7 Ways For Improving VoIP by Mark Allen
1. Variety In The Dedicated Consumer Phone Box Space: Ooma Inc.'s appliance garnered lots of buzz when the fans of PhoneGnome came after it as a copycat device. The Ooma box has numerous extra features, but has a big selling point that PhoneGnome didn't – it seamlessly integrates with land lines. Expect more variety in this space down the road, as the vendors and manufacturers compete on price, performance, call quality and feature set.
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2. Microsoft Goes For VOIP: With the (much anticipated) rollout of Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 in October, Microsoft has served notice to the rest of the industry that they're coming. Microsoft always misses on the first two tries at something, but by the third time 'round, they'll have made the adjustments needed to move into the space. Microsoft's pitch? Voice will become just another application running on the network. Expect existential questions on the future of PBX systems in the near future.
3. Making Transitions Seamless: Switchvox pulled this one – they made their premises-based IP PBX software available to its hosted PBX customers, so that when a small business outgrows the initial hosted offering and needs to bring their PBX server in-house, there's no costly (and disruptive) transition of services to act as a barrier to entry. This is vendor lock-in at its smartest, and we expect it to become the norm down the road.
4. Open Source Vendors Focus On "Out Of The Box" Installs: Open-source IP PBX software suppliers Digium Inc., Fonality (trixbox) and Pingtel Corp. have shifted to productizing their offerings as stand alone, easy to install appliances, making it a one stop solution for Value Added Resellers. The price of the software is right, and the software itself is rock solid; whether it manages to get past the Open Source "by geeks, for geeks" inadvertent branding remains to be seen, but we're hopeful.
For Pricing & Selection of IP Phones, Go To The Voip Store
5. Flat Rate Networking For Hosted VoIP: Junction Networks charges a flat rate for the entire business — no matter how many extensions, plus the actual cost of calls. This saves a lot of money once a business gets past about 20 extensions.
6. Desk Phone GUIs For The Masses: IP desk phones with GUIs have been around for three years now; what's changed is that competition on hardware has almost turned them into commodity items. Expect them to hit commodity status by the end of 2008. This removes another barrier to entry for companies looking to switch over.
7. Mobile Call Transitions Break Carrier Reliance: Keeping a customer's call during the walk from the parking lot to the desk just got easier. Several IP PBX vendors (Siemens AG, Avaya Inc.and Divitas Networks) call hand-offs seamlessly grab calls from dual mode cell phone/WiFi phones, routing them as a parallel call through the enterprise wireless LAN. Most impressively, this was done without cell phone carrier co-operation (indeed, it was done over cellular carrier intransigence.)
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