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Supporting Student Notes:

• Existing hosted/cloud industry is fragmented and includes many niche players, and others who are adding “cloud” to their
marketing literature

• Competitive solutions are often made up of disjointed suites of applications from multiple vendors – stitched together to
resemble a “seamless” offering. Support and security implications

• Competitive solutions are generally multi-tenant architectures, limiting customization and flexibility and introducing a
different level of security concerns

• Lack of certifications for vendors offering hosted solutions, providing customers with little understanding of a providers
technical competence, no testing, no audits/site visits, no required skills around providing managed services, SLAs, etc.

• Very little in the way of organized end-to-end or uniform solutions, making it difficult for customers to compare offers and
understand what is “behind the curtain”. This includes: applications, data center and security architectures and
infrastructure, WAN, end points, management suites for service fulfillment and service assurance, etc.

• Felt customers would see tremendous value in a solution that was backed by the industry leader in voice and
collaboration, who is financially viable, and provides a globally supported, tested and pre-integrated “whole offer” for their
partners