I’m mostly through the first day and a half of VoiceCon 2009 and have noticed a common thread running through the sessions: it’s important to understand your customer’s business. Duh! Well, actually it’s pretty impressive that a technology conference – VoiceCon – is laying this out so clearly. The technology is taking a backseat to business. I started to hear that at VoiceCon in San Francisco, but now the message is focused and is being hammered home.
Kevin Kennedy, CEO of Avaya gave a really engaging keynote this morning. First sentence from him was about the economy and how we’ve been through bad economic times before. But his message was positive: innovation has always been what drives us out of recessions. I really liked that message – that bad economies spur technological innovation. Avaya’s message on the actual technology wasn’t very clear – it did seems to trend towards social networking (they have an Avaya Facebook app) and Web 2.0 type functionality. For me, though, that wasn’t the point: they were clearly focused on how to lower costs or improve revenue. That’s a message that resonated well in the convention center. This was a much improved Avaya keynote from last fall’s address.
And Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO, had a pretty jazzed-up presentation that showcased TelePresence for practical applications, like remote medicine. They did a great job putting the demo together and showing potential to link the technology to business processes. They even demoed some mobile device access to pre-recorded TelePresence sessions, which was interesting. But the TelePresence model may not have as easy a time driving ROI today. In a few years time, I can see applications like this taking off. A+ to Cisco for technical vision. Maybe less so for the right here, right now business value discussion.
In the breakout sessions I’ve attended – you can hear the pen-on-paper scratching as soon as someone puts up a slide with cost comparison. I talked to a guy from MS after Brent Kelly’s OCS / SameTime comparison session. We both agreed that it was a pretty good presentation with some good insight & observation. For sure what stuck with both of us was his back-of-the-envelope calculations that showed SameTime costing about 50% less per user than OCS. I’m not totally sold on his math (the SameTime pricing didn’t include the pricing for telephony integration because the pricing is not published by IBM right now. He had a couple other mistakes in his OCS pricing as well) but it’s not a coincidence that the guy from MS and started talking about that right off the bat.
Marty Parker did a session focused on feature comparison between UC vendors. The place was pretty packed. Again – as soon as he started talking numbers, keyboards started clacking. He was trying to nail it down to per user cost AND per user ROI by deploying a true UC solution. Interestingly, when he compared costs from vendors, he said that the price differences between vendors amount to "rounding errors" when you look at the ROI that any vendor’s UC solution delivers. Whether it’s a $40 per-user cost from vendor A or $125 per-user cost from vendor B, you’re still looking at an ROI of many times that cost per-user.
In Robin Gareiss’ "Building Business Cases for IPT and UC" presentation she pointed out that there is a simple way to tell if you are going to get an ROI on your UC implementation: Did you ask your customer about their business needs? If yes: you will see a 1-3 year ROI. If no, it will take much longer.
Last point I thought I’d make on this: I just got a message from Mike Gersten, our CEO, about a potential UC opportunity for a large customer. In his message to me about the opportunity he said that, according to the customer, "This is not about the technology as much as the business." That about sums up the climate here at VoiceCon as well.
