Round Table: Wildix EVENTS
Top (L) – Ian Walker, Top (R) – Rob Loakes, Bottom (L) – Stephen Dracup, Bottom (R) – Tim Mercer
say £15 a seat, when they are
only paying £10 a line, and the
system is already paid for, is a
really dicult sell.
Tim Mercer, CEO at Vapour
Cloud (TM): I think there is
always going to be an element
of this. It’s like either ying
British Airways or Ryan Air.
ere should be people that
provide dierent services to
customers. We don’t get into
that space because we can’t
make enough money. For me,
hosted is about the service
levels and network level, for
Vapour it’s just an application
that sits on the network. It’s
not about voice, it’s about what
the client wants to do with
it. at might be working at
home, exible working from
everywhere across mobile or
something else. ere is no
point, in my opinion, trying
to sell something if you can’t
support it in the right way.
You will pay more to y
British Airways than Ryan Air.
You will complain when Ryan
Air is late or canceled but you
will still use it. Where you
want to play depends on what
you want to oer. I had to turn
a deal down this morning for
300 users because I couldn’t do
the price point, they can buy
it from someone else cheaper
than us and I’m not going to
battle over it. It’s a waste of
time because it doesn’t make
any money and I’ll still have to
support it and look after it.
CBM: Is the end of the ISDN
driving sales?
Stephen Dracup, Chief Growth
Officer at Chess (SD): I’m
not sure customers have the
awareness. We meet various
parties quite a lot at the
moment because obviously a
large number of our assets are
going to be shut down at some
point through this process.
Openreach are not really
making, publicly anyway,
much noise.
From our perspective the
motivation to moving to
cloud and away from TDM is
more to do with the customer
business objectives rather than
the end of the network. e
ones that are transforming
their businesses are moving
because they have a much
wider play going on around
going digital.
Kenny Neill, Head of Hosted
at Abzorb (KN): I think a lot
of people are showing interest
but not necessarily doing
anything about it. ey are
moving away from ISDN for
other reasons mostly. ere
are people spoking customers
with the switch-o but that is
not driven by the customer, it
is nearly always driven by the
sales guy.
CBM: What are you doing
around WebRTC right now?
Rob Loakes, UK Channel
Manager at Wildix (RL): I don’t
actually see many businesses
implementing a WebRTC
policy in isolation, WebRTC is
a protocol that addresses many
other business policies but with
some unique benets.
For example, many
companies are looking at a
Video conferencing policy
and there are many solutions
out there that may t their
policy. If the policy states that
video conferencing should
cross-platform, allow mobile
devices and be available
without having to install an
application, then WebRTC will
address this need.
Given that these
requirements today, with
the advent of COVID-19
are heightened and maybe
changing daily, the exibility
of a WebRTC solution is a
technology must for these
policies. If we look at home
working, the ability to have
zero-touch deployment by
simply logging into a Webpage,
really using any device
regardless of operating systems,
service packs and alike, not
requiring a VPN or hardware
such as handsets shipped to the
home worker, along with more
services than just voice with
things like Chat, video and
screen sharing then WebRTC
is the only technology that can
address these.
SD: It’s part of our cloud PBX
proposition. In terms of ease
of use and access, it just works.
You don’t have to install an app
which is a good move I think,
and it’s a bit more secure. I still
think people want apps though,
particularly on devices.
NH: From my point of view we
have seen a lot of noise around
WebRTC revolutionising the
industry, but it hasn’t really
been adopted at scale yet. We
haven’t seen the big shift with
the technology yet.
Barry Ward, UC Product
Director at Wavenet (BW): I
think when the big guys come
into play, Microsoft and Cisco
with the MSTeams integration
with WebEx Teams, and they
standardize I think it will drive
the whole market forwards.
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