Cool Connections

Let’s face it. The business comms marketplace can be confusing for business owners.
For a start there’s all that terminology – new words and acronyms constantly being invented. New players are regularly entering the market too; and some of the old ones have undergone major rebrands – Spark Digital is one that springs
to mind.
Speaking of which, Simon Baxter, sales and marketing manager for the Collaboration Practice at Spark Digital offers a great explanation for ‘unified communications’ (UC) – a term used to describe the coming together of all the communication platforms required by a typical 21st century business.
“UC enables the use of a number of different devices – such as landline, smartphone and PC – to seamlessly conduct conversations,” he explains, “while moving between voice, video or instant messaging. 
“It also integrates a ‘presence’ capability on a user’s devices, which allows them to see in real-time what anyone in their contact list is doing – for example, whether they are available, on the phone, in a meeting, away, and so on – so they can choose the best way to communicate with them in real-time.”
UC has recently evolved into what the industry more commonly refers to as ‘Collaboration’, Baxter adds. “Collaboration enables all the same functions as UC, with the addition of real-time document or application sharing between people, plus other online services such as web-chat.”
That’s UC and Collaboration in a nutshell. Now let’s look at what’s driving it.
Baxter points out that it’s not just technology – but also financial trends and changes in human behaviour.
In terms of technology drivers, he points to the growing proliferation and importance of devices, particularly smartphones and tablets, plus the increasingly tech-savvy workforce.
Organisations can no longer define the devices and applications employees and customers will use, says Baxter. “Instead they need to continually evolve and adapt to the expectations employees form from their use of technology in their personal lives.”
And forget BYOD meaning Bring Your Own Device. It now means Brought My Own Device, as people decide for themselves what technologies they need to do their jobs better. “Employees of all ages are more free thinking. They expect to work and communicate seamlessly across these different devices.”
Another factor driving the move to UC and Collaboration is the rising cost of capital and the need to reduce operational costs, says Baxter. “So businesses need to find smarter ways to keep up with technological change.”
And whenever the word ‘smart’ gets mentioned, the word ‘cloud’ is never far away. UC solutions are increasingly hosted online (or in ‘the cloud’) because this knits together voice, presence, messaging and high-def video into a single interface. Spark Digital’s ReadyCloud Collaboration and ReadyCloud Video are prime examples. Cloud hosting also eliminates capital outlay, often eliminates contract terms, and businesses can scale up or down depending on their needs.
Baxter believes it’s important that business owners understand the ability of their staff, partners and customers to communicate across devices and communication channels.
“People already use applications like Facebook across their smartphones, laptops and tablets. They’re used to using video for collaboration because they use Skype on a regular basis in their homes – and now every device they hold has a high-definition video experience.
“They understand the concept of ‘presence’ because they can see on Facebook, or their Google accounts, or Skype, whether people are online or offline. This experience in their personal lives needs to be available, enterprise-grade, in their business lives too,” he says.
“The most important thing for business owners to know about Collaboration and UC is that there’re no longer the same barriers to adopting it. It can make dramatic differences to productivity; it eliminates geographic barriers – driving up the effectiveness of teams; and  improves [the speed and quality of] decision-making.”

The impact of UFB
The current roll-out of Ultrafast Broadband (UFB) will, and is, having a profound effect on how SMEs (small and medium enterprises) operate. It’s crucial for businesses wanting to take advantage of cloud services, such as UC solutions.
Spark Digital’s Baxter says they’re bundling services to provide businesses with reliable costs and service. “By accessing unified communications for a fixed per user charge per month they are able to remove the risk of bill shock.”
He advises SME owners to be open-minded to what’s possible. “We’re getting to a point now where no organisation is too small to take advantage of these services.”
Baxter says there’s a big move to high value services over the cloud, but Spark Digital provides fully managed services for organisations who aren’t ready for an end-to-end cloud service. “We give organisations the choice and even enable those who need a hybrid of the two.” 
In regard to UFB and its impact on unified communications, there is a real possibility that some businesses may be disappointed in its performance.
However, Kelvin Hussey, GM of CallPlus Business Solutions, believes any disappointment largely comes from a lack of understanding about speed verses capacity. “They may only buy low capacity [UFB] and get the same speed as VDSL.” He says bottlenecks, such as the customer’s own servers and internal networks, can also slow down service delivery – and uses the analogy of a four-lane highway being squeezed into a single lane, or one of Auckland’s notorious motorway on-ramps.
“The good news is that UFB has been designed to handle bigger volumes of traffic, so should not be impacted to the same extent that VDSL is.”
Overall Hussey says business clients who’ve hooked up to UFB have been generally delighted with the new speeds. UFB delivers performance flexibility in spades – for example, you may start out with a 50Mb/sec bandwidth. Upgrading to a 100Mb/sec connection simply involves a change of software. There is no hardware to renew. Big bandwidth users especially, such as architectural firms and creative agencies, which send and receive massive data files, will finally have their appetite for speed satisfied.

Make it easy
Hussey believes owner-managers are far too busy running their businesses to get too involved in their communication needs. They prefer that a provider delivers the whole bundle of communication elements – broadband, calling, mobile, and so on. “One bill, one price for the whole lot. And they definitely want price certainty,” he says.
For a business just starting out, key considerations include UFB, if they want to future-proof the business; ‘hosted voice’ – essentially a cloud-based PBX; and mobile.
The latter, says Hussey, is still largely an emotional proposition in terms of the hardware (the ‘gotta have an iPhone’ syndrome). Smartphones and their associated data plans are becoming the norm for small businesses, and free calling options from mobile-to-mobile or mobile-to-landline have become hugely popular.
Businesses that now operate solely on smartphones and have ditched landlines altogether are still low in number, but becoming more common. For businesses thinking along these lines, minute and data buckets would be worth a look. All smartphone users (on the same account) use a shared pool of minutes (or data) removing the admin headache of managing individual plans.
Services from the comms providers have become more sophisticated in recent times too. Hussey describes his company’s Visibill billing portal, which is accurate to two minutes. “It’s for business owners who really want to manage their communications spend closely.”
But if he had to name the ace card for CallPlus, it would be its own Managed Wide Area Network (MWAN) platform – designed and priced specifically for the medium enterprise space. “It provides WANs for people who don’t yet know they need them, and it has been very successful,” he says. “Such a platform would once have cost thousands of dollars a month; now it’s just a couple of hundred.”

Trusted advice
Before embarking on any communications upgrade or expenditure, Hussey’s advice is to seek advice from a provider you trust. That can be either a pure telecommunications specialist or an ICT specialist, he says. “The key is to ensure that the service provider thoroughly understands your business and what you want to achieve with it. Spend some time thinking about what you want from your communications. And obviously, shop around for the best deal.”
He says the objective at CallPlus is to provide real value and save new clients 15 to 20 percent of their existing telecommunication costs. “That’s a good deal for everybody.”
Now is the best time to review your communications strategy – your data security, your ease of connectivity and mobility. Hussey is horrified by the number of businesses in New Zealand still persevering with outdated, often neglected, comms platforms and hardware to store their precious data. He refers jokingly to the dust-covered PC under a desk that keeps getting kicked.
“We carried out a survey of businesses and 65 percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with their incumbent telecoms provider, and didn’t think they’d ever get a good deal from them. But of that 65 percent, only 20 percent were thinking about moving.” I know… go figure.

Lync and the bigger picture
To fully appreciate New Zealand’s unified communications service landscape, it’s necessary to talk to a telco. Who better than Kordia – who owns, operates and sells its own nationwide network (thereby having complete control over all data carried by it).
Cloud applications depend on connectivity – this is why Kordia, which has direct links to Microsoft Amazon, Google and other cloud solutions providers, and its own optimised network, is having such market success.
Interestingly, Kordia consumes exactly the same services that it sells to its customers.
It was the first Microsoft Lync certified telco in this country, and, as head of product Murray Goodman informs me, one of the first in the world. It ‘enables’ a significant number of Lync users on its fully converged OnKor WAN network, and therefore can produce great examples of the effectiveness and productivity provided by the cloud-based service.
So what exactly is Lync?
Briefly, Lync ties real-time ‘presence’ information with instant messaging, video conferencing, and voice communication, and it integrates with Exchange email and cloud-hosted Microsoft Office 365 applications. Goodman gives NZBusiness a demo on his own desktop. It’s surprisingly easy to navigate and its ‘presence’ capability and call re-route functionality is clearly designed to minimise the familiar “we can’t seem to track that person down” business scenario. Lync is particularly useful for multi-sites; it integrates with mobile devices such as iPhones; and can be used for desktop sharing.
“Lync is essentially a single application, and it works across multiple devices and media types,” says Goodman. From a recent blog he sums up his view of the comms application: “just as the iPhone provided a phone that could do pretty much everything I wanted to do, Lync has provided a tool that has allowed me to genuinely work anywhere in a way that is seamless to the rest of the business.”
Another benefit from Lync, he says, is the ability to ‘federate’ with other businesses – such as clients, suppliers and partners. “So you can share your calendar and ‘click to call’ and see presence information across different companies.”
Getting back to the definition of UC, which we began this article on, Goodman explains that the network foundation of UC is generally a converged network service with Quality of Service (QoS) management that recognises different services and supports/prioritises them so there are no frustrating performance issues, such as pixelated video (Skype is a good example) or frozen screens.
“We recommend if you’re going to use any voice/video, whether it’s UC or not, that you carefully plan the capacity underneath,” says Goodman. “So you can be assured that when you’re on a videoconference or voice call, a colleague downloading a YouTube clip isn’t going to affect the performance. That can happen if you’re on a ‘best-effort Internet service’ and not on a good quality network, or using QoS.”
Having one converged ‘pipe’ into your business premises also provides the advantage of bandwidth being allocated to the applications being used at any one time – the idea being to avoid having to pay for any unused capacity.
With cloud-based Office 365 applications hosted offshore, and Lync hosted locally (again via the cloud), the quality of a business’s network connection is even more critical, he adds. And again this is where UFB has an important role to play.
Goodman believes UC is not understood very well by smaller businesses – but the technology best suits businesses whose people mostly sit in front of a PC, but perhaps want that mobility factor as well – the ability to plug in from home or on the road, for example. Seamless connections via IP (Internet connection) are now the norm. “If you called me on my ‘09’ New Zealand number and I’m in LA working, you wouldn’t even know. All the same applications would appear on my desktop, including the presence info and video, and it will all work just as well.”

Efficiency and productivity gains
The business case for UC is not just about the obvious Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings on things like hardware, Goodman says. He gives the example of Kordia, which has slashed its travel costs between the Wellington and Auckland offices thanks to Lync’s video connectivity. There is also the ability to speed up the decision-making process, and hold almost impromptu meetings, regardless of where people are physically located. “It just makes life so much easier. Distance is no barrier, and you claw back real savings in time and money.”
There’re efficiencies within the office too – WiFi connectivity and Ethernet jacks allow staff to plug into full functionality, wherever they’re located in the building.
However, Goodman cautions, people won’t accept these new technologies if they are hard to use or don’t work correctly  – so proper training is vital as well as a well performing network.
Going forward he has advice, particularly for multi-site businesses. They must think about more than the UFB connection speed; they must consider their Internet provider’s ‘back-haul’ capability, he says. Or in other words, the strength of the ISP’s underlying network.
“It’s about price and performance. The best software in the world won’t run well if it’s hamstrung by network performance issues.”
In summing up, Goodman’s advice is to consider what outcomes you want to achieve with unified communications. “What are the critical success factors?”
It’s crucial your communications work seamlessly and that your workers embrace it, he adds. “Don’t think of it as just another software roll-out; there is much more to consider.
“If you want to build a business case for UC, it’s not just the obvious hardware cost savings, it’s all those other less obvious hard-to-quantify soft cost savings you must weigh up.”

›› Glenn Baker is editor of NZBusiness.