UC and the SMB

Today, we highlight two more valuable reports recently made available on Webtorials. The first piece is a Webtorials State-of-the-Market Report written by Steven Taylor, Joanie Wexler and Leslie Barteaux and it is titled “2011 Report on the Impact of UC on SMB Customer Service.” The research provides insight on how small and medium businesses (SMBs) can excel at customer service. The second piece introduces the fifth edition of Jim Metzler’s research and analysis on the topic titled “2011 Application & Service Delivery Handbook. “

In the first study discussing how unified communications (UC) affects SMBs, the research revealed three customer service trends:

•Consumers will pay a premium for good service from SMBs. UC is a fundamental path to delivering responsive and well-informed service.

UC NEWS: Startup opens videoconferencing bridging service

•There is a significant trend among the companies surveyed to use voice over IP (VoIP) and UC to save money and electronically expand skills sets across locations for improved customer service.

•Respondent companies are using a mix of premises-based UC equipment and cloud-based UC services, and their organizations’ strategies often depend on company size.

The report examines each finding and what it means for small businesses and their ability and willingness to leverage UC to their business advantage. For example, it shows that “Smaller businesses are catching up with larger enterprises in being able to reap greater economies of scale that put them on a level playing field with their bigger counterparts. What’s driving their competitive abilities is an increasing abundance of pay-as-you-go hosted and cloud services that let them ramp up with the latest technologies quickly and with no or little capital outlay.”

For a full copy of the report (made possible in part with support from Fonality) please click here.

The second piece, written by our colleague Jim Metzler (who is also a frequent contributor to Network World, including the Wide Area Networking Alert), is the fifth edition of what had previously been called the Application Delivery Handbook, with the title slightly modified this year in recognition of need for IT organizations to support complex services that are comprised of multiple, interrelated applications. As was true when the first edition was published in 2007, one of the primary goals of the handbook remains to help IT organizations understand that successful application delivery involves more than just making sure that protocols run well over the WAN.

This year’s ready reference book describes how IT organizations are facing a new wave of challenges driven largely by the broad adoption of virtualization and cloud computing — many of which are far more daunting than anything we have seen before. The latest edition introduces the concept of a Cloud Networking Service (CNS) and other additions, including a discussion of cloud balancing. The handbook also describes how virtualized application delivery appliances and cloud-based optimization and management solutions can help IT organizations respond to these challenges. Given the extremely difficult management challenges associated with both virtualization and cloud computing, the management section of the handbook contains an added emphasis on application performance management and introduces the concept of application performance engineering. The handbook will be introduced serially and then published in total form; a copy of the first section that includes the executive summary can be found by clicking here.

Our thanks again to Webtorials for sharing these valuable resources.