After my last Interop session was over, a gentleman from the audience approached me and another one of the panelists and started talking about his experiences at ACUTA's event the week before (ACUTA is the major association for IT/communications professionals in the higher education industry). Several times he repeated, "People are nervous."This was someone who works at a university, and what people are nervous about, he said, was the awkward place they're at right now, at least in higher ed, regarding their communications infrastructure. Many postponed replacements or upgrades over the last few years, when budgets were scaled back, and so are that much further behind in the technology. So they could be in the market, except that they're not really sure what they're supposed to buy.
Do you buy some kind of IP-PBX right now? Is that really a worthwhile investment in a market where vendors are touting all kinds of new capabilities? On the other hand, what are those new capabilities, really? Specifically, what do they mean for your enterprise? Are they something you can implement today?
I think we're in a time that's actually more confusing and difficult than the previous market inflection, i.e., the move from TDM to IP. People had a range of opinions about whether IP was ready for prime time, and that (along with the state of their installed base) dictated how quickly they moved. If you had confidence in IP, you at least felt free to migrate aggressively. If you were a doubter, you went slower or tilted heavily toward more hybrid architectures.
Nowadays, if you spend a big chunk of your budget on a plain-vanilla IP-PBX, you can be pretty confident it'll work well--but you can also be confident that it won't do much more than that. The money you spend won't give your end users video, it won't integrate presence with your business applications, it won't provide you with new UC applications. And are you really going to spend a big chunk of money on big, chunky slabs of plastic to sit on the desks of people who, in every other facet of their lives, are used to using a light-as-air mobile device?
(And you know, Brian Riggs makes a great point in this blog post: There's no better way of sending people the message that your communications system is stuck in the '70s than making everybody talk into a receiver that's lashed to the phone on their desk by means of a curly, twisty, tangly cord.)
We need a new way to think about budgets: Software integration services should be a bigger line item than telephone sets. You can use the phones to make a giant abacus, like Microsoft did at VoiceCon Orlando; or you can make sheep out of them:
What is it about phones? Why can't we quit them? Even when we don't want to use them as phones. There must be something elemental about the form factor, something about a thing you talk into, or the funny twisty cord? Nothing else we've ever used has had a cord like that, that I can think of. At least, nothing any of has used since we were in the womb. Maybe "cutting the cord" really is a more loaded term than we think.
Anyway, there's got to be a new strategic approach to communications. We're about to launch a major new initiative on this at Enterprise Connect/No Jitter, because the change we're entering into isn't a matter of technology, as my ACUTA friend pointed out; it's much more about making the right strategic communications decision.
