If you can put out an RFP for a type of product and receive credible responses from most or all of the players in that segment, then you have a product that’s probably ready for prime time.
Is the cloud ready for prime time? Can hosted providers do the job?
Gary Audin has pointed up some of the shortcomings in cloud providers' offerings and general market readiness. He was writing mainly about SMB-focused offerings--what about the enterprise?
Hopefully we'll get a lot more information on that score at Enterprise Connect 2011. Brent Kelly of Wainhouse Research is going to present an RFP for an enterprise deployment, and will discuss the extent to which such an RFP can or cannot be met today by managed/hosted services. We’re informally calling this session our "Cloud RFP," but cloud services are new enough that this is as much an exercise in understanding the state of the market as it is in evaluating specific RFP responses.
This is a big deal. RFP sessions have become one of the hallmarks of Enterprise Connect, now and in its former life as VoiceCon. That’s as it should be, because we're a show that's overwhelmingly attended by buyers, and so we try to offer them a vision for long-term planning, as well as information they can use today as they execute the steps along the way to that vision.
RFP sessions give end users a massive amount of data they can take home and use to help them in crafting and refining their own RFPs, but this type of session helps to do something strategic as well: It helps the marketplace understand when a technology is ready for prime time. Bottom line: If you can put out an RFP for a type of product and receive credible responses from most or all of the players in that segment, then you have a product that’s probably ready for prime time. You can then move on to the step of comparing one vendor's offerings against others'.
That's how it worked when we first did IP-PBX RFPs, and it's where we’re headed with our Unified Communications and Mobility RFP sessions. And so now we're using the RFP format to help answer the question: Is the cloud ready for prime time?
We've got four vendors who have committed to respond to Brent’s RFP and to be on hand at the Orlando workshop to elaborate on those responses. They are:
1. BT Global Services (with Microsoft as a partner)
2. InterCall[Note: Since I posted this, Brent has let me know that Intercall won't be participating in the session, though they' are in this market
3. Cypress Communications
4. PGi
In addition, Brent has told me he has a couple of more prospects for panelists, and if this session is as big as I think it's going to be, they'll be well served by jumping in.
The diversity of the companies already committed tells us something about Cloud-based communications: It's a market that many different kinds of players see as an opportunity to expand their own business model. We have a telco-owned system integrator (BT Global Services) working with the biggest software company in the market; two companies that come out of the world of business conferencing services (InterCall and PGi); and a company that has basically built itself from the outset as a hosted UC provider (Cypress).
It's especially interesting to see the conferencing vendors making a play here. For the past several years, whenever anyone talked about UC ROI, the conversation usually came down to one basic change: Taking the enterprise’s audio conferencing in-house, to an IP-based bridge, and ditching the conferencing service. A couple VoiceCons ago, we even had the question posed by an audience member: If the cloud's so hot, why is everyone giving up one of the few cloud services they already have?
It looks like the conferencing vendors are trying to fight this trend in a logical way: By going after the core markets of the vendors who spent the last several years attacking conference service providers’ revenue base. If this kind of battle breaks out in the cloud, the result could be interesting choices and possibly good deals for the enterprise.
