Déjà VU
Those who saw the George Clooney vehicle, "Up in the Air," should be familiar with the satirized word "glocal," or global activities done locally, used to describe teleconferencing.
It worked in that scene as a whimsical send-off to cost-saving technologies, but it's not a joke.
While there are some things that will always be better in person, teleconferencing is growing in quality and prevalence in the SMB space, with upstarts such as VU Telepresence are delivering in a big way.
Along these lines, MSPs and VARs alike are in a great position to offer stand-alone teleconference services, such as those showcased at the Autotask Community Live this past spring.
With telepresence services, channel partners can either rent out telepresence rooms and upsell hardware-as-a-service packages. In an ideal situation, VARs would able to charge visitors roughly $150 to $250 per hour per link to use the telepresence rooms.
Such telepresence rooms could potentially attract C-level customers at the enterprise level and owner/proprietors at the SMB level offices, at which point tech service providers have the opportunity to pitch integrated framework along all lines of IT and telecommunications.
The world is definitely moving beyond Skype, but there is simultaneously a less complex and expensive proposition than those offered by big players such as Cisco Systems.
Indeed, the middle market is where most of the growth in this area will occur. MSPs and VARs that hop on this early could be in a position to reap the benefits.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on July 14, 2010