Matt McGillen, Perficient‘s Unified Communications Practice Director recently spoke with Redmond Channel Partner Magazine‘s Barb Levisay about Lync Voice trends we are seeing in the marketplace. Perficient is one of only 15 US based Microsoft Premier Support Lync Partner (PSLP) and one of two Microsoft Partners in the US to have multiple Lync Certified Masters (MCM) on staff. From Barb’s post which you can read here
“Several years ago, customers just wanted to put in unified communication for IM and presence. It generally wasn’t business-critical,” McGillen said. “But over the last couple of years, as the product has matured, we have also seen customers’ thinking evolve about what communications can do for them. Businesses have to support a distributed workforce so they need better communications strategies.”
With Lync, communications projects can replace or augment current business communications through a single source for voice, IM, audio, video and Web-conferencing.
“Our clients are using Lync to facilitate day to day interactions,” McGillen noted. “They are connecting everyone together with presence, taking advantage of drag-and-drop conferencing and screen-sharing for ad hoc collaboration — everything that the departments within enterprises need to work together.”
Emerging Midmarket Service Opportunity
As an NSI partner with 14 competencies, Perficient historically works with customers in the enterprise space, but sees a growing opportunity in the midmarket.
“A Lync project for a small to medium-sized business customer is really good consulting business. The value of Lync’s components is exponential and the midmarket clients are better able to make it all happen at once,” McGillen said. “We get in the door with Lync and really demonstrate our value. We have access to the top decision makers to earn their trust for further work.”
While Perficient works with clients from all industries, McGillen finds that professional service businesses like accounting, advertising and engineering firms quickly see the value of Lync consulting.
“We found that professional services companies with a mobile workforce and people working from home — where communication in real time is important — those are the folks that immediately grasp what Lync can do for their business,” he said.
Consumerization Driving UC
McGillen believes that the proliferation of communications in the home is driving change in the enterprise.
“Five years ago, we got funny looks from clients when we talked about OCS [Office Communications Server]. Now, when we go in to speak with a customer, they talk about how much easier it is to communicate at home than it is in the enterprise,” he said. “The days when the IT department says it would be too hard to implement and train employees on unified communications are gone. The mindset has changed.”
“As the workforce gets distributed and people bring their own device, we see communications fracturing,” McGillen added. “Lync is the way to bring the people in a distributed and disparate workforce together.”
You can learn more about Lync Voice on the Perficient Microsoft blog and meet members of the Perficient team at the inaugural Lync Conference in San Diego, CA February 19-21.
