I think Matt may have hit upon one of the factors that could actually drive some enterprise communications systems into the cloud. It has to do with single-numbers, and the larger issue of how enterprise users actually use communications now and into the future.
Cloud-based, hosted, Centrex, whatever you want to call it...the communications industry has traditionally shown skepticism about moving its call control assets off prem and into a third-party infrastructure. There have been lots of reasons to shun the cloud: New reasons (security concerns) and old reasons (control and management). In the past, I've suggested that it's strictly a rent/buy decision, with no technology issues really driving it. But as I think about Matt's latest post, I’m reconsidering, at least somewhat.
Matt focuses on the inefficient resource consumption that results from having to "hairpin" calls into and then out of the enterprise if you want to provide enterprise-based single number service: You consume at least double the bandwidth and call equivalents in many Unified Communications single-number call routing schemes.
I still believe it's a rent/buy decision in the end, but properly considering all the costs of rental vs. purchase should include the kinds of considerations Matt discusses: What will it really cost us to run on-premises call control in a world where we want to provide single-number access to a significant number of our end users?
The overarching trend here is mobility, and the fact is that mobility and the cloud are intimately connected. Pretty much anything you want to provide your mobile end users is better served out of the public cloud, and it seems to me that this includes call routing. It makes a lot more sense if incoming calls to your mobile users hit your call control in the public cloud and use shared resources to find the user, rather than eating up your access resources in that single-number function.
This seems like the perfect example of a hybrid premises-cloud solution that makes sense. Maybe you don’t want or need all of your users to be served out of the public cloud. Your big Accounts Payable and HR departments, staffed by deskbound workers; your call centers—these might be more efficiently served by internal call control assets. But you ought to be able to implement a mirrored call server in the network whose primary purpose is to control DIDs or extensions dedicated to your mobile users, with call routing rules that carry out the single-number search function within the public cloud. This could be a hosted version of whatever IP-PBX you’re running on site; this hosted IP-PBX probably could even be configured to run as a backup to the on-prem devices in case of local outages.
The hype for the cloud is that it's going to take over everything and provide all computing capabilities just like an electric or water utility, killing off all premises systems and leaving IT to wander in the desert. We're a long way from that, but it is time to consider how you can use the cloud to deliver next-gen capabilities to users in a cost-efficient way.
