UC Company Strategies: Building to Scale

The whole idea of running “at scale” is an interesting and somewhat vexing problem for UC service providers and for the customers who must evaluate them. Effective UC solutions have to be designed to function properly at the customer’s scale but also have to perform well across all customers at the service provider’s scale. In other words, the UC offer has to work well for the customer with 50 seats and for the service provider that has 10,000 customers with 50 seats. Where it gets interesting is when the UC service provider is providing offers to customers with 5, 50, 250, 1,000, 5,000, and 25,000 seats – these are very different engineering and business problems to solve for each of those customer segments and for the full-stack issues that the service provider must address. One size does not fit all.

I’ve been thinking about this as we observe a number of VoIP and UC providers starting to move upmarket – meaning that they are taking the UC products they currently offer to small customers (e.g., under 250 seats) and try to scale them up to serve the mid market (e.g., to 2,500 seats). The common narrative is that these providers enhance their current products by adding feature sets demanded by the larger customers.  But in most cases, the underlying UC platforms are still the same. This approach makes sense – it is expensive and time-consuming to entirely re-engineer a UC service for each market segment – but we’ve all been around long enough to know that at some point a system designed for 50 users is going to strain or break trying to serve 2,500 users.

Similarly, a solution designed for 5,000 users doesn’t move down market easily – which is why I believe the telcos struggle when they try to move their UC offers from the enterprise to SMB customers. While the physics for a Cessna 172 and a Boeing 787 are similar, the design principles and use cases for each are very different – and this is true for UC platforms as well.

One service provider with a different approach to scale is Avanade, which entered the UC market a little over two years ago through its acquisition of Azaleos. Combining Azaleos’ service provider knowledge with their own experiences deploying over a million seats of Microsoft Lync, Avanade decided to build its Skype for Business UC platform from scratch so that it would massively scale on the backend while providing service flexibility on the front end for all customer segments. This service flexibility includes native capability to support most deployment scenarios (on premise, cloud, and hybrid) and to provide calibrated reporting and management to fit customer requirements from all business segments.

Why is this scalable architecture important? It does a lot for Avanade. It allows them to continue serving their large-scale enterprises in a hosted or hybrid scenario that aligns to the business imperatives of the customer. For example, Avanade can segment services based on geographic/regulatory concerns or it can unify while segmenting business units within a holding company. It also allows managed service providers to resell Avanade’s Skype for Business solutions regardless of which market segment they might target. It also serves as an extensible platform on which third-party developers might add to or incorporate Avanade’s services into their own.

Pretty much everyone says they can do this, of course. But what I have actually observed is vendors tend to take a platform they design for a specific customer segment and then try to adapt it to scale one way or the other. Avanade designed its platform so that it natively scales. 

Phil Edholm and I talked at length at the most recent UC Summit about why generic UC service providers are going to have to dramatically scale their customer numbers in order to achieve the operational efficiencies that will allow them to compete on price and service in the new cloud economy. The flexible and robust architecture that Avanade has invested in around a flagship product like Skype for Business could be a significant competitive advantage in the enterprise space as well as in the channel. I look forward to talking with other vendors and service providers about their scalable solutions next month at Enterprise Connect.