Fred and I were talking with a prospective speaker for an Enterprise Connect session on the Cloud this week, and the guy, an enterprise executive with a title that included "unified communications," was explaining the status of Cloud offerings as he saw it, from the perspective of a global enterprise serving multiple thousands of users at multiple hundreds of sites worldwide. His enterprise was committed to using Cloud-based services wherever it made sense--and by the way, it was looking increasingly like that actually would make sense in more and more places and scenarios.
He wasn't the least bit concerned that the Cloud was going to take his job or that of any of his colleagues.
For one thing, he said--and I'm sure this is true of most enterprises--he's already got a very lean operation. And he provided validation for something that you hear analysts and consultants say about the Cloud: He's hoping that using Cloud-based services will free up staff time to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Earlier this season, we had another conversation with a prospective enterprise-based speaker who told us that her communications organization was increasingly seeing itself as a service provider--in the broad sense of that term--to her end users. Not in the narrow legacy sense of "communications service provider," i.e., someone who provisions bandwidth and circuits; but rather, someone whose charge is to figure out what communications needs their end users have, and fulfill those needs.
You can see where the cloud would make this easier (though I must say that we didn't get into cloud strategy with this particular speaker). Maybe there are employees out there who really want to take charge of all their communications decisions and provisioning, because they're so enamored of a particular device or service. I think we often overestimate the size of this cohort because so many of us are among them.
But I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority have no problem with these decisions being made for them, if the tradeoff is that the employee doesn't have to invest their own time or money upfront in it. Just give me something that lets me do my job more effectively, make it easy to learn how to use it, and be done with it. Or, in the case of CEBP, just sneak it into some application that I use every day, make it open up into a communications portal I’m already familiar with or can easily learn, and don’t make a big deal out of it.
Managing all of this, on the back end, will still be a big deal. That's why our friend from the multinational wasn't worried about job security for himself or his team.
