Stories by: David Binning

Last year Microsoft and Telstra agreed to work together on developing a UCaaS offering based on Microsoft OCS and supported by the carrier’s vast fixed and mobile broadband networks. Neither company would reveal exactly how many subscribers they have signed up, except to say that they have doubled the number of UCaaS services sold between June and December last year. Microsoft will soon announce an upgraded version of the service which supports Lync 2010.

One of the biggest barriers to UC in the enterprise he feels is the existence of expensive legacy equipment.

Research has shown consistently that the major bugbear of IT managers about unified communications (UC) is perceived cost.

For some organisations the hassle and uncertainty that can arise from multiple vendor relationships is best addressed by putting all of their eggs into the one carefully chosen basket. South Australian transport and logistics company, Northline, recently entered into a five year, $5 million contract with integrator Brennan, which will handle more than 300 portable and desktop computers in addition to servers, enterprise software and LAN communications. Basically, everything except telecommunications, which is provided by Optus.

According to Dr Tim O’Neill, co-founder and director of business intelligence specialists Avolution, probably the biggest mistake an organisation can make when dealing with suppliers is to outsource the systems architecture. “This is why there’s so many untold billions of dollars-worth of failed IT projects out there,” he says. “Outsourcing the architecture function is fraught with danger.” In order for projects to be successful organisations need to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism and effectively force vendors to earn trust.

The IT choices a company makes can mean the difference between business success and failure. Whether it’s access to information, communications between staff, partners and customers, HR, inventory management, operation and monitoring of equipment and other and assets as well as business security, IT has managed to make itself indispensible at virtually every organisational level. Yet it would seem that for many organisations, this awareness often fails to translate into properly thought out and well-executed strategies for managing the vendors that supply the technology.

Telstra's Dwight King is charged with steering the company's IT services through the most profound period of change in Telstra's history. But obstructing the passage from the old world to the new is a huge iceberg in the form of customer service