How to sell unified communications in hard times

Hosting unified communications solutions was expected to be a big market in 2009 and may still be. The question is whether UC will be hurt or helped by the economy.

Presidio Networked Solutions, a Maryland-based service provider to enterprises and a master agent/rebiller to the service provider community, is seeing “a sudden demand for hosted UC – not hosted voice – that our clients are talking about,” said David Hart, chief technology officer.

“They are looking for managed services that encompass Web-based meetings like WebEx but stuff that is integrated so it’s not just an online meeting but also presence and document-sharing and work flow,” Hart said. “Enterprises are suddenly viewing that as an important way to add some real competitive advantage in a down economy. They want to add some interactions with customers, partners, suppliers. Presence and collaboration as a hosted solution is a pretty meaningful trend we are seeing.”

Rebecca Swenson, analyst with IDC, believes hosted solutions do become more popular during economic downturns because companies are looking to restrain spending, but she cautions that more elaborate UC applications may be harder to justify economically.

“A hosted solution in general tends to be more favorable than paying for a premises-based solution,” Swenson said in an interview.” What I am predicting is that typical hosted VoIP solutions – telephony and some extra next-gen features – are going to gain some more traction. But hosted UC solutions are going to struggle a little bit. People are going to have their purse strings really tight.”

Swenson believes service providers that want to sell a hosted UC solution need to provide proof of cost savings “almost immediately” or they’ll find enterprises unwilling to invest, because of the current hard times.

“Something that, even last fall, people would have seen the ROI [return on investment] and been willing to shell out money for, now is going to be a tough sell,” she said. “Hosted UC will be growing, but it will be how the service providers and the vendors pitch it.”

Building some features – such as presence or find-me, follow-me capabilities might have more appeal than a broad and more expensive UC solution, Swenson said.

Hart admits his customers are continuing to look for ways to save money, but believes they are also looking for higher function.

“We are continuing to see customers wanting to re-look at what their network will look like, to see if they are getting the best deal from their carriers,” he said. “They wonder if there is a different technology they could be using that will save them money.”