When I interviewed Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy last week, I was particularly struck by this comment: “My first day at work [at Avaya] was the first of January, and in January we had a bankruptcy of one of the competitors in the marketplace. We had another competitor sort of up the ante in the way they’re playing and declare their intentions in the server world. And so the competitive environment actually changed quite a bit.”
Now, there had certainly been reports throughout the previous months about the severity of Nortel’s financial troubles and the likelihood of Cisco’s entry into the server business. So it’s not like Kennedy was blindsided by these developments; he surely knew something like this was likely to occur early in his tenure at Avaya. But the industry really has changed significantly just in the last two months.
We’re getting to the point in the VoiceCon Orlando cycle when I start thinking about what I’m likely to see and hear during the event, what themes I expect to hear repeated over and over during the week. Clearly, a lot of the focus this year is going to be on cost savings, business cases, ROIs and the like. How could it not be?
A lot of companies are looking at IP telephony/UC as a potential cost saver, but cost savings don’t happen on ROI worksheets; they have to happen on the ground, within the enterprise. It’s never been more important to actually do the things that capture real savings; a botched or inefficient deployment will leave you worse off than if you’d done nothing.
Sorrell’s comment raised several questions in my mind. The first one grew out of the fact that I’ve been hearing this shorter-depreciation argument for some time now; Gary Audin discusses it in his VoiceCon tutorials. But what I don’t know is: Are companies actually going with shorter depreciation cycles? Or, as Sorell suggests, are they sticking with longer cycles that don’t fit with the gear’s true worth to the company? And these days, whether an enterprise went with a longer or shorter cycle, if that time has expired, would the company really look to refresh the technology—or would they simply tell users to make do with the old stuff another year or more?
A couple of interesting developments have come up recently when it comes to desk phones. A recent blog by Steve Slattery, VP and GM of Cisco’s IP Communications Business Unit made reference to two market research studies that offered up conflicting projections on the future of the desk phone: Gartner predicting that 40% of desk workers wouldn’t have a desk phone by 2013, while In-Stat forecast almost 31 million IP business phones shipping in 2012, indicating a healthy market going forward. Which vision, Slattery asked, is correct?
