MOVING FORWARD: Enterprising Approaches to Keeping People & Teams Connected

Forget everything you thought you knew about “convergence” and “unified communications”. An entirely new and exciting world is opening up as three big trends intersect in support of a new level of demands from next-generation business users. Our industry has done an amazing job moving communications and collaboration forward over the last two decades leveraging IP telephony, building mobile applications, creating conferencing and messaging platforms, and otherwise continually responding to the new way work is getting done – particularly as the economy continues to recover.

I’ve been in this industry for most of my adult life, and I’ve been fortunate to be part of the development and growth of a number of companies, working with some of the finest technologists and business visionaries. Like so many of my colleagues, I have contributed to replacing wires with fiber, phones with IP-edge devices, flip phones and Blackberries with smartphones and tablets, and as a manager, have myself become rather addicted to ease of access and sharing information – in real-time, all the time.

It hasn’t been easy, and managing increasing modalities (including multiple devices in the office, at my home office, in my car, in my pocket, on airplanes, over WiFi networks and 3G/4G networks) has been a challenge – and that is just for me personally.

As President of Enterprise, I manage a global team of product, sales and sales engineering folks, and have accountability for a budget that includes communications expenses. As a member of GENBAND’s management team, I also have a voice in the kinds of communications solutions and devices we use – GENBAND is very much like the enterprises we serve, so we grapple ourselves with what our teams need to deliver results – in a very hot market.

We’re competitive, and we love a good challenge – and in all my years being part of the communications industry, there has never been a more exciting time than this. Communications technology has become a centerpiece of today’s fast-paced business environment – and enterprises are consuming more and more of every aspect whether broadband, wireless, data access, collaboration, mobile devices, workflow applications, hosted services, cloud platform delivered experiences and so on. With VoIP, voice is “IT” – the relationship of IP and IT is now in high gear, and voice as another application and an increasingly “embedded” application has finally arrived.

Traditional voice communications networks based on TDM technology are all but gone, and while the PSTN is certainly on a downward slope, particularly for global businesses, access to call completion over the PSTN is still a necessary function. How do you choose to invest, knowing not everything can go “over the top” using broadband and browsers?

Mobile devices are officially dominating phones and even laptops, and within a very short period of time, we predict that “desktop phones” – will be reserved for only a fraction of enterprise users who are stuck at their desks or elsewhere and have no reason to be supported with mobile alternatives. Even for those users, softphones integrated with workflow applications and directories we believe will replace “handsets” as we know them.  How do you make the leap – or do you – from all those phones to fewer phones while keeping the company “together” using an application server, otherwise known as the PBX?

And as the cloud continues to prove itself worthy, now, of storing and serving up even the most intense and sophisticated data applications (it took more than a decade for enterprises to reach their comfort level there) – the next frontier on the cloud is Real-Time Communications, which has the potential to turn premise-based equipment into the next dinosaur following the way of the desktop phones.  How do you decide when your organization can “cut the cord” – and why rush when the systems in place today are working well?

When it comes to enterprise communications and the evolution of enterprise collaboration, I like the calculus metaphor better than math. It’s not just about the arithmetic (natural cost savings that occur when we get to the simplification of UCaaS for example) – it’s about timing.  It’s not just about what enterprise CIOs will inevitably do – it’s about how they orchestrate the evolution of their enterprise communications environments over time.

There is, without a doubt, a new reality that impacts every aspect of the communications environment – from procurement to network engineering – from provisioning to moves/adds/changes – from new devices to new applications – from BYOD (bring your own device) to BYOE (bring your own experience) – and from policy management to cost control. 

Finding the right calculus for MOVING FORWARD is challenging – but that is what also makes it exciting. There is not one roadmap for all enterprises. And in fact, as enterprises continue to invest in the “new world” even more opportunities will open up given all the creative applications possible in an all-IP world, including those that can be built leveraging technologies like WebRTC. I’ll cover some of those in a future post.

For more information on GENBAND’s enterprise capabilities visit http://enterprise.genband.com/.