By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email 4/23/10
I'm just getting ready to leave the UC Summit but I wanted to give all TA members a quick review of what I've learned. I'll blog more extensively over the next several days.
The UC Summit was billed as a collection of "channel thought leaders" which it certainly was. In layman's terms, it was all the big universal communications solution equipment providers (NEC, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, IBM, Microsoft, etc.), their resellers, their analysts & independent consultants. Except for a couple hosted VoIP business owners I think I was the sole representative of the "network service sales" world.
It was quite eye opening because while the folks I met acknowledged "network service sales people" like me and many TA members are active in the industry, by and large, they really did not acknowledge that network service master agent distributors were playing a big role in how "UC" solutions were being packaged and sold to the end users.
I guess that's good and bad. The opportunity for pure network services distributors is that all the "equipment guys" we both swap leads with and/or compete with are all trying to get to the same place we are, how do you sell business customers "solutions" instead of boxes or dial-tone?
The big lesson I learned is that all the solutions providers acknowledge that they need to be perceived as using communications technologies to make corporate business practices more efficient in a measurable(cost justified) way.
While many TA members and vendors have been struggling to get hosted solutions fielded and sold in a profitable manner, those TA members and vendors that perfect solution deliverability and profitability within the next year or so will be in a great position.
Of all the "phone system" solution providers I met at the conference, all were open to hosted solutions because they saw that their customers are interested in hearing about them.
On the other hand I didn't find anyone who thought that premise based phone systems would become extinct any time soon.
The take away for TA's classic "network service only" salesperson is that you need to get up to speed on the solutions that the network hardware and software are delivering. While there will always be a need by the equipment solutions providers for network service people that can get a multi-location MPLS network installed correctly, if the same salesperson is not also consulting on the equipment solution (hosted or not) that delivers the business solution, that sales person will continue to have to give half their commission away to their equipment lead partner and eventually go out of business when their equipment lead partner creates an in-house staff position for that job.