In the middle of the Indonesian jungle perched on the side of an active volcano and wedged between picturesque rice paddies lies ‘Hubud’, a place that shows the transformational power of unified communications in our globally connected age.
Hubud is a co-working space, or ‘hub’, populated by 30 ‘digital nomads’: entrepreneurial, smart young things mostly working on the next killer start-up. The attraction of this smart-working nerve centre –which is based in Ubud, a wellness mecca about an hour’s drive north of Kuta, Bali – is that it combines a backpacker holiday with what amounts to an accelerated MBA.
Those who come here pack every digital device imaginable: laptops, digital cameras, tablets, smartphones and portable hard drives. What you won’t see on Hubud’s shared trestle tables is the humble desk phone. For this cordless generation, ‘softphones’ (programs that act like desk phones but run as apps on mobile devices) and collaboration tools such as instant messaging and social media have replaced the trusty handset.
The irony for ‘netpreneur’ and Dutch freelance journalist Liza Jansen is that even while launching her start-up – Newspresso, a news magazine for busy women – in this remote place, she felt hyper-connected. The village made famous in the book Eat, Pray, Love and studded with yoga studios, juicerias and wellbeing gurus has ubiquitous Wi-Fi. Hubud’s high-speed broadband would be the envy of many Australian businesses.
Even while Jansen and her ‘tribe’ of start-up founders were climbing volcanoes they still had mobile phone coverage, she says. “You’re in a place where you want to spend as little time as possible behind your laptop. It’s proven more efficient to work from Hubud than from home because you want to get out [and enjoy the attractions],” she says.
What enables global enterprises to launch in places like this and grow rapidly is cheap access to broadband and the unified communications (UC) and collaboration applications that ride on top.
Jansen, who slid an iPhone, iPad and MacBook in her backpack before flying the 12,000 kilometres from Schiphol to Bali, set up WhatsApp and closed Facebook groups for collaboration. Skype kept her in touch with clients using its voice, video, chat and presence features to work almost as well as if she were in an office overlooking the Amstel.
“It was an eye-opening experience seeing how much is possible by having a reliable internet connection and the power of co-working,” she says, not to mention collaboration technology.
Only a power outage shattered the illusion. “It was annoying right when I had to submit something but [the editor] said that’s because you’re in Bali as opposed to a normal place. Which was just them being jealous because they were stuck in wintry, depressing London,” says Jansen.
Telecommunications analyst Rodney Gedda says that after 15 years of false starts, UC is “gaining traction, finally”. He says business uptake that languished at 10 percent, ticked up last year to about 12 percent.
“The problem is it has been complex and costly to set up,” says Gedda, an analyst at Telsyte, owned by UXC Limited. “But now there are more options from telcos.”
He credits the work by solutions providers for integrating new entrants such as Microsoft and Google. “I wish more organisations would go down that path to give workers a more efficient way to collaborate,” Gedda says. “Take the concept of the office PBX [private branch exchange] and push it out to the mobile device.”
Office workflows can then be completed on mobile devices. Documents shared, commented and approved. Invoices completed and signed. Financial figures shared across workgroups and subject experts consulted with clients, just for starters. “One extension follows them everywhere. There’s no limits to what you can accomplish on a mobile device, but the infrastructure has to support call routing.”
Many organisations are deploying activity-based working (ABW). Consistent with 1980s hot-desking, ABW divorces a worker from a specified workspace. Proponents in the Australian IT sector include Microsoft and Brennan IT.
Today’s workers are often supportive of the change – and what supports them are better tools, Gedda says. “You want to integrate with chat and project management to see if people are online, what work they’ve done. If you have UC on the network, and APIs [application programming interfaces, or hooks between software programs] are available, you can integrate multimedia in any application.”
Gedda also sees the end of the desk phone, with Skype the most popular softphone, “even more popular than PBX vendors’ softphones”.
“People have expectations of softphone features because of experiences in their personal lives,” says Gedda.
Users expect the same experience in the workplace with the ability to share files and see who is online. “The corporate world is playing catch-up in the softphone world. And when organisations decide to use corporate softphones, their user base will already be well trained.”
Next: Handsets in decline
While handsets are in terminal decline, Plantronics is doing well out of the shift to different modes of work. The company founded in 1961 to streamline clunky airline headsets is looking at thousands of headset replacements as people give up desk phones, says Graeme Gherbaz, Australia managing director.
“We love UC because of the opportunities it brings to our resellers and the higher level of attach as headsets become more important,” Gherbaz says.
“The timing is good as people’s PBXs are at the end of the cycle and business is changing from role-centric silos to a more collaborative environment.”
But while UC brings workers together in higher-performing teams, there’s also ‘communication chaos’ as end points vie for the user’s attention, he says. A Plantronics headset that works across the user’s PC and mobile phone and tells others when they’re busy smoothes these disruptions, he says.
And while the desk phone still has some life, Gherbaz says some big companies “have gone 100 percent softphone and headset”.
“There’s not a desk set to be seen,” he says. “Your laptop or tablet is becoming your primary communications tool.”
Plantronics is among companies that are tipping their senior executives out of Mahogany Row. “Plantronics senior VPs don’t have an office. They sit with groups that they’re working with and people drift around and work in teams. It’s dramatically reduced premises costs.
“Today, work is truly what you do and not where you turn up. A lot of organisations are changing their business processes and saving office real estate by moving to activity-based working, having smaller open cubicles and people not having their own desk.”
Making UC pay
Jeff Whitton has seen his telephony reselling business grow rapidly as companies adopt UC. KNet, a solutions provider based in Sydney and Orange, lists key partnerships including Avotus call accounting software and most recently Cisco.
CIOs want to understand the cost structures of these new ways of working, he says. “Now it’s on a single [internet] pipe, they have to [work out] who is using this the most so those areas are charged inside the business. Everyone wants to do that,” Whitton says.
And while most organisations are “keeping the old boat anchors” of heritage PBXs “until they fall off the wall”, for mid-sized business especially, a hosted communications system they pay for as they go is attractive, he says.
“That’s a really saleable item. You can walk into an accounting firm and say, ‘How would you like to never have hardware or pay licences again? You just pay each month and have the latest and greatest.’ ”
Next: The gift of 'presence'
The ability to see which people from your network of customers and partners is online and available is one of the most underrated features of UC. Called ‘presence’, it all but eliminates time-wasting telephone tag.
Associated instant messaging often makes voicemail redundant. See if someone is online and click to call; if they’re away or busy, drop them a quick text message. The productivity and speed savings are immense.
There’s another reason to accelerate depreciation of a business’ old phones: suffering competitiveness.
Rob Dell, managing director of Melbourne solutions provider IComm, says old phone systems block the kind of digital business model transformation that Australian businesses need in order to stay relevant.
“The days of the old hardwired phone is a blocker to enable business staff to move around more freely and deal with customers in a more logical way,” Dell says. “I very rarely leave a voicemail; instead, I’ll flick an instant message to most of our vendors and customers who we federate with.” Being accessible to customers makes the difference.
“A voicemail is frustrating [but] it’s not hard to respond to an instant message. You have to put it in a business context. If someone is looking to reengineer their business processes and said, ‘We’re stuck in the 1990s; if we were to [install UC], how would that be?’ You have to be able to drill down to the feature level and [show how] it will increase service levels to customers.”
Better deal for resellers
On the other side of many UC deals is a customer who wants to lease the solution. Even if the hardware is on-premise, they expect to expense it, says Westcon UC vendor manager Dan Meadows.
“If you take a phone system and bundle calls and lines and lease the whole thing back, and the customer doesn’t own it, they have a monthly cost and they can track that out for five to 15 years,” Meadows says.
In March, Westcon pioneered a value-added distribution project with UC vendor Avaya where they assemble a package through Westcon’s leasing arm that solutions providers can resell.
“The current model is we’re the distributor with the box, who moves it to the reseller, and it’s up to the reseller to come up with the leasing option and do all the account management,” Meadows says.
“We had a presentation from our [North American] leasing arm and it looks like it stacks up. We’ve gauged customer feedback and the response has been really positive.”
Meadows expects the leasing service to launch before the second half of the year in New Zealand before possibly rolling out in Australia. Westcon distributes UC gear from Avaya, Jabber, AudioCodes, Acme Packet (Oracle), Polycom, and New Zealand videoconferencing start-up FaceMe.
Meadows says Westcon is “exceptionally lucky” to have invested early in consumption-based platforms, including cloud, and to have a mature services department throughout the Asia-Pacific.
“We don’t just lick a stamp and put it on a box; the business is always looking for ways to diversify. The leasing arm is a perfect example of out of the box thinking.
“If we don’t climb the value chain ahead of [resellers] we’ll fall behind. The pace of distribution has changed massively in the past five years.”
Case study: Isaac Council & TAA Connect
With a local government footprint covering an area of 58,862 km2, the Isaac Council of Western Central Queensland has a wider landmass than half of Europe’s countries. But with just 22,650 residents, its population density is less than the Western Sahara. And with Brisbane 1,000 km to the south and Mackay an hour’s drive, getting help and staffing are constant challenges.
The sparsely populated area had administrative problems, issues that Queensland communication integrator TAA Connect solved with a UC solution crafted from NEC, Enghouse Systems and Zeacom.
“[Council] has sites at least 100 km from each other and it’s very hard to get staff out there,” says Peter Scheimer, sales manager of TAA Connect, which was No.35 in the 2014 CRN Fast50 after growing 26.5 percent to hit a turnover of $7.5 million. “We implemented a system on a single IP platform and routed calls intelligently between the sites.”
Presence alerts the network to route a call to the next available agent if someone walks away from their desk, for instance, which boosts productivity and customer service. “The main thing for the council was to answer calls efficiently and quickly regardless of the site and provide a single number [to contact] available people with the right skills.” TAA Connect rents a solution to the council, saving it up to $30,000 a month, he says.
While the equipment is on-premise, the reseller remotely manages it as part of a managed service. Wireless bridges some remote locations and outside lines were retained for redundancy and in the case of disaster.
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