Are On-demand Suppliers About to ‘Take-Away’ YOUR Business?

Traditional communications suppliers are facing their biggest threat not from rival technologies, or brands, but from the customers' method of consumption. The contractual relationship and the style of service delivery is about to dictate who emerges as the dominant players and, like so many other industries, no brand is safe!

We have all recognised this form of transformation; Uber changing the cab business, Netflix revolutionising TV, Amazon disrupting retail and the restaurant/take-away market is being transformed by central online order/delivery brands. These changes are having an even bigger effect - they are diminishing the customers fear of change which is a massive threat to any legacy player in any market.

“Despite living at the front end of technology evolution, too many business communication suppliers still present the same commercial, and often structural, solutions - single instance deployments, lengthy contracts, managed service and collectives rather than individual user focused solutions with plenty of flexibility,” says Iain Sinnott, VP of Sales at Cloud Management Platform developer Uboss.

“It makes commercial sense in the old world, but this does not reflect the direction of travel that buyers are going in, nor does it defend against emerging competitors who are building their model on the principles of dynamic fulfilment.”

[caption id="attachment_17597" align="alignleft" width="200"] Iain Sinnott, VP Sales, Uboss[/caption]

In the Cisco BroadSoft world, we know the strengths of BroadWorks; a world class core platform that is reliable (still one of the biggest drivers in the business market), has a developing feature set including improving collaboration and good device range integration.

What we also know is that service packs can be hard to understand and manage; the portfolio is not complete and will always require deployment alongside additional products from other ‘best in class’ vendors. This makes back-office management more complex and real-time, multi-product, multi-vendor customer level self-service with full commercial control a real challenge.