philipchich. “They may be paying for them upfront, but they really quite quickly recoup the benefits.”
And in today’s world, for almost any business to invest in any kind of technology, demonstrating a visible ROI is mandatory. Fortunately, the voice convergence space affords precisely that. Firstly, implementing a VoIP infrastructure will eliminate phone line rental fees and provide cheaper toll calls. In some cases, you can bypass toll fees altogether if calling from VoIP to VoIP, which is particularly useful for companies with offices dotted around the country. But that’s only the beginning of the savings to be had with a Unified Communications solution.
“The ROI comes from having a single infrastructure. Savings are the result of a centralised data infrastructure [and] centralised management of the infrastructure for voice and data,” says Rebecca Hick, Alcatel-Lucent’s Channel Manager for Australia and New Zealand.
“If you look at a lot of customers’ organisations, they’ll have three disparate networks, potentially: they’ll have a video network, they’ll have a voice network and they’ll have a data network,” adds Register from Cisco. “As a result, those networks running separately are not as well utilised and efficient as they could be if they were running as a converged network, so you’ve got cost savings straight away there. That’s just the network layer. What has been the norm is that you had separate IT teams managing those environments as well.”
In fact, some argue that now is the perfect time to invest in the voice convergence space, such as Microsoft’s Romaniuk: “It’s the perfect storm for cost savings at the moment. The current environment is making it more critical to take action.”
Microsoft itself has tested the waters, measuring its own ROI after implementing its Unified Communications platform. “We saw a return on investment of 240%, and we saw a payback within two months of our investment. That’s phenomenally fast, and we are expecting other organisations to see similar results if they embrace it in the way we have.”
Similarly, today’s comprehensive Unifi ed Communications suites eliminate the need to purchase other expensive hardware and software that formed part and parcel of the traditional PBX system, making it easier for resellers to sell the total package.
The non-monetary benefits
As a reseller it’s harder to pin a dollar value on some of the other benefi ts of implementing a voice-convergence solution for potential clients. Specifi cally, Unifi ed Communications streamlines most aspects of daily business for unprecedented effi ciency and allows a degree of fl exibility that most workers have never yet encountered.
“Pre-UC telephony services were nodal/ location-based and people had to come into the offi ce to use the office telephone and IT services. With UC that is null and void, and as long as an employee has an IP connection they can get access to communication services as they would in the offi ce,” says Nortel’s Channel Director for South Asia, Neville James.
And given today’s economic conditions, working from home is a move that many businesses are considering. “Efficiency’s really topical: how can I do more with less people?” continues Portugal. “Staff redundancies are a matter of reality now, and people end up doing multiple jobs. Also, a lot of people thathave been made redundant are willing to work part-time. Unifi ed Communications is one of the main tools to take advantage of all these worlds.”
In some cases, Unifi ed Communications can liberate entire businesses, says Avaya’s Maxwell. “We have a customer in the US that has avoided having a contact centrealtogether. They were able to deploy all of their agents via VoIP and VoIP-type technologies out of home.”
While such benefits lack a tangible ROI for those not easily convinced, they can be translated into monetary terms with some simple calculations. Zeacom projected the efficiency savings in dollar terms for one of its clients by calculating the total of seconds saved per day against the average staff salary. “We had a customer of 100 users and based on the average staff member’s salary of around 40/45k for this particular organisation, we were saving them something like $4200 a month just in effi ciency gains by using ‘presence’,” says Zeacom’s Philipchich.
The connectivity issue
Some companies may be hesitant to invest in Unified Communications given its reliance on internet-based technology. Vendors, however, remain convinced that it’s a non-issue, even given concerns surrounding New Zealand’s less-than-desirable connectivity speeds.
“Provided the companies are purchasing the correct capacity of the bandwidth, then we don’t run into problems, to be honest,” says Maree of Interactive Intelligence.
James of Nortel agrees that the responsibility for ensuring adequate internet provision lies squarely with the reseller deploying the solution and the client itself. “The number one thing a reseller should always do in a UC proposal is to conduct a thorough VoIP assessment to convince themselves they have both a sufficiently high-quality data network and connectivity pipe to be able to handle the applications they are looking to run over it.”
Interactive Intelligence’s Maree even goesas far as suggesting that resellers should decline to deploy a solution unless adequateconnectivity and bandwidth provisions are available, citing it as “too much of a risk”. And even if a customer’s connectivity Microsoft’s Romaniuk explains that Unifi ed Communications technology is often designed to best utilise any available bandwidth by scaling down codecs (a bit like the way media streaming scales up and down depending on the bandwidth available).
Portugal of Vadacom, however, is extremely confident in the reliability of robust, modern Unifi ed Communication solutions, contending that they’re every bit as reliable as ISDN phone networks. “I haven’t heard of, for example, a CallPlus or an Orcon fi bre connection with voice go down any more than your ISDN lines go down.”
That said, the deployment of hybrid solutions – allowing access to a traditional phone line in the event of ISP failure – is not completely unknown. “Many resellers are choosing to recommend a hybrid solutionto their customers whereby they have a PBX that operates in an IP environment and provides access to the PSTN network with an established carrier,” says Nortel’s James.
The future is telepresence?
Perhaps one of the most impressive and attractive prospects offered by Unifi ed Communications solutions, however, is telepresence. Not to be confused with video conferencing, telepresence attempts to give the impression that the user is actually present at a meeting. The technology itself has come on in leaps and bounds, even in recent years, to unprecedented levels of immersive detail. But the industry appears relatively divided about its accessibility and even its potential as a replacement for faceto- face meetings.
“It’s definitely a part of the UC solutions offerings out there, but it’s quite expensive to deploy,” says Zeacom’s Philipchich. “It is very network-hungry. [But it] will come down in time, just like most technology.” Nortel’s James agrees, suggesting telepresence will be restricted to big enterprises with multiple large locations for the foreseeable future. Every vendor questioned scoffed at the idea of telepresence potentially replacing face-to-face meetings outright. But they also conceded that the technology will considerably reduce the requirement for such meetings and, subsequently, travel expenses. Cisco is a leader in telepresence solutions, and Register, who agreed that telepresence will never completely replace physical meetings, insists that many underestimate its merits. “It’s one of those things that you’ve got to actually experience to realise how powerful it is,” he begins. “You can sit here and say, ‘Well, I’ve had a meeting with someone sitting in New York and I could read the second hand on his watch.’ It’s a pretty powerful statement. I can actually fully read their body language. You forget about the technology. The technology becomes irrelevant.”
Beacon in the storm
Because the voice-convergence space is an attractive proposition for businesses during an economic downturn, Maxwell from Avaya argues that it’s a logical area for resellers to promote. He contends that it’s placed better than most areas in the IT sector to weather the storm. If there’s any area that businesses should be investing in right now, it’s this one.
“Clearly, there is less spending,” begins Maxwell. “I think we all have to be conscious of that. But there’s always a need for communication. Because these voiceconvergence technologies are the core there, then I think we’ll fare pretty well throughout.”
Zeacom’s Philipchich agrees, adding that communication and customer service are necessities that no business can do without, no matter what other cutbacks they’re forced to make.
“Some companies are now looking at restructuring, there are people being laid off, and they are looking for technology to give them efficiency gains. Businesses are now looking to keep the customers they have got and they’re going to use these technologies to retain these customers by giving them a better experience. Dealing with companies out there, yes, some of them have closed their books on spending, but others are saying, ‘This is the perfect time to differentiate ourselves from our competitors’.”
