VoiceCon 2009 in Orlando came and went this week. I'm not exactly sure what the final attendance count was but judging from the traffic, attendance was probably down. For those that did attend, I think this was a great show though with many new themes that made me think about how this industry would evolve over the next several years. These are some of the more interesting themes that made me go hmm....The future of the desk phone. During Gurdeep Pall's keynote for Microsoft, he compared the current desk phone to what the standalone word processor was many years ago. The thesis being that we would roll the desk phone functionality into the PC, like we did with the word processor. I disagree somewhat with the analogy since the word processor wasn't a real time device like the phone is. Also, I'm not sure most people would be willing to wait the 8-10 minutes it takes to boot a Windows laptop to make a call. However, I do agree that my desk phone is about as useful as my 401k. It's got a bit of value but declining in value every day. I do though think that a significant threat to the desk phone exists and that is the mobile phone. More and more people are shedding their home phones and are starting to do that with their desk phones at work. During the user forum (and if you missed it, it was a good one), there was almost unanimous opinion that the number of phones on the desk would diminish. So, it's clear we need desk phones less and less but my bet is on mobile phones rather than soft phones.
The intersection of cloud computing and unified communications. I moderated the cloud computing panel with Eric Krapf and we had an interesting discussion on this topic. I don't really think the panel did a good job of explaining exactly how to deliver value for UC out of the cloud other than with SaaS based services. One of the points I touched on, but only lightly, was thinking about how communications services could be delivered more easily through the use of cloud. Take the example of a call log. Each phone I have (2 mobile and one desk) has a call log on it so I know who the last ten people to call me on each device are but I don't have any way to aggregate that. By pushing UC to the cloud, the call log could become a mashupable service that could be displayed on any phone or integrated into an application such as a CRM application. Currently Cisco with WebEx and IBM with Lotus Live are the only two mainstream vendors strongly pushing the cloud concept but I expect to see this become a much bigger part of future VoiceCons.
The impact of the economy. There's no doubt that the economic situation has changed the way companies buy. One of the individuals on the user panel stated that a project at her company doesn't even get looked at if it can't return a 12 month payback. With that being said, it was also interesting to hear how so many IT leaders struggle with all of the "hidden costs" to VoIP deployments that can remove much of the value and stretch deployments out by several years. I think it's critical for this industry to develop much crisper cost models to help many of the organizations that are in the process of deploying VoIP finish the deployment.
UC as a development platform. Anyone that has followed my blogging or the research I've produced at Yankee Group knows that this has been a drum I have been beating for years. To date many of the examples are around extending call center functionality to the entire organization or embedding presence to other applications, but application integration is now a topic that we're discussing consistently at this conference. This should help prime the application pump and get more ISVs interested in the communications market, creating significant value for the entire industry.
The overall growth and interest in video. The video market has had many starts and stops before where we industry pundits boldly predict that this will finally be the year video goes main stream... and it doesn't. I do believe though that this time it's different. One of the reasons is that the quality and ease of use of the systems is just so much better than the systems of days past. Also, the economy has forced many companies to look for alternatives to hopping on a plane, so that's created the need we haven't had before. One of the significant events of 2008 was the network operators rolling out multi client telepresence. This means that an operator, such as AT&T, will broker inter-company telepresence allowing the deploying organization to "telepresence" with other companies. Now, all we need is for the operators to work together and extend this service cross network.
Those were my main take aways from this year's VoiceCon. Hopefully we'll see more of these as this industry matures. See you in SF!
