The National Broadband Network manages to attract an awful lot of attention for something that, at best estimates, won't be usable for several years at least. But resellers ignore the coming of the NBN at their peril.
Industry watchers agree the high-speed network will have a deep and lasting impact on the way Australian businesses are run and the way they buy and use ICT equipment and services. It is safe to say every single business in the country will be affected by its roll-out in some way.
For enterprises which already use private high-speed networks, the NBN may seem a little oversold. You can buy a 100Mbit connection today in the larger cities, it's just very expensive.
However, the effect of the NBN for many SMEs is a massive price cut in their bandwidth costs. It also means introducing a large number of companies to online and network services that consume higher amounts of bandwidth which made them unaffordable.
The NBN is a "game changer", says Brennan IT's managing director, Dave Stevens, because it will provide 10 times the speed for the same cost.
Stevens says that a Gigabit connection between Brennan's Sydney data centre and a customer in Epping, in the northern suburbs, can cost around $10,000 a month.
"Even if it falls to $5000 a month, so many more business deals become viable," says Stevens.
Winners and losers
The NBN will instantly kill off a popular arm for many resellers - provisioning connections between offices. Today a reseller buys services from a telco and equipment from a vendor to connect two offices of one business.
But under the NBN, every business and every building will already be connected - that means goodbye to ISDN, PSTN, cable, ADSL, SDSL, SHDSL and leased lines. And farewell to the skills and knowledge that supported their roll out.
"The channel no longer has to think about how you connect," says Geoff Heydon, marketing manager at Alcatel-Lucent.
Instead, resellers will need to develop expertise on managing bandwidth and purchasing traffic. Every customer will be asking - how much bandwidth do I need to run my business?
Resellers can answer this by counting the number of employees and the hours they work, and the applications and data sets they use. The better consultants are at judging the capacity of services and applications, the less unused bandwidth a customer needs to pay for.
IT managers will buy connectivity and be responsible, along with the reseller, for choosing the right amount.
Today, if a service or application requires dedicated capacity, one approach might be to lease a dedicated line. Under the NBN, one could simply set up a VPN.
Of course, a company will want to make sure its network is capable of taking advantage of a 100Mbit connection, and in some cases that will mean upgrading routers, switches and cabling.
"When the NBN connects to your network you don't want your company to be the bottleneck," says Microsoft's Paul Voges, small midmarket solutions and partners director.
Telcoinabox CEO Damian Kay says it is vital that resellers make the switch from voice to a converged voice and data business. Telcoinabox is pondering how to make changes to its own business such as migrating ISDN and PSTN over to IP.
The company is also looking for other products that require a high data rate. "If resellers stay in the now - with fixed wire, copper wire, PSTN - they are just going to die away over time," says Kay.
Going hard on software
The big winner is selling applications via the cloud. On-tap provisioning of software services will present the opportunity for companies to make a strategic shift in the way they do business.
"Once you have 100Mbit you can think very differently about how you manage your business, how you manage and store your data, how you buy licences, how you collaborate globally. It opens up a fantastic opportunity for SMEs in Australia," says Gen-I's CEO Phil Varney.
Software collaboration is already showing signs of becoming a killer application for high-speed networks. Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server, which covers CMS, wiki, document management and workflow, has grown faster than any other program sold by Microsoft.
The current version took two years to hit US$1 billion in sales, claims the vendor.
An important part to collaboration is videoconferencing. Applications and supporting hardware have reached a new level of maturity and the long-promised take-up of the technology by SMEs is starting to happen.
In 2008 videoconferencing vendor Polycom hit double-digit growth and topped US$1billion in sales for the first time.
Axxis Technology's Mathew Dickerson says he is seeing a take up of videoconferencing among regional businesses. Axxis is installing a $20,000 high-definition package at four offices of a graffiti removal company, including Dubbo and Sydney.
Staff use NextG connections on notebooks to connect into four-way video conversations.
"We really haven't done much with videoconferencing in the past," says Dickerson.
Videoconferencing is already being supplanted by teleconferencing - essentially a higher definition version of the original. Telepresence, usually restricted to purpose-built rooms, is coming to laptops and desktops with high-end audio and video definition.
Voges says the technologies that will flourish in the next couple of years include CRM, collaboration, business intelligence and document management.
Microsoft is hedging its bets with cloud computing. Although it is introducing Microsoft Online (the launch on Telstra's T-Suite is promised to be mid-2009), the vendor is counting on companies wanting some software on premises and paying for it by conventional means.
Voges says he sees three arms to software distribution on the NBN: on premises under licence, online by annuity and partner-hosted.
"I don't think everything will be cloud," says Voges.
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