|
Author
Patrick Lloyd
Product Manager for Voice
Macquarie Telecom
The future of Telephony technology and video conferencing - How will
businesses communicate?
Businesses can expect to rely more on IP based telephony products as we see a
gradual shift away from ISDN and PSTN products. The next 10 years will bring an
unparalleled change in the ways businesses communicate with each other and with
customers. Not only is this going to change the methods of communication from a
technology perspective, but also the way customers and employees interact in
day-to-day life.
The last five years has been fairly static in the fixed voice market apart from
a great deal of hype about IP telephony (much of this from hardware vendors
wanting to sell expensive IP handsets and PABX equipment), and while a
percentage of large businesses have replaced their telephony hardware, very few
are using end to end IP voice solutions with the majority of calls still being
switched through the PSTN.
There will be two distinct technology shifts happening between now and 2020. The
first will be that we see replacement of life expired premise based hardware
such as PABX’s and handsets with IP enabled hardware, this is likely to occur
much quicker in the corporate sector than in the small business space due to the
cost efficiencies achieved by merging voice and data networks into one.
The second shift will be a shift in telephony carriage from ISDN and PSTN to IP
based products, this second shift may not happen as quickly as expected as
incumbent carriers lower the prices of the existing technologies to maximise the
return on their existing telephony networks.
The future of conferencing
 Collaboration
products such as video and web conferencing will also increase in popularity
given that we’re already seeing an increase in the use of collaboration products
due to the cost savings they bring and this will continue, particularly as more
and more business adopt Web 2.0 methods of communicating and interacting with
clients. For example, many websites have features allowing you to chat live to
sales reps, at the moment, it's largely text based chat, but it won't be long
before you'll be able to chat face-to-face with a sale representatives who will
be on hand to talk to you via conferencing technology.
I think another area we’ll see changes is in the inbound voice 1300/1800 product
space. We’re already seeing some of the bigger carriers offer new features with
their inbound products. I think in the next ten years customers purchasing
inbound voice services will see new features offered and also new easier to use
user interfaces for managing inbound traffic between call centres and other
answer points.
The major forces behind the changes in product usage in the next ten years will
be driven by two factors; cost savings and replacement of life expired hardware.
Certainly I think cost will be a big factor in the next 2-3 years with the
economic downturn this is where we’ll likely see an increase in the usage of
conferencing products.
It’s important to consider ‘efficiency’ as being the major factor in driving
change in the way people will communicate in the future – conferencing is
certainly something that saves a lot of time and money as well as providing an
ideal environment for collaborative work.
Now how can we help you?
Got a question for Patrick Lloyd on the future of telephony or conferencing technology? Email your question
here.
Contact Macquarie Telecom
about how we can help you manage your telephony and conferencing technology.
| 
