Industry observer Savio Rodrigues has written recently that the growing demand for mobile applications "is set to challenge the apprehension that enterprise telephony buyers have toward open source telephony offerings."
He reasons that as IT departments strive to meet new mobile application requirements, "they will play a role in driving open source and cloud telephony adoption within enterprises."
As Rodrigues says, much to the surprise of nobody with experience in larger organizations, "IT and telephony departments are often separate departments, if not fiefdoms, within an enterprise." Needless to say this results in two different views on open source, how it should be used and where.
He's correct when he notes that "open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco (News - Alert), Avaya, Siemens, and other well-established telephony vendors. "
It's the old "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM (News - Alert)" syndrome. And as Rodrigues says, hey, "you can hardly blame enterprise telephony buyers: No one thinks twice about having to refresh a browser if a Web application crashes. But it's a different story if a conference call crashes or a call between a customer and a contact center representative is terminated abruptly."
That's when heads start rolling down the hall. The prudent simply wish to ensure that theirs is not one of them, so understandably, they go with the old reliables.
Rodrigues thinks mobile applications will be communications-enabled from the start, and that "we'll see a couple kinds of applications become the norm:
"A mobile CRM application that lets a sales executive review a sales lead, and within the application itself, call one of his or her direct reports, based on presence availability and personalization information, and jointly browse through the sales lead data online while speaking over the phone.
"A mobile retailer application that lets buyers co-shop online using desktop and/or mobile devices, and if required, call the toll-free number and be routed to the appropriate contact center representative, based on browsing history, without having to traverse automated call menus."
David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David's articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.Edited by Juliana Kenny