2016 in Review - What a Weird and Wonderful Year it has Been!

5 Jan 2017

Evolution to Cloud - Where Does it Stand?

Our clients in government, enterprise, 9-1-1 and the SMB marketplace, continue to show interest in the cloud, but actual deployment has primarily been in storage, messaging and the desktop space, with less interest in collaboration and VoIP areas.

The challenge for organizations has been to identify real, and accurate, capex and opex costs in moving to cloud, as well as the technical skills required by organizations to deploy and managed cloud-based solutions. There are also delivery problems with vendor performance, overall automated tools and management practices.

We have seen more and more organizations investing and moving to cloud-based contact centres as the primary driver in order to move to omni-channel environments.

Our View of the ICT Industry from our Client's Feedback - How is the Industry Doing?

On the industry side, whether IT or telecom oriented; we see all vendors whether manufacturer, carrier or VARs, struggling to identify what products, platforms and services are best to continue growing revenue and profitability.

It seems like many of them believe that crossing into new areas, i.e. cloud or IT VARS moving to telecom, or telecom moving to IT or colos is the best way to grow and succeed.

One of the challenges with this approach is that they are not investing enough in human capital to either hire or train their teams in order to have them develop the expertise to design, deploy and support the solutions they are proposing to sell.

Were has the Money Gone?

During 2016 many of our clients did not spend that much money on technology investments due to a variety of concerns and fears with the industry.

They did spend extensive amounts of time analyzing, researching and planning to invest in new technologies in 2017 - 2020, some to replace their legacy Nortel environments, their legacy Windows platforms and others.

Like some of my technology peers have said, some are looking to replace like-for-like, while others are looking to identify and deploy solutions that will have the ability to transform their organizations, not just help them survive.

This leads me to my last major observation for 2016...clients plan on spending more on communications oriented technologies in the future, but they will have significantly higher expectations from the vendors.

They are also expecting vendors to be able to clearly show and prove that they have the insight, expertise and ability to show real value for the technology investments they are recommending.

This is an area where we at FOX GROUP are particularly adept at developing accurate next-generation total cost of ownership technology investment forecasts that stand the test of time for transformational technology investments whether cloud, hybrid or premise based, and we have the track record to prove it!

Customers will also be expecting vendors to prove in advance that they will be able to design, install and deliver their solutions on time and on budget... prior to getting the order!

From my perspective at FOX GROUP, 2017 is looking to be a transformational time in the UC technology space for the vendors, and their customers.

As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback, and look forward to hearing from you in 2017!