More and more South African organisations are opting for a single ICT service provider.
So says Chris Baisch, chief marketing officer at Nashua Communications, commenting on the results of the ITWeb / Nashua Communications Convergence Survey, which ran online for 14 days during August.
"The key benefits of opting for a single service provider include better pricing because the selected vendor is able to provide a bundled or packaged solution. There is also more efficient technical support, as the vendor understands the organisation's entire ICT landscape completely, and there's a single point of contact for technical and billing queries, resulting in less and more efficient administration," says Baisch.
According to the survey results, the majority of respondents (65%) prefer to deal with a single service provider who is able to cater for all their PBX, voice and data requirements, while 35% do not.
"The main downfall of using multiple service providers in a converged ICT environment is 'finger pointing' between the providers when there's a technical issue," says Baisch.
Baisch believes using too many service providers leads to longer resolution times when there is an issue, which can impact the business in various ways during a downtime, depending on the nature of the business. Obviously, these risks still apply when dealing with a single service provider; however, the fewer service providers involved, the speedier the resolution time in general when there are issues, he adds.
It also emerged that 39% of survey respondents use an IP-based telecommunication system, 24% use TDM/analogue/legacy systems, and 27% use a mixture of both.
Commenting on this, Baisch says: "Ideally, using a single technology simplifies the technological landscape, resulting in simpler support and more cost-effective maintenance overheads. However, in most cases, organisations are forced to migrate from one technology to another, over a period of time, because 'rip and replace' is just not an option, both technically and financially. So there are no real pros and cons here; organisations just need to make a smooth transition from one technology to another, in the shortest feasible time period."
Some 55% of survey respondents said their PBX, voice and data infrastructure is managed in- house, 22% said it is outsourced, and 16% indicated that their organisations use a mixture of both.
Baisch believes the debate on whether to outsource or maintain in-house ICT infrastructure is ongoing, and depends on the size and complexity of the ICT environment within a particular business, as well as what ICT capabilities that business already has in-house.
He explains: "Naturally, with the growth in cloud services, more and more companies will gravitate towards consuming these kinds of services and will essentially outsource, preferring to pay a monthly opex-based service fee. The maintenance overhead, therefore, shifts to the service provider, allowing the company to focus more on its core business. However, as it currently stands, many companies have invested heavily in their current ICT systems and personnel, so they are slow to adopt cloud services for now, but that should change in the coming years as cloud services become more mature and trusted, and businesses have sweated their assets."
For 48% of respondents, their organisations' voice and data traffic is split, with voice carried over one circuit and data over another. Some 34% revealed that their voice and data traffic is converged using the same last-mile access circuit.
Commenting on the benefit of converging the two over one circuit, Baisch says: "Essentially, it is all about economies of scale, with a single, larger circuit catering for the voice and data requirements of both individual circuits being cheaper than running two separate circuits."
Baisch adds that operating a single circuit requires a single service provider and comes with the same benefits mentioned above. Operating two separate circuits makes sense in the case of redundancy, or where failover is required, where both the voice and data are converged on both circuits and where one circuit is dedicated as the primary link and the second circuit as the redundant link, should the primary go down.
Twenty-five percent of survey respondents indicated that their organisations currently have little control over their bring your own device (BYOD) environments, and 15% said their organisations do not allow employee-owned devices to connect to the company network.
Commenting on what, if any, BYOD controls should be in place, Baisch advises: "This depends on the size and nature of the business, the complexity of the ICT environment, the corporate applications used, and the sensitivity of the company's data. This combination will reveal a basic risk profile that can be mitigated with various mobile device management technologies and security tools and applications. The extent to which a business chooses to mitigate these risks will determine the type of solution required and the costs involved."
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