The Changing VoIP Landscape

Application Skills A Necessity
For the channel, however, two things are already clear: first, that droves of new solution providers will be entering the VoIP and unified communications spaces, and second, that partners will need to develop new application skills to keep up with the changing market.

"It is more competitive. The IP telephony market is definitely changing," says Jeffrey Schmidt, president of SOTA Technologies, a 3Com partner in Coshocton, Ohio. "We're seeing pushes from Microsoft and Cisco toward thinking about VoIP as an application on the network vs. as just a box."

For solution providers like Dave Casey, principal at Carrollton, Texas-based Westron Communications, applications are the key to building a successful VoIP practice.

"Application integration is the story, tying VoIP with things like messaging, presence and CRM," Casey says. "In professional services, customers like law firms, medical and CPAs—where they attach the cost of people to particular cases—we can show that they're losing billable hours because they're not billing for phone calls made or messages back and forth."

The shift VoIP partners will have to make toward applications is inevitable, says Richard McLeod, director of unified communications solutions for worldwide channels at Cisco.

"We're now moving to a very applications-centric, a very presence-centric, a very business-transformation-centric power of unified communications. Partners are once again going to need to move to a new space," McLeod says. "Partners that are highly skilled in Microsoft Exchange will have some advantages; partners highly skilled in IP telephony will have some advantages. All partners will need to have some real clear understanding of contact center [and] unified messaging."

Cisco is investing heavily in helping its partners make the shift with design guides, training and financial incentives as they work to tie Cisco's unified communications platform with applications from vendors such as IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Salesforce.com, he said.

Microsoft also predicts the emerging dominance of applications in the future of telecommunications.

"A messaging administrator is different than an IP telephony professional, and they have different buying patterns. But we think that will change and start to come together as software plays a more dominant role in these types of solutions," says Chris Caposella, corporate vice president of the Business Division Product Management Group at Microsoft.

Potential partner poaching by Microsoft has already begun as the company works to bring VoIP experts into its channel and team them with its existing software partners.

"Microsoft has had kind of a [competitive] play going on. They've been targeting organizations that in the past have been Cisco and Avaya partners. If you bring those people into the ecosystem, from a Microsoft perspective, you're getting a lot of that expertise," says Jay Lendl, vice president of Microsoft services at Granite Pointe Partners, a solution provider in Plymouth, Minn. "It isn't just expertise in the Microsoft platform: They already know VoIP and they already know call centers. They're in a great position to evaluate how Microsoft compares to all the other vendors' solutions."

When Microsoft partners that have expertise in Windows Server and Exchange team up with solution providers skilled in the ins and outs of realtime collaboration and VoIP, that's when the fireworks fly, Lendl says. "If you can bring that together, it really is a high value proposition for customers," he adds.

Microsoft partners that try to make the leap into VoIP on their own might be unpleasantly surprised, says Don Gulling, president of Verteks Consulting, a Microsoft, 3Com and ShoreTel partner in Ocala, Fla. "When we got into [the VoIP space] in 1999, one of the things we learned is that it looks easy on the outside. Executing it right is not as easy as it looks," Gulling says. "These Exchange guys that think they're going to get into voice, they're crazy. They don't know what they're getting into."

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