John Linton
.....to the old frontiers only more expense is involved.
I spent some time yesterday morning having a 'breakfast meeting' (along with 20 or so other people from the Australian communications industry) with a US company who has some new ideas (and products) that address the 'unified communications' requirements of medium to large size businesses. When it became clearer as to what this involved it seemed to me that the ideas were not so new and the products were very little different to those offered by many Taiwanese 'clearing houses' who somehow obtain your email address and bombard you with weirdly worded 'special trial offers' whose principal attractions are the anglicised given names of the people signing the emails which have recently included Violet Sun, Betty-Lee Choo, Marigold Tsieh, Heavenly Tang and Venus Chung - I would really like to meet those ladies one day and see if they are as exotic as their names.
I did enjoy the highly polished presentations of the three bright and shiny US employees (I never ceased to be amazed at how incredibly more accomplished US company personnel are at this sales 'art' than any Australian I have ever seen) and, if I didn't know better from direct experience, I could have almost believe what they were offering was worthwhile and of real value. As I do know a little bit about buying most of the hardware they had put together via a few lines of code in a $1,000 or so dollar switch I was grateful to listen to some new ideas on how to 'present' such facilities but wouldn't consider spending some 400% more on what was simply 'packaging'.
Essentially they were offering hardware products from Taiwan with some beautifully crafted coding for a user interface to provide 'unified' communications from the office desktop including video conferencing, video calling, voip, sms, fax, email with transfer of all facilities to a notebook or 3G phone so that you could use the facilities wherever you had IP access anywhere in the world. It was an impressive demonstration of an essentially simple concept that even a company of Exetel's size has been offering for over two years now (except for the video phone which we have never seen a demand for in Australia).
I did learn how to market these functions much better than we do today (we have never put in place such a capability). I also learned, based on questions and statements by the attendees, that most of the people attending the breakfast presentations did think the products WERE innovative (the person sitting next to me thought they were "very exciting") and that the wholesale asking prices were more than reasonable - one person publicly said he thought they were '"a bargain". (I feel soooo old when people talk like that). However on the way to the office I thought about how much better we could 'present' our SMS and FAX gateway services to business customers or even to soho customers. I have never seen the value of video phones because of the obvious limitations of the lack of such facilities by people you call - however the cost of such facilities now is trivial if you really wanted to use video calling or conferencing from your desk top or lap top.
It's a pity that we are so inundated with new development demands at the moment that any ideas I, or other people may have, on how to better 'package' a soho unified communication offering it will have to wait until we acquire more development resources allocated to internal development work. Perhaps its the general uncertainty in the various marketplaces we address but the demand for new development work, despite our doubling of development resources, is becoming much greater than it has ever been. It never occurred to me when we started Exetel that one day we would have more programmers than any other type of personnel but it's definitely more than a possibility that will happen before the end of 2010.