SMBs Look To Gain the Most From Unified Comms

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Reducing the crippling overheads

Craig acknowledged that this was indeed a barrier for many companies considering adopting unified communications, but suggested that it could be outweighed by the convenience of having all their communications channels tied up together.

“Analytical research says 70 percent have a desire to buy from a single source supplier,” he said. “You might say that seems amazingly high, but the average business with 45 employees and down has no dedicated IT man or woman. So when someone joins the company, the responsibility falls on the MD’s PA or the office switchboard operator to coordinate all the various technology requirements. And even in a small business, that can mean five or six suppliers. For a small business that’s just crippling overhead and administration.”

In terms of building up enough customer confidence for companies to be willing to buy all their ICT services from a single supplier, Craig said that it all comes down to providing a service design that gives them comfort.

“We spend more on service process than anything else,” he said. “When we deliver these services we need to make sure their access networks are dimensioned correctly, that we understand the customer environment in the building. We have to manage the whole service experience.”

He suggested that one of the reasons the industry has been slow to start offering these kinds of service is that it is a long-haul deep investment. “It’s more than the product, and it’s more than network capacity, it’s provisioning systems, testing systems, a whole bunch of configuration tools that are techy and boring. All need investment and have to be in place to ensure the cloud works.”

However, the recent recession has created a surge of interest in consolidated services, which offer savings as well as improved responsiveness.

“The petrol on the bonfire of adoption was the recession. Suddenly you’ve got these small companies saying, I’ve got no capex to invest in technology. I have a choice. I either make savings on people or savings on internal consumption and spend,” said Craig.

Investing in the network

This has also prompted other companies, such as O2, Microsoft and Shoretel, to start pushing their unified communications offerings. O2 launched its Unify service last month, offering managed wide area network connectivity, cloud data services and flexible working solutions, as well as traditional converged solutions, such as fixed and mobile voice and data communications.

Meanwhile, Microsoft Lync emerged in November as a relaunch of Office Communications Server, and since then the company has tied it closely with the cloud version of the Office productivity suite, and incorporated in other companies’ products such as LifeSize video conferencing.

However, Craig says that many of its competitors’ offerings are still “box-driven”.

“I would say the fundamental difference is our core strategic offer Vodafone OneNet is an explicit out-and-out cloud-based offer, and a lot of other offers in the market are still hybrids of putting boxes on a customer’s site and then pseudo-integrating them into the network.”

We asked Craig if the increased take-up of unified communications was putting increased pressure on networks, which are already under strain due to the growing popularity of connected devices such as smartphones and tablets. In May 2010, for example, Vodafone brought in new charges for customers who exceeded their monthly data limits, suggesting that Vodafone’s efforts to increase its data capacity had been unsuccessful.

While the company claims that network stats do not show congestion being an issue, Craig said that Vodafone invested £6 billion in coverage and headline speed last year, and has made a public commitment ensure that its service experience is business grade for its customers.

“When you go to the cloud, then the speed of response, the immediacy, whether it’s an application experience or a voice call, it has to be business-grade, it has to be business class, or people will be completely intolerant,” he said. “But certainly from our installed base, which is 1.4 million customers so far, their experience of service quality has been extremely strong.”