I've just completed reviewing the 7 RFP responses for my session at Enterprise Connect 2013 on cloud-based communications services. The RFP is a 60 page document describing the communications and collaboration requirements for a 2,000 person enterprise with three locations.
End users may obtain a copy of the RFP at no charge at www.constellationr.com/cloud.
The seven responding vendors - 8x8, Avaya, NEC, ShoreTel Sky, Siemens Enterprise Communications, Thinking Phone Networks, and Verizon - have each gone to great lengths to provide the information required by the RFP which included over 300 individual functional components along with the WAN links and pricing for the entire service over a period of 5 years.
What has made this doubly interesting is that four of the respondents, 8x8, ShoreTel Sky, Siemens, and Thinking Phones, provided reference customers that I interviewed. After doing thorough interviews, I've written case studies, which were not vendor sponsored. I learned a lot about motivations for moving to the cloud, some of which involved total cost of ownership, but others centering around other value propositions of the cloud including geo-redundancy, disaster recovery, focusing on the most important IT/telecom business issues, and so forth.
The responses will be presented on March 19, 2013 at Enterprise Connect 2013. I will also make them available in a workshop/seminar format for organizations who want to know more about cloud communications, ts costs and drivers, and for those who would like to use these RFP results to quickly get to short list of one or two providers to pursue for a cloud communications solution.
The RFP workshop contains the following items:
- An architectural overview of each solution
- A review of the supported functionality
- The total cost of ownership for the solutions, including both monthly OPEX and one-time CAPEX
- Committed SLAs and credits for not meeting these SLAs
- How each vendor approaches the design, on-boarding process, and continued operations and maintenance.
A sample graphic illustrating vendor responses about encryption as well as the vendor support demarcation point fis shown below. There are many other graphics and figures comparing these solutions in detail. More information is available at www.constellationr.com/cloud.
