The Seamless Enterprise

The Is-VoIP-Dead debate goes on, and it’s performing a valuable public service by making us all re-examine what VoIP was, what it is now, and how it fits into the AoIP (Applications over IP) concept that Steve Parrott talked about on January 19.

There’s a side to the argument that contends that VoIP is healthy, just not as novel as it used to be. That’s no fault of VoIP; time and technology simply keep marching on. Look at cellular phones themselves, which were once novel simply because they were no longer tethered to a car. And when was the last time you saw someone use a pager?

A few years ago, VoIP for businesses was all about efficiency in eliminating the need for separate networks for data and voice. VoIP for consumers was a way to use the Internet to all but eliminate long distance calling charges, or disconnect from The Phone Company altogether.

At Sprint, we understandably pay close attention to IP network trends. We’ve seen the ROI potential on VoIP decline. But that’s when you look at VoIP in a vacuum, as if that was the only reason for moving to IP. Almost no one thinks that way anymore, because so many more applications have now been made possible thanks to the intelligence, flexibility, and power of the IP network. The ROI on these applications has been trending upward far more convincingly than the VoIP ROI has been heading south.

Today, it’s all about AoIP, as companies converge a broad range of applications – voice among them – onto a single IP-based network. You can’t limit your IP vision to any one of these applications, or else you’ll find out that in another year or two that application will be the next one declared “dead.” IP networking definitely demands a holistic view.

–posted by Shaun Ledgerwood

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Tags: AoIP, convergence, IP, IP infrastructure, IP networking, voice over IP, VoIP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 8:43 am 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.