Mitel presents on customer-centric innovation at the 2014 Integra Tech Expo series.
In today's global, consumer-driven economy, the only survivors will be those companies that are able to put the customer at the center of all their thinking and processes. Technology is the indispensable toolset that holds everything together and delivers the seamless connections customers are demanding. Will your IT department continue to be regarded as a cost center primarily concerned with internal processes rather than as a front-edge source of product innovation and customer engagement? Learn about innovations and trends to help you deliver on this new imperative.
12. Purpose Built Appliance
Benefits
• Long Lasting
• Easy to Use and Maintain
• No Interdependencies
Cons
• Limited Upgrades
• Single Function CapEx Investment
13. Hybrid Cloud Architecture
Benefits
• Supports Consolidation
• Increases Reliability/DR/Portability
• Strong ROI Model
Cons
• Requires Expertise
• High Initial Cost
14. Hosted Software as a Service
Benefits
• Infinite Scale
• Supports Mobility/Anywhere Access
• Pay as you Grow
Cons
• Connectivity Dependent
• Ongoing cost may be More Expensive
15. Business is Changing
THEN NOW
Known
Owned
Methodical Planning
Slow
Millions
“Built to Last”
Unpredictable
Shared
Rapid Iteration
Instant
Billions
“Built to Change”
Competition
Assets
Innovation
App Deployment
Customers
Organization
25. The Power of “AND”
Traditional Apps &
Cloud-Native Apps
IT &
Developers
On-Premise &
Off-Premise
&
Safe, Secure,
and Compliant
Instant, Elastic,
and Self-Service
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31. Social Media
“A brand is no longer what we
tell the consumer it is - it is
what consumers tell each
other it is.”
- Scott Cook, co-founder Intuit
As IT leaders we are all faced with a difficult challenge supporting our users today, applications need to be always on, accessible from anywhere on any device and deliver the information that drives business interactions efficiently and effectively.
Steve Jobs said “quote” and I believe that comment now applies to not only the device, but also the Network you’re using or the Framework you employ.
In preparing this presentation I decided to poll my most discerning end users, my family, to find out what applications are most important to them, for my wife it’s Words with Friends - give her a bottle of wine and WwF and she would be set. For my two teen daughters, it is Instagram, I know I took pause as well, but Dad is subscribed to both of their feeds. For my next two daughters, Netflix and White Tiles are neck in neck, and for my 9 year old son, it’s Minecraft. For me, whether I need to relax on a long flight, or get some inspiration on the treadmill, I turn to music. It anchors, me… it transports me…
I am sure that you have those songs that transport you to a time and place too. One of my most poignant was prom, by the way, I never had that much hair… The Police, “Every breath you take” takes me back to the excitement of that night.
Another song that has tremendous meaning for me was when I brought home my first daughter, you see my wife and I were relatively young, 23 years old. We were living in a little apartment in Ahwatukee, AZ near Chandler Regional Hospital. Caitlin was so small and delicate, I didn’t even know how to pick her up at first, much less dress her or put her in her car seat, this song fit the moment perfectly and it’s what we listened to on that short drive home. (click) Will Smith singing “Just the Two of Us.”
So join me if you will as we explore the application that I hold most dear and how it has evolved over the years. The Record was the first delivery of pre-recorded sound, invented in 1888. However, it wasn’t until World War II when records were produced and distributed to the military to pick up the spirits of the troops, bring them a little closer to home.
In the 1980’s the cassette tape became more popular due to it’s portability, cassette players were installed in vehicles and Sony introduced the Sony Walkman. You could through a cassette tape in the floorboard of your car, dust it off and through it back into the cassette deck and it would play. But there was a drawback, it was difficult to play the song you wanted to hear on demand, you had to fast forward or rewind until you found the song.
Which is what made CDs such a break though! Wait we could do that with records too. But the fidelity! Oh the clarity of a CD versus a tape, just amazing! Just don’t let your kids touch them, or drop them, one scratch and they were just about worthless. Oh and if you wanted just one song, you still had to buy the whole CD. And don’t try changing CDs while you were driving, you just might end up in oncoming traffic…
Then emerged a true feat of engineering genius, the iPod. I could buy THE song I wanted off of iTunes and combine it with my imported music from all my CDs and create playlists to listen to any song I wanted at any time anywhere I was. I bought a tape adapter for my car, a stereo adapter for the house. Romantic evenings and parties had never been better, no more interruptions to go change the track or the artist. I thought this could only get better if I didn’t have to store it all on my computer…
And then my wish became reality with iCloud, now it was all stored in the cloud for me. Today for the songs I don’t already own, I can subscribe to Spotify or Beats and listen to my favorite songs, or explore new songs from any artist at anytime… as long as I am connected. Funny story about this one, before I got a 10 GB family share plan, it wasn’t unheard of to get a $400+ bill from the wireless carrier because my daughters had been streaming Pandora down the street when they were playing with their friends…
So now that we’ve walked down memory lane, if you would be so kind to indulge me, I would like to compare the music mediums to IT infrastructure.
The record, tape and CD for that matter were purpose built appliances. They were fairly long lasting and durable, easy to use and maintain, didn’t require much in the way of technology or interdependencies. Their drawbacks were that they were single purpose, had limited to no ability to upgrade with out rip and replace. But you could say they accomplished what they were designed to do fairly well.
The iPod was like a private or hybrid data center. I could consolidate all of my apps into one place, I had portability, I had a DR strategy. If my iPod stopped working or was lost, I could recover from my computer. It had a good ROI model, and I could upgrade while retaining most of my investment. But there was some expertise required to import my data, sync the environment and maintain the databases. And there was a high initial cost, $500 for my 10GB model.
When the iPhone came along, I was dismayed that storage was only 8GB. I had to be selective about what songs I could take on the road with me. It wasn’t too long though and the price for cellular data plans started to come down. Now I have limitless storage in the cloud, I can go anywhere and listen to any song I want on demand. I can pay as I grow… The cons are that I have to be connected to access my music and the ongoing cost may actually be more expensive than what previous mediums may have been.
Now lets take a look at the evolving business IT landscape. Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, introduced a concept of the “Liquid business” at VMworld 2014 in August. In order to enable our business to change effectively we have to think about our IT frameworks and application delivery in a whole new way. -read from the slide-
As IT leaders, you have an ever expansive beachhead to service, addressing business priorities and technology priorities alike. Gartner surveyed CIOs and identified these top 10 priorities. You will notice that some of the key priorities are delivering growth, attracting new customers and employees, and expanding into new markets. The key technology enablers for today’s workforce and customer applications are mobile devices, cloud computing, collaboration, virtualization and integrated ERP systems. That can be a daunting list if you don’t know what direction to head to tackle these challenges.
You may find, like many of your peers out there, that IT has been flipped on it’s head. It used to be the company determined device, access and application use policies that were then handed to employees. Those were the days when we had better tools at work than we did at home. But consumerization of devices and the proliferation of internet access have changed that. We now find that our users are bringing their own X and expecting us to figure out how to adapt our support. We find that lines of business feel underserved and are turning to SaaS vendors for solutions. The truth is “you can’t do it all” you have to examine your business to determine what services differentiate your business, what gives you a competitive edge, and what could be looked at as a utility service. At my company, we determined that email was a utility service, so we outsourced it to free up resources to focus on differentiating services in its place.
You have to find a way to gain value for the business while maintaining corporate governance and control. So ask yourself, - read the questions from the slide -
The reason so many CIOs are turning to the cloud for answers, are captured in these quotes from Forrester’s Predictions for 2014: Cloud Computing - read the quotes -
So you have some choices to make… do you want to build your own? There are some great vendors out there with some tremendous private cloud offerings, but do you have or want to have the expertise to piece all of these components together? Storage, de-dup, back up, memory and compute, data switching, hypervisors and all the optimization tools to make it work efficiently…
If not, Hyperconverged Infrastructure may your answer. Several vendors are finding a way to deliver the Software Defined Data Center by delivering preconfigured appliances that contain all the building blocks for the private data center that you previously had to build on your own.
Think of it just like your car. You don’t buy all the components and assemble it to take you where you want to go. You buy it preconfigured, just pick up your keys!
Course those methods both require an up front CAPEX investment. If you are looking for a way to deploy your applications and just rent a parking space in someone else's infrastructure, there are some great options out there. They take care of the commoditized infrastructure components, you deploy your apps in their environment and simply pay for the resources and level of redundancy you wish to have. This gives you the ability to pay as you grow while focussing your team on the differentiated offerings.
Sometimes, it makes better sense to let someone even take care of the applications. Like I mentioned earlier, Mitel outsourced our email because it was a utility service for us. Sometimes SaaS vendors provide you with speed and agility that would be impossible to match. We moved our global sales team to salesforce.com because we could deploy quickly, minimize training, and provide easy access to our mobile workforce for pipeline and customer management.
Your opportunity is to deliver on the power of “AND.” By leveraging the private, hybrid and public clouds, you can deliver the power of “AND” for your company delivering applications that meet the requirements of your technical and business objectives at the same time.
So let’s talk about a company that read the tea leaves early on and took a leadership position in Unified Communications, is continuing to consolidate the industry and is focussed on delivering solutions that help our customers collaborate like never before. - read some points from the slide -
Mitel’s vision was to deliver a single stream of software that could be deployed on an appliance, installed on industry standard servers, virtualized in private, hybrid or public data centers. It takes the entire UC application stack, delivered in a software based solution and leverages a customers existing investment in the framework of their choice.
Mitel also helped preserve our customer’s investments by ensuring that the licensing would migrate from one framework to another, while delivering an identical end user experience along the way. A customer that has purchased a Mitel IP-PBX appliance can migrate the licensing they purchased to a virtual deployment, whether private or with an IaaS provider. Mitel’s partners, like Integra can even deliver a managed service where they maintain your Mitel UC stack on your behalf or move you to an OPEX model allowing you to focus on other investments and applications.
No matter what the framework, or who is maintaining the solution, the end user experience is consistent with feature rich collaboration tools, fully capable mobility applications supporting voice, chat, presence and video. The contact center tool sets are multimedia enabled for email, fax, chat and voice interactions allowing your customers to chose how they would prefer to contact you.
Mitel also understands that for true adoption and efficiency the UC capability needs to seamlessly integrate with productivity tools like Microsoft office including Lync, web enabled apps like salesforce.com and google docs. If your employees can stay in their productivity app of choice and have the UC tools simply blend into the environment, you will get the best return out of your investment.
How many of you have a social media strategy for interacting with your customers today? I found this interesting quote by Scott Cook, the co-founder of Intuit, and it really hit home. - read quote -
Mitel realizes that in today’s liquid business, you need to be able to respond to social media post in a timely manner. Mitel’s social media enabled contact center can help you reward brand champions and respond to unhappy customers on a proactive basis.
Coming full circle, to today’s message, have you noticed Vinyl is making a comeback? Any one in the audience happy you held on to that record collection? It’s about the fidelity, about the end user experience. The fact of the matter is you have to evaluate the best framework for your applications. And Mitel and Integra are here to help you do that, delivering on feature rich solutions tailor-made to your framework of choice with investment protection along the way.
If your looking for the path to attracting and retaining new customers, improving the efficiency of your workforce, extending collaboration across your teams, or ensuring you have a good plan for mobile integration Mitel and Integra are a good bet.
So go out there, navigate your IT path to delivering exceptional user experiences and realizing that it truly is (click) “a Beautiful Day”, U2