IT EXPO West - CounterPath UC director debunks some myths, offers path forward

CounterPath, an enterprise unified communications vendor, is taking a different approach to the market segment and offered alternative ways to drive ROI with UC solutions. There is a lot of skepticism around the ultimate utility and value around UC deployments, a fact John Craig, director of enterprise unified communications for CounterPath, readily admits.

"The productivity benefit has been relatively overstated, and it's probably a horses*** argument altogether," Craig said. "There isn't a CIO in the world that's going to deploy UC based a productivity benefit, but in this recessionary environment, if you want to take that and turn it into a hard cost savings, focus the deployment on climbing into the client's skin a little bit. Take the internal productivity benefit and face it out to customers."

Craig offered a hypothetical hospitality environment where guests would receive a SMS message upon arrival that would allow them to login to the hotel's system, receiving RSS feeds about events in the hotel, deals and offers, and updates on their room if it was not ready immediately. He said this system would also allow the customer to customize their profile and contact settings, so the enterprise didn't overbear and discourage use of the system.

In other areas, Craig said the company was seeing success deploying its mobile UC client on Nokia dual-mode devices in Europe, and would be more profitable if partner Nortel wasn't bankrupt.

Craig also said he sees trouble ahead for VoIP and UC, as the industry is in a "race to zero very quickly," due to mobile network advances around LTE.

"After the LTE revolution, what's a VoIP phone?" Craig said. "It will just be a data radio and a SIP client, which doesn't bode well for people selling those solutions."