On the eighth day of UC the industry gave to me eight CFOs bilking,
overuse of power dimming,
applications plug ‘n playing,
five phone rings,
the voicemail market girds,
an AT lens,
what SMB loves,
And a clear definition of UC.
OK, so I really don’t want to see eight CFO’s bilking investors, although we really haven’t had much of a good financial scandal to talk about since the last days of Lernout & Hauspie. But you try finding anything in unified communications that rhymes with milking. It’s really hard, and I said up front that you had to forgive me for my poetic license in rhyming with the original 12 days song.
It does bring up the idea of money, however, and on this note I have several wishes for the coming year. First, is I’d like to see really good unified communication ROI stories coming from vendors. This is so critical to both the education piece for customers and for credibility in the market, and ties back to getting customers to understand both the value of UC and CEBP. I’ve heard a few good stories in briefings, but many of those had the caveats attached to them that we couldn’t use the customer name in our writings. A side wish to this, of course, is that it would be easier for companies to get their customers (and from what I hear, their customer’s legal departments) to let them use their names in publication. This wish extends to getting those customers who don’t want vendors to use their names, because they think that what they are doing technologically provides them with a competitive advantage, to get over it and crow about it instead.
Second, I’d like to really see unified communications sales take off.
Third, following on the heels of this, and along the lines of my first wish of a clear definition of UC, I would like to see a clear definition of the size of the market. This is actually a wish list item from a few of the vendors that I talked to. What is the size of the UC market? What are analysts counting? I had one vendor say that they are suddenly working with a number of analyst firms that previously hadn’t sized the unified communications market, but are suddenly jumping on the band wagon to do so. We talked a lot about what these firms are using to size the market. Having spent years at Dataquest sizing the voice messaging market and IVR, which were simple in comparison, but took weeks worth of time, I wonder this too. What are they counting and how are they counting it. One comment was made that one of the analysts said that they were only going to count those products that actually and unified communications as part of their product name. That is scary.
It makes me really happy to be out of the forecasting market, because this is no easy task.
Finally, I’d like vendors to be honest about the life of the investment. Most vendors are on par with each other at initial installation, but the total cost of ownership is across the board. We need to help customers understand the total cost of unified communications so that they can intelligently add the components over time, and understand the financial impact of doing so.