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Some post Enterprise Connect thoughts

Mark Kowal
Mar. 23 2016
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While attending Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida, a few items stood out: The emphasis on building the business case for SIP Trunking, and the number of sessions focused on how to avoid problems while deploying SIP trunks was rather surprising. Perspective has an interesting impact on how we consume information; Empirix has been helping customers test and verify SIP Trunking and business continuity scenarios for more than 10 years. We’ve partnered with some of the world’s leading service providers not only for service assurance, but for contact center assurance testing and test automation as well. Making the business case for SIP Trunking in 2016 seemed akin to making the business case for combustion engines.

Failure to adopt SIP trunking

Enterprises’ failure to adopt SIP Trunking was really centered around three themes:

  • Lack of confidence in the technology itself
  • Lack of confidence that the business had the subject matter expertise for such a transition
  • Lack of confidence that the return on investment would actually materialize and concern that, as a result, the cost would simply show up on a different balance sheet

The adoption of Voice Over IP and SIP Trunking has created a market opportunity because it has a lower barrier for entry for smaller CLECs and pure IP service providers, but the fear of new technology and the lack of confidence organizations have around deploying them has fueled the cloud services market. Cloud-based services take ownership of all the complexities associated with IP based unified communications and remove the responsibilities from the enterprise customer, assuming the risks of poor deployment and operation—a valuable service. These services, however, come at a cost, which can reduces the margin of the return on investment the enterprise sought by migrating in the first place.

Enterprises are able to run leaner with reduced expenditures, both in terms of human capital and equipment capital, and in the end, lacking control and visibility into the quality of the services consumed by its end-users and customers.

In theory, market demand will reward those service providers that can respond quickly and offer more flexible services that offer a better user experience across all channels of communications.  However, with the lack of visibility and subject matter expertise within the organizations, most will have to rely on two measurement points:

  • What their service provider tells them
  • What their customers tell them

Negative customer experience will cause customer churn, resulting in a negative impact on revenue. Given organizations’ reluctance to migrate, how likely will they be willing to change cloud service providers if they find themselves in a bad implementation that is impacting customers? Or will they simply leave it up to the service providers to “fix it” now that they have relinquished control to the cloud?

Given what is at stake, these late adopters must be willing to implement or prepare for cloud service provider diversity, have ironclad service level agreements, and an objective third party to implement testing and monitoring solutions to validate and report on those SLAs.

Empirix solutions

Empirix solutions have been designed with vendor-agnostic standards and specialized protocol generation and collection methodologies to map technology and user experience metrics to specific key business indicators, offering an objective look at business impact from end to end in all stages of the technology deployment lifecycle.

Written By
Mark Kowal
Mark Kowal
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