UC&C
CONTINUED
is easier as everyone is starting to fall into quite a similar model. This is more challenging for AV companies as that is not how they have traditionally worked but with challenges comes opportunity.” Wayne adds that is doesn’t have to be difficult for traditional comms/AV dealers to move into new markets. “It depends if business leaders are prepared to invest the time in reeducating their employees,” he says. “In a business that has traditionally focused on communications or AV, there will inevitably be a period where the team will have to learn about new products, invest time with new vendors or new partners to understand how you take those solutions to market and how it integrates,” Wayne says. “That can be quite a difficult process if you are starting from a standing start, but once you have started down that road it can become quite easy quite quickly. “It isn’t that difficult; you just need to learn to ask the right questions and qualify it so you can get the right partner involved. “I find that resellers are hungry and see an opportunity and want to go after it, but don’t necessarily know how to, that’s where I3 can add value as a manufacturer. What that brings is a sense of loyalty, because as soon as someone talks to them about a meeting room, they can call I3 about the opportunity, we can say what we could do and our pre-sales team work with them and we support our channel, rather than just looking for traditional business that people might expect a manufacturer to go after.” Increasing volume Wayne adds that he expects the volume of demand for unified communications to increase this year, as more people are returning to the office, if not full-time but for three to four days a week. “Many are realising that the infrastructure they have in their offices isn’t quite up to scratch,” he says. “A lot of time and money has been invested in to people being able to work from home and they are bringing that technology – laptops, webcams etc – into the office and it doesn’t work with the legacy hardware and it needs to be improved and we are starting to see a lot of that. “We are also starting to see bigger integration onto certain platforms. There have been a lot of businesses that have always been Microsoft-driven in terms of the platform they use. This is driving how they interact with customers and colleagues and we are going to see more being hung around the platform rather than the hardware. More companies are becoming platform-minded rather than product-minded.
“We are only scratching the surface of what true unified communications could mean for the way that people work and how businesses communicate with their customers.” Jim Eagers from NEC adds that customer demand for convenience and reducing IT admin costs are driving convergence. “The AV channel and print reseller channel are mature markets and in many cases margins have eroded over time,” he says. “It’s a great time to look into UC as it creates new revenue stream opportunities with existing, and often very large, customer bases that many resellers already have. Studies have shown that acquiring new clients is five times more expensive than keeping an existing customer. “There is this need for convenience, to have less to worry about as an end user, bundling everything up in one and it works, it does everything the user needs it to do, and they want to pay a predictable monthly fee for it. “Businesses can end up with lots of disparate business apps – telephony, webinars, videoconferencing, co-labs and file backups – which are often independent subscriptions, they don’t work together, they run out at different times, and collectively there can be quite a cost. With platforms such as NEC’s Univerge Blue, which bring a range of cloud services together on one single platform, with a single contact for support, which makes it much easier and embraces the ‘as a service’ culture.” Managing expectations But convergence can come with difficulties, and it is important to manage customers’ expectations, notes Mark Sumner, UC&C and AV business manager at Northamber. He notes that frictions can come as some systems take longer to build out than others in comms and AV.
Jim Eagers NEC
“
It’s a great
time to look into UC as it creates new revenue stream opportunities
with existing, and often very large, customer bases that many resellers already have.
”
uk.nec.com
12
Powered by FlippingBook