On a Transitional Journey

With the changes in the mode of communication, organizations need to switch to an integrated and specialized service provider to address communication gaps

The world economy is changing at a rapid pace due to uncertainties in the industry, which has a direct impact on the way businesses are looking at managing their IT and telecom infrastructures and services. Today, these services are not merely tools for facilitating business, but are also critical business functions managed out of a boardroom and not from a server room.

Addressing Communication Needs

Today, one of the key concerns for any large organization is the need for an integrated, unified communication strategy across the organization. It’s an area that has numerous components and typically organizations have different providers for each of these components such as mailing, messaging, audio and web collaboration, etc. Within the UC market, collaboration services and solutions is the fastest-growing segment, with audio, web, and video conferencing becoming central to every organization’s communication needs.

The audio and web conferencing services have been readily available in the market, but video has been more of an elitist product in the last couple of years. However enterprises today are looking at integrated services, including all 3 components, from a single service provider. This transition is already visible through exciting offers in the market such as desktop based video, which is catching up, albeit at a slower rate due to infrastructure constraints like bandwidth and higher equipment cost. Also, conferencing solutions are now becoming richer in nature with close integration with tools like CRMS, SFAS, or cloud based services like Dropbox, etc.

Ensuring Easier Management

Similarly, the way people would like to communicate has changed from the traditional process of using desk phones and laptops to smartphones and tablets with exciting features like plug-ins being offered to users to connect from anywhere and at anytime.

Large enterprises are looking at integrating their solution provider with their internal networks for an easier management. This includes integration with Active Directories, User Management, Reporting tools like SAP, and various tools for mail clients, including the Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc. Hence this transition has resulted in development of highly specialized solutions by various providers; therefore we need a specialist who understands various solutions and finally offers them to the end-customer. Here the conferencing service provider (CSP) comes in the picture, taking the lead in partnering with different solution providers and making the final offering to the end-customer. For an instance, solutions from Cisco Webex or Vidyo are being closely integrated with the

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audio conferencing services by the CSPS like Arkadin to experience the ‘complete end-to-end offering’ to the end-user.

An Ideal Partnership

The necessity of a specialized and integrated service provider is giving a huge advantage to the CSP in selling to the largest enterprises, who in the past relied on their traditional telecom services providers for the conferencing solutions. Since conferencing is not the biggest business for the large enterprises, who are not willing to change the basic platforms at a rapid pace, hence they look forward to the CSPS to bring this evolution to their customers through various partnership models. As a telco can enable an access to a large customer base while a CSP brings the specialization to the deal, thus they make an ideal partnership.

The market for conferencing can be broadly segmented into medium and large enterprises, where the needs are complex but the requirements are simple. In a typical scenario, the telcos/csps have the direct sales approach to cater to the needs of the large- and medium-market segment, while also looking at other models like selling through the cloud or via channel partners for the SME market.

For the conferencing industry, the next couple of years will be very exciting, as it makes the transition from a telephony/ web service to a highly integrated and scalable collaboration solution for the enterprise. It will be a good challenge; and the way things are moving, this will be a race where the smaller players like the CSP will actually have the edge over the big brother! The author is CEO, Arkadin India

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