Not only have we been experiencing extreme heat, rain, floods, and other weird acts of nature and mankind in Canada (and the US), but this summer has been one of the busiest that we can remember related to news from the IT and communications industry, including our federal government.
We have had to sift through 2 – 3 times more articles this month than normal to try to bring you the top news items, so I apologize in advance if this issue is longer than usual.
Good thing is that many of you are on vacation, you still keep up your reading from your portable devices….we know this due to the ‘read receipts’ we sometime do to check to make sure our clients keep up, even though they say they are away on vacation, and have extended absence greetings on their corporate email ids….Yeah right!
Top interpretation of the month’s news – No surprise the pace of technology innovation is getting faster with product lifespan being shorter. This includes announcements like Cisco’s projected $500 billion worldwide revenue from “Internet of Everything” where more and more household devices will be networked. We have also been reading about more and more smart phone products, accessories and applications coming out as we speak, i.e. smart phones specifically for seniors, smart phone pins, wearable computers, etc.
While the industry continues to push ‘Cloud, colo and managed/hosted services’ as the next big thing that enterprise and government customers should get on board with, these types of solutions seem to be adopted and deployed more quickly primarily in smaller firms, i.e. <50 people (including FOX GROUP).
Our FOX GROUP clients are telling us that most of their upcoming technology investments are planned for networks, applications and mobile devices, not servers, PCs or even laptops.
From our TCO analysis of multiple UC projects, there are also interesting tipping points related to fit, depending on various factors such as number of locations, IT profiles of internal users, public communications requirements, use of contact centre technologies etc.
Until the ICT industry learns to develop, sell and educate potential buyers from the viewpoint of the customer rather than their engineering product viewpoint, some of these cool trends may not be adopted near as quickly as the industry would like, in order to reach their numbers, or gosh…not at all!
We wish you all a safe, and happy summer and ‘talk’ to you next month. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback!
