Sorry posts have been so sparse. I’ve been swamped.
So much has changed in the world of IP communications, it’s hard to even keep track of the latest offerings from major vendors, but one thing that remains consistent since the beginning of the IP phone revolution is this: The phone, though largely outdated by recent advances in networking, remains shoehorned into IP communications solutions like a piece of legacy baggage.
Here’s what I mean. With desktop software systems offering a new model for voice communications–one tied to social networking and based on URIs instead of phone numbers, we insist on providing support for the old way, as if our constant cow-towing to the desk telephone’s engineering requirements and traditions is going to make it easier for people to step into this brave new world of IP communications.
There are a ton of reasons why we continue to be in love with the desk phone. It’s familiar, even if its features haven’t changed much in the last 10 years or so. It’s solid, even if it’s immobile. It’s capital, unlike software, even if it’s expensive. (IP phones routinely cost $500+/year to support including maintenance and licensing.)
In a world where everybody has a smart phone, an active directory credential, access to three to five social networks, good web surfing skills, and a high-powered laptop, I find myself wondering more and more why the desk phone continues to be as pervasive as it is. I was at a Shoretel demonstration yesterday for one of my clients and it became clear that, despite the fact that innovation on the desk phone is sooo over, these trusty ornaments of the desktop are here to stay.
The idea of the “phone system” is what needs to change. Phone conversations are a single medium increasingly enabled by protocols that work in other media, too. The SIP protocol isn’t just for phone systems, yet that’s what it’s getting used for in the enterprise. But try explaining to a “phone system” vendor like Shoretel that the way they’re thinking about their flagship product is a dead-end way of thinking.
Folks, the phone system is dead. Innovation lies in our ability to wrangle the various mediums of communication that are available to us into a common substrate. Microsoft Office Communications Server is great step in this direction. Thing is, the phone system isn’t a PBX any more. Instead, the phone system is the network and its applications. And as such, it’s not a phone system. It’s a communications approach.
Yet the phone system vendors push PBX like it’s the only way to look at communications in the enterprise, this despite e-mail, which has been around twenty years and has never worked optimally with PBX functionality nearby. Even Cisco is guilty of this. Sell a hardphone and you sell a seat license, it’s as simple as that. That’s why PBX vendors are so enamored of desk telephones. It’s time to get over it. We don’t need desk phones to communicate in the enterprise–indeed, sometimes desk phones are counterproductive.
When we have document sharing, web conferencing, voice and video over IP, instant messaging and presence, location awareness, file transfer, cell phones, and so many other mediums of communication at our fingertips, why do the blue chip phone vendors always want us to buy a hardphone to enable things?
At first blush, Office Communications Server sounded like a flash in the pan like ISA Server, but on this point–the phone system is no longer–I think Microsoft understands better than anybody, perhaps even better than Cisco, what the future holds.
