Great fun (some parts were pretty dull) with lots of interactions with competitors and customers.
After hearing five other industry players speak, it was my turn (an hour later).
I got up and started with the point that “They saved the best for last. I’m from 3Com.”
And, then I invited everybody to follow-along with the story on this blog.
Starting with a point from Gartner, 40% of enterprises implementing IP telephony will be disappointed because they didn’t prepare their network infrastructure enough. Shame on my non-network competitors for not pointing that out.
Then I showed off the excellent 3Com products in a topology for 1 LAN port per user (every phone ships with 2 Ethernet ports – one for wall connectivity and one for PC), automatically selecting Quality of Service, vLANs for voice traffic segmentation and management and so on.
The applications screen came next showing all the apps, but pointing out that I recommended two servers – for redundancy and automatic fail over.
Then I described the end user client commenting that the benefits of little things like click and drag, telephony presence could save $2.1 million. Even a 4-digit dial plan would drive a cost reduction of the target organization by $50,000. Think about it. If 420 employees made 10 internal calls/day, and dialing 4 digits instead of 12 saved 4 seconds, and with an average labor cost of $100,000; the company could create employees time. Time to do what they were originally hired for – time for health care, time for financial services, time for sales if thats what the company does. That’s only 20 minutes a day of fewer voice mail, more easily executed telephone calls, lower cost conferences, video calls and more.
In fact, I delivered the price in a benefits sandwich – I estimated that these benefits of $2.1 million could be delivered with only a half million investment in infrastructure equipment and software to deliver a payback within three to six months.
