In my everyday wanderings of the web, this article from SmallBizResource
caused me to think about the nature of VoIP, who is succeeding and who
is failing and why.  In it the essential message is that Cisco and Microsoft
are both gunning to provide VoIP to the Small and Medium sized Business
sector.  I have many views about why enterprise level companies
are failing so miserably to catch the SMB market, but I wanted to focus
on a particular couple of points that are glanced over in this article.

Preface

First, a note or two about VoIP:

1. VoIP
   is a game-changing technology specifically because it is based on open
   networks and open standards (for the most part, though Skype might be
   even more popular if it opened it’s network with some kind of open
   gateway system).
2. The open-ness of VoIP standards has created a
   wealth of vendors and a wealth of oppurtunities for collaboration, both
   in the product and service development sense, and in the “unified work
   experience” sense.

The Guts

Okay, so here’s where these guys, and a quite a few others (ahem, Nortel, Toshiba, Shoretel and all of those vendors that like to “lock” their hardware into one system…):

1. People like choice.  People like to be able to touch and feel a device,
   and choose between a few different hardware platforms.  You give them
   that choice, and they’ll love you for it.
2. People like flexibility.  People don’t like being locked in.  Oh sure,
   they’ll accept it, but they won’t necessarily like it.  Doesn’t anybody
   notice all the trends of “unlocking” cell phones, “hacking” various
   embedded devices (AppleTV to be the latest), and “porting” of telephone
   numbers when switching carriers?
3. People
   like innovation.  The ability to open your platform to extensions
   and experimentation breeds a whole new level of innovation.  If
   you encourage this from your community, they will more than likely
   respond positively and do things that your internal engineers would
   never have dreamed of.  If they do it well enough, why not buy
   them out and encourage them to continue innovating with your products.

Anyway,
that’s my short little rant on why I think some of the major players in
the industry are really missing the point of all of this
technology.  It’s supposed to be a disruptive technology.  It’s NOT
supposed to look, or feel, exactly like the old stuff.  One of the
biggest problems with the old PSTN network is that it’s stability
crippled it’s innovation. Sure,
they made some recent advances here and there.  But, for the most
part, nobody wanted to add features to upset an already working
system.  So nobody ever innovated any new functionality into it.

My Advice

Open
up your phones and your servers so that anybody can talk to them, not
just a few select vendors (or even just yourself).  Make the Cisco
IP phones talk SIP so they can talk to any SIP-based server or
service.  Make the Cisco Call Manager systems talk SIP so you can
run your favorite SIP phone against the server.  Stop locking
users into systems they’ll just have to throw out in 3 years
anyway.  If you open both ends of the system up, you can innovate
and synergize on both sides of the solution.