Ongoing coverage throughout the day for Day One of VoiceCon San Francisco.
TODAY'S BLOG HIGHLIGHTS
* VoiceCon Fall 2009 is Underway but without Significant Presence from Microsoft or Cisco
* Favorable Prognosis in Troubled Times
* DiVitas Takes a New Tack
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
VoiceCon 2009: Cutting The Cord On Enterprise Phones
TODAY'S BLOG HIGHLIGHTS:
* VoiceCon Fall 2009 is Underway but without Significant Presence from Microsoft or Cisco
* Favorable Prognosis in Troubled Times
* DiVitas Takes a New Tack
INFORMATION WEEK COVERAGE:
VoiceCon 2009: Cutting The Cord On Enterprise Phones
I'm going to keep updating this chain throughout the day as I attend more sessions and hear from more participants in VoiceCon today.
This is the first time we've kicked off a VoiceCon conference with something other than half-day or full-day tutorials, and from the crowds here at Moscone Center North, it looks as if the attendees like the wider choice of Monday session formats.
We started out with three Deep Dive sessions--two-hours on a relatively narrowly focused topic. The technology-focused sessions--on QOS/QOE and on Troubleshooting Converged Networks--were well-attended, and Marty Parker's session on Unified Communications Implementation was packed.
The other session that drew extremely well--SRO, in fact---was Michael Finneran's back-to-back mobility sessions. Michael kicked off the morning with an informal "Coffee Talk" session, featuring free-form discussion as directed by the audience; he followed this up with a more traditional hour-long breakout session on mobility devices.
I got the chance to sit in on the Coffee Talk session, and the big takeaway was: If this group is at all representative of the universe of enterprise users, voice over Wi-Fi is a dead issue. The discussion began when an audience member asked what ever happened to the Blackberry 7270, a RIM VoWiFi device introduced a few years ago.
Eric Ritter from RIM was on hand in the session and he said RIM was responding to strongly-expressed customer demand: "We truly were told: Build this device, we need it, this is what our users are asking for."
It turned out, the problem was that while users were asking for a VoWiFi Blackberry, their enterprises weren't willing to do what was necessary to support these sorts of devices. Specifically, enterprises simply weren't willing to roll out wirless LAN coverage pervasively in the enterprise environments; users "went insane" trying to plot out a route across their locations that would keep them within range of one of the sparesely-deployed access points, so that they didn't drop calls, Ritter said.
And to prove his point, Ritter then asked the crowd of about 60 people how many of them had WLAN APs deployed pervasively within their enterprise. Two hands went up.
Nor did the audience members expect this situation to change anytime soon. One participant noted that cellular carriers had been willing to come onto his enterprise's premises to build campus-wide infrastructure to improve cellular coverage--at no charge. Finneran pointed out that the improvements are free "as long as you pay that cellular bill each month," but this audience member responded that "we're going to spend that money anyway" on monthly cellular costs.
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NEXT PAGE: How many phones does your enterprise need?
Fred Knight's first plenary of the event, a panel entitled, "How Many Phones Does Your Enterprise Need?" leaned heavily toward the phone-has-peaked viewpoint, with some nuances. Indeed, the big cheer came when Fred read an audience question, really more of a statement, asserting that softphones "are not ready" to replace hard phones. This end user claimed that, though softphones made up a small minority of their end stations, they accounted for the vast majority of the trouble tickets.
But in general, the non-vendors on the phone panel agreed that the value proposition is changing and desk phones--at least high-end, expensive phones--aren't necessarily a given. Steve Leaden noted that three of his clients--a university, healthcare company and HMO--have, to one degree or another, scaled back their deployments of traditional phones. And Dave Michels, whose blog on this topic helped inspire this session, insisted that, "The phone hasn't evolved the same way our other communications systems have"--i.e, it's gotten more expensive without necessarily increasing significantly in functionality.
Fred asked the lone vendor panelist, Steve Hardy of Avaya, whether Avaya continues to invest R&D in new phones, and Hardy's answer was emphatically positive. Hardy and Allan Sulkin both insisted that phones are a good investment because of their traditionally long life cycle--though the question was raised as to whether phones will follow the high-tech tendency, in which the more cool and software-focused a device is, the shorter its practical life cycle--a device can only have a long lifecycle if you're not expecting anything new to happen to it for a long time.
Steve Hardy pushed back at Dave Michels' assertion that a good investment is one that provides productivity, not mere length of service. "Users time and time again prefer that physical device on the desk," Hardy said.
Dave Michels continued to play the skeptic about the importance of desk phones, and he insisted that, whereas a few years ago, you didn't call another person's cell phone unless you really had to reach them quickly--otherwise you didn't want to burn their minutes--now you call them on the cell and expect to conduct business routinely.
We didn't give this session a name alluding to the desk phone "going away," because things don't go away, at least not for a long time. As Sulkin pointed out, even if desk phones do decline in annual shipments, there's still a huge installed base out there. And Allan noted that business phones still have a role as cultural signifiers. A lot of law firms put an expensive phone out in the lobby as a way to send the message to clients that, as Allan put it, "this isn't going to be cheap," as well as a sign that the firm makes money--obviously the kind of firm you want representing you.
Still, even if the phone's not going away, the panelists agreed that some users may opt for stripped down versions--paper labels are even making a comeback, Steve Leaden said, as users opt for the absolute bare minimum as a lifeline functionality.
So far, nobody here is arguing that 5-9s and dial tone are going away; which means phones will be around, in some form.
