SMB

Microsoft Pulls the Plug on Response Point

A couple of years ago Microsoft created an innovative team with the goal of thinking outside of the normal corporate bureaucracy of Microsoft and coming up with a communications system for SMB’s (small and medium businesses). The result was the Response Point system.

Response Point was a powerful tool, offering SMB’s enterprise-class communications features at a cost-effective price that wouldn’t break an SMB budget. Unfortunately for Response Point they were also aggressivley developing Office Communications Server 2007 and their Unified Communications platform and the two are not compatible with each other. That lack of integration or upgrade path from one to the other is a significant part of why Microsoft has decided to kill Response Point.

SMB’s still need communications though. Joe Schurman, CEO of Evangelyze Communications and author of Microsoft Voice and Unified Communications, wrote a blog post with a sort of post mortem assessment of Response Point and some advice for Microsoft on how to proceed to capture that same SMB market and get them migrated to OCS 2007 and Microsoft UC.

Cost Savings Drives UC Adoption by SMB’s

ROI is generally at or near the top of the checklist when trying to determine if a given project should be approved. Of course, the project may make workers more efficient, it may improve logistics or increase the speed at which products or services can be delivered to customers, or it may just be really cool. But, where the rubber meets the road is translating that efficiency, speed, or productivity into dollars and comparing it against the initial investment to determine if it is really worth it.

Recent studies by Siemens and bMighty help to illustrate just how significant that ROI is and how quickly the initial investment can be recovered when implementing unified communications. Interestingly, the Siemens study also found that SMB’s have the same top 6 pain points (listed in the same order of priority) as large enterprises when it comes to unified communications.

Looking at the big picture and doing the math “the study says 70% of SMBs have dealt with the top five pain points, rendering an average of 17.5 hours per week per knowledge worker into “unproductive” work time. This costs an average of $26,041 per knowledge worker per year, or $5,246 per employee per year.”

Comparing that with an average unified communications implementation cost of $225 per worker, a company with only 50 employees could see cost savings of over $250,000 in the first year. The cost of deploying unified communications will vary largely depending on the vendor that is chosen and the current state of the organization’s communications and data infrastructures, but for a company of only 50 people it is almost certain to be significantly less than $250,000.

Say the company has 250 employees? Suddenly that $250,000 in savings becomes over $1.3 million. If an investment in unified communications can save a 250-person company $1.3 million per year I think the next questions should be ‘when can we start, and how soon can we get UC up and running?’

Microsoft Response Point SP2

I am not sure how this snuck up on me, but today is the day that Microsoft is releasing Service Pack 2 (SP2) for their small and medium business phone platform Response Point.

SP2 adds a number of new features that users have been asking for since SP1 was released last summer. With SP2, the Response Point Auto Attendant feature can now be configured on a schedule. That enables customers to set up the Auto Attendant so it only answers during off-hours, or holidays, or whenever needed. SP2 also adds parked call return. That means that a parked call will ring back to get someone’s attention after a defined timeframe (no longer than 3 minutes). That helps to ensure that customers aren’t forgotten and left on hold forever.

There are many more new features and improvements. There are new technologies for improving call quality, VPN connectivity, analog phone line capabilities, and general overall improvements in Response Point performance. Check out the Microsoft Response Point SP2 site to learn more about the latest features and to download SP2. If you are looking for a resource to really help you understand, deploy, configure, or sell Response Point phone systems, read Harry Brelsford’s Microsoft Response Point Primer - Cut the Strings.

Are You Ready For UC?

What does that even mean? I think you have to at least get a grasp of what the essential concepts of unified communications are, how they might impact your organization, and what the potential benefit is to justify the upfront investment.

However, even after you address those issues and make some decisions about how to move forward with a unified communications deployment, there are still some fundamental questions to answer in terms of what your current network infrastructure can handle. The audio and video components of unified communications are bandwidth intensive and sensitive to things like latency and jitter. Building UC on a weak infrastructure is a recipe doomed for failure.

This article from Computing SA addresses this question specifically from an SMB point of view. What is the value or benefit of unified communications for small or medium businesses? In the end, the author poses a different question: “have you realised that you need it?”

Combining the ‘Tels’: Nortel Buys Pingtel

Nortel is a major player in the unified communications arena. Much of their VoIP and UC technology is built on Pingtel’s open source solutions. In their effort to strengthen their product line and improve their ability to deliver innovative UC soutions for the SMB (small and medium business) market, Nortel purchased Pingtel. An instantmessagingplanet.com article says “The acquisition, which has Nortel buying Pingtel from the smaller firm’s parent company, BlueSocket, illustrates a growing trend as vendors strive to push out seamless and easy-to-manage UC solutions — but often don’t have the capacity to develop needed software elements in-house.” Check out the article to learn more.