Prior to Enterprise Connect earlier this year, I had the opportunity to hear about Votela from Adam Cole, CEO and Tim Cook, Vice President of Business Development.
Based in Annapolis, MD, Votela is the sole combined carrier and North America distributor for Siemens OpenScape Cloud Services. Adam said their platform promises feature rich, scalable and easy-to-deploy solutions with five different seat types to choose from.
Adam and Tim aren't strangers to the voice business, thanks to their prior stint as an Interconnect, ABTECH for 20 years. They both had something to say about heading to the cloud:
"It's not just financial."
Customers want to focus on their core businesses and not IT and telephony. Votela's market focus is on the 50-2,000 seat space, and I'd agree that in the higher seat range--1,000 seats and up--that these customers tend to ask the old question, "Do we really want to be a phone company?"
But that's not enough of an argument to not buy or lease a PBX for any firm. Another concern that Adam and Tim hit upon is the idea that my IT pals love to cite: Having predictable costs. This is a key concern because many businesses fail because they cannot grasp that failing to control controllable costs is key for survival. These firms ignore the opportunities and become complacent with monthly OPEX as simply overhead.
Here's where I think that the argument falls a bit short. These same businesses fail to weigh that a wise investment can yield a return (ROI). Hosted and cloud services are very predictable but they are often more expensive than buying or leasing a premise solution. The real value comes in rightsizing the licensing, and with a premise solution it can be more difficult. Throw in the TCO and the gap narrows.
As Adam and Tim both pointed out, scaling the solution on demand is something that a premise solution may have issues with.
Again, Adam and Tim know the business and I thought that getting to why they are excited about providing cloud services instead of "Interconnect" services would be more revealing. So I asked, "Why change your business model?"
"It's less risky, less headaches, less overhead and higher profit."
I've evaluated several offerings for hosted services and I've heard and concluded the same things. Adam and Tim were quick to remind me that having enough trained staff with trucks to roll, and maintaining a warehouse full of stuff to maintain service and sales isn't easy.
I asked, "Do you have any questions for me?" Both wanted to know if I ever read "Death of the Telecom VAR in 2013" by Jeff Hawkes. I hadn't read the piece until now. Having read it, I have mixed thoughts about the conclusion and the rationale.
Everything that Adam and Tim mentioned in our talk, I agree with. For customers, it's not just a financial decision and it's evident that some businesses favor predictability, scalability and convenience. Votela is an Interconnect turning to the cloud for all the right reasons. No one with voice experience ever said, "It's easy being a phone company" and Votela certainly has a platform to lay claim to providing customers what they want, when they want it and how they want services delivered.
But there's more to their story because the question of late, at least for a good period of time, has been raised in plenty of organizations: "Do we really want to be an IT company?" There’s no question that the cloud will be leveraged more for both voice and IT. How customers migrate to the best-breed cloud solutions and what premise solutions remain will be interesting to see unfold. The landscape will definitely change, as will the consequences for when things go awry, which will be weighed against as the benefits such as when companies need to expand or contract.
Telecommunications is no longer a utilitarian service associated with the one-armed bandit (the telephone, not the slot machine), because customers are actually feeling value even when the service costs more than owning a premise solution.
