International Telecoms Consultancy Harnesses Cloud Telephony

Every good business leader knows that failing to focus on core competencies risks stunting potential. Time and energy are precious, and there are plenty of distractions to steer businesses away from being the best in their chosen market.

Such discipline can hard to maintain when you need to make crucial procurement decisions about a new technology. Many non-technical business people fear they don’t have enough knowledge to get these decisions right. They understand that ill-informed choices create poor outcomes but, often, just don’t know what they don’t know.

Most businesses are too busy baking bread or machining precision components (or whatever else they do) to spend time learning the IP telephony market inside-out.

Being world-renowned telecoms experts puts Analysys Mason in an altogether different category. This London-based consulting and research firm has specialised in all things telecom since 1985, and has a team of 170 spread across five European offices. There isn’t a telecom provider or service it doesn’t know all about, or a technology it hasn’t studied.  

So when so it needed to select an new global IP telephony solution, you’d think that the choice would be simple and immediate, right? Well, not exactly...

Being experts in telecoms means companies like Analysys Mason aren't blinded by brands or confounded by technical language. In other words, they understand all the underlying detail.  

But, like any good analyst firm, it put technology into its proper context. Instead of focusing on the tech, it was determined to conduct a thorough forensic investigation into the business drivers and outcomes.  

“Being a consultancy business, we ran all the business cases. This made sure we looked at all the options and the cost - rather than just one area.” David Creighton, CIO, Analysys Mason.

The upshot of all this is that the Analysys Mason CIO and his team consciously decided to think like business people - not technologists. This involved questioning every claim made by providers and running every available scenario and cost. It stopped them being complacent about their outstanding technical understanding.

Analysys Mason’s first step was to outline its requirements, which were - perhaps unsurprisingly - very similar to those of non-technological organisations. These were:

1. Reliability: the system needed to work and do whatever users asked of it.
2. Cost: an important factor that needed to show a value-for-money improvement compared to the previous on-premise PBX approach.
3. Flexibility: to enable users to maximise productivity regardless of location or task.
4. Management: allowing the IT team to dispose of the technical overheads needed to administer the previous system.

All this was narrowed down to the need for new IP telephony solution to drive a more seamless communications experience for the growing Analysys Mason team. After evaluating a range of different options, NFON was the final choice.