The good news first: Enterprises of all sizes are ready to embrace Voice over IP (VoIP). The bad news? They don’t know what they are talking about.

“VoIP” looms large in the mind of the modern enterprise decisionmaker or influencer. Yet, in the process of achieving its high profile it has turned into a shibboleth that is less likely to describe its original meaning — packetizing voice conversations to be transported over the Internet — and more likely to include a broad variety of multimedia and multimodal applications that share a broadband, IP-conformant wide area network. This fact donned on me when I fielded a question from a telecom manager at a large academic institution who called to see if I thought he could turn to VoIP to connect a campus-wide network of surveillance cameras.

My immediate answer was “Well, it’s a great use for your campus’ WAN, but carrying video images really isn’t VoIP.”

Maybe the “V” Stands for “Victory”
After ten or so years and three iterations, “VoIP” has achieved top of mind. It has morphed from the hobbyist’s favorite mode for cheap international phone service into an architecture that supports voice as one of a multitude of data types on an IP backbone. This phenomenon exemplifies true “irony,” defined as “incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs.”

VoIP in the enterprise infrastructure has long been expected to support cheap, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint transport. Early pilots generated cost savings for multi-site firms whose telecom managers designed systems that quickly moved voice conversations into the IP “cloud.” “Push-to-Talk,” Reservationless Conferencing and intelligent call transfers were the early manifestations. Each promised cost savings and more functionality than switched services. That was the expected outcome: better, cheaper handling of phone calls.

The unexpected outcome is that — although VoIP begins with the word “voice” — voice is no longer the be-all and end-all of VoIP spending. VoIP’s persistence is market-driven. Decision-makers with their hands on the corporate purse strings perceive VoIP as an inexpensive mechanism for supporting voice conversations in the IP cloud. Yet, their attention should be more focused on opportunistic companies providing solutions that are ready to ride VoIP’s long coat-tails into larger sales opportunities. By definition, these involve multiple media types (voice, video, audio, radio.) under the control of applications servers and subsystems designed to deliver higher levels of personalization and self-service to telecom and hosted service providers. By some strange quirk in human information processing, all of these services are now being categorized under the name “VoIP.”

VON Amplifies VoIP’s Dilemma
Pulver.com’s VON Conference in San Jose brought VoIP’s positioning issues into bold relief. VON began in 1997 as the “Voice on the Net” Conference. Its organizers like to point out that “VON Events focus on the convergence of the Telecom and the Internet Industries.” Thus, by their own admission VON, and indeed VoIP, have outgrown the narrow confines of “Voice.” Yet the “VoIP” moniker is much more popular among the general public than “IP-Telephony.”

VON has always been about “packetizing” the core public network. Once traffic is sliced, diced and distributed it can support multiple applications and data types. As networks become faster from end-to-end they make it possible for service providers to offer video on demand, massive multiplayer games and enterprise conferencing and collaboration that goes beyond mere voice and whiteboarding.

We wonder how long the VON nameplate can sit atop a show where video services, “The Triple Play,” “Spectrum Sharing,” Host Media Processing and the IP Multimedia Services core are the concepts that generate the most excitement. The VoIP focus shed more heat than light in terms of illuminating the way toward next generation telecom services. Broadband IP is the great equalizer, but the range of services it supports will quickly integrate voice with video, location-awareness, presence and a set of tools and professional services to knit disparate platforms and processors into full-blown solutions.

A Term that Says it All
Like it or not, the term “VoIP” is here to stay. Voice and the Internet are the largest common denominator for a slew of new revenue generating services that have already added multiple media types and transport mechanisms (like WiFi, fixed line and the wireless Internet).

The direct beneficiaries for offering “pure” VoIP are Cable TV multiple system operators (MSOs) — especially Comcast, Cox and Time Warner — who are using the VoIP protocol to offer residential phone services that already include such “enhancements” as voice mail, 911 emergencies, directory assistance and number portability. In North America, Cable TV companies serve something on the order of 500,000 subscribers with VoIP services (roughly on par with VoIP pure-play Vonage).

On the enterprise side, Cisco, Nortel, Alcatel, Siemens and other infrastructure providers have had tremendous success getting so-called “IP-PBXs” installed and serving nearly 7 million lines. The selling points include piggy-backing voice conversations on the corporate VPN or WAN, but also involve the addition of several new calling features for employees to invoke over their IP phones. “Presence” (or the ability to see who’s available to talk or how they would like to be reached) is one of the biggest selling points. So is the seamless integration of contact lists or other forms of the personal phonebook. These are not “pure” VoIP services per se, but they do ride on VoIP’s coat-tails.

Next Up: the VoIP Contact Center
Opus Research’s “Future Readiness” survey (conducted in the first quarter of 2005 in conjunction with Amcomm, Inc.) showed that nearly 50% of respondents were conducting VoIP “pilot projects.” Yet other research shows that VoIP deployment in contact centers is less than 10%. We like to think that the key to getting enterprise decision-makers to cross the chasm from switched to IP in contact centers will be based on demonstrating the value of leveraging existing Web-based logic and extending it over the phone through live agents and media resources. Thus it would be more accurately called the “IP-based, multimedia, distributed self-service and customer interaction network.” To keep things simple it will continue to be sold as VoIP in the contact center.

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