This issue of eNews is sponsored by LiveOps

Ovum Reveals New Decision Matrix: Selecting a US Contact Center Solution

Attend this Webcast to hear Ovum discuss the latest results published in their Decision Matrix Report. This research will serve as your roadmap to understanding key players in the market and critical trends affecting decisions by other leading enterprises.

Register today to gain valuable takeaways to help select the best Contact Center service for your company.

Registrants will also receive a complementary report.

All-in-One or Best-of-Breed?

“All-in-one vs. best-of-breed” is one of those timeless arguments in technology, like bandwidth-vs-QOS or buy-vs.-lease. But the reason that these arguments are timeless is because each new generation of technology changes the variables that enterprise decision-makers have to take into account when they weigh the choices.

We’ll be discussing all-in-one vs. best-of-breed in an Enterprise Connect webinar later today (Wednesday, June 23, 2 PM ET/11 AM PT; there’s still time to register). The webinar’s sponsor, Interactive Intelligence, has become one of the hot companies in the contact center market on the strength of their ability to offer all-in-one solutions, and Interactive’s chief marketing officer, Joe Staples, will be presenting some pretty compelling figures around management and related costs that make the case in favor of an all-in-one approach.

Of course, here we’re not talking about buying everything in your entire communications network from Interactive, or about doing some forklift upgrade. Interactive’s case is primarily that as a goal and as the basis of a migration plan and the heart of your UC approach to contact centers, all-in-one is the way to go. Don Van Doren, president of Vanguard Communications and a longtime contact center consultant, will be joining us on the webinar to offer his perspectives on the question.

Best of breed is something a lot of people are thinking about more as we move more deeply into the Unified Communications migration. The assumption is that with communications running on software-centric rather than hardware-centric platforms, you’re freed from earlier generations’ need to either standardize on one PBX vendor throughout the enterprise, or else resign yourself to a rickety, non-interoperable network in which parallel piece-parts couldn’t talk to each other optimally.

Of course, a UC implementation based on best-of-breed software solutions is one in which you will expect to shell out a lot of money to systems integrators. Indeed, the companies that led the communications-to-software movement most aggressively — Microsoft and Siemens — openly said from the start that integration would be where the money was. They meant where the money was for vendors and professional services companies. For enterprises, it’s where the money would be going.

Like most of the perennial questions, I don’t think there’s ever going to be one across-the-board answer to this one. But certainly the different technology cycles tend to push the bulk of enterprises toward one pole or another, and I think that’s going to be true in the UC world for all-in-one vs. best-of-breed. It’s kind of early to tell which pole will have the strongest gravitational pull on this question, so I’m hoping and expecting that our webinar will help us understand the issues and start to figure this out.

I hope you’ll join us for the webinar; you can register here.

This Week’s UC Weekly
Are UC Vendors Up to the Challenge?

Everyone associated with Unified Communications has to be encouraged by the formation of the UC Interoperability Forum (UCIF). Implementing UC was never going to be quick or easy, but without the ability to interwork piece parts from multiple vendors — indeed, even from a single vendor — and without hooks into legacy equipment and services, the UC market has been hobbled, some would say, crippled.

But now that UCIF is here, the question remains: Is it up to the challenge? The list of current members is impressive and that’s certainly grounds for some optimism. However, as of this writing, two very important UC companies — Avaya and Cisco — have yet to join.

Their reluctance stems, in part, from concern that the UCIF is a creature of Microsoft, an argument not without merit. But that’s not the whole story. Avaya and Cisco are leaders in critically important UC market segments, and market leaders almost always view UCIF-like organizations with skepticism; the very fact that they’re leaders means that they have the most to lose if industry-wide standards, federation and other formal or informal mechanisms for interoperability become widely available.

That position is understandable, but in the case of UC, it’s also short-sighted; kind of like an oil company taking short cuts on a deep-sea drilling rig. Given all the challenges UC faces, if market leaders shun the UCIF and other industry-wide interoperability/standards-setting activities, both buyers and sellers are going to get hurt.

Read more »

Posted in Implementation, Management |

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