Unified Communications breaks down all the walls between fixed, mobile, email, conferencing and messaging. The technology has been in business use for a decade, the market looks mature and settled. But what about the $430 million Shoretel acquisition by Mitel last July? Or the rumour that Amazon would buy Slack, the fast-growing corporate chat platform, for $9 billion? Microsoft’s acquisition of ‘the Facebook of the recruitment world' for $26 billion, equivalent to £50 for each Linkedin account, is a move laden with UC overtones.
Twenty six billion... Is it a lot? Avaya bought Nortel for less than $1 billion; Google paid around $1.5 billion for YouTube; Microsoft paid less than £9 billion for Skype; and Facebook acquired WhatsApp for under $20 billion. So, it’s a lot.
Microsoft must see $26 of value in the opportunity of integrating Outlook, Skype, Linkedin, Cortana, Lynda and O365? Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft or Mitel are also converging. The mission - breaking all the walls.
All those acquisitions have one element missing in the convergent equation: corporate service management. Where to go when things go wrong. Truly managed service is missing most of the times because not enough effort and planning is going into providing outstanding customer service. Even telcos, traditionally known as service providers, have struggled with the digital revolution and increasingly demanding customers.
Orange has always taken customer service very seriously. “OBS was the first among its peers to establish a full global service support infrastructure. It promotes its global credentials and has a robust approach to managing CE for MNC across Orange properties and its wider ecosystem of partners”.
Orange has been part of the Unified Communications revolution. Orange manages, deploys and supports thousands of users on Microsoft, Cisco or Polycom. But Orange does not think that the UC&C decision depends on the UC&C story of a particular manufacturer, it knows that customer service is the key ingredient. All Orange UC&C solutions have strong service at the core. The benefits are compelling, the end-to-end quality of service is straight-forward, and the convergence between UCC, WAN and cybersecurity is transparent.
To discuss UC&C services, contact Javier on Javier.Sanz-Blasco@orange.com
Javier holds an MBA at Henley Business School (UK) and has more than 20 years’ experience in Unified Communications. He currently works as Sales Executive at Orange, where he maps the business requirements of the biggest multinationals to a service. An avid reader and former chess player, he enjoys hiking with his family the mountains of Picos de Europa in Spain and long distance running along the Thames River.