VoiP so far has been a total dud for the Telco and Network Infrastructure industry.
The reasons are simple: the technology is costly and currently not as good as the equipment it is replacing. People expect their phone to work first time every time, they don’t expect echo and complicated menu systems. Administrators want less headaches, fewer complaints and lower costs. Today VoiP delivers more problems at greater cost. Finally VoiP has delivered nothing new to the enterprise. A phone at the moment is pretty much a phone.
But all this is about to change. The battle lines are being drawn by Microsoft and Cisco, VoiP will be dragged along and then pushed aside by web2.0. Certain product teams and managers in Cisco and Microsoft have woken up to this and the acquisition spree of web2.0 has begun.
They are doing this because i’d imagine VoiP sales in Cisco are below expectations and Cisco realize that to sell more systems their sales teams need a unique argument which Call Manager has never truly had. web2.0 will provide the technology and innovation that will sell VoiP systems. Tele-working, presence, voip, personalised homepages, interactive whiteboards, RSS feeds, conference calling, gadgets, wikis, user generated content, social networking will all be integrated into the Cisco and Microsoft VoiP systems and they will sell by the bucket loads.
I don’t see web2.0 technology being adopted by any other integrated business software vendor and sold into enterprise. Given that VoiP will be a big requirement within the web2.0 technology and Cisco are looking for a sales angle it seems a match made in heaven.
So who will be the players? Cisco, Microsoft, Asterisk, Skype and Google will be the players in this market. No traditional PBX vendors? Nope the old world of PBXs may deliver reliable voice but their business model is dependent on closed, proprietary, licence dependent offers and that just isn’t going to fly in the phone2.0 world.
Welcome to the phone2.0 blog, check back soon for plenty of coverage and comment. Disagree with any of the above? Please feel free to comment below, look forward to talking with you.
