Mike Storella, COO at snom, is an unapologetic advocate for desk phones. A lot of what you think is a drawback to deskphones, is really an advantage, Mike has told me in the past, and on the occasion of the release of snom's newest line, the 7xx series, he made the point to me again.
snom executives like Mike have long made the point that desk phones really aren't that expensive, when you consider that they last a decade or so--a multi-hundred-dollar investment in a desk phone amortizes to a lot less than the same or higher price, spent on a tablet or softphone that you're going to ditch after a year or two. Of course, you can't play Angry Birds on a desk phone. But that's kind of the point too: Desk phones aren't good at everything, but they're really good at what they're supposed to be good at.
As we move further into the age of mobility, companies like snom, who make desk phones almost exclusively--they do have a low-end PBX appliance and software, too--have to battle the idea that we'll eventually reach the point where nobody wants a desk phone because they just use their mobile phone for everything. In a briefing with Mike Storella last week, he told me that, essentially, the fact that the desk phone stays where it is, is a feature, not a bug.
"The desk phone, some of the good things are, it's not mobile," Mike said. "It stays with the company"
In other words, if the company buys a new desk phone for me, when I leave the company, they keep the asset itself, and they don't have to worry about all the things you have to worry about when a mobile user leaves the company--taking the phone number, setting up a new user with the mobile policies and making sure they're enforced, etc.
I don't want to overstate this point; obviously mobile use is growing because mobiles really are better and more productive for a lot of users. But the idea that enterprises will just stop buying IP desk phones, even for people whose job entails at a desk all day, talking on the phone, is kind of ludicrous, when you think about it, for the reason Mike Storella mentions.
We also talked about PC-based softphones, which may make sense for some users in some situations, and certainly Skype has trained a generation of users in the delights of PC-based calling. Still, when you think about assets that the company purchases for its employees, a point came up in my discussion with Storella that also came up in Dave Michels's interview with Joe Burton of Plantronics: Wireless headsets, at least the smallest, coolest ones, are kind of like chewing gum--they don't have high reuse potential. If you give someone a headset at company expense, you have to figure their successor in that job isn't going to want the thing for their own use.
snom's New Release
As for the latest news from snom, the 7xx series consists of two sets, the 720 and 760, which Mike Storella described as mid-range phones, all HD audio, which start shipping to the channel at the end of this month, at list prices of $219 and $329 respectively.
While this price is certainly not high-end, it also belies the stereotype of the "SIP phone" as a cheap, low-function, lowest-common denominator alternative to pricey proprietary IP phones from the big platform vendors. Nor does the feature set look like the barebones SIP phone of the past, including such functions as:
* Gigabit Ethernet switching * Automatic provisioning * Wireless connectivity--Bluetooth & WLAN
snom also pays attention to "phone-like" qualities of the phone--here's how they describe one of the new features of the mid-range 7xx phones:
"Subtle design updates to handset for swift and silent pickup/return when switching from speaker to private handset calling--Designed when you need to 'get a phone call off speaker phone quickly without the other party’s knowledge' to avoid those 'I hope I am not on speaker phone' phone calls.
See, these guys know telephony; it's not a lost art, and it's not irrelevant either.
