This issue of VoiceCon Enews is sponsored by Communications News:

Communications News provides hands-on information about enterprise end-user voice and data networks to 85,000 BPA audited IT/MIS/communications managers and C-level executives who are responsible for their company’s voice and data communications needs. The monthly magazine covers all aspects of the enterprise network. Stop by our VoiceCon booth 330 for your free subscription or visit us online at www.comnews.com

We’ve been doing a mock RFP as one of our VoiceCon tutorials ever since IP-telephony came on the scene. The idea when we started the session was that people needed to know what was real-what you could actually get from a vendor if you told them you wanted an IP-telephony system.

Several years into the IP-telephony migration, the need for solid product information has been given new life by the advent of Unified Communications. Customers are justifiably uncertain about what it is they’re actually supposed to be specifying when they go shopping for communications products today.

We’ve now got two tutorials devoted to RFPs: Marty Parker of UCStrategies.com and Unicomm consulting offers tips on how to define UC and how to begin putting together an RFP for UC capabilities; and Allan Sulkin continues the session he’s done since we launched it, in which he gets vendors to give detailed responses to a proposed scenario for a communications network that, this year, includes UC elements as well as the underlying IP communications infrastructure.

Here are the elements that Allan’s included in this year’s RFP:

• System architecture and design
• Voice terminals (a variety of desktop telephone instruments, attendant consoles, PC client softphones, and smart mobile communications devices)
• Generic software features for station, attendant and system operations
• Integrated messaging (voice/email)
• ACD-based contact center
• Unified Communications tools for personal desktop productivity, conferencing and collaboration
• Systems administration and management.

As you can see, Allan is going to get the vendors to respond to an RFP that tries to position the enterprise for the future of communications. I’d suggest that this is a pretty good check list for any enterprise looking at the next 10 years of communications technology: You need an understanding of basic architecture with a network and a generic feature set that supports a migration strategy, yet you also need to understand what’s available to support the mobility, collaboration and communications-enabled business processes that likely will play an ever-increasing role in your future. You can get the full RFP here.

Allan dropped me a note with the following detail on the session:

“The vendors participating on the panel will be: 3Com, Avaya, Cisco Systems, Mitel Networks, NEC Unified Systems, Nortel, ShoreTel, and Siemens. Aastra/Intecom and Ericsson (soon to be acquired by Aastra Technologies) also submitted proposals, but will not be on the live panel.

“Several vendors submitted proposals based on product releases announced within the past month, or scheduled to debut at VoiceCon. The proposal information is the most current and accurate available anywhere, as it comes directly from the system designers and developers themselves. The system proposal materials will be similar, if not identical, to that an attendee could expect to receive if they issued their own RFP. Countless work hours and significant sums of money (far more than the costs to attend the conference) can be saved by attending the live session and afterwards reviewing the proposals at leisure.”

We’re finding that VoiceCon attendees, whether at the live events or in Webinars, can’t get enough Unified Communications information, especially when we focus on the basics. That seems to tell us that UC remains a nascent market whose constituent parts-and potential benefits-have not been fully explained to the marketplace. Hopefully Allan’s and Marty’s sessions will represent significant steps forward in that education process.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Equipment, Implementation, Management, Market Trends, Tech Trends, Unified Communications, VOIP |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Trackback from your own site.