“I get the tube into Hammersmith when working at Cirrus’s London office and the rubbish the kids talk drives me bonkers – what’s with the mid-Atlantic or fake Jamaican accents for a start? As for our Christmas Party at China White’s or whatever it’s called now – I spent an entire evening in a vodka-induced haze trying to lip-read what was being bellowed at me; I could have been fired, propositioned (unlikely) or sworn at and wouldn’t have had a clue.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a grumpy old man (normally) and as far as technology is concerned I’m not a Luddite – I’m even on the team WhatsApp group and know how to communicate via the medium of amusing graphics.
The real difficulty I have is where technologists define their value-add and businesses drivers through unnecessarily complex language. With my commercial and para-legal background, I’ve always been at something of a disadvantage in the Telecoms industry. Despite being notoriously non-technical, I was given the opportunity to take the reins of a channel business some 14 years ago and since then have largely been playing catch-up with the mega-brains who devise the technologies which the rest of us mere mortals attempt to sell.
The problem with this is that in order to demonstrate how innovative their solution is, many manufacturers and providers tend to describe what they have to offer in terms that need to be de-constructed before you can latch on to the benefit – some are so obtuse that much of the potential market is likely to be excluded.
Then there are the evangelists who not only didactically lead the technology debate, they create uncertainty in the minds of channel partners and customers. The worst offenders here in recent years have been those blazing the trail for cloud technology. All too often, this takes the form of advice to remove perfectly good premise-based equipment or to focus on new cloud supplier relationships at the expense of those that have formed the foundation of many channel businesses.
Cirrus provides the best of both worlds. Yes, we are a cloud technology provider but we overlay existing telephony networks, so users can get all the benefits of our business efficiency-driving applications which work seamlessly with existing premise-based solutions, Lync or even hosted telephony.
So while Cirrus is available as a stand-alone cloud solution, you don’t have to remove your reliable PABX or contact centre, or turn your back on decades of investment with your voice supplier of choice. Our message is clear – Cirrus will benefit your business, whatever the environment.”