Once upon a time, companies sold their enterprise communication solutions, including switches, ACDs, voice mail, and other systems, based on features. “Feature Wars,” as they were known, pitted one vendor’s offerings against another’s, based on the features that each product supported. There were competitive matrixes that listed all of the hundreds of features, with check marks next to the various features supported by each vendor. The idea was that the one with the most check marks wins, and the reseller would show these matrixes to customers in order to make the sale.

Fortunately, those days are over, and now both vendors and customers are looking at the bigger picture. Most vendors today agree that solutions are where the action is, and are working with their channel partners to highlight solution selling. For example, at Interactive Intelligence’s Partner Conference last month in Indianapolis (next time, could we make it Hawaii?), this theme was repeated over and over so that the company’s channel partners understood the value of solution selling, and of course, selling the Interactive Intelligence solution!

For example, one of the presenters told the attendees that it’s important to get customers looking at the “vision’” and the ultimate benefit to their organization, rather than selling on a feature-by-feature analysis. Interactive Intelligence suggests that its partners take a “Holistic high level view of how everything works together, to enable their customers’ business.”

I was especially pleased to hear Interactive Intelligence tell its partners that it’s not about the technology, but it’s about business processes, noting that customers get the benefits of the technology when they change their business process to take advantage of the technology, and that technology enables the change. Regular UCStrategies readers know that this is what we’ve been saying since day one – it’s about the business processes and using technology (UC or other) to enhance and improve those processes.

Most companies have been talking about solution selling for a while, but many have a hard time getting their channel partners onboard with this message. Interactive Intelligence has had an easier time of it because its “all-in-one” product is more conducive to solution selling – and selling a solution. At the conference, presentation after presentation – aimed at both the analyst/consultant audience and the partner audience – highlighted Interactive Intelligence’s solution approach and the benefits that its all-in-one solution provides. Its message came across loud and clear: Interactive Intelligence’s all-in-one solution provides increased security, broader integration, simplified deployment and enhanced mobility.

Reviewing many of presentations, the consistent message was that the all-in-one approach provides many benefits for customers, especially when compared with competitors that offer much more complex solutions. The primary benefits cited for the all-in-one approach include a single point of management for simplified administration/maintenance, fewer “boxes” for lower costs, flexible deployment, support of open standards such as SIP with no proprietary SIP extensions, the ability to run on commodity servers without special boards or hardware, multi-channel processing and blending using business rules applied across media types, and end-to-end report/tracking across media types for improved quality assurance.

In a session about how Interactive Intelligence compares with its competitors, one of the speakers noted that while Interactive provides most capabilities on a single server, the other vendor (I won’t name names) requires several servers for call/contact routing, a separate reporting server, an IVR server, plus a third-party recording platform, etc. And in order to make its applications redundant, they have to duplicate all the boxes – including the call/contact routing, IVR, and call recording servers.

These separate boxes and servers all have to be managed, and some of them run on multiple operating systems, making it difficult to manage and support. Another presenter noted that in a competitive situation, one vendor’s bid included 26 servers, while Interactive Intelligence needed only 8 servers, based on having more integrated multimedia contact center capabilities, adding that the Interactive Intelligence solution is simpler to administer, with a lower cost per agent.

There are certainly trade offs associated with having an all-in-one approach. Mainly, it’s harder to implement best-of-breed and third-party solutions, and it ties customers to a single vendor. While some people like “one throat to choke,” others prefer not to be too tied to any one vendor. One also has to wonder if the functionality provided from an all-in-one solution are competitive with third-party offerings from vendors that specialize in that particular area. Several years ago I wrote an article questioning the wisdom of Interactive Intelligence providing its own call recording capabilities, when there are so many high-quality offerings in the market.

I thought at the time that the company may be spreading itself too thin by trying to be “a jack of all trades.”  So far I haven’t been proven right, as the partners I spoke with at the recent conference were very pleased with Interactive’s various offerings and didn’t feel that the company was skimping in any area. In fact, the company continues to expand into new areas, such as Interaction Process Automation, which partners I spoke with were very excited about.

As a side note – it was great being able to talk to the channel partners at the conference and hear what they had to say about the company, its products, strategy, direction, etc. I kept trying to get some partners to share dirt about Interactive, but all the partners I spoke with were extremely happy with the company, and love the all-in-one approach. This approach makes selling and supporting Interactive’s products easier, allowing the partners to focus on helping customers see the big picture.

[Editor’s Note: This post originally written by Blair Pleasant at our partner blog UC Strategies, and is reposted with permission. –mrh]