Vodafone Business One: converged comms may be just phase one

by Stuart Corner

Thursday, 26 June 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Vodafone's one-stop shop converged offering for small business, Vodafone Business One , is truly  an ambitious move. It certainly brings to small business an offering with a level of integration and 'one-stop-shopness' that is unprecedented and the technology Vodafone is using has the potential to support a wide range of business applications. However despite Vodafone's claims that its surveys have told it this is what customers want, I doubt that success will be guaranteed. The big question: 'what will it cost?' won't be answered for some time, but it does not look like it will be cheap. Vodafone's chosen partners - Cisco and RIM (BlackBerry) are not known for being the lowest cost offerings in their respective contributions: IP PBX, data networking and IP phones from Cisco and push email services from BlackBerry. Then there will be the not inconsiderable cost of setting up the whole thing for a customer, migrating the customer's existing fixed and mobile telephone services, Internet access and PBX functionality to the new system, and just as important: maintaining the level of service that is able to quickly respond to a customer complaint, identify which of the various components is at fault and, through the relevant provider, effect expeditious rectification. Having only 'one throat to choke' is the sort of functionality a business does not appreciate until a hard-to-pin-down problem occurs. When it does, running around grabbing throats might be frustrating and time consuming but the cost of doing so is probably never really accounted for. Vodafone will have to factor this into the cost of supporting the service. I ventured to suggest that the standard BlackBerry solution was something of overkill for a small business. It requires the installation of dedicated hardware, the BlackBerry Enterprise server in the customer's data centre to route email messages from their systems to the BlackBerry handsets via RIM's servers (in Canada) an the cellular network. Jeff McDowell, RIM's vice-president, global alliances, said that RIM offered BlackBerry Unite software that performs similar functionality but runs on any of the user's desktop computers. But Vodafone has no immediate plans to offer it, and in any case, it is limited to five users. http://eu.blackberry.com/eng/services/blackberryunite/ However on the upside is the prospect for upsell. This might be a Vodafone service but at the heart of Business One sits the Cisco Integrated Services Router. According to Vodafone, "it is a big part of Vodafone Business One, providing the core of your upgraded network infrastructure. Connecting to broadband DSL connections, it provides complete network security for all traffic and information both entering and leaving your business. Utilising Cisco CallManager Express support, it also provides the complete IP-PBX phone system for your business, managing all numbers, services and features you will use as part of your Vodafone Business One solution." CONTINUED << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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