Let's face it, business communications are changing dramatically in many ways. They are becoming more flexible to meet the needs of individual end users, mobile, multimodal, software based, personalized, application-oriented with CEBP capabilities, controllable, complex to develop and manage -- and that's just to start! These changes have caused a larger shift away from the premises-based systems of old toward hosted, managed cloud services.
Although we all may recognize this shift in business communications, we are still faced with the challenge of migration.This will particularly impact ALL types of mobile end users, including mobile employees, business partners, and customers.
Many businesses must continue to rely on existing desktop connectivity, however, particularly for telephone conversations, while treating mobile communications as an after-thought. So, there has to be a practical way to provide interoperability between existing telephone systems and new mobile devices for comprehensive phone call management for any size business. This must now include enabling mobile workers to have separate access to job-related and personal calls with a single, personal mobile device ("dual persona").
A practical implementation strategy is not to try to replace all existing premises-based telephone systems, but rather to start using cloud-based, hosted services that can handle the new capabilities required by mobile end users.
I am calling this focus on mobile call management "Call Management as a Service" (CMaaS), which is a practical migration step in moble business communications.
While end user multimodal mobility enables greater accessibility for person-to-person contacts and information exchange, it also opens the door for automated business processes to initiate contact notifications and interoperate with people (often referred to as communications-enabled business processes, or CEBP). However, there will always be a need for real-time, person-to-person voice connections, which will require efficient and flexible call management functions.
We therefore need to recognize how mobility is changing legacy call management needs and the challenge to organizations in planning and implementing such changes while retaining existing desktop telephony operations. This will require understanding what is changing in all aspects of business communications, whether between people or between automated business processes and people.
The biggest change to business communications is operational and affects how end users initiate and respond to a variety of communication modes. While wired desktop devices are still used by workers where appropriate, more and more employees are simply reaching for their mobile phones to take and place calls. And that's not just happening when out and about; employees are also reaching for mobile devices when working from their desks.
Increasingly, internal staff are Millennials. By 2025, 75% of the workforce will be Millennials, and if there is one commonality among that generation, it is their reliance on smartphones for so many aspects of their business and personal lives.
What this means is that business communications infrastructure must absolutely be location and device independent in order to accommodate future business processes.
Business communications range from asynchronous messaging (text, voice, video) to real-time connections for IM, voice, and video conversations. Such real-time connections increasingly originate "contextually" from existing information (messages, documents, etc.) commonly accessible with smartphones and tablets, and PCs, rather than from a separate POTS telephone number that the caller initiates.
A key factor, therefore, in enabling more efficient real-time connections is the availability status of the contact recipient, made through "presence" information. We're used to this in instant messaging, but not in voice calling. Unless calling between deskphones linked together over the same private branch exchange, we simply have no idea if those we're trying to reach via phone are available, until hearing a voicemail response or busy signal.
While it will eventually be common practice to initiate a real-time voice or video connection contextually from within a message or document via the likes of WebRTC, the current role of PSTN telephone calling will be around for a while, and must therefore be accommodated as an option of the total user interface for multimodal mobile communications. However, mobile devices equipped with multimodal communication capabilities, can provide more effective and efficient real-time communications, collaboration, and performance.
Beyond having to purchase hardware, often at each and every business location, premises-based information and communications systems all have storage and software upgrade limitations that prevent businesses from easily and quickly implementing business process improvements.
With the shift to IP networking for connecting people (especially mobile users), data, and online applications in a common network space, there is now no limit on how different business processes can be easily implemented, accessed, and dynamically managed with minimum costs. For this reason, multimodal mobile business communications must be based upon cloud implementations versus legacy premises-based wired networks. No new business today is not leveraging the economic power of the cloud.
Imagine having to update communications software every time Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Salesforce -- you name it -- issues updates. It's the same with your mobile interactions. Reliance on the cloud for disseminating and maintaining mobile applications has also made its way BACK to the desktop, as well as to any kind of Internet-connected mobile device today.
Even if everyone agrees with the benefits of moving to an IP-based, multimodal business communications environment, the biggest challenge is how to move forward with a painless implementation. It is not simply a matter of replacing everything on-premises at once, but rather a strategic plan for a "graceful migration" from existing telephony solutions to the next generation of mobility and cloud-based applications -- with minimum disruption.
In addition to traditional ringtone notifications of voice calls, there are new ways to notify recipients about who is calling or sending messages, and in context. Most importantly, people who work in teams, collaborating around projects or with customers, especially those who are "location-agnostic," rely heavily on constant communications where call management plays a significant role.
While everyone can benefit from CMaaS, we have found that sales and marketing activities can get the most "bang for their buck" from improved mobile communications.
Key areas of change are the choice of network connectivity options and legacy end user interfaces (UI) for initiating and responding to a variety of contact modes. Since it is most practical to move forward "gracefully," it will be necessary to allow both legacy telephony and newer unified forms of communications to interoperate efficiently. This requires making changes to premises-based communications technologies, as well as mobile services from the carrier service providers. However, because technologies and standards are still evolving, this is not a simple task.
CMaaS technology proves its worth by enabling new forms of call management to be implemented without disrupting existing, premises-based phone call operations.
Toto Communications is very experienced in migrating legacy desktop telephony communications to multimodal mobile communications and a variety of endpoint devices. They realized that no one really used the deskphones provided. Instead, many end users rely heavily on their cellphones, so Toto developed a solution that ported over all the "rules of engagement," traditionally taken for granted in a private branch exchange (PBX), onto a mobile platform.
In conjunction with European partners, they developed the Toto Lynx service to provide a simple first step in migrating from internal desktop telephony to a cellular-based mobile platform. This approach allowed them to offer a single mobile platform for integrating all mobile and desktop endpoints through which existing PBX functionality is fully preserved.
Toto Lynx is a cloud-based communications service platform that is easily set-up via a Web-based administration panel and accessed via a simple app on a user's personal or company-owned smartphone. A Web-based switchboard is also used for full call reception under existing PBX functional control.
Toto Lynx also provides the analytics tools necessary to evaluate all communication activities and productivity metrics of individual end users and the different business processes they are involved in.
In my opinion, it seems that something like the Toto Lynx service is needed to help meet the rapidly changing expectations of many different types of mobile end users.
