The telephony area is in a rapid transition, driven by user demands and new unified communication solutions. Many companies are not prepared for this change. They lack a proper strategy to move forward. A common situation looks like this:
- Telephony is a separate area, not cooperating with IT concerning
solutions and governance
- Telephony solutions are in many cases obsolete and built to meet
old demands
- Companies usually own telephony equipment, with different standards
spread over many sites
- Telephony is usually locally administrated and managed
- International mobile telephony costs are galloping
With this as a starting point, companies are now facing changes and challenges of different kinds. The main trends to address these are:
Mobile knowledge workers
Large enterprises want to make use of the knowledge and information of the entire organization. Communication solutions have a major role to play, if used in the right way. New telephony solutions can facilitate and speed up vital information flow in global enterprises. Offices are changing rapidly and the office space is increasingly dynamic. Telephony solutions need to match this and become more flexible. Staff is increasingly “nomadic” and needs to communicate efficiently while traveling.
IT telephony convergence
New IT solutions are providing voice services as a complement to chat, conferencing and collaboration. Communicator solutions (e.g. OCS, Office Communication Server) are already in place in many companies and they have to be integrated with telephony in order to avoid costly overlapping solutions, which confuse users. Smart phones are booming and companies need to take control of this development to avoid galloping costs and to control deployment of mobile business applications for security reasons.
Communication as a service
Telecom operators are providing services capable of replacing a large part of the traditional in-house telephony solutions. The network centric services offer telephony from the “cloud”. Companies need to consider if old switches and support systems can be phased out to use the benefits and flexibility of the new services offered. These services can offer global coverage in a new way. Internal corporate services can be reached from all over the world, in the same way as from the local office.
Companies need to take action on these trends and challenges in order to manage telephony costs, provide efficient services to the users and to integrate telephony with IT. In other words: A telephony strategy is needed urgently if these issues are not already addressed.
