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UC buzzword lacks fizzle.
Unified Communications has been a buzzword for the last two years in the channel, yet there is a feeling among some resellers that vendors are failing to provide the support they need to take this new product suite to market successfully.
On whether vendors are leaving resellers behind in their rush to go to market with new products, Carl Churchill, Commercial Director at murphx Innovative Solutions, says it is all about support, or a lack of it, that is the issue. “Vendors have left the channel behind on support, the education piece, understanding how to sell the product and how it works. The pieces of the puzzle are there, but what vendors have failed to do in a lot of cases is tell us how to go to market and work with these products. It's vendors and this 'arms length' policy they seem to operate. There isn’t the support for people to understand what these products are. Vendors are spending millions of pounds developing these products, but they aren’t spending on educating people. Selling UC now is like trying to sell IPT two years ago – the concept is good but the market isn’t ready yet.”
Another reseller sensing a lack of support is Atia Solutions. Patrick Copping, Business Development Director at the company, says: “Vendors have left resellers behind. Vendors have caught themselves up in the hype of UC and they are not allowing resellers enough time to get themselves skilled up in UC solutions. Vendors are racing to get products to market, leaving no time for resellers to train and hire people, and that takes time.” Jayne Dimmick, Product Marketing Manager at Swyx, agrees that vendors are shooting off without bringing the channel with them: “Unified Communications at the moment is all about vendor push. All the vendors are getting caught up in the hype and can’t see the wood for the trees. They say if you had this product, you could have everything in one place, integrated, but you need a lot of money to buy that and skill to implement that.”
Dimmick says for UC to be appropriate for SMEs, products have to be easy to understand, easy to implement and easy to use. She explains: “SMEs can’t afford to have this big learning curve when switching from one system to another. Looking at the average UC products out there, you could forgive SMEs for thinking that UC is going to be complicated and will suck up all their resources. Also for resellers, it has to be easy to implement and sell.” Yet Dave Dyer, Channel Marketing Manager at Siemens, disagrees. He says: “I don’t think resellers have been left behind.
If you think about where most resellers tend to focus, at the SME market, well UC there is at the beginning, it’s embryonic. So I don’t think anyone’s been left behind.” Part of the perception that resellers have been left behind seems to have stemmed from enterprisefocused UC products being sold into the SME space, resulting in chaos and confusion for resellers and customers. Dyer admits that Siemens should not have pushed into the SME market with its enterprise unified communications products, as it did over the past three to four years. He comments: “From the Siemens perspective, we probably tried to get SMEs to adopt enterprise products, which probably wasn’t a good thing to do. SMEs don’t tend to have the support they need to work with those products. A lot of the early applications tended to ask too much of resellers, for them to be comfortable with it as they were carrier grade products. But we pushed it because that was what we had available.”
Siemens released its HiPath Open Office ME product in December 2007, which combines instant messaging, conferencing, and, Dyer says is everything required for UC in one piece of software. He comments: “SME grade UC solutions are starting to become available, so resellers can now provide everything integrated together.” Yet Dimmick says: “Users tend not to need the whole solution. They just use 25-30 per cent of a complete product. To suit that need, our approach is to do UC in small, manageable chunks, so resellers can pick out the bits they need and users can choose the bits they want.” Swyx is introducing UC functionality to the marketplace as it demands it. “We started with unified messaging for email, fax and voicemail in your inbox, then we added fixed mobile convergence in November last year. We’ll be adding instant messaging this summer as demand for it builds, and web conferencing and video conferencing late 2008 or some time in 2009, again, when our customers are ready to use it,” states Dimmick.
Unified communications needs to be delivered piece by piece, states Copping. He says this is what customers want: "I don't think there’s any customer out there with a complete UC strategy. I don't think there is anyone in the market that would actually spend money on a true UC platform with everything in place. It would scare people. "
“People are buying bits of a UC platform," explains Copping. "Our customers are buying a voice platform, then we ask them if they would like videoconferencing and voice collaboration now, and they say they don't really need it now but they want to make sure the system they buy is future proofed."
Copping added that the challenges for this market are matching what the reseller says it can deliver to the customer, with what is actually available technologically, to what the customer is actually looking for: "That problem will clear up in exactly the same way that IP Telephony has. But early implementations of UC were an absolute dog."
