By: Ari
The end of every year is always a time when lots of predictions for the new year appear in various publications. Today I wanted to comment on NetworkWorld and the Top 10 predictions for VoIP and convergence for 2009. I agree with the authors, Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick with most (if not all) of their thoughts as I have also stated in some of my predictions.
First, as I wrote in my previous blog, i do think that we need to NOT generalize and call it “Predictions for VoIP” as Voip is to general. Any replacements are welcome… the NetworkWorld report did add “and convergence” and whether it was intentional or not I think it is an important addition!
Second, i completely agree with their comment about “attention paid to every “single” user’s experience wherever possible“; though different for every business we can see from our experience at Phone.com how listening to our customers comments, suggestions and requests has helped us improve and grow our service. We all tend to think of the next big thing and sometimes forget about what is needed and can be offered today.
This leads to my third comment: some of the big opportunities for VoIP is in UC and mobile voip. Again i agree with the NetworkWorld prediction that working on ROI is key: “proving the ROI thresholds will be more important than ever, so suppliers need to be prepared with the best possible modeling tools that prove the case for UC“.
This is why I predict that just as it took time for VoIP home phone service market to grow (whether pure play or MSOs), it will also take another year or so for mobile voip and UC to really emerge with the general public. Despite the big opportunity in this segment we still dont (and wont in 2009) see general use of mobile phones with voip enabled services nor enterprise voip services / systems that seamlessly transfer between the office phone and the mobile phone.
So this leads to the final comment: 2010 will have more mass introduction of VoIP services and 2009 will be the year to get ready for it!
We may be going through some hard times but we believe the future (for our industry and for our entire economy) is bright!
