IP-PBXs: Main Streets After The Freeways
IP-PBXs: Main Streets After The Freeways by Marty Parker
For centuries, commerce happened on "Main Street," where the foot traffic and horse traffic passed the retail vendors’ stalls, shops or storefronts. Then new forms of transportation and communication came along and reduced Main Streets to an ancillary status in commerce and society.
The alternatives that dis-intermediated Main Street are numerous, including railroads and airlines, telephones and the Internet, and surprisingly, the automobile. Main Street was not designed to deal with any of these alternatives. While the automobile should have been a boon to Main Street since it could bring more people to the shops, the automobile actually accelerated the reduction of Main Street to a side show.
The automobile allowed people to move farther from Main Street. Main Street could not deal with the traffic and the parking demands of more automobiles when initially drove to Main Street. Malls sprung up in the suburbs with parking, air conditioning, and new shopping and entertainment options that attracted the newly mobile population.
Then the freeway (or expressway or turnpike) took away the inter-city through-traffic on Main Street that might have stopped for lunch or to buy a few items for the trip. Many Chambers of Commerce fought long and hard to keep freeways from being built as a by-pass to their Main Street, but the trend was inexorable. The freeways came and Main Streets were mere shadows of their former selves.
It seems that the same pattern is visible in the IP-PBX marketplace. The users of communications have many new options that have all of the attractions and few of the limitations of an IP-PBX, i.e. of the old "Main Street" model of enterprise communications.
Laptop PCs, tablets and smartphones are the automobiles in this analogy. Broadband Internet services, both wired and wireless, are the new freeways and expressways. Web shopping, entertainment and social options are the new malls and shopping centers.
Where does this leave the IP-PBX? The analogy to Main Street is illustrative. Here are some examples:
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The IP-PBX will be reduced to a few specialized services for a local or loyal population. This is the population of folks who still work at a single desk or cubicle location all day and remain loyal to the familiarity of a desk phone rather than embracing the power and convenience of a softphone client.
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The IP-PBX will certainly have an association with the physical infrastructure where it is located. This will likely include support of phones that are necessary for security and safety reasons or are in common spaces.
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The IP-PBX might support local analog devices such as fax machines, monitoring devices or alarms, though IP-Gateways and the "Internet of Things" are replacing many of those analog connections.
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Of course, the IP-PBX may still be core to a voice call center, though even in that case, customer contacts are shifting to other devices and modes (e.g. web interactions via text, chat and voice or video sessions).
The major IP-PBX producers are doing their best to participate in the demand for new communications services, which new services are analogous to the malls and the online services mentioned above.
Video conferencing services provided by the IP-PBX vendors under the marketing banner of "collaboration" are the best example of this. Yet those video conferencing services do not require an IP-PBX. Forcing the user to connect to video calls and conferences through the telephone device is like requiring people to drive down the old Main Street to get to the new mall. That didn’t work then and it isn’t working now.
Mobility clients are another attempt to connect the freeway of the cellular and Wi-Fi worlds to the Main Street of the IP-PBX. But, as Michael Finneran continues to note, this isn’t working particularly well, either. Mobile workers can best get their job done by loading up their mobile devices with email, text/chat, contact directories, calendar, and social links as well as with mobile applets connected to their business applications (e.g. Salesforce.com, SAP, Dynamics, and most other workflow applications). Almost all of these mobile device services or applets enable the user to make a phone call by clicking on a contact name or highlighting a number. There is no need to get "off the freeway" of the cellular and Wi-Fi networks just to make a voice call on the Main Street IP-PBX.
Perhaps this analogy to Main Street will make sense to you, perhaps not. If not, then it may be worth comparing the evolution of the IP-PBX marketplace to other technology and social evolutions with which you are familiar. If you have other, better analogies to guide the thinking of the UC industry, we welcome them as commentary to this post.