Trends Impacting Business Telephony

Technology is all around us and is constantly evolving, especially when it comes to communications. To help you keep up with the pace of change, this section summarizes eight key trends that relate to telephony. The analysis below explains how each trend plays into the decisions you’ll need to consider when moving to VoIP.

Trend #1 – Mobility

Implications for SIP phones: Mobility is the hottest trend in communications and some businesses have indeed moved away from desk phones completely. Most businesses, however, are not ready to do that, and when it comes to telephony, fixed-line VoIP remains the best path for them. Mobility may become the preferred mode for data applications, but for everyday telephony, it’s more expensive and less reliable than desk phones. You should also consider the user experience, as mobile devices are simply not comfortable for people who are constantly on the phone – and at the mercy of battery life limitations and dead zones when roaming about.

Keep in mind that the definition of mobility is broad, and, in some cases, mobility inside the office environment is more important than being mobile outside the office. In this regard, SIP phones can provide enough mobility coverage for telephony, with many advantages over personal wireless devices.

Whatever your needs, as 4G and LTE networks mature, wireless VoIP will become more common. For now, however, your internal telephony needs are best served with SIP phones, reserving smartphones for voice when employees are on the go outside the office

Trend #2 – BYOD

Implications for SIP phones: Bring Your Own Device reflects the rise of smart devices in the consumer world. With mobile broadband being almost everywhere, demand has made these devices affordable; seemingly everyone at the office has one. Employees are increasingly bringing these devices to work with the expectation of using them for both business and personal communication. This puts tremendous strain on the network and reduces IT’s ability to manage data flows.

To address this trend, businesses have been upgrading their networks with better management tools and security elements, but the habits of mobile users tend to evolve faster than IT’s ability to keep pace. BYOD will continue to pose challenges for businesses. As part of the broader mobility trend, things will only get more complex and costly. Of course, there are many benefits, making BYOD too important to ignore; banning mobility outright at work simply isn’t an option.

BYOD may be a major trend, but it is much more about data than voice. To the extent that BYOD represents a pain point for your business, you can rest assured that SIP phones are outside this realm, making VoIP a relatively low-risk investment.

Trend #3 – Cloud Communications

Implications for SIP phones: Over time, the cloud will be an even bigger trend than mobility. Explaining why is beyond the scope of this paper, however. VoIP’s rise is part of the broader shift of technology from hardware to software, which is now being superseded by the ability to move applications and services from being premise-based to being hosted in the cloud. In short, this is the on-demand utility model, where the business gives up ownership in favor of the cash-flow-friendly, decentralized approach to managing communications technology.

This evolution is great news for SMBs, as VoIP is a relatively easy service to host in the cloud. In the past, VoIP options for SMBs were limited, with the offerings only moderately attractive pricewise and often too complex for existing IT resources to manage. Cloud-based VoIP scales up or down seamlessly, making it viable for businesses of all sizes and highly adaptable for varying demand levels and growth scenarios when adding new locations or headcount.

Another virtue of the hosted model is the ease of deploying VoIP with SIP phones. Along with the affordability of these phones, the overall value proposition is very strong, especially when compared to legacy telephony.

Trend #4 – Changing Workplace

Implications for SIP phones: Workforce demographics are trending younger and changing the workplace. The nature of work itself is evolving in today’s Internet-centric world and information-based economy. Millennials are tech-savvy knowledge workers, with expectations that are quite different from their pre-Internet co-workers. They expect applications to be flexible and customizable and will find VoIP very familiar in that regard.

Beyond these expectations, however, is a change in how and where work gets done. Businesses are increasingly decentralized, especially when serving a global customer base. This leads to a disparate workforce that may rarely meet in the same place to collaborate. If that describes your reality, then VoIP is definitely the right move, especially for providing a distributed employee base with a reliable form of real-time communications. Near-real-time tools like email and chat are efficient, but telephony is more immersive, plus the intimacy helps employees feel connected. SIP phones play a key role in delivering that experience, and their affordability makes it easy to support all employees – no matter where they’re located.

Trend #5 – Improved Productivity

Implications for SIP phones: Competitive pressures facing all businesses today make productivity a core driver of success. Everyone wants to be productive, but the reality is we have too many tools, too much information and too many demands on our time. All SMBs will be receptive to new tools that boost productivity, especially those that are easy to deploy and easy for employees to use.

VoIP fits those requirements very well, although it may be difficult to see how it enhances productivity. When deployed from the cloud, SIP phones make VoIP a plug-and-play service that works from any Internet connection. This matters when you consider that VoIP has a richer feature set than legacy services. While it’s easy to think of telephony as a one-dimensional commodity, VoIP is highly customizable, allowing employees to tailor features to their specific preferences. Typical examples would include custom ring settings for specific callers, updating voicemail message remotely, changing call forwarding settings on the fly, and prioritizing the order for reviewing voicemails. This level of flexibility is an upgrade from legacy telephony, and once new features such as ad hoc conferencing and visual voicemail are in use, employee productivity should noticeably improve.

Trend #6 – Opex over Capex

Implications for SIP phones: The shift from Capex to Opex ties into the cloud trend and is highly relevant for VoIP. For most businesses, telephony is a Capex decision, especially those with a legacy PBX system. Telephony has clearly moved away from this model, but that is the history businesses know best. Whether premise-based or hosted, VoIP holds appeal by shifting telephony to Opex. With cash flow being critical for SMBs, this shift is a key value driver. Long term, businesses may not be ahead financially with the Opex model, but it’s hard to argue against the benefits that will be realized right from the start and remain in place going forward.

A key part of that appeal is the affordability of SIP phones. In the early days of VoIP, the price point was too high for SMBs. As demand grew and production costs fell, a wide range of SIP phones became available for any budget. Given technology’s pace of change, there is no need to buy Capex-priced phone systems with a lifespan of more than ten years. Today’s SIP phones are built to reflect that, and when funded with an Opex model, acquisition cost should no longer be an obstacle to adopting VoIP.

Trend #7 – Growing complexity

Implications for SIP phones: This is another cloud-related trend and speaks to the IT limitations that most SMBs face. Not only are resources often scarce, but cost-conscious businesses are increasingly outsourcing IT-managed functions to the cloud. SIP telephony has matured to the point where outsourcing IT is becoming the deployment model of choice, especially for these situations.

Key implications of the increasingly complex nature of technology are the high cost and expertise needed by IT departments to properly support legacy telephony. When businesses migrate to VoIP, that expertise is no longer needed and the cost savings can be allocated to other areas where IT still adds value. This is actually a challenge for SMBs when it comes to VoIP, as the incoming technology is new and complex in ways they are not trained to manage. But that doesn’t get in the way of adopting VoIP, as the cloud makes it a non-issue. SIP phones make this an even easier decision, since end-users can do a lot of their own provisioning, resulting in fewer demands on IT than legacy phones create.

Trend #8 – Legacy losing relevance

Implications for SIP phones: The sum of the overall impact of the above trends is perhaps the most telling shift in terms of what the future holds. While most businesses still have functioning legacy phone systems, virtually everything else they use is based on modern technology. The PSTN may still be the gold standard for telephony, but the cost doesn’t justify the benefit and VoIP is simply a better technology for voice.

The need for telephony does not change, but the technology has, as has the role of telephony. Voice remains the best form of real-time indirect communication, but its value is declining the longer it remains segregated from all the other modes we use to get our work done. Whereas legacy telephony functions in its own closed world, VoIP is seamlessly tied into everything else by virtue of running over the same network as email, chat, video, etc. This is how people work today, and SIP phones provide a great bridge between the old and the new. Since the experience basically replicates legacy systems, SIP phones are totally familiar for employees, so there is no barrier to usage. At the same time, they add business value by bringing telephony into the 21st century with new features that make employees more productive.

Source:vrtech.com