The UCStrategies Experts share their expertise in bylined articles, opinion pieces, blogs, and podcasts, to define unified communications, educate you about unified communications technologies, and help you make informed decisions about unified communications solutions.
UCStrategies.com defines unified communications as “Communications integrated to optimize business processes.” The definition of unified communications narrows significantly when you can read and hear about real-world examples that other companies are implementing right now—and apply them to your situation.
This section offers learning tools to help you plan your unified communications implementation.
This section provides a practical, vendor-independent service to any Enterprise that is seeking the benefits of Unified Communications. How do you pull everything together to implement unified communications? Use the tools in this sequence to define unified communications for your business.
The Unified Communications industry changes daily. We keep track of it for you.
UCStrategies is an industry resource for unified communications enterprises, communications vendors, system integrators, and anyone interested in the growing unified communications arena.
A supplier of objective information on unified communications, UCStrategies is supported by an alliance of leading communication industry advisors, analysts, and consultants who have worked in the various segments of unified communications since its inception.
Early in 2000 a team of veteran industry analysts from the telecom and datacom space, formed the IN-Fusion Group in order to create a study on how the market for converged voice and data products (CT) was developing. The study focused on the resellers, systems integrators, consultants, and others that represent the indirect channel, who we called Convergence Resellers (CRs), reflected an industry in transition. Now, 12 years later, converged technologies have evolved to unified communications (UC), and the convergence resellers have evolved to Solutions Integrators (SIs), yet many of the channel challenges remain the same. Several of the IN-Fusion Group team are now part of UCStrategies, which will conduct another survey, focusing on the business needs of the solutions integrators and the key factors driving their success in the UC market. As before, we will be measuring how vendors are meeting the needs of their channel partners. The study will consist of both a quantitative online survey as well as qualitative phone interviews with solutions integrators. The SIs participating in the study will represent a cross section of the various UC vendors.
The first objective of the study is to gain knowledge of the reseller sales organizations, their relationships with clients, and the key sales operations processes. Specifically, we will be gaining insight into the skills and sales competencies necessary to identify opportunities in this complex sales environment. This data will be in the context of their company background, size of the organization, types of solutions they are selling, and the quantities they are selling. As an extension of the 2000 study, we will measure Solution Integrators’ satisfaction with the market and business opportunity.
Our most important objective, however, will be to find out how the SIs could be more successful and how vendors can help them achieve their goals. Survey participants will be asked questions about their businesses in a number of areas, including:
They will be asked to evaluate whether the actual support that they have received in those areas lived up to their expectations. Finally SIs will be asked to comment on which vendors are easiest to work with, and to list freely any comments they have regarding vendor-related issues.
The results of the study will be used to help vendors better understand their channel partners interests and concerns, and identify how to better support their partners. Vendor sponsors will also receive objective insights as to how well their channel partners feel the vendors are meeting their needs and where they are lacking. Vendor sponsors that opt for briefings on survey finding will be privy to comments made about them (the SIs names will be anonymous). Vendor ratings, satisfaction with channel programs and relationships, and specific comments made about them and their effectiveness at channel support will be provided to sponsors.
Platinum
Gold
Silver
Sponsor Fee
$15,000
$9,500
$4,500
Participate in survey creation
X
Access to reseller comments on vendor
Private phone briefing/consultation with UCStrategies experts to discuss survey findings and vendor-specific information
Two hours
30 minutes
Display of sponsor logo on survey – related materials
Full access
Summary
Webinar discussing results with sponsors
For more information contact: