UC Summit 2010 was held April 25-28, and brought together unified communications vendors, "Solutions Integrator" executives, and end-user consultants for 2 ½ jam-packed days of keynotes, workshops, focus sessions, learning, networking and relationship building.
In this podcast, the UCStrategies Experts discuss their takeaways from the event, what they learned, what surprised them, and the maturation of the industry.
The expert panel includes Jim Burton, Marty Parker, Don Van Doren, Art Rosenberg, Blair Pleasant, Michael Finneran, Steve Leaden, Dave Michels, and Pam Avila.
Podcast Transcript
Jim Burton: Welcome to UC Strategies Industry Buzz. This is Jim Burton, and I am here as usual with the UC Strategies Expert team, and today’s topic is the UC Summit which was last week in La Jolla, California. Rather than me getting into the introductory remarks like I usually do, we’ve got such great comments from my colleagues, we’re just going to get started, and I will turn it over to you, Marty.
Marty Parker: Thanks, Jim. I thought the summit was really a wonderful event, and I heard so many comments from all the participants reinforcing that. The thing I would highlight first is the venue. This is a venue where the vendors or suppliers in the UC market, the resellers who actually presented to the customers, and the consultants who are advising the customers on Unified Communication all come together in a place where they can have an open candid conversation, plenty of networking time, and they can talk about developing the industry without the customer being present. Not that we don’t love the customers, but we can talk candidly and talk about strengths and weaknesses in a way that often isn't possible in a venue like say VoiceCon, where the customers are watching and listening to everything you say. So it really paid off in that regard.
The two examples I would bring out: one is IBM; Bruce Morse, the leader of the IBM Lotus Sametime programs for IBM, did a great job of really addressing the reseller’s requirements, and it was almost an objections clinic: you know, “here’s what I’ve heard are the problems--let me address those.” And he did a great job of addressing them, both in terms of the resellers’ requirements and meeting their needs, and why IBM Lotus Sametime was a great solution to those requirements. Again, a candor that wouldn’t happen in other forums, so that was fabulous.
And the last point I make is that the resellers came with a serious interest in expanding their business and capturing the new value. Many of them already have started programs to develop applications on UC platforms—not just reselling what the suppliers produce, but actually becoming value added resellers or independent software vendors. A lot of good news in that regard, and when we asked for a show of hands during the Reseller Profitability panel, we asked “how many were taking on new product lines,” it was amazing. Well over 80% of those that identified themselves as resellers were storing new products into their product line in order to address the opportunities of Unified Communication in terms of diversity applications and enhancing business processes, or as we say, communications integrated to optimize business processes. So the theme was reinforced, and I think people came away really positive. Don, you were going to comment on what you saw.
Don Van Doren: Yes, Marty, thanks--I certainly echo your comments, and I think that in general there was just much, much, more awareness on the part of the channel participants of what this is, how to make it better, and how best to integrate into their business areas. Clearly lots of knowledge transfer was going on, not only in the sessions, but frankly in the halls and on the exhibit floor. I had two situations that I just happened to overhear where a channel partner was talking to a vendor and basically coaching each other on best ways to go about helping to develop real good Unified Communications applications. There was just a lot of that.
You mentioned Bruce Morse’s presentation. I thought there were a lot of good ones; one I’d like to bring up, frankly, Marty, is one that you ran, the panel on Microsoft. In particular, again, the same kind of theme I think, in particular Bill Vollerthum from Enabling Technologies, just went right through a lot of really detailed examples of what you should be looking for, and where you go to get information on some of the Microsoft products. It was just extremely well done. Laura from Microsoft was there reinforcing and commenting on this, too. But it was just, I think, a great example of the kind of information and knowledge transfer that this industry really needs, and I think it went really beautifully. Art, what were some of your views?
Art Rosenberg: Well, the thing that caught my attention the most, and I don’t really remember who said it, but the way I would encapsulate the thought was “try before buy.” In other words, if you are going to use an application which we all agree is important--whatever it is--and it doesn’t have to be all of them and it could be the most important one or whatever. Try to develop it enough so you can prove to yourself that it’s worthwhile doing; that you are doing it the right way, that it’s having the payoff, that it will work, etc. And what I heard during the conversation is someone who is a provider of the technology--I don’t know whether it was a box or software combination or something like that--and they said, “hey, if you have got an application, we’ll lend it to you. Prove it to yourself, don’t buy it first, and then find out it doesn’t work or if you don’t know what you even want to do with it, maybe, and I think that’s going to be an interesting direction, the way things are going to be able to move forward is go with those applications that are so important. What you really got to do is put them to work and I think that that’s what people are starting to see now that that’s what’s going to be their responsibility in helping their customers and ultimately to the individual end users within the customer organization because they each have different applications like that. End of story.
Blair Pleasant: One of the things that I found is that even though there were great discussions, and we answered a lot of questions, there are still a lot of outstanding questions and a lot of issues so we’re really at the very beginning stages of the discussion. One thing is we still need to work on getting end user adoption of UC and a lot of people were saying, “how do we get the end users to ask for Unified Communications?” Another thing—we have talked a lot about CEBP and business processes, and definitely we all agree that this is what it’s all about and it is definitely resonating and I loved Bill from Enabling’s quote that “CEBP is the gift that keeps on giving,” but the question is, how do we bring the line of business people to the table? And that’s still a real issue that people haven't been able to overcome yet. There is still a lot of confusion about the cloud versus hosted versus software as a service—what’s the difference between all of them, and what's the adoption going to be? And then for me, one of the biggest things is, there is still a huge need for training—both end user training and also training for resellers on consultative selling so that resellers--a lot of them are saying that they need more tools from the vendors on making the transition from box or product selling to solution and application selling. But I think end user training is also really, really lacking and that’s an area that we need to focus more on. Michael, do you want to follow up?
Michael Finneran: Yes, well first I’ll echo what Marty had to say, that there was definitely a different feeling about the maturity of the entire UC marketplace. Basically we have gotten to the point where it seems we’ve got them sold, but like you were saying, Blair, now it’s how do we get it used. I think a big part of that is really going to have to be to think bigger and think about marketing. Bruce Morse, in passing, mentioned that IBM is considering a real advertising campaign around Unified Communications, which I find enormously exciting. It’s when you get those advertising geniuses behind this, they can really reach out to the end user, and basically start pulling it through the channel rather than our trying to push it from the other end. And whether they are going to use the name UC to describe it or just describe the idea in some other crazy creative way we have never come up with, we are going to have to think big if this is going to go, and I think moves like that are the most encouraging thing I have seen. Steve Leaden is joining us today, and I know, Steve, you have some insights on end user acceptance from your consulting practice.
Steve Leaden: Yes, exactly Mike. So there were a couple of takeaways that I personally took away from this conference. One is I think this conference is very, very visionary. I think it plays to setting the tone for the industry at large and some new definitions at large. Just one example, one of the Cisco keynotes that came out of the initial night, Richard McLeod was saying about eighty to ninety percent of all of data bandwidth will be devoted to video by the year 2013--just a huge statement as to where we are seeing the market shift towards video and UC acceptance. We also saw from Marti’s panel that UC is now at a cost point where it really is here, it’s close to half what it was just a few years ago, and therefore you know just like any kind of market once that price point gets accepted people will begin to use it even more.
And we saw that there is now UC analytics being introduced into the market as well, which people are looking for in terms of metrics and measuring the success of their deployments. In our space, we service the end user community and we are finding that people are consistently, if they are seeing the strict UC element, maybe the multimedia portion of UC, with the IM chat, and the video, and the document sharing as a piece—we are finding that we are gaining hundred percent acceptance from users and its about the shift that they can provide to their end user community that the traditional kind of PBX platform just cannot fulfill. So we are finding high acceptance and its simply because really as an option once they see the cost point there that its really not a huge leap in terms of total price performance and they can see the beginning of metrics and the way that they can do business that our customers are really latching on to it. So you know those are my takeaways. It’s a very, very exciting time I think for all us to be a part of this and to see the game change and the industry shift. So Dave, I know that you had a couple of takeaways too, from the conference.
Dave Michels: Thanks, Steve. This is Dave Michels, and I had the pleasure of running a channel conversation with most of the team leaders in attendance at the conference, and there were some real surprises that came out of the dialogue that we had. Real surprises, at least to me, and maybe not to anyone else. We first started off talking about the training models and you know the channel models have a very protective training model where authorized training from various vendors is only available through the dealer network. You have to be approved by the dealer or be a dealer and Microsoft and Cisco changed those rules where anybody can get certified and that allowed dealers to hire people with certifications and allowed the users to hire people with certifications. I was expecting the audience of the crowd to embrace the Cisco Microsoft model that opened training and certifications. But there was a very strong opinion in the room that the protected model makes more sense and that Microsoft and Cisco are actually doing it wrong, that really surprised me.
They were a couple of other surprises--very few of the dealers in there felt that SIP endpoints were much of a threat to their revenue models, which based on the popularity and increasing sales of SIP phones, and going through the Dotcom networks that I thought that that would be a big thing on their mind. Most of the people in the people were selling proprietary endpoints and didn't find SIP such a big threat. But the conversation changed dramatically when we started talking about cell phones and mobility--that’s surprising as well. I thought that cell phones are more of a concern longer term but I got an update on this conversation that the cell phones as a primary endpoint are a concern to the channel as a near term concern.
I also sat through a number of the vendor presentations to the dealer networks and I guess I just want to call on two, Siemens and Aastra both seem to me like they don’t get a lot of attention in the press and they don’t get a lot of attention in these big conferences. But they both have very strong channel propositions that raised a lot of interest and they were both there with a force and they were both there with a fairly complete story, I thought that was fairly interesting. There were a lot of dialogues around those two brands and that surprised me, and not so much with some other brands that I would have expected that to have occurred with.
One last observation is I think that the growth and popularity of hosted voice which is predicted by just about everybody I think is going to have some fairly significant ramifications to the channel and I am not sure that it is very well understood by anybody yet, including the manufacturers. I think that we are seeing some manufacturers repositioning their end user products for service providers. We are seeing subscription pricing models; we are seeing the manufacturers quoting a new channel toward service providers, defining a new channel. I think that there is going to be a lot of evolutionary changes that could happen very quickly around the service provider space as the proprietary enterprise, phone systems or UC solutions migrate into the service provider market which has been already dominated by Broadsoft and Asterisk. That’s it for me; I think our organizer, Pam, had some thoughts as well.
Pam Avila: Thanks, Dave. I was very pleased to see how far the solutions integrators, the reseller channel, has come since we did the last Summit. They are so much farther along in thinking about, “how do I move from my traditional business model,” “how do I move forward with this whole UC concept,” and “how do I get it out to my customers?” And one of the things that I thought was very interesting was that they’re starting to understand, and we had some great examples of those who are farther along, like Bill Vollerthum,but for many of them they are starting to finally understand that this isn't about selling a group of products—it’s actually a whole different sales process for them and as Blair mentioned, consultative selling training is rearing up as a bigger and bigger issue, where are they going to get it, and who is going to make that happen? So that was an interesting thing that I noted.
And also, I sat in on Dave’s session with the resellers, which was an open forum which let them kind of talk about some of their issues, and one of the things that still seems pretty clear is that there are still cultural differences between the traditional telcom dealers that are now morphing into the more the converged dealers, and the same thing for the data VARs. And Dave’s comment about the certification issue, it was very much along telcom dealer versus data VAR lines, their perception of the value of – the way Cisco does it for example, or Microsoft. So the fact that those cultural differences still exist and still play a role is very significant. But overall I was just so pleased to see how many of the resellers that attended, and I really do want to start using that term “solutions integrator” that we came up with--but how many of those solutions integrators are looking at their whole sales process. They’rre looking at the end user or looking at the product that they have to sell very differently than they did two years ago, and I think we are making a wonderful progress. Jim, I am turning it back to you.
Art Rosenberg: Before you do, a quick question. Would you comment on what you saw as the respective roles of the consultants versus the resellers or integrators, etc.?
Pam Avila: Well, I think that was one of the other important things that came out of the Summit, and thank you for bringing that up. But I think that the solutions integrators are becoming more aware of the importance of the consultants today as from the end user perspective the technology has gotten more confusing for them, they are not always quite sure where to go, so they are calling on consultants more and more and more, and the solutions integrators are realizing that it’s going to be more important than ever that they figure out how to work with the consultants. Unfortunately, there is some baggage from the past that the solutions integrators have to get over, but I am sure that it’s just a matter of time and events like the Summit are a great opportunity for them to put some of that baggage away.
Jim Burton: Thanks, Pam. Just some observations that I had. There were a number of things that I recognized as I was sitting in some of the sessions, that a number of the resellers and consultants weren't aware of some of these vendors who are sponsors. And some that come to mind are NET, Verint, AVST, Acme Packet. And then also for them to understand some of the capabilities that some of the distribution partners have, like Computer Telephony Distributing (CTD), and ScanSource. So I think that in addition to that, other parts of the education, it was a great opportunity for the vendors to meet new potential partners and for consultants to understand what they have to offer.
That’s it for today. It was a great Summit and I want to thank everybody who participated, not only the UCStrategies team, but the resellers, the consultants, and our sponsors. I appreciate it, and we look forward to seeing everybody next year at the UC Summit and I look forward to speaking with all of you again on next week’s podcast.