What is the next step for VoIP?

LOCALLY-BASED DISTRIBUTOR EXPRESS DATA gathered major vendors together to look at why resellers needed to talk about the future of VoIP, what these vendors tout as the next step for the industry and delves into what exactly Unified Communications is.

In attendance were Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard, AllCom, 3Com, Data#3 and Oriel.

Express Data (ED): How does everyone define Unified Communications? How is your organisation involved with the technology?

Oscar Trimboli (OT), director Unified Communications, Microsoft: I’ve been looking after Unified Communications with Microsoft for about two-and-a-half years. For our customers it’s about a journey, not about a solution that’s going to work today or tomorrow. It’s about making this journey to ensure they’re using the building blocks they’ve already got. When I went to see a bank in Melbourne, it’s message was very clear – “we’ve got a big, investment in Microsoft technologies, we’ve got a big investment in Cisco technologies, show us how those two work together”. For us, it’s about bringing the customers along a journey of integrating silos of communications that exist independently today and over the next five to 10 years will come together through industry co-operation, at an R&D level and also at a channel level. The co-operation that’s been going on in Australia is world-leading, which is great news for our channel partners because it means we are able to take them forward from where they are today.

Brett Kullman (BK), national practice manager Unified Communications, Data#3: What we are seeing a lot from our customers is they are increasingly more mature in their adoption of ICT solutions and they don’t expect an integrator to be all things to them. But they do expect an integrator to be able to partner effectively with vendors to deliver solutions that have a positive impact on business processes.

Chris Fydler (CF), general manager, Oriel: I am responsible for that practice within our organisation. We’re a medium-sized integrator so we find that a lot of businesses rely upon us to provide advice, on direction and strategy from an IT perspective. We have a pretty broad skill set from a Microsoft perspective through to the networking space. We kind of represent ourselves as an infrastructure player. We see infrastructure as everything up to the operating system level. From a Unified Communications perspective, we are really interested, and have been over the past few years – we are a Cisco Unified Communications partner. Most of our customers are moving into that space and a lot of our customers are in that 100-1000 user space, so we really don’t play in the enterprise area at all, but what they are trying to utilise is how their communications systems interact with other applications to make their businesses more efficient.

Peter Hughes (PH) regional sales manager, Cisco: I think end-users have come through a phase of implementing what was IP telephony and are now looking past basic operational costs and value propositions, to how can I change the productivity of an organisation, and how can I provide some added value, which for me makes my job a lot more exciting and interesting. I think what has happened over the past four to five years will be dwarfed compared to what we see over the next two to three (years). It’s a very exciting time with open source applications and mobility in the desktop space — working with best of breed suppliers and partners. And I think most organisations that operate in the enterprise space are consolidating down to primary vendors. As an industry as well we need to be able to stand up and show how we are going to let these organisations take this journey for the next two, three, or four years.

Kevin Bloch (KB), director of advanced technology (ANZ), Cisco: I guess the central theme that Cisco is pointing to at the moment is building a network that enhances the human experience. That sounds pretty fluffy, but at the end of the day the technologies that are built for their own sake fail. Those technologies that really help human behaviour and the human experience tend to flourish. So this whole concept of the human network and enhancing the human experience is really what we see Unified Communications as a part of – collaboration, wanting to talk to people and not waste a lot of time, but it’s about new experiences, whether you’re a consumer all the way through to enterprise. When you bring that down a level, Unified Communications to Cisco is now a billion dollar business.

Shaun Smith (SS), Notes and Domino sales and strategy manager, Lotus Software (APAC), IBM: One of the key drivers we have in Lotus right now, and right across IBM as well, is a unified approach to Unified Communications and Collaboration. From a Lotus perspective, we typically provide collaborative solutions to our customers and partners — an application framework. When you collaborate with people, it’s about ‘something’, so you’re really unifying and tying together the way you communicate using various technologies, but also in context, with ‘something’. We are developing software and solutions that support a collaborative environment which includes Unified Communications.

Ewan Hunt (EH), network centre business manager, Hewlett Packard: There is some confusion in the market and I think customers are seeing that. A lot depends on where their background has come from – whether they’re from the network or the IP tel space, or collaboration (such as email), and I think that it’s a challenging time for systems integrators. We need to define a roadmap, or a journey, for our customers and where they can take this.

Andrew Leigh (AL), director, Allcom: The exciting thing for us in Unified Communications is we are moving away from product sales to solutions sales; going away from presenting a price list that can go to the market in general, to being able to offer true value. We have been talking about value add for a number of years now but I think we are really getting there – especially around vertical solutions. We’ve been doing IP tel for about seven years now – very early adopters, and it’s really pleasing to see the market really moving away from dial tone. And now we’re not competing against anyone, we’re creating that market rather than competing for dial tone.

“We are moving away from product sales to solutions sales.”
“The co-operation that has been going on in Australia is
world-leading.”

That was just a sample of what was discussed at the event. For a full transcript, go to the CRN website at www.techpartner.news.