Summer of Confusion - Who's Who in the Zoo to Buy From?

We have also heard from many vendors, whether channel partners, VARs or telcos that a lot of customer projects have been conceptually approved, but not signed. In many cases, the final approval with legal paperwork has not been provided, which is causing delays in orders being booked and implemented. Some of this is due to negotiations details differences, particularly related to performance expectations and differences between customers and vendors.

Other customer IT sources have said that they can't get IT capital budget released due to funds being moved for other initiatives in their organizations. Some of these IT folks have said that while the capital budgets have been moved from IT over to lines of business, there are many who are hesitant in making the wrong vendor decisions, and thus have been holding off on final approvals.

While sitting by the pond reflecting on what has changed this year, we came up with a few points to consider that may be affecting customer acquisitions and deployments:

⦁ Ongoing consolidation of major manufacturers with niche players
⦁ Consolidation through acquisition of vendors
⦁ Entry of new cloud players offering alternative approaches to customer premise solutions
⦁ Newer players now looking for new owners (multiple instances here, i.e. ININ, ShoreTel, etc.)
⦁ Expanding capabilities of IT vendors in the telecom space
⦁ Perception of traditional voice communications becoming less important because it is used less often by both employees and customers

⦁ Other business units have been able to get capital investments for technology projects rather than IT groups (whose budgets continue to hold or decrease depending on the sector and organization)
⦁ Move of ownership and accountability away from dwindling telecom resources that have been consolidated into IT departments
⦁ Many next-generation pilot projects seem to be stalled, and not able to move from pilot into production in any meaningful way, from a volume perspective

In our internal use of UC&amamp;C applications over the last six years, combined with our move from 100% customer premise solutions (for all our messaging, telecom and collaboration apps) to a totally cloud platform, we have observed there are numerous challenges and shifts. Some of the shifts required are on our side as clients, and some are on the vendor's side.

These challenges, and changes required, do not have that much impact for a small team of tech savvy consultants like FOX GROUP folks, but they could be significant for customers of other sectors, and particularly for general workers who do not have the skills to use and manage their own apps.

One of the main challenges we have observed, and commented on in past articles, is the shift required by IT professionals from hands-on tech support of their own internal systems and applications to being able to manage the vendors in a cloud/managed environment.

We are not aware of any courses that teach IT, accounting and legal professionals how to manage vendors related to day-to-day operations, performance/financial management or contract management. In fact, the same challenges apply on the vendor side as the customer expects the vendor organizations to have adapted to being the virtual IT organization for the customer's operations. As early-adopter cloud clients have discovered, there are challenges on both sides (whether totally cloud, or hybrid combinations).

I believe that this "Summer of confusion" is caused by all of the various factors outlined above, and probably more! Until the industry can develop the capabilities to successfully communicate the unique business benefits of switching over, or upgrading to their UC&C solutions, clients will keep a close hand on their wallets and not open up to spend money for next generation solutions to the levels that the industry would like.

I welcome thoughts and feedback (of agreement or disagreement) on this article and can be contacted at [email protected] or 289.648.1981.