VoIP is Alive and Well; As Long As You Are Willing to Pad Your Offerings With Applications

Many bloggers and industry experts have been in deep discussion this year about whether or not VoIP is dead. This question might be a little bit more complicated than some might think. Most would think of VoIP as simply providing dial tone and long distance, but VoIP telephony is so much more than that. And while many VoIP providers may not be seeing the quick adoption to VoIP that was expected, that may have more to do with their applications offerings than their delivery of dial tone and long distance service.

Issues with VoIP adoption have centered largely on service quality. These issues have turned many early adopters away from VoIP and they have gone back to their traditional wire-line service. And they were right. There were issues with phone line service quality as well as customer service quality in a large segment of the VoIP market. But, here we are talking about VoIP as if it is as simple as providing a dial-tone.

The beauty of VoIP, and the reason that VoIP is not and will not be dead in the near future, is simply that VoIP provides an excellent building block to providing business-critical applications that are more flexible, scalable, and geographically redundant than was possible with traditional wire-line technology. By VoIP’s very nature, given that it is service providers via the web, it is easily integrated into a more flexible portfolio. VoIP telephony is not limited by physical telephone wires and the markets are much easier to infiltrate because the internet is its backbone…and the internet is everywhere.

VoIP is a technology, like a floppy disk drive or an iPod. It’s the content that you put on those disks and iPods that make them useful. Similarly, the content (applications) you build on a VoIP platform is what makes VoIP technology useful. Such applications could include hosted call recording, telemanagement, or ACD reporting software. The more top of the line applications a carrier offers its customers, the more desirable its service will be. It is the applications that make the VoIP service, not the service itself, and the future opportunities in VoIP will be in providing the most advanced applications options to customers. This will be the future differentiator.

So, to say that VoIP is dead might be a bit premature. The way that VoIP technology was originally delivered is becoming a thing of the past and better ways of deploying VoIP service are emerging, but VoIP itself is alive and well. VoIP’s future success rests on the fact that it is easily deployable and that the best and most robust business-critical applications are available and will continue to be available in the VoIP framework. Applications providers have more options and more flexibility in the VoIP architecture to provide that flexibility, and business customers are going to continue to require that these applications options be available. The real question that we should be asking ourselves is, who will be providing the best and most diverse applications feature-set to their customers? Because these are the VoIP providers of the future.