The Road To Innovation

What we quickly learned is that innovative solutions can be as simple as providing clients with what they need but don't have, to something as sophisticated as quadruple play convergence solutions. In between those, there's a hell of a lot of talk about VoIP and advanced managed services.

"We're looking at VoIP and other hosted base solutions that take the infrastructure out of small businesses; they don't have the time or the staff to deal with it," said Niv Dolgin, tech support manager and systems engineer at SADA Systems, North Hollywood, Calif.

Point taken. Any solution should be designed to provide the client with greater efficiency and productivity. Kevin McDonald, vice president, Alvaka Networks, Huntington Beach, Calif., realizes that's the sweet spot, considering all the "technology" options employees now have while at work that don't quite relate to work.

"We're looking to provide clients with higher transparency with what their end users are doing to increase productivity," he said. "There is a phenomenal amount of distractions—from MySpace to YouTube— that are rampant throughout all corporations. Clients have to have a way to control that. We have all this great technology but we have to ask, 'When does it become a distraction.' "

So much for trying to grab a few hours on the waves. Not that there's much surfing in Kansas City, Mo., the home of solution provider Ceridian, where product manager Matthew Kaiser is looking to free up the amount of custom code in the solutions his team sells. He's eyeing cutting-edge products that reduce the need for customization and can be quickly rolled out to a larger customer base.

"We want to get to the point where we can eliminate as much custom code as possible. Our solutions are 80 percent [replicable] and 20 percent custom," he said. "We want to try to move that to 100 percent. We want to move from a one-to-one solution to a one-to-many."

Ian Lanning, CTO of L&P Group in Round Rock, Texas, is looking to do the same thing but on the hardware side. Specifically, he's creating a more efficient and cost-effective way for small wireless and content providers to offer quadruple play services, which translates to the wired and wireless delivery of voice, video and data. Take for example content delivery over IPTV. Typically a separate server is required to deliver content to each channel, he said. Lanning is currently working with a hardware manufacturer to create a single blade-type server that can send and transform digital and analog signals to multiple channels.

"That way you can replace 100 boxes with a single server. It's disgusting the way it's done today," he said. "The right solution doesn't really exist today and it will enable small companies to offer a quadruple play and triple their business. It will offer those small businesses an instant exit strategy because the big boys will come knocking on their doors to buy them out."

Auggie Shima, owner of AM Computers out of Santa Monica is another solution provider eyeing VoIP. He's sick of visiting clients who used another company to provide the solution. "It's such a huge opportunity, but the client doesn't think of us as being in the phone business," he said. "They think of us as their data specialists."

Nick Glinkowski, president of Pacific Voice and Data, San Francisco, said being proactive is one of the keys in driving innovation. One of Pacific Voice's big clients, Pete's Coffee, is quickly expanding locations. The problem is that the new location is usually up and running long before the DSL provider has connected the line linking the business's local POS solution to its main headquarters.

To get Pete's new locations immediately up and running , Pacific Voice and Data added a PC WAN card to SonicWall's T2170 network security appliance, which solves the problem by providing secure 3GByte connectivity, he said. When the DSL line is finally dropped, Pete's locations now have a failover backup solution in place. "We're working with them on 30 new stores a month and they're expanding globally, so something innovative is needed," he said.

Sometimes, however, innovation has little to do with technology and everything to do with how solution providers run their businesses.

Adtran, a Huntsville, Ala., manufacture of networking gear, is generating some buzz at the show with its Netvanta 7100, an all-in-one networking appliance with optional VoIP capabilities.

Steve Harvey, the company's vice president of sales, said the idea behind the development of any worthwhile product is to help solution providers generate higher margins by offering them something that's simple to install, easy to use, creates incremental customers and allows them to provide something their competitors don't.

"There are all kinds of areas that can help solution providers and their clients innovate," he said. "Technology is just one of them."