What do most people do when they are confused? They stop what they're doing and try and figure out what they need to know so that they are no longer confused. Or worse, they sit on their wallets and wait until the dust settles. So why do vendors work so hard differentiating their products and confusing the market when this slows down the decision/buying process?
It's an unfortunate side effect of their marketing programs. Most vendors invest a lot of money in marketing to show how they’re different and better than their competitors so that customers will buy from them. Product differentiation is a key element of these marketing programs, and some vendors are clearly better at marketing than others.
To understand the importance of marketing and product differentiation, look at the legacy PBX market. Did any vendor sell anything less than a quality solution? In a word, no. Every vendor--Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya, Interactive Intelligence, Iwatsu, Mitel, NEC, Nortel, ShoreTel, Siemens, and Toshiba, sold feature-rich, reliable solutions. So why did some vendors do better than others? Simple--they had better marketing.
Take Aastra, NEC and Siemens, for example. It could be argued that they had better products than many of their competitors, but never achieved the North American market share of some of those competitors, which had better funded and executed marketing programs.
When IP arrived on the PBX scene, so did one of the world’s best marketing companies in technology--Cisco. Cisco, with its marketing prowess, has become the leader in the IP PBX market.
Let's take a look at the unified communications market. In a way, IBM helped to start the unified communications market back in 1998 when it introduced Sametime, unifying a number of communications and collaboration components. More recently, another marketing powerhouse, Microsoft, began developing solutions they called unified communications. At the same time, Cisco showed their market awareness by quickly jumping on the UC bandwagon and rebranding all of its communications products as UC.
Now that everything is UC, vendors need to stand out from one another. Let the product differentiation begin. As the many communications technologies evolve and become "unified," (although in truth they’re actually integrated) we can expect vendors to try to differentiate their product offerings with new names. Some may even try to coin a name to identify the broader market. There are many of us who believe UC may not be the best term to describe the broader market but it is what most vendors use, and changing it at this stage will cause even more confusion.
One of the new differentiation battlefronts is UC platforms that can deliver a multi-vendor overlay to others' PBXs, At VoiceCon San Francisco, Avaya hyped its new UC platform, Aura, while Siemens reminded everyone that it has had an open enterprise communication platform for several years with OpenScape; now Cisco has a "Session Manager," too. Aastra recently reminded the industry about its open Clearspan platform during a webinar with UCStrategies.com last week. And then, in a totally confusing departure, Cisco introduced Session Manager, a new collaboration platform while repositioning its products from unified communications to "Collaboration."
In the legacy PBX days it was hard to differentiate products. Everyone had a similar list of features, 5-9s reliability and competitive pricing. In today's emerging UC market, there are plenty of ways to differentiate as vendors evolve their products and product marketing position. For example, some PBX vendors have moved from a basic call control platform to a UC platform, as mentioned above. Or vendors can add tools to help automate business processes and integrate communications into these processes, such as Interactive Intelligence's Interaction Process Automation product. Finally, an agile professional services arm will become increasingly important, either for custom development or to create vertical and horizontal communications packages and features.
At this stage in the evolution of UC, vendors are intent on leapfrogging each other, and as those that are behind try to catch up, they often send out marketing messages to make it appear that they are keeping up with the technology leaders. Again, confusing the market.
At VoiceCon in San Francisco, I met with a number of vendors that understand that a rising tide lifts all boats and their share of a larger pie is better then their share of a confused market. They understand that less confusion in the market is good for everyone and would like to find a way to work with their competitors to help reduce the confusion and educate the market.
As someone who makes a living helping vendors with strategic planning and partnering, I was pleased when several major vendors asked if I could help them with this important mission to grow the UC market for all. Let me know if you would like to join us. Please send me a message jburton@ctlink.com
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