IP Telephony

Keith Ward is Co-Founder, CTO & CFO of Product Support Solutions (News - Alert), the voice self-service and contact center experts. The company’s business focus is helping customers improve and optimize the voice self-service channel, with more than 150 years experience in building, deploying, maintaining and supporting contact center infrastructure and applications.

 

 

KW: Among the customers we encounter almost every one of them has some level of VoIP implementation or testing going on now. If this were a football game, VoIP has made a long successful drive down inside the 20 yard line. But leveraging VoIP for transport only gets you into the red zone. I still don’t see many conference rooms or offices with VoIP phones on the desk, and that means their phones are still being used as plain old phones. The touchdowns will come for those who realize that VoIP is about enabling innovative services. That’s when this game will get really exciting.

 

KW: One of the wisest things I’ve heard someone say is “When you predict the future, expect to be wrong.” You might get it right sometimes, but you’re going to be a whole lot more successful if you develop a strategy that doesn’t depend on whether your predictions about the future are right or wrong. If you stay flexible and build in an ability to adapt quickly to change, you’re going to beat the people who try to predict the future. This is what we tell our customers when we help them transition to new technologies, and this is what we practice ourselves as we grow our own business.

 

KW: Our pipeline today is already more than three times as large as it was a year ago, and we’re of course very happy about that. PSS did very little to market ourselves last year, so it would be a stretch to attribute that whole increase to our good name alone. Hopefully this indicates that the market as a whole is still very healthy for those who can show customers real value. We believe this will be the case whether the market takes an upturn or a downturn.

 

KW: VoIP, no question about it. But we’re just scratching the surface until the market starts to take full advantage of the application implications that VoIP enables. Part of this becomes a transition challenge because you have to consider how you’re going to offer services across both a legacy and VoIP infrastructure as you transition from one to the other.

 

KW: It’s probably politically incorrect to say this, but I don’t think Skype has changed the telecom market at all so far. Skype has created a parallel market that hasn’t yet collided with the telecom market as we know it today. It’s certainly got a lot more people thinking about what that collision will look like. In a way this reminds me of the early days of video rentals. Many people were convinced that rentals would kill the movie theaters and suppress big movie studio revenue. Instead, rentals turned out to nicely complement the existing market- an additional revenue source for blockbuster movies and a new channel for smaller films that couldn’t thrive in theaters. Skype and its clones have similar potential, particularly when you look at them as a possible breeding ground for new applications that can extend the current market.

 

KW: How many times have you crossed your fingers hoping you hit the right buttons to conference someone else into a phone call? It’s amazing that users have tolerated that fear since conference calls were invented. If VoIP is about services, services are about User Interface. Apple is the King of User Interface, and they can be the catalyst to finally raise the bar for usability in this industry. When that happens, it will be easier for people to start thinking of the phone as an application instead of a device.

 

KW: If you’re not a carrier today, the fastest and most expensive way to become one is to buy a lot of spectrum. It will be interesting to see how the economics work out after this auction is over. Is it enough to dominate the on-ramp, or do you need to own the superhighway too if you want to be a player in the next decade? I think the auction outcome itself will offer some predictions about how our industry will reinvent itself over the next ten years.

 

KW: It’s never easy to change the tires on a car that’s speeding down the highway. But today our customers are faced with changing the tires and the whole engine block while they’re speeding down a highway that’s being repaved. PSS specializes in helping our customers through these kinds of transitions. The bright spot for us is there are a lot of these transitions taking place today: TDM to VoIP, legacy services to Web services and SOA, proprietary IVR to VoiceXML (News - Alert), the list goes on. The good news for customers is these don’t have to be “big bang” transitions that massively disrupt business. With proper planning the legacy and new technology can coexist peacefully while you transition at a pace that makes sense for your business.

 

KW: Our biggest challenge is the emergence of new technologies and our ability to stay current with these changes. We must continue to do a terrific job anticipating the potential “next big changes” in our space, then fully understand the technology, who will benefit, and under what conditions and timing they will benefit most. The pace of this change is accelerating, and our customers count on us to stay on top of it so they can focus on their operations.

 

KW: PSS brings a unique perspective (see below) on how to transition to new technologies like VoIP. Conferees that prefer not to make a “big bang” transition to VoIP will learn how to make a graceful migration instead. And VoIP is just the start! The potential to make telephony just “one more application” can drive a corporate-wide paradigm shift. The boundaries between communication and application can be blurred by providing anytime/anywhere services that provide real-time critical information for your business and your end-customers. The days of Web, phone, IVR, Customer Service representative, IM, chat, etc. as separate customer “touch-points” are fading away and being replaced with a converged middle-tier that can allow customers and your business to interact and react to real-time, instantly updated, accurate data and Business Intelligence across any medium.

 

KW: Most next-generation technology vendors are project-centric. They have a bias towards getting customers to upgrade as much as possible and as quickly as possible. But if you look at the lifecycle of a new service the “project” accounts for maybe only 10% of it. The other 90% happens after the project is complete and the service goes live. If the project is like dating, the other 90% of the lifecycle is a marriage. This is how we look at transitions. It’s not about a new project; it’s about doing what’s healthy for the marriage. At ITEXPO I’ll talk about VoIP as a transition, not as a specific product or solution. Like a marriage it’s filled with changes and challenges, but if you focus on the other 90% your business will thrive.

 

KW: Open standards and vendor support and adherence of these standards will drive a new level of interoperability and less reliance on single vendors providing total solutions. I believe the push by large Enterprises to reduce the number of vendors they deal with and focus on deeper relationships with fewer vendors is a “knee-jerk” reaction to vendors’ inability to conform to standards in the guise of “more/better functionality.”

 

KW: In a surprise move, the Technology Party will nominate Rich Tehrani for President of the United States. He will run on a Convergence (News - Alert) platform combining Republican and Democratic views into a single unified presentation that offers something for everyone. Honoring time-tested political standards, any conflicts on opinion will be handled with a simple redirect.