Our friend and No Jitter contributor Larry Lisser has a post on the just-completed UC Summit, which is the annual event that UCStrategies puts on for the channel and consultant community. It's a good summary of Larry's takeaways from the event (which I had to miss because it ran the same time as my Interop VOIP/UC track).Larry's a veteran of dealing in the channel, so he brings a pragmatism to complement the visionary perspective that he's gotten from dealing with startups over the years. And that pragmatism comes out in his first takeaway:
It's still about selling. Period.
He elaborates:
Telecom or otherwise, selling higher margin solutions to enterprise is not easy stuff. It takes sales people that can quickly recognize or better, uncover problems their offering can solve in a way the customer may not have otherwise perceived. It takes listening, a sensitivity for the pitfalls of business processes that are not optimized, and an appreciation for the role your products can play in fixing it.... Don't get me wrong. VARs are loaded with good sales people, not the least of the which are the owner/operators. But they're being asked to do something very different than what they're trained to do.
My thought in reading all of Larry's post (which you should go do) is that it's kind of a mirror image of the post-Interop blog I just did (here). Ironic: Larry's report from the "visionary" conference focuses on the nuts and bolts, and my report from the "infrastructure" conference focuses on the strategic vision.
In some ways, that kind of makes sense. The infrastructure buyers at Interop are worried about making the right strategic choice, so they need to look 5-10 years into the future. And the channel partners, vendors and consultants at UC Summit are trying to incubate an industry, and they know that a market is only validated by one thing: People writing checks for the product.
I hate to drag this back to the "future of the phone" idea--just because we keep coming back to it--but it seems to me that this is a place where pragmatism could meet vision. Are there enterprises out there that, in their next RFPs, should "zero out" the line item for desk sets, and then make every user or business unit justify any new expenditures on hard phones? What would this exercise teach the enterprise about where its communications investments are headed, or should be headed?
