The Seamless Enterprise

In my role as Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Sprint, I obviously need to pay attention to the shifting winds in the industry.  I thought it would be helpful to share with you seven shifts that I think will be particularly meaningful to business telecom managers.

1. VoIP is dead. Long live AoIP! The VoIP is dead topic has been well covered here (and here and here) already. I’m guessing if you’ve been paying attention to Seamless Enterprise, you also understand the “Long live AoIP!” aspects of this prediction. I won’t belabor the point.
2. B’bye desk phone. Many of the trends we’re observing are impacted by the current economic climate. IDC estimates that more than two-thirds of workers are already mobile. Why should businesses continue to bear the cost of maintaining deskphones for workers when they already have a mobile phone with them everywhere, all the time?
3. IP surges ahead. Our internal industry forecasts predict that 2009 is the year when retail business IP revenues surpass non-IP data revenues for the first time. Of course, the writing’s been on the wall for years, and we’ve been ahead of the curve in helping customers make the transition, but this is a very meaningful milestone for the market.
4. Unified communications makes real inroads. UC is a buzzword that got lots of exercise in 2008, but we’re early in the process. According to a recent study, only 6% of companies have completed their UC implementations, while 70% expect to complete UC adoption within two years! Most expect it to have a meaningful impact on productivity and cost reductions, making Unified Communications an initiative that will continue to be funded in 2009.
5. Mobile broadband becomes standard configuration. As workers are increasingly dependent on network connectivity to perform the most basic tasks, and as notebooks (and watch for netbooks…) have become standard equipment for increasingly mobile workers, I expect 2009 to see a marked uptick in the number of workers and employers who view mobile broadband as an obvious part of the standard notebook configuration.
6. Economic challenges drive mobile productivity. Unfortunately, companies of all sizes, in all industries are having to make cuts in their workforce. Those cuts often outpace any reductions in the amount of work to be done, so businesses are having to increase worker productivity. Mobile applications are a great way to accomplish that goal, and recent research indicates developers are hearing the demand.
7. Outsourcing explodes. Finally, as workforces contract, and as businesses look for opportunities to reduce operational costs, outsourcing becomes an obvious choice. By leveraging the scale benefits that a service provider can achieve in managing networks, security, or infrastructure across multiple clients, business customers can realize both cost savings and performance improvements, while enjoying significantly increased flexibility. In the current economic environment, that’s a hard opportunity to ignore.

I hope these predictions are helpful as you plan for the coming year.

-Russ McGuire

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Tags: 2009 predictions, 2009 telecom predictions, AoIP, IP, IP networking, mobile broadband, netbooks, telecom predictions, UC, Unified communications, VoIP

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under IP networking, Unified communications, collaboration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.