Unified Communications: A resellers primer

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.

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