Inside Baseball: Phone and Phone Systems
This one's gonna be about modern phone systems UCaaS is it's referred to and endpoint devices the actual physical device on the desktop so you you probably don't care about any of this so just just skip forward but I'm I just need to get off my chest Microsoft teams Microsoft is just as much as like I mean I can't I come I mean I got intact in the late 90s so you know Microsoft was the evil Empire and and Microsoft did the most incredibly incredibly smart thing when they released teams Microsoft created a partner certification program for the endpoint for the physical device the phone on the desktop the conference room hardware all these different things and so you have team certified devices and you can go through and you can get certified whether you're selling a phone or you're selling a headset or whatever it is right you have to go through and you have to get approved by Microsoft but what Microsoft did that was so amazing was they provided the software and the UI for the device so if you're using teams on your desktop and then you go and you use teams on your cell phone or then you go and you use teams on a physical phone or you go use teams in a conference room Microsoft owns that u x they own the user experience and the UI across the entire platform and so the functionality is the same the look and feel is the same the experience is the same and you know and if you think about Microsoft Microsoft does this very well they've created they've commoditized the hardware manufacturer and they provide the value in the software in the UI does it sound familiar that's windows windows commoditize the PC so it didn't matter if you were buying you know back in the day gateway Dell PC HP compact whatever IBM whatever it was the hardware didn't matter anymore made no difference You know what it was in the hardware because it was Windows inside and Windows is what you actually cared about.
Speaker 1:And so we see this with, you know, with with teams and teams endpoints. Looking at the the state of the voice world in the UCaaS world today, Going back a few years, I thought Avaya was gonna be the one to do the same thing and actually really own this user experience market. And they released a very exciting update and software stack, and I was super stoked about it. I think I think this was like 2,000, 2,000. Yeah this is pre pandemic so I I want to put this in 1999, 2019, 2020 timeline but so they they come out with this you know unified desktop experience with a mobile device you know experience for iPhone and Android and tablet and then show demos of this or likes, presentations of it running on their phones.
Speaker 1:And by the way, I've got one of their fancy phones down here on the desk here. This this this thing right here, this giant Android screen. I mean, it's literally it's just a giant giant screen. I'm super excited and so we I, I I forced Avaya to give me one. Thank you, Avaya, for shipping me this stuff and promptly turned it on and and booted it up and guess what?
Speaker 1:They had shipped these things and their platform required you to run their old interface and the second I saw that I just I just knew there was no chance for the via to actually figure this out or make it like they just was just gone most you can't as companies in the market today you know are really only pushing or selling if you if you want a a physical endpoint, your options are poly, you know, which is now which might tell tried to buy but couldn't, which is an HP HPE HP heal 1 HP or HPE, I forget bought bought Polycom. Polycom and Plantronics merge become poly. Poly isn't acquired by HP. Okay. Gotta keep track of all this stuff.
Speaker 1:It gets really confusing very fast. So Polycom being Poly now, Poly being the dominant endpoint device, physical device on phones. They have nice touchscreen phones. It look great. Other one that came out and just really exploded was Yealink.
Speaker 1:Yealink is it makes a really pretty phone as well. Very common, you know, cheaper than Poly, so super popular. There's a lot of things. It's also nice to the service provider and includes, voice quality statistics without licensing. It has a, a zero com boot, so the phone can check-in and with its registration server and say, hey.
Speaker 1:Where am I supposed to check-in? So you'd have to physically configure every phone when you ship them out. Getting getting too into the nerd details here probably. You know, there's, like, AudioCodes and Snom and Grandstream, and there's there's other manufacturers out there, but they're not really super, super relevant. Pick a UCaaS company.
Speaker 1:You know, let's just pick on the big names. If you're RingCentral, if you're 8 by 8, if you're if you're Zoom, if you're Dialpad, let's just go down that list. And you want and people's come to you and say, hey, we wanna actually run a physical phone on the desk. You know, you're going out and you're getting, you know, again, they're just buying Poly or they're buying Yealink probably. And Yealink and Poly control that experience.
Speaker 1:And the phone company, the UCaaS provider, is dependent on the device manufacturer to actually determine what features are enabled. So how does the, user directory work? Well, that's a poly function. How does blind transfer work? That's a poly decision.
Speaker 1:How do you, how does voice mail retrieval work? That's a, you know, Yealinks decided. How does, you know, so all these different things, you we're in the hands of the device manufacturer versus device you know the hands of the u cast company and when you when you look at the integrated vendors so this was Avaya where they were making the the phone system for on prem and the phone system you know the phones right so they had a tight coupled experience and Mitel was doing this and ShoreTel was doing this and these different companies were doing this. But none of them really transitioned very well into their cloud services. Avaya got out of the business.
Speaker 1:They just said, we're out. Now Avaya will tell you that they're adding value by overlaying their intellectual property on top of RingCentral as a stack. But I mean, ask to see a demo of their physical phone and and what the UI and the physical phone is versus what the UI is, from from Avaya for the desktop, you know Mitel got completely out of the cloud space completely, you know and like they're just they just they're not they didn't attempt to overlay on somebody else. They just decided just to run away from the whole thing. Mitel, by the way, made a really cool phone, which is this one up here.
Speaker 1:You can't see but it's I can't point behind me very well. Anyways, that this one up here on this desk. They had a really cool phone, you know, you know, wireless receivers, nice big color touch strings, Bluetooth built in, you know, all these different things. Great phone but same thing now they don't own the underlying platform. They can't you know, the interface between the phone and and and the UX, you know, and the of the softphone, you know, don't jive and don't don't connect.
Speaker 1:You know, Cisco still has a Cisco Webex calling. You know, it's out there in the market. You can go to, you know, you can you can move on premise, Cisco call manager, you know, CUCM to, to a HCS platform and use the phones. And you can also go to Cisco Webex calling, you know, disconnect experience between the phone and the, softphone. You know, what's running on your on your on your desktop and what's running on your cell phone.
Speaker 1:So I I'm, you know, really Google Voice. I mean, the the Google Voice doesn't count because they don't care like I think they just put this product up there to say that they have it and whatever suckers buy it buy it. So you know when when I look at this and I think about this and start talking about you know where would you actually invest what company would I buy stock in and how would I actually decide well you know part of that is you know you can you can look at it from like an you know market share acquisition you know what's what's their percentage of TAM what's their percentage of growth you know these are all things that you kind of look at. But but from a from a technology from a technology standpoint, I look at it in terms of who's actually looking down the road and in trying to actually capture and provide an integrated experience for the user because these are the things that actually end up winning. You know, at some point if you're interacting with a phone system and you're using just the poly or Yealink device on your desktop and you're not using a softphone from that provider and you're not using the admin interface your experience with that phone system is a poly and everything behind it is completely interchangeable you know it doesn't matter what you're running at that point because you don't see it you don't experience it there's no there's no connection to it there's no affinity to it there's no value to it it's just like what what provides and make that what makes that phone work and this drives a lot of commoditization and pricing pressure down now if you control the experience end to end and you say this is the experience that I want to buy I want to buy this experience the only place I can go and get this experience is from this company that provides differentiation and value and you know it doesn't lead to price erosion so I'm curious to see if any of these erosion.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious to see if any of these UCaaS providers actually take this step. You know, there's there's a certain sense that physical phones are dead and then it's just a matter of time before nobody uses them anymore. And, you know, to a certain degree, maybe that's true. I mean, this also comes from the whole idea of, like, the whole entire world went to work from home and is never going back to the office. But the second that you have people going back into office and you start talking about RTO, you know, you can talk about if it's RTO from the standpoint of like hot desking you can hotdesk you know phones on on desks hot desking doesn't apply to most enterprise users and most knowledge workers now you're still talking about a person who has a physical has a has a designated physical spot and that person has a designated physical phone so I kind of I kind of feel like physical phones are gonna make a resurgence here and you know I'm not betting money on this actually I bet some money on if you want to take a bet with me about whether or not physical phones are gonna die or come back you know reach out and and and we'll we'll set up a deal you know set up a set up a side bet but you know, I don't know.
Speaker 1:We'll do something silly. But the that device and that ownership of that user experience outside of Microsoft teams, I kind of feel like maybe Zoom would be the first one to really do this and to, figure it out because they've got, you know, Zoom rooms and they've they've got a good good, you know, hardware manufacturer program and they've got a lot of interaction with that stuff and they're they're probably the ones that I would do this the first. It comes into again strategy because Zoom wants to push people to desktop with, you know, video. You can have that experience also running on a physical in device. It's like sitting on a desk.
Speaker 1:It's always there and they have their, like, their their big screens and big monitors and kinda wonder if Zoom's gonna do it. You know, it'd be it'd be interesting to be a fly on the wall and some of the conversations are going on inside. But, you know, when we counsel clients on phone systems and we start talking about these things, you know, the the stuff that we're really looking for and I'm looking for and talking about is, you know, I mean, a lot of it's not like, what what other platforms are you integrating with? Do you have a CRM you have to have an integrate with? Do you have, you know, equipment in the office?
Speaker 1:Do you have, you know, paging systems or door access gate control systems? Or do you have existing conference room hardware that you really care about? Or, you know, are you are you running Windows or Mac on the desktop? And what do you have for your cell phone fleet? What's your mobile?
Speaker 1:And what are people doing? I mean, like, all that kind of stuff. But it's, you know, what is your users experience? What are they going to experience day to day? How do you provide a good experience for your users?
Speaker 1:How do you make people happy? How do you make them, you know, feel like that they have, like, a sophisticated advanced, you know, cutting edge experience? Because this is a big thing for you. Right? Like, nobody wants to come into an office and feel like they've just stepped back in time 10, 15 years.
Speaker 1:You know? If you're providing an experience, it really feels like you're going backwards in time. Like, you know, like, people look at the company. Like, you know, it's it's it's this thing of, like, oh, my we're so backwaters here. You know?
Speaker 1:Or like and and a lot of that is just what people experience when they sit down and they interact. Right? You know? Are they getting modern equipment? Are they getting modern experience?
Speaker 1:Anyway so, you know, like I said, a lot of inside baseball here in terms of devices and phones. And, you know, it's great that a lot of these devices have gone touch screen. It's kinda like this when the iPhone came out and all of a sudden everything went touch screen. You know, the touch screens that exist today, a lot of them are just touch screen representations of what were buttons beforehand, and the and the UX hasn't really been changed. And, I'm really hoping it does.
Speaker 1:I'm hoping somebody figures it out because it's gonna be really cool once that when when this happens it's gonna be really cool when this comes out and somebody else is in market going really head to head with Microsoft on I'm providing you know a seamless end to end environment so I'm Max Clark. That's not quite 20 minutes, but that was 20 minutes max
