Are carriers afraid of VoIP?
“Do we have to swallow hard when we convert someone to VoIP and cut costs by 20-30 percent for a business [over our TDM services]?” said Fred Briggs, executive vice president of customer service and program management at Verizon Business, during his kickoff keynote for the VON Conference & Expo on Monday. “Of course. But while IP is a fantastic tool for creating cost savings and efficiencies for businesses, it‘s just the foundation of a fundamental shift that‘s coming, which will forever change the way businesses run.”
That fundamental shift, put simply, is businesses starting to carry out functions by taking cues from social networking. Which, if all goes well, will translate into much more value down the line for the likes of Verizon, which can provide an array of the underlying enabling technologies for that shift.
In a hyper-connected world, we’re all familiar with the difficulty in keeping work in its place: It’s just too tempting to pull out the BlackBerry at dinner when a big project is underway at work. But Briggs thinks the next great wrinkle will be a reversal of that trend, where the social life will intrude into work life, instead of the other way around. That means that people work more in the cloud and in less hierarchical ways, and collaborate en masse to provide corporate feedback. Call it communication-enabled business processes.
“Consider blogs, wikis,” said Briggs. “There are 300 million Facebook users today, 2.7 articles in Wikipedia, 130 million blogs out there and 3 million tweets are sent per day. And this is a powerful force coming into the workplace because social networking – which is second nature to a whole new generation of workers – creates a new set of expectations when it comes to responding quickly and how you communicate with customers.”
Consider the term “human latency.” A Facebook approach to disseminating corporate information allows users to get information to people, get feedback and make decisions very quickly, without an approval hierarchy to bog down the process. “Imagine using this to get feedback on latest product launch,” Briggs noted. “Social networking can provide an incredible mechanism for getting information back to you.”
To capitalize on the trend, Briggs noted that Verizon is considering ways to provide open APIs to its network for developers to create third-party applications and widgets for businesses that use network information like location and presence. The schedule for that will soon be posted on the Web site, he pledged, perhaps aware that Verizon has a lesser reputation for moving quickly on openness.