Spring is traditionally a busy time of year for Newbury-based network services supplier Gamma. It’s when they roll out a national roadshow, held at locations throughout the UK, where they herald all their planned developments and new product announcements to their reseller channels.
It is also a time when the company holds its annual customer experience conference, the GX Summit, and this year Gamma had a lot to share with the 150 or so ‘C’ level execs attending.
The good news for their guests was that Gamma recognises events such as these are for their customers and not solely for the company so the agenda for the day was definitely not a standard corporate template.
The presentations were conversational more than anything, with questions from the floor and key facts supporting the narratives appearing on screens around the theatre style auditorium in London’s Royal Institution of Great Britain building.
However, if the key word of the day was ’Experience’, then the Gamma messaging throughout was most definitely focused on the digital applications to create great customer experiences Unified Communications.
Opening the show, Alex Ayers, Gamma’s Enterprise Sales Director, reminded those attending that their customers and users communicate today in ways that are shattering traditional topology concepts.
David Macfarlane, Gamma’s Managing Director for Direct (pictured above), posed the deeper question, ‘What is happening to voice?’ by illustrating the decline of TDM-based PBX systems and the corresponding rise of the Unified Communications as a Service.
This message was essentially an Enterprise call to action based on the anticipated death of TDM in 2025 when support for ISDN is ceased in the UK. The precise message being:
‘SIP got you ready for TDM switch off and Cloud Telephony today can propel you forward to UCaaS and the full stack integrated UC experiences of tomorrow’
There can be no doubt that this is where Gamma is heading as a company and for those that have followed the firm for some time it is clear to see how the ‘lines and minutes’ firm of yesteryear has progressed from its’ decision made five or six years ago to diversify in to ‘data products’ and more recently its move in to mobile, UC and collaborative working.
This leaves Gamma almost uniquely positioned as a national voice and data infrastructure supplier having the ability to deliver a range of UC applications to both fixed and mobile end points to both the SMB and Enterprise sectors.
It would seem therefore that the cloud is firmly the “new normal” and digital transformation is now a continuum that is only gathering momentum. The more applications added to the UC Stack, the cloudier it has become and in answer to the question, ‘Why are we doing this?’ the emphatic response is, ‘To deliver differentiated value’.
Many observers would also say that technologies are pushing us in this direction and there appears to be a growing consensus that;
- Moving to Cloud Offices provides a baseline of capabilities
- Workstream Collaboration offers persistent channels of communication
- Technologies to improve efficiency and effectiveness include virtual personal assistants, conversational user interfaces, rich meetings and artificial intelligence
- Technologies that allow application development and integration (APIs) include Communications Platforms as a Service
The second half on the day comprised workshops on a range of topics from Operational Excellence to Digital Transformations and the new Gamma Horizon Collaborate UC applications followed by the excellent keynote presentation from Steven Van Belleghem of Nexxworks on the subject of ‘Customers the Day After Tomorrow’.
I’d seen this before and bought his book of the same title as a result. Belleghem takes you on a vivid journey to the world of modern customer relationships mobilised by innovative and surprisingly accessible developments in customer experience technologies illustrated with a variety of real-life cases and new management models.
Looking back at the Gamma GX Summit it was clear the company was painting their vision for the future on a canvas undercoated with a solid network infrastructure and hosted telephony.
The top coat, and one that is being progressively applied, is that of a full stack UC as a Service offering to enable user competitive advantage.
