Whenever I hear or see something about Erich Weiss my antenna starts to spark. His last surviving stage assistant, Dorothy Young, died today at 103 years of age. She was an entertainer too and began working for Weiss (Harry Houdini) when she was just 17 years old. Google posted a Google Doodle today in memory of Houdini’s 137th birthday. Was her death on his birthday coincidence, fate or magic?
Nothing, I think will surpass Houdini not even the industry's current state of affairs. Fred Knight questioned, Are We In a Post-PBX World? Today on Houdini's birthday, I wonder whether or not mojo is eluding companies and purveyors of telecommunications products and services. It seems the industry istrying to pull a magic act all of its own making. I am going to focus on two key claims where I think the magic resides. Customers say they feel like they are getting sucked in, and it's usually after the deal is done.
Claim # 1: "Unlike complex traditional phone systems that sit in a closet, hosted VoIP requires very little IT support or training to administer."
The boxes that I sell or have sold in the past sit in closets or now, mostly in a rack space and they usually do collect quite a bit of dust. The reason is they just work. But my claim contains some magic too and the key difference is, anyone buying into the hosted claim that VoIP requires very little IT support or training to administer isn't just buying off, they are signing off from the world of reality.
Hosted solutions churn in the SMB space too. There are simple metrics that I base this on. First, phone calls from customers wanting to salvage what phones they purchased for their hosted solution into something of a solution that is more reliable than they bought into. Often, this isn't possible whether they call me, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens or Toshiba. Proprietary is prevalent.
Another measure is the availability of products that are on the secondary market and the really gray market of ebay, pawnshops and newspaper ads. My bet is that I'll start to see them in flea markets and yard sales.
Okay, so you don't shop there for enterprise class products but there are other indicators. When we don't sell boxes we sell services. Last year was a good year for hosted problems. Customers with hosted solutions that needed very little IT support or training called me, and those services weren’t one-hour truck rolls. The magic in Claim #1 fails to reasonably set customer expectations. Another standard is simple, does it sound right?
What ends up being so predictable are the overselling of benefits and a lack of long term commitment from the customers that can't wait to dump adopted solutions. Then, customers begin to realize that their local infrastructure must be hardened, and this is where most issues come to terms with the erosion of the stated benefits. Solutions will often work but not without disruption from the hidden, ignored or unknown issues that call into question why and how the customer ended up in this situation. The reality is that local support is still required and this is what hosted providers fail to mention. It's not that they should provide the onsite support, it’s just that they fail to reasonably set customer expectations. For those providers reliant upon VARs and resellers of their services, another soft point of failure remains. Unless these partners have training and experience in infrastructure, troubleshooting and servicing real time demands of customers, relationships get pretty sensitive and frustration levels damage the trust. It's one thing to know a product or service, but another to service it and getting it to work.
Claim #2: "PBXs are dead"
This incredible vanishing act just isn't materializing in the way that is spoken, predicted or believed. The illusion is that all technology applies to everyone and one size can fit all. While large enterprise is often ideally suited to shed their PBXs of any generation, there remains a sizeable market that aims to hold onto what works better for them. The 20-100 station range is still positioned to own or lease a premise solution. The under 20-station market is questionable because of bandwidth and costs. For the very small 5 and under stations, they are no doubt big adopters of hosted solutions. Then, even within the 100 stations and under, there are still many varied solutions because of identified needs and requirements that move customers into specific solutions.
"Industry Magic Claims" could be an ongoing theme because there is a plentiful supply of inflated claims about what the technology will do for business. For consumers and very small businesses including SOHOs, the choices and available bags of tricks are numerous, and this particular market segment is all about cost and they are the lion’s share of VoIP services.
Whatever magic act you're buying into still requires metrics to back up the claims. Most of these metrics are proven in time, after cutover and with follow up analyses. How much dust you have on your gear is still a pretty good basic indicator. Customers want more than entertaining demonstrations and they demand more than claims of prosperity ahead. Tangible benefits remain elusive and even those that are soft have the potential to become hard dollar benefits, but they won't materialize just because you say so in some slick marketing piece. Recently, I had discussions with a hosted UC provider that did not want to discuss their migration path from Microsoft OCS to Lync. How will these customers migrate over to Lync--how will (you) the provider accomplish this? The only comment I could obtain was "Microsoft Lync is not ready yet--for this environment."
What will be interesting to see are changes in improving economic scale and adoption rates of pieces of the cloud and hosted services. The carriers aren't your best friends and the cash cow is the enchantment of bandwidth. Leveraging the pieces of the puzzle isn't an act of waving the wand, a sleight of hand or charming the customers.
