Solving the Voice Conundrum

The Voice Conundrum: elevating the value of voice (and UC) in the enterprise; from commodity to strategic business asset.

Telephony has been around a long time; over 130 years in fact. The interesting thing is that it initially transformed the way people worked and communicated. I remember back in 1927 (no, I wasn't actually around then) the big news was that you could make a 3 minute call from NY to London, UK for $75. That was a huge event back then even though the submarine cable could literally only handle one call at a time. Unfortunately, not much has changed since then...

Even VoIP turned out to be just another transport conversation - i.e. a less expensive way for people to call between NY and London - but it's never been able to demonstrate sustainable business value.

A little story that epitomizes the “status” of telephony and voice in the enterprise: I was at a hospital for an IP telephony meeting a few years back. It was a crowded day for meetings so we were in a conference room in the lower level of the hospital. During one of the breaks the phone guy wanted to show us the “phone room”. Reluctantly, we obliged and as we headed down the hall we walked past the morgue. The very next door was the phone room. This sent a chill down my spine, so I commented that this was the oddest place I had ever seen a phone room...to which the voice guy replied “You don’t know the half of it son. Sometimes I’ll be in here punching down cables in the bix block and I can hear the bone saw going in the next room.”

Right then and there I realized voice/telephony was at the bottom of the barrel and could never drive business value on its own. Now let's fast forward a few years to the age of unified communications...

So here we are talking about UC and I accused many vendors of commoditizing UC in the same way telephony has been commoditized. The problem, as pointed out in the blog "Presence, not VoIP is the Foundation of Unified Communications" by Zeus Kerravala, The Yankee Group, is that most vendors have been approaching UC as an evolution of voice. As Zeus points out, "it hinders deployments of UC. If, as an industry, we promote UC as a set of tools to be built on VoIP then only companies that have finished their VoIP deployments will really be in a position to deploy UC". Now, considering that the average Cisco VoIP deployment is less than 350 phones, it's going to take them a long time to get to UC (if at all).

Microsoft, was one of the vendors I chastised for commoditizing UC back in my blog in May but I think they may have turned a corner. Thankfully the term VoIP is fading from their vocabulary and they've embraced Zeus' revelation that presence is the foundation for UC...dare I say this is the start of a movement to UC 2.0 (universal collaboration)!

So here is my spin on how I think Microsoft can approach the voice conundrum when talking about their UC vision:

Microsoft Unified Communications approaches voice as one of the many capabilities inherent with UC. They elevate the value of voice/telephony by surrounding it with communications software (like email, IM, presence, web and video conferencing) and drawing it into the workflow and embedding it into business processes.

Admittedly, Microsoft has some ground to make up in providing enterprise-class telephony capabilities (like e911 and branch survivability to PSTN) but that shouldn't stop them from transforming the industry and leading the charge into the next phase of Unified Communications.