Small business is being enticed more than ever to VoIP and Unified Communications. Communicado thinks the industry needs to be straight about the risks that go along with VoIP’s siren call … and the relatively small additional cost of mitigating those risks with Management as a Service.
Microsoft, which had previously supported only analog line connection to the PSTN in its small-business-oriented Response Point product, will soon have full VoIP via SIP trunking. Meanwhile Dell has filled out the “S” portion of its “SMB” strategy with Fonality (to go along with Dell’s previously announced Nortel offering for mid-sized businesses). Fonality is certainly a compelling choice for a small business that wants to tap the productivity of IP Telephony and Unified Communications through Dell, the largest provider of SMB gear. Fonality even has some reliability advantages through its hybrid platform and built-in management software that mitigates some of the reliability risk.
It’s just that SMB organizations need to know that VoIP depends on IP infrastructure that typically delivers 99.9 percent reliability, not the 99.999 reliability associated with “old fashioned” (PSTN and TDM) dial tone. Before a Small Business chooses to trust their real-time collaboration and communications to their familiar PC hardware and software providers, they need to understand that, should something go wrong, they will be routed to the same offshore call centers used to handle server and PC issues. They need to know that even the best Level 1 support person answering their call will be able to do little to help them with no monitoring data, no converged network visibility, and no expertise in the interdependent technologies that make VoIP and Unified Communications work.
The right answer? Resellers should support SMBs with Management as a Service (MaaS). SMB implementations should have a specialized NOC watching over them, manned by personnel with the ability to monitor and correlate the relevant performance data to quickly troubleshoot the problems that tend to arise in converged communication environments.
Management as a Service isn’t free. It adds to the cost of doing business the way any insurance does. But the mission critical nature of real-time communications and collaboration means SMBs need that insurance. A problem with an SMB’s ability to communicate and collaborate cannot sit for days in an offshore trouble-ticket queue with no real hope of resolution. Management as a Service should be added as a SKU to every VoIP deal.
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