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Developing Your Strategic Plan
Enterprise users need to consider a strategic plan for their underlying IT, UC, and contact center infrastructures. The plan's objectives should include the following:
- Managing costs for your current Avaya (or other vendor) infrastructure -- consider capital costs, savings, ongoing costs, and managed costs
- Minimizing product end of life and risks to the organization (any vendor)
- Conducting due diligence for best "fit" for organization
- Helping facilitate funding for product replacement
- Staying competitive by leveraging evolving market technology
- Transitioning to the latest available technology that will help differentiate your organization
Your strategic plan involves a specific nine-step process, as follows:
- Identify and review your corporate and it strategic plans. Identifying and reviewing your corporate and IT strategic plans will help zero in on and facilitate where your enterprise is headed in the next two to five years, and will help tie in what technologies may make most sense for your organization. For example, if delivery of retail products is critical to your customer experience, than a CPaaS application with real-time tracking may make a lot of sense for your enterprise.
- Identify technologies that should be on your roadmap. Considering the technologies I've shared in this post (and beyond), identify which may be most practical for your organization. Do you need the UC or contact center cloud, mobile UC, CPaaS, or another?
- Closely watch the latest announcements from Avaya (and others) at Avaya Engage and other events. Review the latest announcements from Avaya and determine how they could benefit your organization. If an announcement for a particular technology is significant, you can baseline that to your internal plans and see how they might tie in. Also consider major announcements about end-user support, whether direct or through a VAR, and determine if that aligns with your expectations.
- Obtain an nondisclosure agreement (NDA) from Avaya and go deep (12 to 24 months if possible). Under an NDA, obtain Avaya's plans for evolving its UC, contact center, and adjacent technologies. This will provide perspective to use in aligning with your organization's plans. Ask when particular releases, features, and functions will be available. Ask if you can include such releases as a part of your upgrade platform. Ask what incentives Avaya will provide if you migrate from your premises platform to a cloud service.
- Build a pro-forma specification of your short- (12 months) and medium-term (24 to 36 months) requirements for budgetary purposes. Building pro-forma specifications for 12 to 36 months out will provide Avaya (and others) with enough financial detail for requesting CAPEX or OPEX budgetary requests for next the fiscal year and two years out.
- Ensure your current infrastructure is UC ready. Make sure all intra- and interbuilding cabling, Layer 3 switching, and WAN bandwidth is ready for UC, including all voice, video, data, and now extended technologies that require additional bandwidth. By 2020, 82% of all IP traffic will be video, Cisco has said. HD video calls will add approximately 1 Mbps of bandwidth per call over the data (depending on codec) -- i.e., 100 concurrent calls will add 100 Mbps. Voice calls at G.711 or G.722 HD codecs, placing video at 11 times the volume of a voice call. Expect video to add significant WAN bandwidth requirements.
- Identify areas for ROI. Many of our clients grab onto the notion of balancing any CAPEX or increased OPEX costs with ROI opportunities. We were able to save one client $1.5 million annually by leveraging SIP trunking. In another instance we identified $8.2 million annually in hard-dollar savings for a $10 million contact center opportunity, paying for the system in less than 15 months. In a third case, we identified $3.2 million savings annually for a $2 million annual UC and contact center cloud spend. Providing these kind of numbers to executive management goes a long way in getting approvals for any major CAPEX or OPEX investments for the same of next fiscal year. A spreadsheet showing all costs and hard-dollar savings -- "net net" costs -- seven to 10 years out can be a real asset for executive management. A recent SD-WAN use case with SIP trunking savings and POTS savings showed the client how it could create a fully redundant network across 500+ sites, spend $78 million over 10 years, and save $77 million or a net $1 million for an entire UC upgrade/replacement and replacement of a legacy MPLS network.
- Document your plan, and then present it to and get buy-in from CXO management. Document your plan in the form of a report and PowerPoint presentation for management. Consider your organization's objectives, capital/non-capital monies available, options available, project objectives, any risks associated with each, the general timeline for implementation, etc. Provide enough documentation and support to help management leverage the funding needed for a system upgrade or replacement. Develop a timeline, as a part of your plan, to include Avaya announcements; your due diligence; getting the assistance of industry experts when necessary; logistics required for a new system migration and UC readiness; one-time and ongoing costs, and use of the newer technologies available that can 1) facilitate your organization's effectiveness, and 2) differentiate your organization from others; and one-time and ongoing costs.
- When ready to purchase/upgrade, go out for bid. This is an excellent time to be an Avaya customer (or other vendor if Avaya is also bidding). When making a significant capital purchase or OPEX increase (cloud), a competitive bid via an RFP will always facilitate best pricing from any vendor. If you're an Avaya customer get two to three other bids. If you're a Cisco, NEC, Unify, Mitel, Microsoft, legacy Centrex, or other customer, get two to three bids and include Avaya in the process. Your due diligence and a strong, comprehensive RFP will give you the results you'll need in determining what services, technologies, and costs are available that will match closest to you and your organizations' vision and culture. I expect Avaya's pricing to be very aggressive over the next 12 to 24 months as it seeks to win back market share, and I would expect other vendors to be price-driven to some degree as well. There could be an all-out price war taking place and any enterprise customer can take advantage of such.
Summary and Conclusions
With the dynamics of mergers and acquisitions, the rise of the UC cloud, CPaaS, APIs, big data, AI, video going mainstream, and the new Age of Customer Experience, leveraging new technologies and integrating them with your culture to enhance your competitive edge are all critical considerations for enterprise customers.
It's good to see that Avaya has made it through the bankruptcy period. During that period, as expected, there was some erosion of Avaya's base. But it's a new day at Avaya and, as shared in an earlier No Jitter post by editor Beth Schultz, I would include Avaya in any procurement RFP while closely watching its financials and growth over the next six to 12 months.
We need a competitive environment with the many mergers and acquisitions that took place in 2017, as choices are always best for any enterprise organization. I look forward to including Avaya as a possible solution provider for our clients.
Hear more from Avaya during an Industry Vision Address at Enterprise Connect 2018, March 12 to 15, in Orlando, Fla. Register now using the code NOJITTER to save an additional $200 off the Early Bird Pricing or get a free Expo Plus pass.
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