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BEYOND 'ERNESTINE': THE EVOLUTION
OF CANADIAN BUSINESS COMMUNICATIONS;
A SEABOARD DISCUSSION PAPER IN TWO PARTS |
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PART ONE
“ Your Call is Important to Us”; New Directions in Corporate Communications |
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September
2003 - IGB Grant +1 514 849 3508
& Brian Sharwood +1
416 413 9381
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KEY HIGHLIGHTS: |
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- IP-based, integrated voice and data systems are about to be embraced
by Canadian enterprise; within the next 12-18 months most communications
equipment purchased by enterprise will be IP-based.
- Enterprise hearts and minds will be won, despite skepticism,
conservatism, and capital expenditure constraints, by the new functionality
of IP-based systems; enterprise will be convinced too by the increases in
employee effectiveness and ‘contentment’ such systems will afford.
Costsavings,
although part of the move-to-IP-mantra, will be a less important
factor.
- Small Businesses, as we shall see in Part Two, will be empowered – the
constraints and problems of systems’ scale that have hampered SME
abilities to compete against larger enterprise will be largely erased by
IP
systems. Integrated IP-based products will put sophisticated tools within
the reach of the smallest of firms.
- Integrated systems, systems that marry voice, data and image, will
drive
revenues for equipment providers and for systems integrators to new
heights – as a result, markets are about to rediscover communications
growth.
- Carriers, telephone companies specifically, will be challenged. Many
traditional revenue sources that have sustained them since the mists-of-the-beginnings-of-time,
are going to dwindle. Enterprises will not consume
legacy voice-and-data products (long distance, “800”-services,
interexchange
data circuits, and the like) as they have in the past: The revenue
base that those services have represented, for decades, is about to fade.
Business will still be spending though. Indeed, probably more. The
enterprise communications expenditure will shift to access, to assurance
and security, to management of services and to applications development.
As we will see in Part Two, a large chunk of the economy, the SME
market, will begin to deploy more of their resources on communications
and communications tools.
- Carriers will need to reinvent themselves, and their channels to market,
to
make certain that they participate in the coming business communications
renaissance. “Your next call will be important to ‘us’” --
there is a risk that “us” may be left behind.
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