Throughout our recent Enterprise Connect Tour, attendees showed a consistent curiosity about the potential for hosted Lync services. Not surprisingly, they're anticipating the option of complete Lync functionality as part of Microsoft's Office 365 cloud offering, but the prospect of a fully-featured hosted Lync service from Microsoft has been complicated by Redmond's slowness to deliver PSTN connectivity out of such a service. That's opened the door for other potential providers, and one of the most promising would have to be Fujitsu, which just announced a hosted UC service called ECS (Enterprise Communication Service) Connect.
Fujitsu is positioning ECS Connect to potentially offer multiple vendors' platforms on a hosted basis, but initially it'll just be a hosted Lync service, and it will deliver complete Lync Enterprise Voice functionality including PSTN connectivity. Fujitsu is building the ECS Connect service off its own extensive datacenter infrastructure, which it currently uses as the basis for its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings.
According to Jeff Stucker, Unified Communications Director for Fujitsu America, the datacenters are built using Fujitsu servers, and Fujitsu has a tight partnership with Microsoft, which means the ECS Connect service is well positioned to scale up to serve the largest enterprises. For example, Fujitsu is transitioning to Lync Enterprise Voice for its own internal 160,000-seat deployment, which will be based on its IaaS cloud (though Stucker couldn't say how far along that deployment is).
Stucker said Fujitsu is projecting big savings from its own deployment, and you'll never guess where the low-hanging fruit is: Bringing conferencing in house ($1.8 million a year). Fujitsu is also expecting to see savings from cellular minutes where users can connect via VoWiFi, and in general by winnowing down the number of systems and vendors running its communications.
The ECS Connect delivery model provides a dedicated Lync server instance for each customer, running on the shared infrastructure platform. Given Fujitsu's existing business in IaaS, infrastructure and desktop managed services, and IT outsourcing, "Just about all our major customers" have at least shown an interest in discussing future cloud Lync implementations, Jeff Stucker said.
One interesting element here is that Fujitsu has incentive to push its cloud Lync service aggressively, in order to maximize utilization of its own infrastructure resources. In fact, Stucker said, "We've got way more capacity in our cloud than we have ability to sell to our own customers," so Fujitsu's go-to-market for the ECS Connect service involves both direct selling of Fujitsu's own consulting and hosted-Lync services packaged together, as well as using partners who want to pair third-party consulting/implementation services with Fujitsu IaaS-based Lync capability.
Partners currently offering Office 365 are a particular fit for the ECS Connect service, since it fills in the gap of telco termination, letting the partner offer a hosted Office service that's completely cloud-based, according to Jeff Stucker.
Another point that Fujitsu is emphasizing is its insistence on doing a complete voice network analysis as a first step in rolling out the ECS Connect service. "That's really critical for end user satisfaction," Jeff Stucker pointed out; it's also something that our Enterprise Connect Lync Tour speakers asserted is not as universal a practice among enterprises as you'd expect it to be 10 years after VOIP went mainstream.
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