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MODERATOR: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our webcast today. Should UCaaS be part of your
unified communications strategy? Today's webcast will be discussion on unified communications
as service. Should it be part of your UC strategy? So thank you all for being here. Let me introduce
the panelists. The first panelist we have is Blair Pleasant.
Blair is the president and principal analyst for COMMfusion LLC, and co-founder of UC Strategies.
BLAIR: Hi, everybody.
MODERATOR: Her areas of focus include unified communications and collaboration, contact
center, and social software products and solutions. Then we have Phil Edholm. Phil is president
and principal analyst at PKE Consulting, and UC expert from UC Strategies. He provides
consulting and market research analysis to end users and vendors in the communications
and networking markets. Phil has over 30 years' experience in creating innovation and transformation
in networking and communications.
PHIL: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
MODERATOR: Excellent. And now we have Joe Hines. He's the CEO and owner of Voice and
Data Networks in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Joe founded VDN in 1995 and has guided it to be
a trusted provider of communications products and services to the enterprise markets. VDN's
focus areas include unified communications, Wi-Fi, Ethernet networking, contact center,
audio and video conferencing, server support, storage, hosting support, network analysis
and monitoring, and virtual CIO services to clients. The panelists also -- I want everybody
to know that the panelists have some great offers available for the attendees that we're
going to reveal at the end of the discussion today. And if you have any questions or comments,
please enter them in the comment box below the live stream. We'll be monitoring the comments
throughout the presentation and will answer as many questions as we can at the end of
the discussion. So if questions come up, just go ahead and type them in. And let's get started.
Okay. So, what we want to talk about is start out with, What is unified communications,
first of all, and then what is unified communications as a service? So let's just start with the
'what is unified communications' piece. And why is it important to the enterprise? So
I'm going to open it up. And, well let's just start with—let's just start, go down the
row here; let's start with Blair.
BLAIR: Okay. Well, thanks very much. UC Strategies has a very simple definition for UC. It's
communications integrated to optimize business processes. And what that means is there are
different tools and capabilities that are integrated together with a unified client
interface that help make it easier for workers to communicate, to collaborate, to see presence
availability, to see the status of people, to be able to click to call, and basically
making it easier to collaborate and work together. And part of the keys is having that unified
interface so that everything is together, making it easier for people to have the tools
that they need to get their work done.
MODERATOR: Excellent. All right, Joe, what do you say? What is unified communications
and why is it important to the enterprise?
JOE: Well the way we view unified communications, and we're a provider of those services, is
the—from the client's point of view, what business tasks are getting done via the underlying
technology, which is unified communications? And the underlying technology includes a rather
large grab bag of technology. It would be the telephony, the video-audio conferencing,
the interactive voice response unity, voice mail, mobility, mobility units -- the devices
themselves -- Wi-Fi, identity management, you know, the SIP trunking and the circuits
that go along with it. All these things are things that the client needs in order to communicate
in their desired fashion, and integrating them, as well as procuring them, is a unified
communications solution. And it's different for everyone, is what we have learned with
painful experience.
MODERATOR: All right, very good. And Phil, how 'bout you? What is unified communications?
How do you look at it? And why is it important to the enterprise?
PHIL: So I would argue I think there are two dimensions to unified communications, in terms
of not so much the technology and the pieces, but rather the business impact. One dimension
is unifying communication modalities together. You know, today we have lots of communication
modalities. We have email, we have IM, we have voice, and we have video. Bringing those
together in a way that they're integrated and unified so that the user doesn't see them
as each a separate choice, each a separate capability. That would be one dimension. The
other dimension is, as Blair said, the impact on the business. And in the business there
are two major basic impacts. The first is for users that are knowledge workers who manage
their own tasks, who manage their own personal business process, manage their own time, UC
becomes a way that they enhance their collaboration capabilities, by integrating those communication
modalities very tightly with how they manage their collaborative activities to get work
done. You know, typically that's where products like LinkedIn and—fall. Then there's the
other side, which is integrating communications into real-time formal business processes to
accelerate the business process. When, you know, a problem emerges and someone needs
to be involved, how quickly do you bring that person in? So I think UC has two dimensions.
We often only look at one of the dimensions; obviously bringing both of those together
is critical to actually having this impact you want to have on your business, your organization.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. Now let me just say what the next question is. In "UC as a
service" -- does the "as a service" part automatically imply hosted? So again, I'm going to go around
the room and get a sense for where you guys land on that subject. So again, let's just
start with Blair.
BLAIR: Yeah, I know we've been talking about this. To me, as a service does mean hosted
or cloud-based. Someone else is outsourcing the solution and providing it as a service
to the end user. So the end user is getting it as a service. To me, it does mean hosted
or cloud-based.
MODERATOR: Okay. Fair enough.
BLAIR: So I know Joe's going to disagree with this a little bit, but.
MODERATOR: All right, Joe, what do you say? Does as a service automatically imply hosted?
JOE: Well I love that Blair and I disagree a little bit about this, because I think that's
the state of the market. The state of the market is trading terms and redefining terms
and that's what's going on. So what -- does it imply hosted for us? In part, yes. I think
many of the technologies can and should be hosted. But many of the technologies should
not be hosted. And as a service means it's a service to you, and you being the organization
that's employing these tools. And so that could be professional services and it could
be on-premise wireless and it could be off-premise telephony, or any combination thereof.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. And Phil, how do you weigh in on that? Does as a service
automatically imply hosted?
PHIL: So, you know, I'm actually a big believer that we need to have some pretty pedantic
definitions in this space. And I think a guy named Timothy Chou actually wrote a great
book called The Six Levels of Cloud Computing. It was not around our industry; it was rather
around the computing industry. Timothy Chou, by the way, built at Oracle the Oracle on-demand
service between 2000 and 2004, and he's a lecturer today at Stanford. But he argues
that, you know, there are these six levels, going from, you know, level one, which is
basically you buy equipment, you deploy it in your site, you manage it and operate it
with your own people, all the way to level six which is essentially the Google model,
where people don't actually pay for the service with money as subscribers; rather it's monetized
through other dimensions -- i.e., you know, Google monetizes your information to sell
as advertising. I think if you look at that, there is a critical point. The layer—level
two is where you've owned the equipment, but you outsource the management and operation
of that. So I think, you know, Joe's point here is you can turn your existing investment
into a service by outsourcing the operation and management of that. I wouldn't call that
UC as a service; I would rather call it, you know, management as a service. But I think
then once we get to the point of saying, if you're buying a solution, and it's a new solution,
without having a core capital purchase, it's now a service. 'Cause you are buying it on
some sort of monthly basis. Now, by the way, I say core -- often you will buy end points.
You know, for example, if you buy a Voice over IP as a service or UC as a service and
you buy IP phones, those are actually things you buy, but they're end points; they're not
major capital purchases. They can be expensed typically, if you desire, in your organization.
So if you look at that, then there really are, I think I would argue, three models of
a service. The first model is where it's a contracted service but the physical equipment
is premise located. Essentially, the end organization is giving the person who's selling the service
a location to put that hosted equipment. The second is that you have physically designated
equipment that is hosted off-site, and hosted at some other location. The third is where
you do not have physically dedicated equipment, and where in fact the service is a service
that's designed where the equipment that's being used at the core is shared in a multi-tenant
environment, in a way that there's not a significant entry cost for the provider of the service
to take you on as a new customer. And the analogy I use for this is very simple. If
you go out and hire a gardener, and the gardener has to buy a $500 lawnmower to mow your lawn,
and if they stop mowing your lawn the lawnmower's going to get thrown away, they're going to
ask you for a commitment of a year or two of a hundred-dollar-a-month lawn service to
be able to afford to buy the lawnmower and assure that they can pay it off. On the other
hand, if they bring their own lawnmower to your house, they're just going to charge you
a hundred dollars a month and the only commitment in time is a discount on volume of time. So
if you buy a monthly service, it is a hundred dollars per month; if you buy it for a year,
it's $900 total. So I think if you look at UC as a service, it's important to understand
all of those are service models in that you've taken away the initial capital purchase of
the core. But you have to be cognizant of how they work.
By the way, this all leads to the really important point that I think we're beginning to see
in this industry, which is this whole concept of "X as a service", or cloud -- whatever
you want to call it -- is really the industrial revolution of computing and now communications.
Just like the industrial revolution changed the way products got built, way parts got
built, this is going to change the way we do and use computing services. So, you know,
just very clearly, 'cause I think as a user you need to understand why you are doing this.
So, you know, in 1780, if you wanted to build an outhouse...
MODERATOR: Hey Phil, I'm going to interject here just a minute. And I'm sure we're going
to come back to some of what it is you're going to cover, but we have a lot of questions.
PHIL: Okay, that's cool.
MODERATOR: And I think you answered it beautifully, whether or not it's a service, 'cause the
different service models I think you outlined in a really excellent way. But let me ask
this question: Does one delivery method -- on-premise or hosted or hybrid -- provide more benefits
than the others? Or does it depend on the business industry or environment? And I'm
going to toss that over to Joe, only from the standpoint that I think, Phil, you sort
of covered some of that in what you were just talking about, but Joe, let's get your take
on that.
JOE: So, does one method provide more benefits than the other? I would say yes. And the reason
I say yes is because in some cases, hosted is a much better solution; in some cases,
premise is a much better solution; and in some cases, the combination of the two is
a much better solution. And so the delivery method -- and this is why I see, you know,
UC as a Service as very organic and wide -- is that clients need some of it on-site and they
need some of it off-site. Or perhaps it's just more convenient for them to have some
of it off-site. And so I think it does -- it depends on the business environment, and all
are correct answers.
MODERATOR: And Phil, really briefly, what do you think about that question? So does
one delivery method -- on-premise or hosted or hybrid -- provide more benefits than the
other, or does it depend on the business that the client is in, that the organization is
in -- their industry or their environment?
PHIL: I think it's 100 percent business dependent. Because again, if you come back to this, why
are you doing UCaaS? And in the end, there only are two reasons to do UCaaS. It costs
less money overall, or it has better delivery capability -- i.e., availability or service.
And really, those are the two reasons. And so, you know, again, I think those are dependent
on the organization, the organization's capability to manage and operate things, the organization's
capability. But again, the whole concept here is we are standardizing and repeating services
and dramatically reducing the cost to deliver those. That's what cloud is all about. And
UCaaS is a form of cloud. So, again, as you evaluate this, I think you ultimately -- it's
not a technical question, it's a business question in the end.
BLAIR: There's actually disagreement about whether the TCO and the overall cost of UCaaS
or cloud or hosted is actually lower. So there have been studies that show that after like
three to five years, the cost—the TCO of a hosted or a cloud service is actually higher.
So that's why it's really more important to look at your business goals and what you're
trying to achieve, rather than the cost. It's really about what you, as a business, are
trying to do.
MODERATOR: Okay. All right. Good enough. Now let me go—let me move to this question:
Are the benefits and issues with UCaaS similar in on-premise versus a hosted deployment?
So Joe, in terms of benefits or issues -- and if you can provide any specifics that people
can put their arms around, that would be fabulous -- but are the benefits and issues with UCaaS
similar in an on-premise versus a hosted? Or do you have different things that you have
to actually address?
JOE: Well if I'm going to give a long answer all day, this is going to be the one. So the
way I look at it is, first of all, when you're dealing with communications -- and we've proven
this out with the use of our own cell phones -- it is a very fluid, fluid technology. Or
excuse me, a fluid quality of use. Each one of us is trimming up our cell phones on a
day-to-day basis in order for it to do things better for us. So now let's get to the business
model. The best way for me to describe this is to say the day you buy -- and is by analogy
-- the day you buy an automobile, it is the best day of that automobile's life. It's got
the best transmission it's ever going to have, and motor and suspension, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera, and it gets—the automobile generally gets worse. Well what I think that our friends
at Apple, less discussed item did for us with the iPhone 3, is they said the day you get
this product -- certainly there's going to be limitations on the hardware -- but the
product keeps getting better. You get more apps, it does more things for you. So when
you drive that whole -- they turned it upside down when they did that. So instead of buying
something and it gets worse, you buy something and from your perspective, it gets better.
So how UCaaS can do that is instead of buying it and have a TCO -- okay, five years later
I got a five-year-old unified communications solution -- with UCaaS, the host provider
-- you know, I'm back to Blair's thing -- or the provider can continue to make the product
morph into what you want it to do. And if you see the organization as the person at
the end of the cell phone, then the organization keeps moving fluidly and the UCaaS solution
can keep moving fluidly with them. And I think this is the key element, and it sets it apart
from things like inventory control where you can buy it, put it in your stack and leave
it for a number of years with some software upgrades. Communications just isn't like that.
People aren't like that. And I think it's critical.
MODERATOR: Well let me then flip this back over to Blair. So what, Joe, you just said,
if I understood it correctly, is total cost of ownership is a different way you're even
looking at it. Because if you look at a static system, you implemented it and your total
cost of ownership out over five years is, you know, X, what you're saying is, Wait a
minute, that's for a static sort of I implemented it and now it's got—you know, this is what
the total cost is. What you're saying is with a UCaaS implementation, it's going to constantly
get better and stay updated in a different way than perhaps an on-premise solution would
be. Is that what you essentially said?
JOE: It can. It depends on how you procure it, and we went through that before -- which
model, hosted, hybrid, who you going to have help you, those kinds of things. You want
to put yourself in a position where you can do that -- be fluid with the technology.
MODERATOR: Yeah. And Blair, so Blair, how does that -- does that change what you think
around TCO? Or what, you know, 'cause the studies say one thing, but does what Joe's
saying kind of have a point there?
BLAIR: Well Joe always has a point.
JOE: Thank you.
BLAIR: To me, the main thing is it's about the consumption model. You're still going
to get the same benefits of unified communications. You know, UC is going to do all the, you know,
wonderful things for an organization, whether you get it, you know, on-premise, managed,
hosted, whatever. So it's really how you're going to consume it as an individual, how
you're going to access those capabilities. Now one thing about UCaaS, and I totally agree
with Joe, you can get the latest and greatest without having to invest any more. So the
really nice thing about it -- and when I talk to customers, I tell them to focus on this,
rather than the TCO or the cost -- is that when you have something on-premise and you
need to upgrade it, you know, if you want to get the latest features, you're going to
have to spend a lot of time and money, you know, to get the latest release for everybody
to put the new software on everybody's desktop. It can be pretty time-consuming and expensive.
With UCaaS, when the vendor or the service provider updates something and adds new capabilities,
you get it automatically. So for companies of any size, that's really, really powerful,
and I think that's part of what Joe was getting at. So you can get the latest and greatest
automatically without doing any work. So that is very, very powerful. But I think the main
thing really is to look at is how do you want to consume it? You know, so you understand
that you want UC; you know all the great benefits it's going to give you. How do you want to
consume it? Who's going to provide it for you? Do you want to be responsible for managing
the day to day and upgrading and, you know, doing all that work, or do you want to outsource
it to someone who has more—you know, who has the expertise on it, who will let you
focus on your core business rather than focusing on your communications? And that's really
what it should come down to.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. And Phil, would you like to weigh in on this subject?
PHIL: Yes, I absolutely agree. I think both of you made great points. I mean the point
here is that over time the functionality increases, and in order to keep that, you have to plan
on doing regular upgrades. So if you're comparing, for example, UCaaS from an offer, you want
to ask the vendor not to quote you just a basic software package, but quote you, for
example, what they charge for subscription support. So subscription support, generally
you buy a license and then you pay a percentage of the license, typically about 30 percent
every year, and then you get all the updates and all that. And then what you have to do
is plan on what's it going to cost me to install those updates. So I think it does come down
to a TCO question about how does that TCO balance out of managing yourself and operating
it. And the whole key point here that Joe makes is, in the end, UCaaS should reduce
your cost, your total cost of ownership. But the other side -- and don't lose track of
this; don't lose track of this -- that you also are getting the benefits of things like
reliability and redundancy, that if you don't build them into your premise solution, you're
not going to get. So there -- it's a complete tradeoff. It's a very complete thought process
you have to go through as to which one is going to be better in your situation, depending
on your company and your implementation.
JOE: And I want to bolt onto Phil's comments real quick here. When -- and even in our case,
with our ERP system, if you get all those pieces and you build them into your contract
-- the upgrades and those pieces -- that's a good thing and a powerful thing. But oftentimes
I watch customers not take advantage of those things, because if they upgrade this, then
this other piece that they already have bolted on isn't at the same level. And if they upgrade
this, then this other piece can't be dragged along. And so it's not a one-look solution.
You can buy subscription service for five or six of the options, and you'll probably
have a group of -- I've seen very few people have a group of under four. Then each one
depends on the other to make the whole thing work, and you will sometimes not take advantage
of things 'cause other pieces won't bolt on right. So the integration of communication
is tremendously important, and I think better served in a UCaaS model because then the technologists
are dealing with those interdependencies, and you as the end user are not subject to
them at the technology level.
MODERATOR: Right. Okay, very good. It looks like we answered a whole bunch of our questions
right then. So what I'm going to do is jump into one that is, I think -- just to earmark
it and maybe get a little more detail about it -- which is how is communication sensitive
to being fresh? In other words, being up to date. How is it sensitive to that? Phil, I'm
going to let you kick off with that one. But how is communication sensitive to being fresh?
PHIL: I assume when you mean fresh in terms of the newest versions of the application,
those kinds of things, versus being fresh in terms of the lightest person who wants
to talk to me. So I think this is -- the thing that you need to really realize that's very
important about, you know, UC, the communications industry, the communications space, we are
in fact in a market that's moving very quickly. If you look back 10 years ago, I mean just
think about 10 years ago -- Voice Over IP was something we were talking about whether
it was going to happen and when it was going to happen. Voice Over IP is the basis of everything
we do today. You know, the iPhone was introduced in 2007. The whole concept of BYOD is something
that's emerged. So, you know, I think having a vendor and a solution that has the capability
and the commitment to adapt to these changes is absolutely critical. Because I can guarantee
you -- and we'll talk about this a little bit later when we talk about some new technologies
-- that if you look forward two years to this industry, it's going to be a dramatically
different industry than it is today. And so I think having that freshness -- and again,
coming at I think Joe's point, one of the critical opportunities in UCaaS is the complexity
of managing those transitions, managing that new technology, implementing it, driving it.
If you can essentially outsource that to someone who builds that across a large number of organizations,
it has huge advantages for you in terms of taking care of that. And again, coming back
to Blair's point, the value here is not the technology; the value is how does it change
your business. And, you know, our business, our industry, the United States in fact has
been driven by productivity gains for the last 20 years. This is the next big area of
productivity gains, and you want to be positioned to take advantage of those. So you absolutely
want to be fresh.
MODERATOR: Very cool. And Joe, how would you answer that question, in terms of communication
sensitive to being fresh and up to date?
JOE: Well I think it's really sensitive, and the best testament to it is watching people
trim and prune and trim and prune and trim and prune their cell phones. People love to
communicate in any way they'd like. And they continue to update it, put updates on -- Hey,
have you seen my new app? And so you really have to go to the end point, which is the
consumer. Even if that consumer is playing a role inside an organization, they want to
communicate the way they want to communicate. And the guy next door's cool device or cool
functionality is something they want. So being fresh is almost paramount now. It's almost
expected—I don't know about paramount; maybe just expected. Because it's coming at each
and every individual from all other angles and the curiosity of the entire populace is
what's driving it. And I think it's really important.
BLAIR: And, if I can add something. When we look at unified communications, it's been
evolving so much since we first started talking about it several years ago. You know, things
like social software, social media, that wasn't even part of what we were talking about or
thinking about a few years ago. And, you know, collaboration, the way that's become, you
know, it's whole -- it's this whole thing unto itself. So UC has really evolved over
the past years, and it's not what we first started with. So it really is important not
only to be fresh, but to be open enough to be able to add all these new capabilities
and new things that are being added to what we're calling unified communications.
MODERATOR: Excellent. Yeah, I agree. I think that that's a very good point. Now if I were
to look at what size companies is UCaaS really targeted at, what size companies would most
benefit from UCaaS? And I'm going to say whoever jumps in first here.
BLAIR: I'll say all of them. I don't think there's -- it really doesn't go by size to
me. I mean obviously it's a no-brainer for the, you know, under 50 seats and less. You
know, for companies that, you know, small companies with under 50 users, you don't need
an IT person [phone ringing], you don't need, you know, the expertise. For them it makes
absolute sense. But what's not as intuitive is like the really large companies, especially
if they are distributed all over the world, or, you know, medium sized companies that
are geographically distributed and have offices in different locations. It really makes sense
for them to not have to manage something at every specific individual site, and to have
this provider who can take care of it at all the different sites. So for me it's not size
as much as, you know, again, what's your business? What are you trying to achieve? Are you geographically
distributed? If you're geographically distributed, I would say definitely look at UCaaS.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. Phil, go ahead.
PHIL: I think very much I would comment absolutely similarly. I think this is less a question
of size, and again a question of what fits best your business model. You know, obviously
the first question is, you know, Are you a capitally well focused company? What you tend
to see, by the way, if you look at Voice Over IP as a service, the average company using
that today is typically in the 12 to 15 seat range. They're relatively small, small businesses,
capital focused. On the other hand, if you look back a number of years ago, in the days
when we had, you know, the managed voice services, those tended to be actually purchased by large
financial institutions and the government. Both of them, again, saw capital as being
a significant issue. So I think there's a big decision there. I think the other point
is to understand that, going back to Joe's point, hybrid brings the capability of using
UCaaS as a way of not being all in, but being for part of your organization. So, you know,
if you have a 2000 person main-site office, you may decide at that office to use a premised-based
solution, but you may decide for the users that are remote to buy a service and integrate
it that way. So again, I think it's very dependent upon the organization. But what I will say
is I think we're seeing a strong increase in the viability of UCaaS. And, you know,
to me, it's really the change that we saw, if you think about answering machines, 20
years ago. Where I could buy an answering service for $5 a month or I could buy a $30
answering machine. Well somebody would say if I've got $30, in six months that's free.
But if the answering service is 50 cents a month, it changes the equation. And I think
that's one of the things you're seeing. I personally think you're going to see very
dramatically in UCaaS over the next year or two is that you're going to see the cost of
service actually drop significantly, and therefore change this model dramatically. Which, by
the way, is an interesting thought process, which says, you know, maybe, if you think
it's going to cost the same for five years, it's not a good decision, but if you assume
the cost is going to come down, it may actually be a good decision 'cause you're betting on
that change in cost structures that's coming.
MODERATOR: Very good, very good. And Joe, how 'bout you? What size companies is a UCaaS
service really targeted to? How do you weigh in on that one?
JOE: Well I'd agree with Phil. I think it has to do with price. And I do think the prices
are going to come down, because of course the small companies are substantially more
price sensitive than the larger companies. And of course the larger companies have scale
so that if they can, you know, implement one feature and then go, you know, 50,000 people
wide, they get a lot of return on investment. But I think what's going to really turn the
key here, because it's communication, is what the guy in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
likes to say, it's about quality. Because if you can buy it inexpensively as a small
organization, but it doesn't work very well or it's clunky or people don't like to use
it, it's toast. Same on the high side. So I don't think that size matters as much as
what you want to do with it, and can you deliver it in a high quality manner. And that takes
good qualitative, not quantitative, thinking. The qualitative thinking will say, Do I get
the right provider? Do I get—Is that provider providing good strong technologies? Do they
know how to integrate them for me? Because in the end, you know, the whole thing, it's
about the end user. Are they getting what they want? It's about them. And that's what's
going to turn the key.
MODERATOR: Okay, excellent. All right now, it's interesting. Here we are, all on a Google
Hangout, recording this panel with a live audience, and if Google has all these apps
-- so we've got, you know, we've got Google Talk, we've got Google Hangouts -- you know,
why would an SMB, a small organization, want UCaaS over free applications like those from
Google?
PHIL: I'll start off. Because, so, everybody's who's not on the video side of this call doing
a video doesn't realize we started setting this up an hour ago. And I think that's the
indication -- by the way, I think Google has amazing tools. And I think Google is looking
to continue to provide this kind of service as something free. But again, remember back
to what I said earlier. Google doesn't ever give anything away for free. This is not free.
If you think this is free, you are wildly deceived. There was a great article about
2-1/2 years ago at Newsweek, back when they actually published a magazine, this guy wrote
a column and he said, Google are the Dutch, we're the Indians, and we're selling Manhattan
for beads. And his point was, Google gives us these great trinkets and we use them, but
they're gathering information. By the way, Google has the right -- and you clicked on
this when you accepted this -- they have the right to record and analyze everything that's
said on this, and in fact they are using that to build their transcription engine. Google
also received a patent last year to deliver advertising based on what's said in a conversation,
and that's why all of these conversations go through Google servers. So if you're a
business, do you really want to have a communications solution that's free, where in fact your competitors
are listening in on that—a potential competitor is listening in on that conversation? Because
if Google is selling the fact that I'm buying a car, and I have -- you're a car dealership
and I happen to be talking to you about buying a car on your Google supplied SMB system,
and Google records that and now I start seeing pop-up ads all over the Web for other cars
and other car dealers, is that really what you want to implement? And I think that's
the biggest thing. You have to think about cost -- nothing is free. You pay for it one
way or another. So I mean we could talk a lot about what Google doesn't have from a
technology perspective, but I think the bigger question is, Do you want Google monetizing
your communications? Because it's not necessarily true that it is necessarily in your interest
to have them monetizing your communication. And by the way, I don't dislike Google. Don't
get me wrong; I actually have no problem with what Google does. But as a business, communications
is so essential to my business, my monetization process of my assets, I'm not sure I want
to expose them to alternative monetization of my competitors.
MODERATOR: Right. I understand that. Now, but could -- let me ask you this follow-on:
Could SMBs get everything they need from Google, from a UCaaS perspective? Could they even
get everything?
PHIL: I think they can get a reasonable set of technologies. I don't think they are, quite
frankly, all that well integrated, as we saw this morning. Trying to get, you know, I have
to be in your circle, you have to do this. I mean trying to explain to a customer, to
be able to have this video meeting with a customer, is hugely complicated. So I think
it's still very complicated. Will it get better? Absolutely. Will Google continue to provide
that? Will there be other alternatives coming in the future? Absolutely. But again, I think
coming back to Joe's point about this, this is a tool to make your business better; it's
not a technology you want to enjoy. And therefore, you know, if you pay $10 a month of $20 a
month for something, and if you can get it for free but it costs your employees 15 minutes
a month to use it, and your employees cost you $150 an hour, you didn't make money off
it. It wasn't a good business decision. So I think the question is, Google, the technology
is still not well integrated. You can do things. I use Google Voice for my office number; I
like it. But again, I'm not sure I would recommend to a real, a larger SMB, that this was the
choice to make for your total communications system today.
BLAIR: I was going to say the same exact thing. I use Google Voice and I love it and it's
wonderful. But, you know, I'm a one-person operation. If I had, you know, 15 people,
it probably wouldn't be the right type of solution. But also, we don't know about the
security, the privacy, confidentiality, integration, all those things. I mean Google is wonderful
for what it does, but it's not offering an enterprise-grade solution right now, and it's
not even saying that it is...
JOE: Well I think there's another psychological point to be made here. If I'm using a business
application like inventory control, I must use the company's inventory control. But when
I'm using a communications application, and I'm the end user way out on the edge, and
somebody starts to explain it to me and it's clunky and it's hard, what I do is I just
ignore it. You know? I just ignore it and I come around the back side and I call somebody
on a copper wire, or something like that. And so the adoption is very different, when
you talk about communication.
PHIL: And I think the important point, Joe, that you've made there is the value of UC
is in both hard and soft benefits. It's hard benefits -- you know, moving calls over to
SIP, eliminating long distance, managing conferencing. It's the soft benefits of saving people time
in the business and being able to be more productive. So if your business is going to
grow over the next 3 to 4 years, 5 years, your business is going to grow 20 percent,
you don't have to hire 20 percent more people. If the solution you give people, they don't
use, you're not going to get those benefits. You're not going to get the cost reductions.
You're not going to get the productivity benefits, and therefore you haven't taken advantage
of it. And I think that's the question is, you know, Is Google for the average person
that you're trying to do? 'Cause remember, we're not selling, we're not delivering UC
to the IT department. We're delivering it to our entire employee base. We're delivering
to that salesman who doesn't really care about technology; they care about booking an order.
That service technician. Those people, their adoption characteristics are as critical.
And I think the challenge is, Google tools for us are great, but that's because we're
those techno-weenies.
MODERATOR: Right. Well let me ask you this; let me kind of open this question up. What's
the challenge that companies face regarding accurately defining user communication requirements?
I mean can you talk about -- and then -- so you talk about the challenge of employee adoption;
we kind of jumped into that. But how's -- let's talk about the challenge of accurately defining
the UC requirements for your organization.
BLAIR: Well I think the issue is that it's going to be different for everybody. And right
now the IT person is responsible for deploying and purchasing unified communications. But
it's the business users, it's the line of business people that are using UC, and the
IT people don't always know what it is that these line of business people need. So the
receptionist is going to need something different from the salesperson who's going to need something
different from the engineer. So it's really important to focus on the different use cases
and the different ways that people are using unified communications. It's not about technology.
And we say that over and over. The technology is the last thing that should, you know, come
into play. It's really, What are the use cases? How are people using it? What are their communication
channels? How are the individual people using this? And that's where it really -- these
individual line of business people have to be brought into the decision; they have to
be brought into the conversation. It's not an IT discussion. It really has to go way
beyond that. And that's why it's important to have an evangelist, someone from the top,
who can really bring all these different people together. And yes, IT is absolutely part of
this and plays an important role, but these lines of business people are equally important.
So someone at the top has to bring all these different people together when it comes to
making the decision and figuring out what's required.
JOE: And I think, on that same point, that there's a psychological shift occurring. You
know, I've been in IT long enough to say that we used to actually write the code. You know,
we wrote general ledger, and we had people that went to the end user and said, you know,
What are you doing that I can automate? But when, as second and third and fourth generation
languages came along, IT stopped doing that, and just started building networks and managing
really good applications, but managing the technology. And what's coming back now around
the circle is the end users are getting back involved, and that's a psychological shift.
I think much of the IT departments look to the business for the requirements, has been
riffed out of the business, and so now they're starting to come back and the end users are
saying, Hey, where's my support here? And the end users are saying, Well, I'm going
to have to build it myself. And now they've got people that are business systems analysts
that are -- do they work for the—the business or do they work for the IT? And this psychological
shift is going on inside the enterprise, which used to be there 25 or 30 years ago, and it's
coming back. And I think it's hard; it's very difficult.
PHIL: I'll just make a very quick comment... There are different kinds of workers. There
are service workers, information workers and knowledge workers. Information and service
workers -- basically, service workers don't use information in the process of their job.
Information workers, contact center agents, folks like that do use, in the process of
their job, a bank teller. Knowledge workers are people who actually manage their own time.
They have a calendar, they manage their own events, they have an email account. Everyone
on this call is a knowledge worker. One of the things that's really important is what
a lot of us think of UC is actually a knowledge worker tool -- integrating with your email,
integrating, you know, collaboration meetings, those kind of things is actually a knowledge
worker tool. What's interesting is most companies, knowledge workers are only 15 to 25 percent
of the employee base. The majority are information and service workers. In order to get the benefits
for information and service workers, you almost by definition have to integrate to the business
process they fall in. This comes back to the thing that Blair said earlier -- you really
need to engage those business line managers to have that benefit.
By the way, just as an aside, if anyone's interested in understanding a bit more of
that, if you go to the PK Consulting website there's a white paper on the whole concept
of knowledge worker, service workers and information workers that's called "KISS and How You Manage
That), the knowledge worker, information, service worker structure. Before you even
engage with your organization to talk about UC, I think you need to understand your employee
base, because it's dependent upon your vertical business, what you do, how your employees
work. And if you don't get that right, you will totally misunderstand the benefit value
to your organization of UC.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. Now, we're coming up to the end here so I'm going to do a couple
more questions to try and get us through our last couple subjects. So we're going to keep
them brief. But what's the role of a VAR, of the VAR, in UCaaS? So the value added reseller
-- what's that role? And can you talk about the distinction between those two roles in
terms of UC? So what's the role of the VAR? And I'm going to start with Joe on this one.
JOE: Well, okay, I'll start, but I was hoping you'd start with the other guys because we
are a VAR. But I'll start anyway. I believe what the role of VAR is emerging to, and it's
continuing to morph, but I think what the role of VAR is emerging to is that the VAR
helping the end user determine from the business what they need. I will say that 10 years ago,
this company as a VAR was the tail of the dog. The dog was the OEM, whatever OEM we
were following -- Cisco, Avaya, etc. -- and we were the tail of the dog and we, you know,
worked with them, and we did fulfillment and things like that. And today it is not a hundred
percent switch, but we are not the tail of the dog anymore. The client wants the VAR
to do some of this work for them, and then go forward to the solution. And it's commonly
a multi-vendor solution, and so the VAR needs to have multi-vendor technology capabilities...
That's what I think it is.
MODERATOR: Yeah, that's excellent. Now what I'm going to move on to here is the value
of UCaaS. What is a reasonable ROI to expect? And just a quick answer: What's the ROI we
should be evaluating against? I'm going to toss this over to Phil, just really quickly.
PHIL: So obviously ROI is going to change for every organization. But I'll tell you
one of the things, and Joe's aware of this, we at UC Strategies and Blair and I have been
intimately involved in this have built a UC benefit and ROI tool that literally, in about
15 minutes, can generate an anticipated ROI for your organization. What's interesting,
we've run literally hundreds of these models for hundreds of different kinds of organizations,
and we often find that the payback is measured in months. It's not measured in years; it's
measured in months. And the reason is very simple. If you adopt UC and how it changes
your organization, the business impact can be significant. You know, from cost savings,
you know, that are hard costs, and conferencing and minutes, but also in terms of just imagine
if every time a person goes to a meeting, that meeting could start two minutes earlier
-- maybe not even start on time, but instead of being five minutes after the hour, it could
start three minutes after the hour. Does that productivity gain translate into effectiveness
so you can grow your business? And again, in the economic growth we're going to see
in the next five years, the monetization of this, I think is going to be key for a lot
of organizations to succeed. So, and again, we don't have enough detail to go through
it, but I know Joe, for those of you that are listening to this and working with Voice
Data Networks, I'd ask you to talk to him and say, Hey, look at how this can impact
my organization. 'Cause I guarantee you, it's one of the best investments you can make in
IT today in terms of ROI. It has a great payback, and it's equivalent to things that people
talk about having excellent paybacks, like virtualization.
BLAIR: But again, you need to look at the business benefits and, you know, tying it
in with the business processes. If you're just looking for people to save, you know,
10 minutes from their day because they can see, you know, who's available and, you know,
not call them or leave a voice message because you can tell that their present status that
they're away, that's not what it's about; it's not about saving that 20 minutes a day.
It's about integrating into the business processes, being able to more easily collaborate, being
able to reduce the time that it takes for a business process to get finished. So that's
what you really need to be looking at -- not, you know, can I save 10 minutes off of my
day.
MODERATOR: Very good. Okay, now I'm going to move us to predictions for UCaaS. So each
one of you, we're going to go around, but what's your prediction? What will a UCaaS
offer and include in the future? If the foundation for it is currently voice, will more functions
be added as a standard offering? Or will other communications, technologies always be offered
a la carte? So what do you think the future is? Phil, we'll start with you, just your
10 seconds; what do you think?
PHIL: Better. I'd say -- the biggest thing I think is going to happen in this industry,
and it's the communication industry in general, is this technology called Web RTC. You know,
and everybody kind of laughs 'cause I talk about it a lot. But Web RTC is going to change
the world. What happened 20 years ago with information, what browsers and URLs and the
Web did for information, the explosion of 20 million websites managing communications—or
managing information, is going to happen to communications in the next three to five years.
And I think it's going to make UCaaS a lot easier, a lot more effective, and it's going
to end up having a huge impact on cost. And I think in the end, by the way, coming back
to Joe's point, the technology is going to be an order of magnitude better in three years.
The challenge is going to be how do you get your organization to adopt it, use it, change
your business process, take advantage of it and compete in your market. So I think this
is—personally, I think it's the future of communications. It's a -- there's a fundamental
transformation coming, and it's the intersection of UCaaS, cloud, and technologies like Web
RTC that change the way the end points communicate.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. And Joe, how do you weigh in on that? Predictions for UCaaS?
Your 10 seconds.
JOE: Well I think that I'd point at integration. I think the thing—anything that slows it
down is going to be integration. The clients do need these business processes, which is
what Blair is saying. They need the technologies, which is a little bit more of what Phil's
saying. But do they work for me? I think the mental and the psychological structure of
the organization that's going to change is going to change around integrating them into—the
technologies into each other, and the people processes and the work processes. If there's
going to be a break on it, in the enterprise, that's going to be the break. And I think
that's currently the break. And I think that can get better, because the technologies will
make that simpler.
MODERATOR: Okay. And Blair?
BLAIR: Yeah, I think the future is something that I'm calling optimized communications
instead of unified communications. So it's the use of specific communication and interaction
tools and technologies for businesses and organizations to optimize their business goals
while enhancing the user experience. So I think the focus is really on the user experience,
letting them use the device they want, the channel they want, the whatever location,
whatever consumption model. Really making it more flexible and optimized to the end
user and what they want to do and what they're trying to achieve.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. All right. Well what we're going to do now is open up for
questions from folks. So if you've got some questions, let's see -- let's jump to what
those questions are. So we have a few minutes for them; we're kind of running a little bit
over. So you can type them right in at the bottom of the screen.
Okay...let me ask you this: What are the downsides of UCaaS? Let's just do a couple more questions
that we've got here. What are the downsides of UCaaS? We haven't really covered that.
Just real quick.
PHIL: So -- this is Phil. I would suggest that probably the one downside everyone should
be aware of is if you move to UCaaS, which is a non-premise, cloud-based solution -- whether
it's hosted or a pure service-based solution -- you now move that away from your users.
So you're now dependent upon your network connectivity to deliver that service. So -- and
obviously there's mitigation to this; you can use multiple network paths. The fact is
you have multiple devices, 'cause if you've integrated with mobile, my mobile phone works
as well as a device as my desktop device. But I think having a well thought-out strategy
for how you're going to assure that your users have a continuity of service is really important
as you go into this. And it's one of the downside and differences of a traditional premise-based
solution as you move out into an off-premise cloud or service-based offer.
MODERATOR: Okay. Blair, what do you say about that? Downside of UCaaS.
BLAIR: Yeah, the biggest complaint I hear from people is the loss of control, because
you are giving the control to the provider, whoever that is. So the loss of control. Also,
in some cases, the lack of the ability to do customization. Because again, if we're
looking at a traditional hosted type of capability, it is harder to customize for the specific
user. So those are the two main things that I hear about.
MODERATOR: Okay, Joe.
JOE: I'm going to basically say the same thing as Blair said in a little bit different way.
And that is -- and I'll say it doesn't help me as an organization. By way of analogy,
one of the things I'm going to pick on Cisco here -- not because I don't like Cisco, they've
got a very nice product, but they've got great big market share. So if you take your organization
and say we standardize on Cisco, and we're not going to buy anything but Cisco, then
your next feature as a corporation is dependent on whether or not Cisco provides that feature
to you. So that locks you in to a certain extent. Now if you buy UCaaS and it's only
hosted, then your next feature is the only hosted option. So I think that the downside
of it is getting yourself locked into just this hosted application or just that one,
or just this or just that, because the innovation comes from the edge. And I'm not picking on
Cisco; I'm saying it's brilliant. One of the things they've done is they've said, hey,
the innovation's out there in the world. We're not going to try and innovate everything;
we're just going to buy those innovative companies. And that's what they've done, and they've
done an excellent job of it. So those new hot features are going to come from the edge
and you need to set yourself up in a very flexible way so you can continue to derive
the newest, latest, greatest benefit.
PHIL: Can I just reflect on that comment, just one comment. I mean I think, again, back
to the cloud model. The concept in cloud is the way cloud reduces cost is by standardization,
repetition, ruthless cost reduction. You know, that hinge, instead of being manufactured
by a local blacksmith is now manufactured in the tens of thousands or millions. But
they're all exactly the same. And the point here that I think Joe and Blair both brought
up is UCaaS is all about accepting what the UCaaS provider is giving you, not trying to
decide what you need. And if I can reflect on a song, it's being happy with what you've
got, not wanting what you don't have. And I think you have to be willing to understand.
Now I will say the following: I think those vendors that are doing that are probably 99
percent right in terms of the service that they're going to be delivering. So I think
that's one of the things is that we're a very, in many ways, a maturing industry in some
areas, so being comfortable with that. And the question is, you know, are you willing
to pay two or three times as much for that one feature that you used to use five years
ago, or can you live without it? And that's the kind of discussion you have to have. And
the downside is you may have to go to a user and say, You can't do that anymore. And they're
going to say, Well why are you taking that away from me? You can say, Because I'm saving
the company a half a million dollars a year, and it's going to cost me half a million dollars
to give you that one thing. And I think that's a tough discussion to have, and that is the
downside.
MODERATOR: All right. Well very good. I'm going to give each of you one more time. We'll
just go round robin, really quickly, 'cause we're at the end of our time, just one more
didn't go through all the questions that we had, but that you know is important, that
you want to just earmark as a roundup, as a final statement. So Blair, let's start with
you. Anything that you would like to add to the conversation just as a footnote and an
ending.
BLAIR: Sure. Whether it's hosted, premise, whatever, the key for unified communications
is focus on the end user and don't forget about end user training. It's really, really
important. So many times we think, you know, this is intuitive, you know, it's easy to
use, whatever, and people forget about end user training and the impact on the end user.
And that's really what we should be focusing on, is how is the end user going to adopt
it, and how can we make it easier for them?
MODERATOR: Excellent. Hey, Joe, how 'bout you?
JOE: Well I'm going to steal a line that I heard from Phil, maybe one or maybe two years
ago. Cloud, or as a service, is not a technology. It's a business model. And you have to set
yourself up in a flexible enough business model; then you turn around and you address
yourself to technology. And for my money, the biggest change that's going on now is
the role of IT is changing from technologist to technology application provider. And that's
the role of the people inside the enterprise and the role of the VARs and the OEMs is changing
to those people that actually deliver new latest and greatest features, and integration
of those features.
MODERATOR: Okay, very good. And Phil.
PHIL: So as a UC person in your organization, whether you're an organization or a VAR, the
conversation needs to start as a business conversation. I think we've all said that.
You need -- and that conversation doesn't start by, Let me show you some features. It
starts by understanding and talking about how you can change the organization. I think
that's absolutely the critical point. Telephony was nothing more than a base utility service.
Everybody had to have a phone; everybody had to have voice mail; everybody ignored it once
you paid for it. UC is not telephony. If you think and apply telephony thought processes
to dealing with your organization and UC, I guarantee you your application will fail,
and you will fail as an individual. And I think that's the critical point. Think about
this as something new
and transformational.