Enterprise Voice Services for Small and Medium Businesses (Hosted Lync 2013)

  • Article

For the last few weeks I’ve been having discussions with some of my Telco partners about their future plans for VoIP offerings and the integration with Lync. It’s been of great help that the multi-tenant pack for Lync 2013 has been released and been made available for partners to start their Voice deployments, as this has facilitated such conversations.

The hosting pack allows Operators to be able to provide Enterprise Voice type of services to their customers in a multi-tenant mode. This multi-tenant option helps you to make better use of the investments made on infrastructure; such efficiencies get reflected in a better commercial proposition for end-customers, allowing Telcos to extend their services across different market segments that they might have not been able to reach before, for example:

  • Low Middle Market
  • Small Business
  • SOHO users
  • Mobile Workers

With all of these different expectations and type of implementations from the diversity of customers, we can see how the data revenue is where the growth will be. As Voice continues to fall -both in fixed line and wireless voice-, Data is clearly becoming a core service for Operators, and cloud is moving from value-add to core service for Operators.

At the same time, as the Telco offers higher products/offers in the value chain, their ability to drive up customer retention as well as the ARPU increases, as Lync provides a new platform for Value-Added-Services.

We can reconfirm this trend by looking at the following indicators:

  • Customers want an overarching communication infrastructure that includes multiple points of communication.
  • Customers are trying to take advantage of cloud services so they don’t have to buy, implement, integrate and maintain on-premise gear.
  • With service level agreements and attractive price points, cloud becomes an even more important option for customers and Operators.
  • Cloud services generate a new recurring revenue stream that helps compensate for potential loss of traditional voice revenue
  • SI becomes a growing necessity for customers and an important opportunity for Operators.
    • Establishing and maintaining a proper communication infrastructure can be complex.
    • Upgrading it wisely takes a lot of knowledge about how all the components work and how they integrate with each other.
    • Decisions have to be made about what stays on premise, what goes into cloud. It requires developing a rational upgrade plan and the ability to successfully executing on it.
    • All of this requires the sophisticated SI capability which Operators have.

With the release of Lync Hosting Pack, Operators are able to embark in a journey that can help them to extend their offers to new segments, becoming more competitive in the marketplace, delivering more value to their customers, while protecting their ARPU and customer base. 

If you want to read more about the hosting pack for Lync,click here.