"Integrating remote employees closer into the business processes (branch office employees in New York fielding morning calls from St. Louis and Denver before the call center in California is open)."
For the last several years at VoiceCon, we've taken it for granted that interest in mobility will continue its strong growth. Most of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, seems to support this conclusion. And yet, it's equally clear that people are driving less--the U.S. Department of Transportation reported recently that Americans drove 4.7% fewer miles in June 2008 than in June 2007, and used 400 million fewer gallons of gasoline in 1Q08 than they did in 1Q07, a 1.3% percent drop. So people are cutting down on energy use.
The operative word, going forward, may not be mobility, but rather flexibility. And if that's the case, the "productivity"-based arguments for Unified Communications may look less like a nice-to-have, and more like table stakes. Find-me/follow-me becomes a much more important capability; a UC client that looks the same on a hard phone, PC and mobile phone becomes a particularly useful thing to have; and social networking tools offer the possibility for people to collaborate in various channels depending on the type of device and the environment where the person is working at that moment.
However, such a new state of affairs would also mean that the user is accessing multiple networks characterized by varying qualities of service. If your base for everyday work is your house, VPN over broadband can re-create "office quality" pretty consistently. But if a lot more home-based users, scattered around the country, are plugging IP phones into that remote access network, is backhaul to a single VPN node going to give them the quality they need?
If the nearest company HQ is the place to go for a telepresence/video meeting, will there be enough bandwidth there? (Maybe so, if a lot of the workers now telecommute instead of going on site--unless they're all VPN-ing into that site over the same access link, I suppose.)
Then there's wireless. The quality of cellular voice calling is not getting better, and cell phones will continue to grow in importance--because even if people are sometimes less mobile, they'll still want to use, as one of their baseline devices, something that permits mobility when they do need it. I don't see the traditional digital cellular networks improving--but can VOIP over 3G and 4G deliver better quality?
The world is your campus. Good luck.
For the last several years at VoiceCon, we've taken it for granted that interest in mobility will continue its strong growth. Most of the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, seems to support this conclusion. And yet, it's equally clear that people are driving less--the U.S. Department of Transportation reported recently that Americans drove 4.7% fewer miles in June 2008 than in June 2007, and used 400 million fewer gallons of gasoline in 1Q08 than they did in 1Q07, a 1.3% percent drop. So people are cutting down on energy use.
The operative word, going forward, may not be mobility, but rather flexibility. And if that's the case, the "productivity"-based arguments for Unified Communications may look less like a nice-to-have, and more like table stakes. Find-me/follow-me becomes a much more important capability; a UC client that looks the same on a hard phone, PC and mobile phone becomes a particularly useful thing to have; and social networking tools offer the possibility for people to collaborate in various channels depending on the type of device and the environment where the person is working at that moment.
However, such a new state of affairs would also mean that the user is accessing multiple networks characterized by varying qualities of service. If your base for everyday work is your house, VPN over broadband can re-create "office quality" pretty consistently. But if a lot more home-based users, scattered around the country, are plugging IP phones into that remote access network, is backhaul to a single VPN node going to give them the quality they need?
If the nearest company HQ is the place to go for a telepresence/video meeting, will there be enough bandwidth there? (Maybe so, if a lot of the workers now telecommute instead of going on site--unless they're all VPN-ing into that site over the same access link, I suppose.)
Then there's wireless. The quality of cellular voice calling is not getting better, and cell phones will continue to grow in importance--because even if people are sometimes less mobile, they'll still want to use, as one of their baseline devices, something that permits mobility when they do need it. I don't see the traditional digital cellular networks improving--but can VOIP over 3G and 4G deliver better quality?
The world is your campus. Good luck.
