A couple examples of this for our company was in our decision to use a hosted project management solution by Clarizen and a hosted Microsoft Exchange solution by Mailstreet. For example, for us to purchase, install and manage our own Microsoft Exchange server, we estimated that it would cost us at least $10,000 in the first year alone for hardware, software licenses, installation fees and ongoing administration. Instead, we pay less than $100/mo for our employees to have access to MailStreet’s Hosted Exchange service, allowing us to add and delete users any time we need to. For those partners, contractors and customers that need email boxes from us, we simply provide them an IMAP mailbox from our hosting provider, 1and1.com. This approach has saved us thousands of dollars a year and many hours of headaches we used to have trying to manage our own email server in-house.

Our customers find themselves needing to make this same type of evaluation as they consider using our cloud-based monitoring and information management tools – a service offering we call Monitor+. We have learned firsthand that the total cost of ownership (TCO) of developing, integrating and supporting all of the components of Monitor+ over the past 3 years has been much higher than we expected… despite how much due diligence we initially did. Fortunately, we have been able to spread that cost across multiple customers over a period of years and thus we are able to offer very competitive monthly fees.

When considering all the direct costs associated with creating the Monitor+ service offering, I believe our partners and/or customers would end up spending nearly 80% more to acquire and support all of the applications that comprise Monitor+ vs. paying the Monitor+ monthly service fee we charge. When requested, we help our customers evaluate the "rent vs. own" costs for themselves, and typically they end up choosing the MSP option verses trying to develop a proactive monitoring solution on their own. Ultimately, Monitor+ frees our customers and/or partners to focus on their core business and avoid the risk of disruption of their voice and data services.

Depending on your tax situation, the after-tax cash cost to finance the development, installation and support of an integrated application platform like Clarizen, Mailstreet or Monitor+ would favor an MSP option. Since MSP fees are expensed, a growing company can essentially use the MSP’s capital. In today’s environment of tighter credit and a scarcity of cash, most companies should have a bias to a managed service or cloud computing as part of maximizing after-tax return on assets/equity.

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.

1. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

2. Platform-as-a-Service

3. Infrastructure-as-a-Service

My goal today is not to dig into the differences of these 3 categories of cloud computing (a good future topic), but to simply ask if cloud computing has impacted you lately – either positively or negatively. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Telizent’s service offering to intelligently monitor and maintain business communication systems (Monitor+) is accomplished largely through cloud computing. Using Johna’s definition above, we’d likely be categorized as a SaaS offering, and 95% of the time we are able to remotely resolve any alarm / problem that is identified by Monitor+ using our SaaS toolset.

But what about our internal use of cloud computing? We actually try to walk the talk. About a year and a half ago, we were searching for an easy-to-use project management tool that we could use to manage some of our telecom projects. Microsoft Excel was not interactive and Microsoft Project was too complex and too expensive. After a little research we discovered a SaaS Project Management tool called Clarizen and we haven’t looked back. It enables us to manage projects across multiple locations, clients and users via the web, without having to load anything on a project member’s machine… in fact much of the interaction is done right from their email inbox!

On the bumpier side of the equation, about a year ago we began using Microsoft’s Office Live CRM tool to track our web inquiries and manage our opportunity pipeline. All was going well until one morning (about two months ago) we woke up to find that the “create new opportunity” function in Office Live was no longer working after a new release the night before.

After 6 weeks of submitting several requests to their message board (they have no direct support phone number any longer) and not getting any resolution, I had to find an alternative option for our organization. So far we’re very pleased with our new CRM solution from Tigerpaw Software. However it is with some chagrin that I share with you as I write this blog entry that I decided to check one last time to see if Microsoft had resolved the Office Live issue without notifying me… you guessed it, the “create new opportunity” feature is now functioning again.

Just keeping it real. Cloud computing is of tremendous value to businesses, but there are some risks that we each need to plan for accordingly. What are your experiences with Cloud Computing? 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.

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.

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.

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.

While standards help organizations leverage economies of scale and reduce overall usage costs, IT groups within large companies are realizing that the “one-size-fits-all” mentality is no longer acceptable.

It seems that every day a new article is published about which carriers have the best networks, which mobile devices have the best user interface, or what mobile applications have the most downloads. Of these three areas, which do you believe is most important?

Though I don’t use an iPhone personally, I have to take my hat off to Apple with regard to their now famous slogan “There’s an app for that”. I too believe that the mobile application is the most important piece to the mobility movement, especially if it runs on multiple mobile platforms. Network World’s Mitchell Ashley, refers to these mobile apps as “micro apps” – a narrow, targeted, mobile app that performs a specific task at the very moment you think of it or need it. Mitchell believes that users would rather download an app to perform a discrete tasks rather than searching for them in Google, navigating to the right website, and then having to use a website interface. I agree.

Do you support multiple mobile devices and/or applications within your organization? BlackBerry has been the dominant smart phone in corporations because of how well it has addressed security requirements; however they have limited apps for their users and are therefore at risk of losing market share. In fact, two highly regarded analysts think that Apple and Blackberry will be in the rearview mirror of both Android apps and Microsoft Mobile apps as early as 2012. Gartner believes that Android will grab the No. 2 position in market share in 2012 while iSuppi analyst Tina Teng predicts Windows Mobile will be the #2 OS in 2013.

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.

With no additional hardware, businesses can download the Skype for Asterisk module and enable their employees to direct dial Skype users right from their existing telephone! Combine this module with Skype’s existing ability to provide live text chat, video chat, and screen sharing with over 400 million Skype users around the world, you can now easily equip your organization with a robust communication platform for very little cost.

I’m not advocating that companies go out and buy an Asterisk phone system, but I am suggesting that you should be asking yourself if your infrastructure is flexible enough to effectively communicate with all of your constituents. As we know, our prospects, customers, partners and vendors want to communicate with us when and how they want. The more flexible we can be to communicate with those who have a need for our services, the more compelling our services will be to them. It is my conviction that unless you have this mindset, you will wake up one morning and realize the train has left the station and your company is not on it.

In March of this year I travelled to London to attend the 2009 UC Expo. Industry experts had indicated that Europe was about 12 months ahead of the US in the adoption and deployment of Unified Communications (UC) systems and I needed to get a sense of what was available and what was coming down the pipe. My primary focus was to understand the capabilities of Microsoft’s OCS (Office Communication Server) system because some of our customers and prospects were asking questions about OCS and how it might integrate with their existing Avaya, Nortel, and Siemens PBX systems. I’m pleased to say that one of our Microsoft partners became OCS certified ) shortly after I returned to the States, and I now have the Office Communicator client open on my desktop – right next to my Skype client.

I will spend some time in a future post talking about how impressed I am with Microsoft’s Office Communicator (MOC), especially with how it seamlessly integrates presence into my exiting Office applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, Live Meeting, etc). However MOC does not afford me the same type of convenient, cost effective access to our prospects, customers, partners and vendors that Skype currently does. For example, we just hired two sales people on the east coast and it was effortless to begin communicating with them via Skype – voice, chat, and now screen sharing – for no cost. Similarly, one of the modules we use on our Service Portal was developed by a company in Spain and I chat with their developers via Skype.

What is your experience with communicating with your customers, partners, vendors and prospects? Do you find chat clients like Skype valuable? Does your company allow 3^rd party chat clients on your network? What lessons have you learned? I’m all ears.

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 blog will be exploring the different tools and technologies that our customers and partners have adopted to optimize their communication infrastructures. Sometimes I’ll be asking for your feedback – how have you addressed this issue of customer-vendor communication?

A picture is worth a thousand words… or in this case, thousands of dollars in cost savings. One of our customers has 89 sites located around the country that was requiring the equivalent of 8 full time telecom support staff to support the multiple vendors and phone systems in use at each of the sites. We were hired to streamline the maintenance and support of these systems, and within a few months the in-house telecom support staff was reduced to 1.5 employees.

Dramatic improvement in basic maintenance communication was the key to the solution. We gave our customer secure access to a service portal that provided a single ticketing system, a live monitoring dashboard, and extensive per-site documentation that included digital photographs of all the phone systems at each of the sites. Time to resolution of system issues improved considerably. The centralized integrated maintenance system gave the internal telecom staff substantially more time to focus on day-to-day issues and improve their customer satisfaction scores. The maintenance service portal also enabled the internal support staff to submit MAC requests, view performance reports, and nearly eliminate the many phone calls they used to have to make to properly support the multi-vendor communications environment.

As much as I’d like to think that the technology behind the service portal was the sole reason for improving the communication efficiency for this customer, it also required us to understand the customer’s current telecom support process and corporate communication philosophies. We needed to understand the methods and procedures of how our customer communicated currently before we could intelligently advise them on how to begin communicating more effectively. If the customer doesn’t believe you understand their pain, they will unlikely believe that you know how to relieve it.

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.  Tell me what issues you have with your current telecom environment, provider, or customer? What do they do that delights you? Thanks, and let’s keep the lines of communication open…..