What's Missing in UC?

Peter : On Rad's Radar?
Peter
| Peter Radizeski of RAD-INFO, Inc. talking telecom, Cloud, VoIP, CLEC, and The Channel.

What's Missing in UC?

Why do people think UC is plug and play! Was Microsoft ever plug and play?

The biggest hurdle to Hosted UC installs is a competent technician on-site. Heck, even for telecom installs, a competent tech would be helpful to extend the demarc, run some cat5e or fiber runs, deploy the CPE, turn up the router (and plug it in), check for UPS, etc. - including work with the carrier to ensure that turn up leaves the client turned up (not on!). And that's just the telecom side of UC!!!!

A site survey is integral to a clean turn up of Hosted UC. A LAN map would be extremely helpful including checking for how many breaking points there are in the LAN.

Do they need POE or are there plugs at each desk? Are there 2 cable runs to each workstation or just 1? These things are important and not easily gleaned from the customer.

Mapping out the phone tree, extensions, voicemails, hunt groups, etc. A competent tech would be able to do all of this discovery.

What about the national VARs? Most of them are not competent to do this. They say they are, but real world experience says they are not.

It is very expensive to sell a 5 seat deal to a customer, drop ship phones, spend (at least) an hour of the tech's time on turn up, to have the customer's LAN or broadband be so insufficient that the customer cancels (and hopefully sends the phones back.) This is churn that no one puts on their S1 filings because it would scare the beetlejuice out of investors! (It is estimated to be 50%!)

How much service provider money just went down the drain on the above? This UC is NOT plug and play.

We are well beyond the days of a key system or Asterisk box plugging into a few POTS lines. That was simple. Today, it is far more complex.

The break/fix guys could make money on site surveys and installation of UC if they wanted to. It's a big business that will only get bigger. there are two issues though: who will pay for their time and how will the service providers find them (and trust them)?


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