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2006-08-22 - Will consumers drive VoIP in the workplace
By Don Panek, TelephonyWorld Editor.Last week I talked about how businesses can leverage VoIP contact center solutions to gain substantial benefits throughout the entire organization, particularly when selecting pure play VoIP communication systems. I received a lot of positive feedback on that article from both vendors and business decision makers.
An interesting thing happened during the course of talking with some of these different people about VoIP in general, and the adoption of it within the enterprise and even SMBs. It seems that the majority of folks I talked with on the receiving end of the equation, that would be the buyers, are more familiar with "Consumerized" VoIP. Now of course I think I made that word up, but what I mean is that on the consumer side of the business, VoIP seems to be a bad word to the marketing folks. VoIP as we know and love it, is not called VoIP, but rather prettier laymen type words like "Web phone", "Digital Phone Service" and so on.
Rightfully so as most consumers are not interested in fancy monikers and acronyms, nor do they really care about the how and why something works or doesn't. They just care about price and service, and whether or not all their friends have it.
So once again, I got to thinking about how the consumer side of VoIP could very well end up driving the business adoption much faster than the business side will do it. I think I even mentioned this in my last article, but when we're wearing our business hats everyday at the office, there are many more factors that come into play regarding proposing an enterprise or organization wide VoIP solution. One of the larger factors is the enterprise wide lack of solution knowledge. Most employees of companies today are not familiar with VoIP technology, or the solutions, or the benefits, or even the enhanced productivity features that I discussed last week.
They would love to have them, but hardly know they exist, and those who do, figure they are out of reach. So it becomes difficult for decision makers within these companies to "sell" the VoIP solution internally. But what happens when the technology becomes widespread in the consumer market first? Well that breeds familiarity, which in turn can make the job a whole lot easier.
This happens a lot. particularly when the cost of the technology is very low or non existent as in the case of VoIP. In its simplest form VoIP is basically free, and as I mentioned before people at home are starting to see free web phone applications bundled into instant messaging, PDAs, cell phones, and desktop applications. Major cable carriers are offering triple play service that includes VoIP calling plans to replace land line service. Of course, as I said, none of these services and applications are calling it "VoIP".
As more and more consumers get familiar with the idea of Internet and web based phone calls, they will become more receptive to having it in the workplace, or they may even start demanding it. They may get used to the convenience of being able to click a button on the desktop to initiate a call.
An announcement earlier this week by LogiTech could really drive this home. As most of us know, Logitech has been making computer peripherals for years and we're all pretty familiar with the mice, keyboards, headsets, speakers and so on that they provide. If you're like me, you have a bunch of them in a box in the basement somewhere that have been replaced over the years by latest and greatest versions.
Now, logitech has just release a whole new line of goodies that all have built in VoIP capabilities. A keyboard with buttons for placing phone calls, a USB Speakerphone, a handheld wireless VoIP phone, and a headset that looks like a standard blue tooth device, but is used for making hands free VoIP calls.
I'm sure by the end of the year, the rest of the leading peripheral players will jump on the bandwagon and by next year we'll start seeing these devices bundles up with home systems. Services will be bundled too. And I predict by the end of 2007 a huge spike in home based VoIP calling will be taking place.
Once that happens, and all of these people come to work everyday and sit down at their old workstation with old keyboard and land line phone, they may start asking "where's my phone call button?", "Why can't I pull up an outlook contact and click a call button?", "Why don't I get a pop-up telling me who's calling?".
That's when business decision makers need to be ready to capitalize. Have your ducks in a row. Have all the ROI and TCO numbers prepared. Select your solution and make your proposal. That is when you'll be met with least resistance.
The smart vendors I pointed out last week who have the interaction centers and the unified communication platforms may do themselves a bit of a favor now and start investigating those bundling options with some OEMs. I'm not expecting you to put the whole platform in there, but it sure would be cool to see a home system ship with a scaled down unified messaging solution. You don't need the whole switching fabric and pbx part. Just the simple single user screen pops from outlook, voicemail and faxes delivered to outlook, and allowing me to respond via a recorded wav file attached to an email when I am out on the road. That would be cool. And that would absolutely drive the business side!
See ya next week!
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