Telco giant sees Microsoft platform delivered on its network
Among the many Microsoft partners queuing up product or service announcements tied to today’s launch party for Lync is Verizon Business, which thinks the ideal delivery method for Microsoft’s unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) suite is on a Verizon network.
“Our world class network infrastructure … is one of our competitive differentiators,” said Patrick Sullivan, a marketing director for Verizon Business for its medium-sized business segment, businesses with from 20 to 1,000 employees, which will be a target for the Verizon/Microsoft UC&C offering. The strategy is to deliver Microsoft Online Services, now Lync, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting and Office Communications Online. Around those cloud-based applications, Verizon will wrap its network offerings of voice, audio conferencing, Internet, network security, mobile communications and remote data backup and storage.
Verizon is jumping on the unified communications bandwagon just like everybody else, getting a piece of the business of helping people work together even though they are miles apart, meeting in the new online working space. “Work is no longer a place like ‘I’m going to work.’ Work is an activity as in ‘I’m going to work right now’” as Sullivan put it, which I thought was a nice play on words.
Verizon Business is certainly not the only network infrastructure company that is a Microsoft partner on UC&C — though it says it is the first supporting Lync — or that is capable of delivering unified communications and collaboration technology. But it does have a well mapped out plan to grab its share of the market as Lync rolls out. It has identified five features of the new Lync that it plans to target first as offerings from Verizon Business’s professional consulting services portfolio:
- Lync Strategy and Roadmap, for identifying areas within an organization where unified communications might have a positive business impact and begin planning.
- Lync Voice and Video Readiness Assessment, which is focused on delivering unified voice, video and Web conferencing on a Verizon network.
- Lync Application Enablement and Planning, to integrate the Lync platform with line-of-business applications.
- Lync Deployment and Migration, which covers deployment and configuration of Lync features on a network.
- Lync Telephony Integration, specifically focused on integrating Lync with Microsoft Exchange.
Verizon Business thinks the release of Lync will spur a fresh round of IT spending by companies, said Mike Holtgrefe, a senior consultant in Verizon’s professional services business.
“We see incredible pent-up demand,” Holtgrefe said, “and we think a lot of customers will be waiting to act on their Microsoft deployments based on what we’re seeing today.”
That may be a marketing department’s wishful thinking, though. True, IT spending forecasts for 2010 from industry analysts have been encouraging but there have been other indications that businesses take a cautious approach to making major transitions such as embracing a program like Lync. We’ve seen it with measured adoption of Office 2010 or Windows 7. Lync may hold promise for advancing UC&C, but customers have still got to find the budget for it.
