Unified Communications: A resellers primer

The arrival of UC two years ago received a lukewarm reception in the market. Companies already had large investments in existing infrastructure and early solutions lacked depth of functionality. Moving forward, 2008 has seen the technology begin to mature as an increasing number of organisations switch to UC to cut operating costs and improve business processes. While VoIP remains the dominant driver as traditional PABX telephony continues to decline, new technologies such as presence and unified messaging are gaining momentum.

Despite analyst enthusiasm, Matthew Johnston, product director APACJ, Quest Software said UC adoption rates remain lower than expected.

“We’re seeing initial deployments of instant messaging and pockets of UC technologies come together, but we haven’t seen anyone deploy, in my opinion yet, the full gamut and functionality that can be delivered by UC,” he said.

This presents a unique opportunity for the channel. The buzz surrounding UC presents resellers with an opportunity to help companies realise the competitive advantages offered by streamlining corporate communication processes. Besides obvious benefits such as saving on telecommunications costs, UC also offers new business abilities such as remote working and extending customer service beyond the contact centre. Add in increasing property prices, rising travel costs and Green pressures and the business case for investing in a converged communications platform suddenly becomes very compelling, according to Johnston.

“One of the biggest hard ROIs that can be achieved is actually reduction in travel costs,” he said. “Desktop-based video and voice conferencing reduces travel costs, increases user interaction and enables companies to further support their greener environmental statements.”

While several multinational companies have already realised the potential benefits in terms of cost savings, driving down the bottom line and delivering value back to shareholders, it is in the SME market where resellers willing to update their knowledge and skills will find a wealth of new business opportunities.

There are currently two main approaches to UC: infrastructure and software solutions. The first solution set is offered by telecommunication providers with a network infrastructure background such as Cisco, Nortel and Avaya. Their focus is on voice and video provision, with particular investment in quality of service, network bandwidth and mobility. The alternative is offered by software and desktop providers like Microsoft, IBM and Siemens who concentrate on presence, access and developing user-friendly desktop applications.This abundance of solutions is offering the channel plenty of options to merge technologies and provide customised solutions built around services, hardware and software. Johnston said that solution providers of all sizes are seeing new business leads as they combine offerings from both camps based on their customer’s disparate needs. While the majority of integrators are focusing on VOIP and video conferencing solutions, the area of presence also offers solution providers plenty of opportunities.

One of the hardest concepts to nail down in both a technical and organisational sense, the basic idea behind presence is an always-on capacity to see an individual’s availability in real-time. A converged communications solution should allow a presence-enabled user in Melbourne to instantaneously see whether a presence-enabled client in Singapore is contactable, and by what means. Packages offering this functionality are starting to come to market from vendors such as Microsoft and IBM and it is up to the channel to follow these developments and offer them to customers.

Johnston claimed that uptake of presence applications is being hampered by senior staffers with purchasing responsibilities who are largely unfamiliar with the notion of being always available. The channel can melt this resistance by demonstrating how presence-enabled products such as mobile devices, PDAs and instant messaging applications can produce increased efficiencies and substantial productivity gains.

According to Johnston, the next big development in the UC space will be presence-based workflows which allow escalation processes based on people’s availability. This will mean that customer or colleague queries can be dealt with as they occur.

“What we’re going to see is unified comms become a way of managing our relationships more effectively through federation. So we can federate our organisations through unified communications technologies where I can see my vendor, my customer, or my sales person, and if I have a particular query I can talk to them straight away,” he said.

As always, providing ongoing support for integrated solutions remains a vital part of the channel’s lifeblood. As technology in this space continues to develop and grow, so do the opportunities for the channel to implement and maintain infrastructure and applications. Resellers willing to research the technology, make strategic partnerships and invest in staff training, stand to do exceptionally well as UC continues to mature.