All,
Something just occurred to me and I thought I'd share it with you. It has to do with a discussion I had recently with one of my West Coast partners who related what he was advising his Silicon Valley clients on, recently. It's got to do with uncertainties surrounding the purchasing of telecomm equipment.
-----------
This thing that's happening with the traditional voice equipment vendors...
It could be called the Nortel Thing.
OK, granted, it was precipitated by the fears caused by the announced lower revenues by NT. And NT's peers are all feeling it through sympathetics. You can remove the influences of Russia, Asia, the president's libido, and the new hedge fund cloud, and we would still be seeing lower volumes of sales coming from the big players.
Something else is happening in the background that does not bode very well for the large switch vendors at this time, and this is something I like to think of as a kind of preemptive backlash [hey! it's my post, isn't it? <g>] caused by the overhang of VoIP. Fears and apprehensions of being left out of the game, if a user were to go forward with new equipment acquisitions at this time.
VoIP is not only a threat to the traditional common carriers who refuse to get with it, but also to the makers of those big ticket items like PBXs, Automatic Call Directors (Call Center ACDs), and associated peripherals. You know... the kinds of things that prop up revenues for large telecommunications equipment manufacturers.
Central Office gear also, for if the next round of bids aren't in some way forgiving of those machines that lack DSLs and VoIPs, they wont stand a chance. This is no joke.
In fact, more than one world-class consultancy has been advising all of their clients to hold off from making any premature decisions on their next voice platform acquisitions. For many user organizations the RFP process for these items used to be ticked off like clock work. A no brainer, every so many years, or when they ran out of capacity.
But now they have something new to think about, a new set of protocols, an ensuing new set of human behavioral patterns when using the "phone", and whether they will be stuck for the next five to eight years with obsolete goods. To be sure, we are beginning to see some dragging of feet here, already, in this respect.
Let's hold on, to what we've got, for just a little while longer, and see if this thing, VoIP, is going to be ready for prime time by the time we really need a change is the message small, mid- and large corporations are beginning to receive. And it makes sense.
If it only makes a little bit of sense now, then that's enough to affect the bottom line projections in a noticeable way. And it will make a lot more sense in another year or so, and going into the future from there.
Of course, if the larger manufacturers can bootstrap themselves to the new paradigm, then they will make up for some of these shortcomings and deficiencies in sales over time... but will the emerging platforms be as cash-cow yielding as the older PBXs? I don't think so. So? Then what?
Do the vendors simply cut their revenue expectations from this sector, and hope to improve on margins only? You tell me. Am I all wet here? Or is there something to this line of thinking that should be so obvious, but hasn't caught on yet? Comments are welcome.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
