In reading Eric's post Is UC Inevitable?, I considered some of my clients and what their responses to a survey would be if asked. I am questioning the answers.
In reading Eric's post Is UC Inevitable?, I considered some of my clients and what their responses to a survey would be if asked. I am questioning the answers.So let's look at Eric's choices for the enterprise:
All of the capabilities to all of the employees seems unrealistic. For 22% to agree with this implies to me that the survey respondent is assuming that if you offer UC features to a user, they will embrace it and be more productive. This also implies that all the features will be applicable to all the users. Not likely.
My own discussions with clients and seminar students have taught me that many users, probably most, don't have the imagination to apply all the features, or don't see the value, or will pick and choose from the menu.
What bothers me is that some of the pricing for UC delivery is in two or more tiers. The higher the tier, the greater the feature set, the higher the license fees. Do you think a CFO will agree that buying the most expensive license for all employees without justification will be worth the investment? I strongly doubt it. The CFO will not tolerate throwing money at a technology without some financial analysis and value.
I have one client that is stuck with a UC license, quite expensive, because a CIO said it should be piloted. What we found out was that the pilot was nearly a $1 million price. The client's organization cannot now afford to even consider competing UC solutions.
Some of the licenses are an extra $150 per seat for the full UC feature set. If not everyone is not going to use all the features, why pay the $150? Did the survey put a price tag forward when asking the question? If not, then the results are skewed favoring UC.
The next Eric comment was all the capabilities to some of the employees. This means that most of the employees will only have some of the capabilities available, which I agree with. I think that "most of the employees" will be the significant majority. What would have been interesting was to determine the population size of "some of the employees". There will be, in my opinion, a minority that can and will use all of the features. Again, if pricing was included, this percentage favoring UC would be smaller.
I remember surveys about predicting VoIP adoption. The same thing happened years ago, a positive pro-VoIP answer. Today, we see many enterprises using some VoIP for some employees. There is only a modest minority of enterprises that have fully deployed company wide. Look at the results from Alan Sulkin's analysis and you will see that VoIP sales, although growing, do not appear to accelerating like last year. The early take up of UC will without a doubt slow and may even flatten as enterprise learn the value, issues and cost of deploying UC.
I was at an Army base discussing some VoIP issues such as security, disaster recovery and anticipated feature usage. Federal government, especially military, procurements take a long time to implement. The DoD is still struggling with VoIP systems and their approval for use.
My observations are that in the near term, a few years, none of the DoD employees will get UC none of the time. There will be pockets of usage such as voice, video and web conferencing, but deployed as separate applications. A vendor could boast that this is UC, but the average DoD implementer would probably argue against this vendor conclusion.
I was not surprised that few enterprises say they won't be performing ROI calculations. This same thing happened in the early deployment of VoIP. Those early VoIP adopters wanted to experiment or lead their industry or their peers. The fact that few RFPs are issued can mean that the enterprise has an already favored incumbent supplier that now offers UC. I have also found that it is difficult to define the usage scenarios for UC procurement in an RFP, thereby restricting or eliminating the usefulness of an RFP...
Another client of mine is wary of deploying UC throughout their enterprise for legal and compliance reasons. The more forms of communications, the more forms of "electronically stored information" that has to be retained for regulatory or legislative reasons. A bigger storage price, a larger backup and duplication site and a real headache trying to comply with requirements like e-discovery will be the result. So one solution is to limit the users who have access to UC or bar access altogether. Result: None of the employees none of the time.
The last possibility for Eric is some capabilities to select employees. I think this number will be very high in the early deployments and makes sense. Once we look back in 3 or 4 years, I think we will see that this is the vast majority.
I think those respondents that chose all capabilities to all employees drank the vendor Kool-aid and made a faith, not a business decision. A faith decision that the selected vendor will deliver an increasingly robust set of features and functions at an affordable price. They should go back through the lessons learned with VoIP and apply them to UC.
