Yesterday I participated in a briefing with a vendor who indicated that some of its independent VARs are embarking on developing and offering their own hosted UC services.  These VARS serve medium and small businesses, and historically derive a significant amount of their revenue from designing and installing equipment like routers, IP PBXs, IADs/gateways, and LANs.  Another major source of their revenue consists of fees for upgrading this equipment, and to perform break/fix functions.  Most of these firms can show little if any expertise in the ongoing day-day operations, administration, management and performance assurance of both the assets and applications that are a service provider’s bread and butter.  For instance, many lack the breadth of operational support systems service providers use to monitor end-end IP performance on a continual basis.  This type of proactive, continuous monitoring and support is essential for many real time IP applications.  In addition most of the equipment VARs offer to customers is based on a purchase or leasing arrangement, but this is not the type of acquisition model many smaller businesses can afford at present.  Thus it surprises and concerns me that some medium and smaller VARs want to take on this challenge directly-because it’s an expensive undertaking (for equipment, applications development and management, operational support and billing systems and staffing expertise) with a very long payback to do right.  Considering that few VARs are flush with cash, I think the majority of those offering their own hosted UC services will re-consider, and so prospective customers are duly cautioned.

However, there is another business model for VARs that are interested in the opportunity that hosted and SaaS-based UC provides, one that I think makes more sense.  In contrast to the above, some vendors are creating packages/bundles that make it easier for VARs to sell and support a wide spectrum of hosted and managed UC applications.  This week’s Broadsoft/Adtran/Polycom announcement is a case in point-it focuses on offering VARs hosted solutions that are easy to install (see http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-newsroom/adtran-works-with-broadsoft-and-polycom-on-hosted-services-delivery.aspx and http://www.adtran.com/web/page/portal/Adtran/wp_newsroom_newsreleases).  If deployed in combination with the availability of the new Broadcloud application delivery platform, this should help a variety of providers, including VARs, to offer uniform (pre-specified)  SaaS-based UC services (UCaaS), precisely the kind of offers many medium and small customers want to deploy (see http://www.ucstrategies.com/unified-communications-newsroom/broadsoft-introduces-new-cloud-based-infrastructure-for-unified-communications.aspx and http://www.broadsoft.com/news/2010/broadsoft-introduces-broadcloud).  Over time, these types of offers should help reduce UC installation intervals.  For instance, today, most providers’ current SIP Trunk installation intervals are 60-90 days.  Additionally, the Broadcloud solution includes PacketSmart diagnostic tools that identify problems that can impact real-time applications, which is another important element on the road to becoming a service provider.  However, these tools are reactive in nature.  While this puts can place VARs on a level playing field with customers who would otherwise attempt to perform these functions in-house, it doesn’t provide a superior service experience.  Thus VARs who want to provide a higher level of performance assurance to customers should evaluate additional services, like VoIPCare, which monitors call quality on an ongoing basis.   This can help reduce the length of downtime or service disruptions.  While this does not constitute UC performance nirvana, it is several steps better than what many VARs and their customers have in place now, or would have in place with the go-to-market approach I described in the first paragraph.  Thus, I expect packaged product and lifecycle UC offers to be very useful to both VARs (and a number of other UC providers) and to their prospective hosted UC and UCaaS businesses customers.  In a world full of vendor solutions searching for customer problems, packaged product and lifecycle UC offers are indeed a solution that fits a very pressing business need.

Tags: Unified Communications //