Working in both Telecoms and Internet businesses for the last 16 years has given me a useful insight into convergence and the emergence of Unified Communications. 

For me it all started in 1998 whilst I was 3 years into running my first ISP.  The initial emergence of Voice over IP technology was definitely too early. Then there was instant messaging and following closely was early software video conferencing, all bleeding edge technology, mostly unreliable but an indication of things to come.

As convergence of telecommunications and IT continued to progress through the noughties we started to see and hear the ramifications of this, from acquisitions of businesses to share value being slashed off public companies deemed to be on the back foot of these changes.

I know many telecoms reseller businesses that have been told they dead or dying if they do not embrace Unified Communications (posh name for converged communications) with this Software Company or that.

Indeed I’m guilty of this myself having been wrapped up so tightly inside an Eco-system that every fiber of me believed that UC was the life raft to every business in a recession and was truly bewildered by any business rejecting it.

It is true that some Unified Communications platforms like Microsoft Lync can help improve communications and bolster collaboration in certain multi-site businesses; the benefit really depends on the type, size and business culture.

Even though it may seem so, I’m not trying poo-poo Unified Communications or Microsoft Lync. I still believe it can be transformative for businesses in many circumstances but in my previous role I was focused solely on medium and large businesses but not any-more.  Now I’m back to my grass roots – focusing on startups and SMEs.

During the planning and preparation stages of our new business I’ve spent time talking to various small and medium sized businesses – from start-ups to 50 person businesses. I needed to find out exactly what SMEs really need from their communications in order to ratify our business strategy and generally get closer to the types of customer we will be supplying services.

I was surprised to find that many smaller businesses I interviewed have neither the technical capability nor the need to take full advantage of many of the features that this emerging technology offers. They don’t need to see people’s presence – they can just look over their desk. They don’t need desktop sharing – they can pull a chair up at someone else’s desk, and even when a couple enquired about whether their iPhone’s or Android would work with Lync the conversations soon turned to other technology.

Microsoft believes the phone is dead – and maybe it will be one day but not for now, not according to the businesses I spoke to.

I was also surprised to find that many of the business simply didn’t want big changes to their working practices or communications technology – many of them felt that it wasn’t the time to try radical new ways of working.

Instead, businesses want to improve and hone their working practices, in other words make small incremental changes with a low risk strategy, the theory being that a larger number of small incremental changes adds up to bigger changes down the line. In summary, the conversations always turned to improving not replacing.

Also given these un-certain times, the SMEs I spoke to wanted definite and measurable return on their investment on any new communications technology or systems and the return on investment needed to be in the months – not years.

They wanted low or no setup costs – definitely no CAPEX, a get out clause if it all goes wrong,  and the solution needs to be very easy to use and manage. Unsurprisingly I did find they were far more acceptable of outsourcing to the cloud but wanted to have good assurances around service quality and up-time.

In numerous occasions I found that businesses wanted to keep their existing software and telecoms in the most part or have the ability to improve their communications abilities and scale out existing systems using the cloud.

After planning SYNETY for nearly a year, I feel as though the business has now developed products and services that SMEs will want in order for them to incrementally improve their business performance.

In the following blogs, I will discuss the types of business issues our technology solves and provide in-site into the ongoing technology development.

Its early days, but following our launch this October,  I’m confident that  SYNETY can help many businesses achieve an improved bottom line.