Buyer Beware: Your phone vendor does not have all the answers!

Quite often when companies look to evaluate their voice and data services they typically look for expert advice on how to make these decisions. One of the places they look first is from their phone vendor. These are the people that typically have installed their hardware or who have helped to make changes to their network over the years so certainly there is a high level of trust in working with them. There are a couple of problems associated with allowing your phone vendor to make these decisions for you.

First, they are biased. Most phone vendors are usually married to one or two carriers they work with frequently. In some cases they also resell the services of those carriers as an agent and get paid a commission for sending business to them. This creates a lot of bias in that decision making process. Sometimes the recommendation is not based on who could provide the best quality of service or even the best solution based on the company's needs but rather on whom will pay them the highest commission. There is a large number of agents who resell telecommunication services these days so this practice is quite evident in the industry. When companies look to a phone vendor to help make recommendations they should ask ahead of time if that vendor is already an agent to carriers. This would help identify when bias is present. Even if the vendor represents multiple carriers the company should look for one or two quotes from carriers that the phone vendor does not represent. Also ask about the past relationships they have had with carriers you might be evaluating. You might find that a vendor had been dropped or had a bad relationship with a carrier based on their past performance with that carrier's vendor or agent program. This should not be factored into your decision making process as it has nothing to do with the performance of that carrier yet only reflects how well the phone vendor could sell that carrier's services.

Another reason vendors can be biased is because they typically only represent a small number of hardware providers. This is due to the fact that they need to keep up with maintenance requirements of the equipment they support and this can be quite expensive. This again leads them to make recommendations that their hardware supplier or manufacturer would support and may be based on commissions, promotions, or relationships that the hardware supplier may have with certain carriers.

Secondly, phone vendors are not often educated about the new trends or new technologies present in the industry. For example the phone vendor may only be comfortable with older technologies like copper lines or PRI services that tend to be analog in nature. They may disregard the advantages of VoIP or dynamic circuits because they do not have the experience to discuss these new technologies with their clients or these technologies may take away some revenues that the phone vendor receives today based on the type of equipment that they support. Here again their opinions are highly biased on their own level of knowledge or what might be in their best interest. This knowledge base may also be limited by the number of products they sell or support and typically does not reflect a networking background that is more applicable to carrier services.

Lastly, as many carriers offer more services that are managed like managed PBXs, firewalls, routers, or enhanced features this may come in direct competition with what the phone vendor provides today. Again it causes a conflict of interest when they give recommendations to their customers. Most often than not carriers can provide managed services to customers that can reduce operating costs greatly and offer better features than are available to most customer environments today. This may overlooked by vendors who would not want to lose professional services from companies or might be looking to sell companies their own hardware upgrades to accomplish the same new features or services. A great example of this is when MPLS or VoIP services are introduced to a company. Many companies are looking for ways to provide voice services between multiple offices but don't want to pay additional Long-Distance fees to do so. An MPLS network or VoIP environment may be able to accomplish this for them. However where as many carriers can offer this to companies as a managed service such as bundled solutions with access to MPLS capabilities or plans that include unlimited calling to the various sites of a company the hardware vendor might see an opportunity to sell the customer additional equipment so that the existing PBX could do the same thing over general Internet or IP access. The difference is that the hardware vendor's solution might include a larger capital expense and not offer Class of Service or private connectivity that would ensure good voice quality while performing these functions. Do not allow a phone vendor to steer you away from carrier solutions that would enable a company to grow into these capabilities because of their own interest to sell you more hardware. In most cases adding hardware to your network is not the best approach.

-King of Telecom