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VoiceCon Enews Issue 179 | June 26, 2007
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A CHANNEL VIEW
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By Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
Presidio Networked Solutions is a four-year-old "value-added
solutions
provider," as they call themselves--something in between a
VAR and an SI. As
you'd expect from the company's age, it was built for a converged
world, so when
I got a chance to talk to Presidio's CTO, Dave Hart, I figured it'd
be a good
opportunity to learn something about go-to-market strategies in
the
convergence/unified communications world that we've entered.
Presidio has about 750 employees, and customers ranging from mid-sized
enterprises up into a few Fortune 500 companies, and Dave Ha rt
says, from his
observation, we're just at the beginning of a shift in this marketplace.
Though
basic dial tone replacement is still the biggest driver in the market,
"that's
slightly changing now."
Now there's at least a conversation about advanced contact center
functionality,
presence and advanced messaging. "It's not necessarily a conversation
about
voice as much as it is a conversation about collaboration,"
Hart said.
I asked Dave what really spurs that conversation, and his answer
was that the
market is evolving and vendors' messages are getting out; but he
also noted the
important role that Microsoft has played in giving a jolt of interest
to this
marketplace. "Microsoft has shown up to the game and got people
thinking about
voice in terms of, How do I integrate with a presence client and
how do I
voice-enable my enterprise applications?"
He also conceded that companies are not making moves toward convergence
or
unified communications based on ROI. "Where we do see [an ROI
case successfully
made], it tends to be where somebody's got significantly older voice
equipment,
where the maintenance is extremely high due to some end-of-life
piece of
equipment that they may have in their network," he explained.
"The other place where we see it is where there are a lot
of remote sites and
the transport is some old-generation technology that's integrated
with the voice
system, and where we can move that to, say, a secure MPLS wide area
network and
include voice and data requirements on the same integrated pipes--that's
where
we see the ROI."
He concluded: "Although I'm sure they exist, I've not seen
a great story where
we can point to some tremendous hard-dollar ROI that came from a
business
communication system per se."
So that all pretty much confirms what we've seen elsewhere. What
I thought was
particularly interesting about Pr esidio is that the company appears
to be
straddling the great Cisco-Microsoft divide: One on hand, Presidio
is one of
only five channel partners to receive Cisco's highest certification
for unified
communications, a process that Dave Hart described as rigorous and
extensive, a
significant investment of time and resources.
At the same time, Hart describes Presidio as "a big advocate
of the LCS [Live
Communications Server] platform, and [we] have had a lot of success
deploying it
for our clients." Furthermore, Hart says he's been running
the Office
Communications Server (OCS) beta internally and it's "pretty
good," though he
believes its lack of telephony-type aspects like a message waiting
light exposes
a kind of cultural gap that Microsoft will have to close.
So...top-certified Cisco UC provider plus big LCS proponent/OCS
optimist
equals....
My guess is it equals where most of the channel and marketplace
will be in a f ew
years.
Down the road, Hart expects Cisco and Microsoft will continue to
be
complementary--at least from the perspective of Presidio and its
customers.
"I don't think that [Cisco will] necessarily ever be the best
at
IP-voice-enabled applications, and I don't think that Microsoft
will ever
necessarily be the best at voice infrastructure, or some of the
infrastructure-enabling things like QOS and extensible wide area
network-type
technologies," he said. "Each other's innovation will
drive demand for each
other's product lines."
What do you think? Drop me a note in the VoiceCon
Enews Forum
or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com
Eric H. Krapf
Editor, Business Communications Review
VoiceCon Program Chair
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