Peter Cochrane has a short opinion piece on Are IT Departments Doomed?. In the same vein, let me pose you the following conundrum.
I make zero-charge calls to friends and associates around the world on an almost daily basis. Skype just works. It’s good enought for business. Or to put in another way, not having presence, IM and file transfer isn’t good enough for business. This technology just works whether I’m at home or on the road. It doesn’t really care much about quirky networks address translations and firewall settings.
On the other hand, business users are still paying handsomely to place ordinary boring calls. Yes, they’re upgrading to IP PBXs and their brethren. The trucks are rolling in laden with session border controllers, packet probes and application proxies and gateways.
What I want to know is, how can a corporate telco manager justify her salary and millions of dollars of hardware to deliver something less functional and more expensive than the technology I use to connect my kid to her grandma?
I think you all know the answer.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:59 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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There is a big debate raging over Skype for business on a number of fronts. Skype ins't a standards based solution, so hard core telephony people, won't deploy closed source solutions on massive global WAN's, personally I don't see a problem, it saves untold money, self configures - and reduces maitenance costs, so as a business owner - it is an easy decision to me.. Don't type - Skype..
Posted by: at November 6, 2004 10:11 PM
To answer the rhetorical question you put at the end, telecomm people could justify their salaries by putting into place the new mobile system.
- Treat every phone like a cell phone (except the ones in offices can have bigger screens and keyboards,) in other words make sure they deal with image as well as sound.
- Start integrating services. Voice mail with visual mail and messaging, make multi-modal a part of every transaction. There are services here which can be charged for.
- Old style "information" is an example. A database that parses t9 etc. A dime or a nickel call. Use the yellow pages contacts to build local directories, menus, reservations for restaurants etc.
- The list of potential products is endless. Get in first, establish the standards and routines and like Amazon or ebay there is the fixed advantage of customer habit.
- The reality is that if one provides simple net services with a few touch of the keys, extends various financial mechanisms (phone number and password as confirmation) then the number of potential Internet cutomers double. There are huge markets waiting to be developed including scheduling systems for ad hoc delivery systems.
However the reality is that the phone companies are surrendering this. They have very primitive services built into the cell phone, they have no intention of giving my regular phone the functionality that the cell phone is acquiring, they are basically going to leave all the good stuff to mobile web pages and watch when people increasingly go around them.