UCStrategies.com's first annual UC Summit was a big hit - with resellers, system integrators, consultants, and vendors gathered together in a heavenly resort in Scottsdale for 2 ½ days of networking and education (and even relaxing in the sun for a little bit). Aimed at helping resellers/SI's and consultants better understand some of the issues and trends in the UC world, and to help forge better relations between and among consultants, resellers, and vendors, the UC Summit certainly met its goals.
UCStrategies.com's first annual UC Summit was a big hit - with resellers, system integrators, consultants, and vendors gathered together in a heavenly resort in Scottsdale for 2 ½ days of networking and education (and even relaxing in the sun for a little bit). Aimed at helping resellers/SI's and consultants better understand some of the issues and trends in the UC world, and to help forge better relations between and among consultants, resellers, and vendors, the UC Summit certainly met its goals.There were breakout focus groups and roundtable discussions, as well as presentations from the extended UCStrategies.com team, as well as leading vendors and visionaries, such as Siemens' Mark Straton, Microsoft's Eric Swift, IBM's Bruce Morse, AVST's Mike Berlin, and Motorola's Don Hausman.
Day one started with a workshop led by Steve McDonald of Optimus Solutions, where he discussed how yesterday's model of selling communications solutions no longer works. What's needed today is a new model that starts with evaluating your business and determining your core UC offerings. Then resellers can move on to developing partner synergy, developing partnership offerings, going to market, and then as Steve said, "Rinse and Repeat."
Jim Burton kicked off the official opening of the conference, noting that timing is everything, and that 2008 is a time to prepare and 2009 and beyond will be the time to make things happen. The keynote speaker was Mark Straton of Siemens Enterprise Communications. Mark stated that voice is the most fundamental method of communications, and any communication solution has to be built around a voice foundation. Describing Siemens' UC perspective, he stated that UC is rapidly transitioning to mainstream business, a single-vendor UC solution is not realistic, and the real customer value is through communications-enabled business processes (CEBP), providing the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO).
On Day 2 of the UC Summit, I gave an overview of the UC market, with market forecasts and projections, and more. There were some great questions about how users will be able to handle all the interruptions from IM, how they can manage their availability, and if people like executives will actually set rules to control which communications they want to receive and how they want to receive them. David Yedwab then led a panel discussion with representatives from Siemens, Motorola, AVST, Interactive Intelligence, Communicado, NET, Altigen, and Excel. For the next session, Kerry Shih from Communicado talked about how UC is THE impending event that will spawn all other changes that the market wants to be a part of. But it's important to tease out the short attention span/gotta-have-it-now dynamic in business, and to get other groups to "pull through" on the project. The pull for UC is there if you can get across the right message of what the benefits are. Most customers are not ready to manage and absorb full UC, and a managed service approach can be the right solution.
During an interactive reseller/consultant session, it became clear that there is lots of confusion in the industry - many resellers have consulting practices and engage in consulting projects as part of their engagements, and many consultants do some integration work. This can lead to friction and misunderstanding for the customer, as well as the resellers and consultants. It's therefore important to understand who the other party is and what their role is vis-a-vis the customer. It's also important to have a strong definition of who has what role and responsibility in regard to the customer. When this takes place, a great working relationship can happen. If it's unclear as to what the role of the consultant is when working with a customer, it can be confusing to the reseller, and vice versa.
Another session, focusing on the vendor/reseller relationship, brought up totally different issues, such as how can vendors enable strategic partners and help them use these products internally without impacting the reseller's profit and bottom line. Resellers often have to re-engineer vendors' products to make them work better, and are expected to fix product problems. But the reseller is also expected to invest in not only training, but also has to pay for buying the vendors' products to bring them in-house. Vendors need creative ways to ensure the reseller buy-in. Some vendors provide demo equipment at no charge, but in the UC world, this is not cookie-cutter technology and every environment is different. Resellers can't have test systems for every environment. If resellers have to invest in a lot of different technologies, it comes out of their profit.
The next day Mike Berlin of AVST spoke about the UC/UM market and key considerations when moving forward. He noted that voice mail is often an entry point for companies to deploy additional capabilities, including UC, later on. Customers are starting to displace legacy systems, and resellers and consultants can make this into a revenue opportunity using voice mail as a point of entry. There's a lot of old voice mail systems out there and it's a great "knock on the door strategy" to see what companies are doing with their messaging systems and explain that you can help provide migration capability to UC.
There were many other sessions and presentations, and you can read more about the UC Summit at www.ucstrategies.com.
