In an interview with Frost& Sullivan, the vendor defends the quality of voice over desk phones, and discusses developments around Microsoft OCS.

Here's a really interesting interview that Alaa Saayed, Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan's Unified Communications & Collaboration group, conducted with Tim Yankey, Director of Product Marketing for Voice Products at Polycom. Now, obviously Polycom is going to push back against any idea that desktop phones are going away, but we have recently had some empirical data that supports the phone, namely John Chambers' report that Cisco's IP phone orders were up 57% in the latest quarter vs. the year-ago quarter. For its part, Frost & Sullivan is projecting that over the next 7 years, the IP desk phone market will see a 10% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in unit shipments and 2.1% revenue growth.In the Frost & Sullivan interview, Tim Yankey asserts that Microsoft has actually discovered the importance of dedicated telephony devices for many OCS deployment scenarios, and he sums up the case against softphones:

I see several challenges in having everything integrated into your PC. One, the audio and microphone quality on your PC is not designed to be optimal. Then there are a host of other applications that may be running parallel, consuming processor power and impacting your voice calls.

I do think that the thing which will slow down the retirement of phones is their legacy status--and not just the same way that installed bases never go away as fast as expected (if at all). In a strange way, the relative unimportance of voice among applications argues for keeping the legacy, dedicated network.

The fact is, we're going to continue to deploy new, resource-intensive applications on our PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, and these applications will have little or no role for voice. But you'll still want at least the option of voice communications; and at the same time, you'll have a legacy voice network available to you. It kind of makes sense to use it, as much to keep the voice away from the other apps as vice versa.

Of course, the legacy voice network may not be a "pure" voice network--traffic may run over an IP infrastructure--but key components of that legacy network like the end devices and switches are still dedicated to voice.

I think about the webinars we produce for Enterprise Connect: It's a running joke that the service providers all recommend you use a landline phone--no cellular or end-to-end VOIP--in order to ensure best quality. So we do webinars about VOIP and make sure not to use VOIP on the speaker end of things (audio does stream out over the Internet to attendees).

But here's the thing: It works just fine that way. The conference service fees don't impose a burdensome cost on the effort, and the number-one priority--making sure the speakers can be understood--is met.

There are a lot of web-based collaboration scenarios where "pure" VOIP would be acceptable; but for those where it's not--hey, the PSTN is still there. And will be for awhile.In an interview with Frost& Sullivan, the vendor defends the quality of voice over desk phones, and discusses developments around Microsoft OCS.