A Cooperative Project of VoiceCon and UC Strategies

This week’s issue is sponsored by BCR Training:

“Planning and Implementing VOIP Unified Communications,” a 2-day workshop presented by BCR Training and Marty Parker, Principal Consultant, Communication Perspectives, will enable you to build a strategic plan and presents the options available from all the vendors. The class runs June 4–5 in New York and August 13–14 in Chicago. For complete course outline and registration details, go to http://www.bcrtraining.com/course-info/ucv.php.

For the past month or so, it seems that every day there’s another announcement from a vendor about new products or services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Here’s a brief run down:

• Cisco introduced several advancements for its channel partners and the SMB market, including the Cisco Smart Business Communications System for small businesses and Select Certification, an entry-level certification for channel partners with a primary focus on the SMB market. Cisco also introduced Cisco Smart Care Service to help SMBs and mid-market customers simplify network maintenance through regular, proactive network assessments, remote software repairs and technical support.
• Nortel introduced its “My Business” campaign, featuring training and demand generation initiatives for its partners, plus a set of solution packages including integrated voice and data, mobility, and unified messaging, which are built specifically for SMBs, accompanied by a full complement of installation, operations, administration, maintenance, and technical support services.
• Avaya also got in the game with two new products—Avaya Customer Interaction Express, which the company says is a “a contact center software suite built expressly for midsize businesses with up to 150 contact centers agents at multiple locations,” and Avaya Meeting Exchange Express, an audio conferencing software solution for small and midsize companies that integrates with Web conferencing and other client applications from Microsoft, IBM and Adobe.

Meanwhile, companies like Interactive Intelligence and many others are focusing more on Software as a Service (SaaS) in order to better serve the SMB market. SaaS is the latest craze, and IDC recently forecasted that worldwide spending on SaaS will reach $10.7 billion by 2009.

Why all the sudden attention to the SMB market? Opportunity, for one thing. Industry studies show that the SMB market will represent 40-60 percent of future IT spending over the next five to 10 years. For some companies, it’s time to expand to the hundreds of thousands of customers beyond the enterprise. There are just so many sales you can make to large enterprises, and the number of SMBs is way larger than the number of enterprises.

But to reach the SMB market and to provide products and services that they can use, vendors must properly bundle and price these products to make them more appealing to SMBs. Even more important, channel partners need the appropriate tools to sell, implement, and service the products.

Many companies are getting into the hosted services business as a way to reach the SMB market, and most vendors have announced various hosted offerings, whether it’s for contact center, unified communications, unified messaging, or general IP telephony. Most industry watchers expect hosted services to be the primary way SMBs get their telephony and UC solutions. And this makes sense—SMB customers don’t have to purchase and maintain the equipment, the initial upfront cost is much lower, and the requirements of the company’s IT staff is much lower than with a premises-based solution.

But, haven’t we been down this road before? While doing a search for SMBs and hosted services, articles from the 1990s and early 2000s kept popping up, and I realized, it’s déjà vu all over again. Granted, the articles were focusing on ASPs and service providers rather than hosting providers, but the idea is the same: Small and medium-sized businesses will get their telephony capabilities via a service rather than by purchasing premises-based equipment, which requires an IT staff to run and maintain the solutions.

I believe that the hosting model holds a lot of promise, but I’m not jumping on the bandwagon—yet. There’s still plenty of opportunity for vendors with appropriately priced, packaged, and implemented premises-based technology to serve the needs of SMBs. The good news is that there are more options for SMBs than ever before. With new products being announced on a regular basis, and every vendor getting into the hosted or managed service business, the winners will be the SMBs, who can choose the product and delivery method that best suits their needs.

What do you think? Drop me a note at bpleasant@commfusion.com—or post your comments here in the VoiceCon Unified Communications eWeekly forum.

Blair Pleasant
COMMfusion LLC & UCStrategies.com

Posted in Market Trends, Blair Pleasant, Unified Communications |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.