Here are my first quick notes after the Voice over IP (VoIP) thought leadership forum from First Tuesday Zürich:
Format
Keynotes with live feedback through laptops scattered around the room.
Discussion sessions with small groups of participants led by thought leaders.
Outcome of the forum will be published in a paper.
Notes and observations
- Many participants didn’t grasp the full possibilities yet.
- There was a tendency to talk more about the threats and impossibilities than the possibilities and advantages.
- SIP is an open standard under development. (Some technical problems still exist.)
- Skype uses a proprietary technology.
- SIPPhone.com seems to be a very promising player in this market.
- Old telco’s should be prepared for a massive amount of competition in a very different way than they’re used to. Compare: email’s competition to regular mail.
- Old telco’s still have a big customer base they should now aggressively target with services that they can compete with.
- The existing address space of regular phone numbers is a tremendous asset.
- Mapping of VoIP ‘addresses’ to POTS Phone numbers elegantly will probably going to be a big selling point.
- Many big businesses are not ready to implement VoIP for several reasons. For example: IT departments too busy with other things, Telco costs make up too small a portion of the overall budget to give enough priority to VoIP implementation, investments in existing solutions, immaturity of current VoIP solutions.
- Potential savings for businesses: 1. actual connection costs, 2. More flexibility, better services = more efficiency for employees => more productivity.
- Technically: Everything will be connected over IP.
- Hardware doesn’t matter. VoIP applications are done in software.
- The ‘V’ in VoIP is only the beginning. Richer content is the logical next step and in fact, it’s already here!
- In the end, it’s all data.
More posts on this subject to follow.