The first thing that needs to be said about unified communications (UC) is that it isn’t new. People have been talking about unified communications for a while now and it’s been touted as the next big thing (or one of them) for a couple of years or so.
As usual, it takes the entrance of Microsoft to bring a technology more attention and the software giant is making a play for the UC space with its Lync product. But there are much wider forces at work that are helping to drive UC to a more prominent position. Mobility is one of them and the other is what Mary Bradshaw, managing director at Damovo Global Services, describes as "the people piece", a cultural shift in terms of how younger people expect to be able to communicate within their workplace.
"We need to see what the younger generation is doing," she says, "because that’s the direction we will go in. There’s a disconnection between their expectations and what they are actually getting."
This is a point echoed by Ron Maher, general manager at NextiraOne Ireland. He says that although UC has been touted for a number of years, the adoption rate has been much lower than anticipated. Things have started to pick up in the last 18 months with the success of the iPad and the increasing focus on bring your own device (BYOD). "It has not been driven from within the enterprise," he argues, but from how the younger generation is communicating. Companies seeking to attract younger employees "need to be able to communicate in the same way that society is communicating. It is happening. UC is mirroring what’s happening in society, albeit at a slightly slower pace."
John Conlon, enterprise sales manager at Cisco distributor Sharptext, agrees with Maher’s assertion that the BYOD ‘explosion’ is one of the factors pushing UC forwards. "More and more people are comfortable with clients on various devices," he says, and they are comfortable using applications like instant messaging on them.
The bandwidth is available to deliver this capability to multiple devices and there is "a push from the workforce to be able to do this, the mobility of people is driving companies to move towards a collaborative environment… Instant messaging and presence is so valuable to anyone who has managed a disparate team. We all suffer with e-mail overload and quick questions can be settled in an instant messaging environment."
Conlon stresses that UC and collaboration are not new, but developments like mobility and BYOD are giving rise to significant opportunities. He argues channel partners need to get customers to understand the value that collaboration of communications will bring to their company. "Nobody ever buys UC, they have a business requirement that this can resolve."
Eoin Mulligan is UC product specialist at Commtech, a Microsoft Lync distributor. He agrees that it’s more a question of "identifying business process and pain points and selling Lync as a solution for that… The conversation tends to start around document sharing, video conferencing and collaboration. It’s about business process and how do we address that".
Paul Hourican, CEO at PFH Technology Group, quotes the statistic that 80% of user endpoints are now outside corporate headquarters to explain his support for UC. But while UC is an obvious next step for IP-enabled organisations, many are still sceptical "because the benefits are not fully understood, despite evidence of problems that could easily be solved. For example, the plethora of organisations wasting time on a daily basis playing ‘phone tag’ and trying to contact each other". And while a multiplicity of devices and media bring flexibility and choice, they also add to communication latency, friction and overload.
Jeremy Showalter, business group lead at Microsoft’s Office Division, reveals that organisations tend to start with the presence feature within instant messaging which he describes "as really really powerful". He claims that when customers see Lync in action, "it’s game over. They really really love it, it changes the way they think about integration."
Showalter is unequivocal in his view of the opportunity UC represents for channel partners. "It’s probably the opportunity of the decade for most traditional partners," he says. When partners talk to customers, they can make customers feel more comfortable by describing Lync as a server product and most customers have been running Microsoft server products for decades. Partners have been supporting Microsoft server products for a long time too.
Larry Banville, sales lead for technology solutions at Datapac, is in the happy position of selling UC products and solutions from Cisco and Microsoft. In their own way, the two companies have come to represent the two major approaches to UC, one coming at it from the networking world and the other from the data/IT/software side.
He believes there is no one size fits all solution and there’s a case for both Cisco and Microsoft routes as "they both have good stories to tell". But he makes the point that Microsoft solutions going across the WAN are going to be using Cisco as part of the WAN infrastructure, so even if someone is putting in a Microsoft Lync solution, "there will probably be a fair element of Cisco involved as well".
Microsoft partners will be comfortable around the Exchange elements and Cisco partners will comfortable around networking/telephony elements. Increasingly, Conlon notes, resellers are looking to partner with somebody else. Instead of developing another specialisation, Microsoft partners will strike up partnerships with a Cisco partner and vice versa. This is common in Ireland where so many channel partners are generalists rather than specialists.
Neil Wisdom, sales director at Complete Telecom, agrees there are two types of channel company at play in the UC arena. Networking specialists have got into UC and telephony and understand the impact voice and video have on the network, bandwidth and security. They don’t understand the Microsoft world whereas Microsoft partners understand the front end, they understand servers, storage, software and virtualisation, but have no concept of what it means for the network.
He claims there is a "holy grail" of a single company with a very wide skill set that understands WAN, LAN, storage, virtualisation, software and the specialist applications in various industries. "That’s a huge amount of knowledge that a single organisation needs to have, that’s why a lot of companies partner together to try and do joint bids which work, to some extent".
Wisdom describes Lync as the Microsoft version "of what other companies have had for many years" but coming from the front end application/desktop side of the equation.
As is to be expected, Cisco is keen to emphasise that the PC is only one piece of the UC puzzle. "Business has moved beyond the desktop," says Andy Chew, senior director for collaboration at Cisco UK & Ireland. "The PC is just one of many collaboration environments."
The successful delivery of the next generation collaboration experience (that word again), "is not just a matter of desktop software, or the latest social network or smartphone. It requires a ‘full-stack’ approach and an acknowledgment that the underlying collaboration infrastructure can make the experience more natural and integrated, can reduce IT complexity through greater reuse across silos, and can deliver the superior reliability, scalability, and robustness expected of a true business solution".
When it comes to the experience, NextiraOne’s Ron Maher asks perhaps the most important question for channel partners, one which takes them beyond the competing technologies and approaches to providing a UC solution: "Is the person selling technology now the right person to sell to someone who doesn’t want to buy technology but wants to buy an experience?"
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