Who hasn’t heard of, planned for or even begun using some form of cloud-based service? From a personal use perspective, if you have a Gmail, Twitter or Facebook account, you can consider yourself an early pioneer of cloud-based services! However, for the enterprise, many IT executives believe cloud computing is or will soon revolutionize business infrastructures. In fact, according to a new poll by Deloitte of more than 750 enterprise-level IT executives, almost 25% see the cloud as a viable option to on-premise server and storage (see Channel Cloud Computing). However, security and ownership issues must be effectively addressed before cloud computing becomes fully adopted.

But how does the cloud affect enterprise voice? Many associate hosted VoIP systems with the cloud craze, but according to No-Jitter’s contributing writer, Dave Michels, hosted VoIP actually pre-dates it. In his article, “Ten Ways the Cloud Will Reshape Voice,” Michels does an excellent job of describing how cloud computing technologies are dramatically impacting enterprise voice. However, the one sentence in his article that I most agree with is “the cloud changes everything and nothing”. I’d like to focus this post on the nothing.

Even if 2010 holds the promise for an organization to migrate to a cloud-based enterprise voice solution, IT / Telecom managers realize it rarely happens quickly, and that they still have to keep the existing phone system fully operational. Fortunately, this is where the cloud can be used just as effectively to remotely monitor and maintain existing premise-based phone systems. Managers can extend the life of their existing systems and/or seamlessly migrate to a new phone system at whatever pace is most appropriate for their organization.

As a third party telephony monitoring and maintenance company, our experience shows that over 97% of the alarms generated by a premise-based phone system can be resolved by a remote technician in the cloud. By using a cloud-based monitoring service, IT managers can cost-effectively prevent system outages by using remote telecom experts and deploy their IT resources to focus on other important IT initiatives.

Remote monitoring, maintenance and management of business phone systems have been operational from “the cloud” for over a decade. This underscores the validity of cloud computing and actually helps usher it in by enabling IT managers to intelligently migrate to cloud-based enterprise voice solutions at the right time and for the right reasons.

What do you think? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

A friend of mine who used to work at Gartner invited me to attend an event hosted by the Colorado Chapter of Society for Information Management. At first I was a bit hesitant to accept the invitation because I was not familiar with SIM Colorado and I was afraid it might just be another sales "networking" event. After doing a little research, however, I discovered that there are SIM chapters around the world that consist of information technology experts, including CIO’s, CTO’s and emerging IT leaders. Their mission is to help develop the next generation of effective IT leaders by establishing a forum to bring together IT professionals from across industries.

Suffice to say, my friend convinced me to attend the event and I found it to be very valuable and enjoyable. However, when the key note speaker announced what the "ice breaker" activity was going to be to kick off the evening, several of us looked at each other in shock and considered sneaking out the back door. You’ve heard of "Speed Dating"… well we were asked to introduce ourselves to 6 different individuals and spend only 2 minutes clearly describing who we were and what we do for our companies! They called it "Speed Networking"!

After all the groaning and moaning around the room subsided, we began the terrifying activity of talking (and intently listening) to one another… and I’m happy to say everybody survived the ordeal. What this forced each of us to do was to convey who we are and what we do as IT leaders in words that are not laced with techno-jargon, but are easy to understand by anyone. By the 6th person, most of us felt pretty good about how we could summarize what we do in a way that was both concise and interesting… what many refer to as your elevator pitch. Here is what mine ended up sounding like:

"At Telizent Communications, we help companies proactively monitor and maintain their business telephone systems. Just like regular medical checkups help prevent heart attacks, our proactive health checks help prevent telephone systems from having major outages by alerting us of symptoms before major problems occur. Telizent can always revive a downed phone system after the fact, but consider the impact that an outage can have on your company financially as a result of lost sales, or on your reputation due to poor customer service, or even on your employee safety due to them being unreachable on the phone. As CTO, my role is to architect and manage our proactive monitoring and maintenance SaaS toolset that we call Monitor+.  It is designed to prevent telephone system outages."

I had the privilege of meeting IT leaders from Microsoft, Frontier Airlines, Great West Life and many other prominent companies and state agencies in Colorado, and the "elevator pitch" that I had finally come up with above actually made the conversations with each of them even more valuable. So how about your elevator pitch? Are you ready as an IT Leader to convey what your company does in a way that most anyone could understand? I’m not sure I did a great job with my pitch above, but I can tell you that it has helped reduce my fumbling for words to describe what we do at Telizent Communications.

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Rolling out large enterprise telecom solutions across many sites, as well as supporting geographically disbursed systems and call centers with maintenance, break-fix, and upgrade services creates numerous logistical and economic challenges. C-Suite executives are intuitively aware of the challenges, but often are unaware of how to address them in an efficient, cost-effective manner.

The Challenges:

1. The single vendor fallacy

Selecting a single telecom (Avaya, Cisco, Nortel, Mitel, Siemens etc…) platform accomplishes far less to meet the goal of reducing long-term ownership costs than you would expect. Several flies appear in this well reasoned ointment including:

• Single Vendor maintenance services for the platform you choose/chose are largely an illusion. These global platform developers increasingly rely on small to medium distributors of varying and limited geographies and capabilities. You may have a support contract with the manufacturer; but at the end of the day, your staff will be coordinating and otherwise dealing with multiple service providers to cover your nationally distributed sites. To illustrate, Avaya and Siemens are pushing more tier 1 through 3 services to their partners. In a further outsourcing play, Siemens is outsourcing all field services to broader territories to a third party who traditionally relies heavily on hourly contract workers.
• An acquisition of other companies is likely to create a near instant mix of communication platforms. Your firm ends up managing at least one new platform with each firm acquired assuming the acquisition target had previously standardized its enterprise telecom platform. If the target hadn’t standardized, your telecom team is facing the need to manage and maintain multiple platforms over night.
• As manufacturers rapidly move to develop their VoIP and Unified Communications server technologies, legacy PBX systems are placed on end-of-life and end-of-support status prematurely; long before the installed systems fail to address the 95+% threshold of user needs for a technology refresh. The business case for a platform refresh is absent, yet the voice communication partner has an end-of-life gun pointed at your head.
• Managing new server-based communications technologies along with legacy systems presents similar interoperability and support challenges as managing multiple manufacturers’ platforms. Mix 2 manufactures with legacy PBX and IP-telephony systems and…you get the idea.

2. Multiplication issues

The internal support of IT/telecom systems spread across 50-100 cities compounds the management headache of coordinating service providers. Multiply the number of cities by the number of different platforms in the network and the headache becomes a migraine.

The primary challenge is not the physical distance. The primary challenge is information management. When the headquarters IT/Telecom team has scant records on the remote site, they view the distance (to go look and see, i.e. collect information while trying to fix a service affecting issue) as the challenge. If the design and other records from the original installation were maintained, the need to dispatch a tech to go, look and investigate would be less.

Consider the following recommendations to addressing these challenges:

1. Let go of the illusion of single vendor support. Call them PBX, IP-Telephony, Unified Communications solutions providers. This provides a clearer picture of just how many different communications vendors are entrenched in the firm. These vendors say their main business is developing and selling software-based solutions. The ongoing maintenance and support is being pushed out to distributors and channel partners. It is the rare customer who is supported directly by the manufacturer.
2. Equip your staff with tools that proactively manage the network, servers, and other devices. By proactively managing, I refer to:
   • Active monitoring and with the flexibility to fine tune what events represent “Majors” to your business.
   • Proactively build, manage, and maintain the design, carrier, cable, rack lay out and other information. Having this information readily available will accelerate problem resolution. The on-going management of this information is easier than trying to research for it under battle conditions.
   • Collaboration tools leverage the monitoring and information among the team members (employees, vendors and partners), streamlining the routine support and project management functions.
3. Become more independent utilizing proven tool sets that are designed to manage multiple platforms and generations of technologies.

These challenges and recommendations are often woven into the sales presentations of large IT outsourcing companies. They can hire large staff, apply best practices, and invest in tool sets. However, not all companies are willing to trust that an outsourcing play will not result in less control and personalization than can be accomplished by an internal team.

Telizent offers enterprises the tools and services needed to self service and fill the gaps of the challenges cited above.

What are your thoughts on the prospect of self maintaining your communications environment? If you found this post useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.

This post was inspired by a September 8, 2009 InfoWorld article titled Dirty Vendor Tricks. The article talks about unscrupulous software vendors and mentions six dirty tricks they employed to separate you from hard earned company funds. The six dirty tricks listed in the article are as follows:

1. The Magic Demo – a canned demo that does magical things but doesn’t actually represent what the vendor can deliver

2. Underbid, then Overcharge – pretty self-explanatory

3. The Customer Headlock – once some vendors have you as a customer they will do anything to keep you, even if it crosses unethical lines

4. The Billing Mistake – billing you for services never rendered, or for more than you contracted

5. The Forced Upgrade March – requiring costly upgrades to keep you current even when what you purchased is relatively new

6. The Clueless Customer – This isn’t really a dirty trick, but is what happens when the customer puts too much trust in their vendors

If you’d like to read some of the specific horror stories that help drive their point, you can find the article here.

After reading the article I had two thoughts. My first thought was caveat emptor, buyer beware. It’s unfortunate that there are people and companies in this world that are more concerned about collecting money by any means than by acting with integrity.

However unfortunate this business model is, it is a reality of doing business and the customer must take the responsibility to ensure that they aren’t being taken advantage. This means taking the time to read the fine print of contracts and agreements as well as making sure that expectations, exceptions and assumptions are clearly communicated in writing. The larger the project in terms of business impact or cost, the greater the requirement to have a clear, written contract that can be reviewed by both parties. Ask your vendor to provide written expectations, exceptions and assumptions before you accept the terms of an agreement or give your authorization to allow work to begin. It can be as simple as a several line email or as complex as a multi-page document. It’s amazing the clarity that such a practice provides for both client and vendor and can save both parties time and money.

The second thought I had was that it really helps to know as much as you can about the companies you’re doing business with. I realize this thought seems a bit obvious, but it is often overlooked. Ask for referrals and actually talk with the reference accounts. Ask questions like, “Did their invoice match their proposal and if not why?” or “Was the level of service delivered equal to their promises?” If a company you’re doing business with treats a previous client unscrupulously what makes you think that it would be different for you?

Don’t take me wrong, I don’t believe all or even most businesses behave poorly. The vast majority of firms conduct business in a professional manner and try to take care of their customers. It only takes one unscrupulous vendor, though, to put your own firm in jeopardy. Take the time to read the contract and get a clear, documented understanding of what products and services you are contracting. In the long run, the enhanced clarity will improve the client-vendor relationship.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. If you found it useful, please leave a comment, share with your peers, or subscribe to the news feed to have my future posts delivered to your news feed reader.