Munich has such a beautiful setting. The strikingly beautiful, snow-capped Bavarian Alps drop suddenly to a gentle plain of perfectly groomed farms and villages. Postcard picture perfect. And, there’s no secret that this Germany is leading auto producer – even the taxis are a contest of style, efficiency and power between Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and Volkswagen. The autobahn ride to the airport leaves one feeling the flight has already begun. The business environment has the same sense of efficiency. This UC Road Show event was different because it was attended by Microsoft UC Partners, resellers of Office Communications Server (OCS) and Exchange, rather than by the enterprise customers. This provided an interesting insight to the customer interests and issues that the resellers need to address in their business development programs. The message was interesting and to the point. German customers require demonstrable business improvements for any investment, including UC. Thus, it is less likely that a German enterprise will just roll out UC to all their desktops and hope for personal productivity than that they will redesign a specific process for measurable improvements. In other words, Germany has more of what we at UCStrategies.com call UC-Business Process (UC-B) than UC-User Productivity (UC-U). It became clear that the definition of a process can begin with personal and team productivity. Many firms were already moving their silos of voice, web and video conferencing service contracts into the consolidated on-premise Unified Communications solution provided by OCS. The Partners reported that their clients are investing to make the conferencing process more seamless and inclusive of supply chain partners and customers all while saving out of pocket costs. Another process-based theme was that customers in Germany were willing to change their mobile workers’ methods, specifically by transforming from primarily mobile voice calls to mobile presence and IM that avoided the calls altogether or that allowed “click to call” on the mobile device so that the call came from the OCS server to the mobile device, a no-charge, cost-saving call in GSM countries such as Germany. Beyond that, the Partners described UC-B applications they were installing, where their clients were changing supply chain and logistics processes by extending communications their supply partners and their customers. Logistics were being transformed, transaction processing was being streamlined and accelerated, and customer service was being increasingly personalized via software rules and presence awareness
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UC Around the Globe – A View From Munich, Germany