Originally published June 19, 2009

Dial tone came from God…

Heard at an InAAU session in Orlando a couple of weeks ago (that’s the Avaya User Group meeting)…

An Avaya distributor was talking about a client he’d been courting for a few years – a big one – 4,500 to 5,000 desktops.  They’d done the Y2K thing last round, so they’re ripe for a new switch, right?  All that new technology out there, IP’s mature now, lots of new features, UC, OCS, etc.  Guess again!  What they heard was “Why bother?  No one calls anyone internally anymore.  We’re all IM now & we’ve got what we need.  That old box will be fine.”

Whoa!  Can you imagine how that hit the Account Exec?  How many other clients are thinking the same thing these days?

Clearly the industry’s changing, but would you have thought it could go that way?  Why bother with voice?  A client you thought you knew?  Wow!

So what’s ahead for voice?

During a discussion with a voice veteran about communication modalities the other day we took the standard trip down memory lane – he’d learned, just like I did, that dial tone came from God.  But, he pointed out, those days are long gone & we just better get over it.  Thirty years ago there were no other options for real-time communications.  You could send a letter or a telegram, but if you had a real-time need, it was telecom.  So it had to work.

Today there’s IM, email, mobile phones, web conferencing – a whole host of new modalities, all with real-time components.  And with everyone trying to do 3 things at once (if you still have a job), email is often more real-time than a voice call because you can answer an email while you’re in a conference call.  Same goes for IM of course.

So voice telecom now has backup, which means it doesn’t have to always work because there are so many other ways to communicate right now -- even if us fogies haven’t caught on yet.  Telecom really is just another app.  Make that a modality.

Get the message?

How ‘bout I IM you the next time we need to chat...  I’m on yahoo, AOL, MSN, skype…   hmmmm. 

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Mike Burke

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