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Surviving the communications’ virus
26 Aug, 2016
Who sells communications products and services? A couple of years ago it was very easy to answer this question: just point to telecoms, specialized vendors and the network of their distributors. Now it gets increasingly complicated since more and more companies with different profiles start competing for the same market share. In the future the answer will become: almost everyone! It doesn’t mean that everyone will deliver such products and services. In spite of open standards and Open Source components, communications technology is growing in complexity and communications services require a myriad of specialist skills. Not everyone though can produce and maintain them, especially business communications with its strict requirements and high expectations.Why would everyone sell communications in the first place? No alternative, whether they like it or not. Communications will become a virushard to avoid, when one delivers any business application or a cloud service: collaboration or productivity, CMS, CRM, ERP, HR, ticketing, project-management, social-business networking, intranet & extranet, office software, email, calendars, knowledge base or any other general or specialized business application. People will expect to communicate from a relevant business context, which in many cases would mean applications that are used for business processes. It will not be sufficient to keep producing, for instance, an excellent project-management tool. It will become a prerequisite to provide users with the option to communicate within the tool. This will force many companies to move outside of their “comfort zone” and start cross competing with several other companies until recently considered not as competitors but as complementary product vendors. And it might get even worse. Not only would it be expected to communicate whilst using a specialized business tool, but it would be required to communicate from this business tool with other users, who might use, at that specific moment, other business tools. Before and after, interoperability will become not just important but mandatory. Which means “game” time for aggregators and framework providers. However, it also means that vendors and service providers would ultimately have to cooperate with their own competitors to meet their own user requirements… Quite an uncomfortable situation, to put it mildly, but interesting to see what happens. The “big guys” will try to resolve this “small interoperability inconvenience” by monopolistic behaviours. But to use an analogy there are too many crocodiles in the water that compete for the same ‘unified communications’ user base – which makes a real monopoly an unlikely outcome. In general, this looks more like a ‘normal’ pre-war situation. We see alliances forming, some parties surrendering and other playing ambitious strategic moves; we see a lot of fear and quite some turbulence. However, mass hunting didn’t start yet. And it still might be avoided by an intensive diplomatic activity and a limited amount of collateral damage… No one will find it easy to survive in this rapidly changing business communications eco-system. If you are a real communications provider you will need to position yourself as a “Trusted Third Party” (TTP) for an increasing number of communication channels consisting of other applications vendors. They have to trust that you know what you are doing, since they are not experts in your processes or technologies. They are just channels. But trust is only the first step. The next step is to really integrate your communication features into their applications, which is not a trivial task. It (always) requires more time than was originally thought, as well as often being a secondary priority for them, since they have their own tough roadmap and strict deadlines for improving their own core applications. Be prepared for delays and frustrations. It is not without reason that for many years the reality of applications-based-communications-business is far below educated expectations. You will hear a lot of compliments, you will see a lot of interest, very serious intentions to go to market with your product; you might even sign some contracts, but you will face delays in selling, integrating and implementing. Even though you might have thought that your channels are dependent on you – since you are the real communications expert in these relationships – it is actually you who became dependent on your channels and it might prove to be as terminal as any other heavy addiction. So, while spreading this communications’ virus around, watch carefully after your corporate health. Which is easier said than done… You are already dependent on these parties from the very moment when users desired to communicate from their applications and not from your own stand-alone communications product. There is hardly a way out of this dependency, so why not make the best out of it. Think about “componentizing” your backend and “widgetizing” your front-end. Or, if you are focused to API/SDK, put additional efforts to include into these libraries also complete front-end behavior, leaving only to external developers to determine how to render the UI. Define pilots around the most attractive and appealing functionalities for a user. Slice the elephant: don’t try too much at once – as the more you aim at, the longer the delays you can expect. There is no magic formula for success. On the other hand, success is its own magic formula. It creates a positive spiral both for you and your channels. So, do everything you can to help your channels not only demo, but really launch promising key functionalities based on your solutions. The communication’s virus is impossible to cure, but it is harmless and even beneficiary if a prescribed dose of technology is consumed on time. Make sure that your channels understand this message and act accordingly. Posted by: Simke Simovic, Head of Business Development at Summa
