“Mr. Watson, come here….” These words were spoken by Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas A. Watson on March 10, 1876, when Mr. Bell had an accidental breakthrough. This event marked the birth of the telephone and the voice communications industry. Now, 121 years later, the introduction of today’s new Enterprise Voice over IP (VoIP) SIP phones are providing a new and long overdue breakthrough for business phones and the telecommunication industry. If Bell saw these new multimedia phones he might add these words to his famous quote: “You have to come see these new phones.”

 

The hype, promise, and finally “real world” delivery of enterprise VoIP over the past seven to 10 years has gone through multiple stages and evolutions of value to the business market. But the one area that was still lacking a new and substantial value proposition is the actual device on the business desktop, the phone. As vendors introduce new business phones, with new non-traditional features, it is becoming clear these phones for business are far different than Ma Bell’s original phone or even the phones we have been using in the enterprise for the past 20 years, this is great news. These phones represent a breakthrough long overdue in VoIP and they are delivering real value in three critical areas.

 

In our business lives we all rely on the three areas of IT communications, mobile communications, and voice communications, to supply our various communication needs. We are increasingly using all three communication technologies as we multitask through our overwhelming multimedia workday. But these three communication areas are really three different worlds with their own rules and reality. As a result, the differences and disjointedness between these worlds is limiting our productivity, causing communication confusion, and just plain driving us crazy.

 

Picture this: You race to your desk early in the morning to get on a conference call, but you don’t have the conference bridge number. The phone number you need is in your Outlook calendar but your PC is off and will take time that you don’t have to warm up and start. You could call a coworker but their phone number is in your Corporate Directory program and you need a working PC to access that program also. Your mobile phone has the coworker’s mobile phone number in its phone book but the “one bar” of network access, you now see on the phone, means it won’t work. Also, you need a speaker phone and the ability to conference others, which you can’t do with your cell phone. Your desk phone doesn’t have access to any directory or phone book but it does have a speaker phone and if you could remember what sequence of buttons to push you could conference in others. SOS, please send help!!

 

Next Generation VoIP phones are coming to our rescue. Because they are built on open SIP IP infrastructure they are bringing together these three separate worlds of communication into one world, “Open Communications.” Also, these new phones, through the use of multimedia open interfaces, such as Java, HTML, WML and XML, are enabling and empowering corporate users to get the best of all three worlds, and without the typical “chaos of the cosmos.” These phones are enabling enterprise users to access, via their “Always On” device, applications from all three worlds with ease and simplicity.

 

Equally frustrating for enterprise users is the missing link of functionality. This is functionality that is missing from business phones in comparison to today’s mobile phones. Mobile phones’ functionality has not only significantly increased our flexibility but also allowed us to be more productive and responsive in business. Having in our pocket a device that will connect to the Internet, contains a 500+ person phone book, provides access to the last 50 people called, or the last 50 people who called you, makes it a device we now can’t live with out. We now look at our desk phone and see an old caveman-like device with no Internet access, no phone book or directory access, no call log for dialed, missed or forwarded calls, and no way to personalize it. We are all silently wishing for more from our desk phone.

 

Finally, the “Missing Link” has been found and fulfilled by the new next-generation SIP-based VoIP phones. These new phones come with large color screens and HTML, WML, and XML interfaces that provide access to corporate intranet and public Internet applications. They also have built-in applications that provide 1,000-person phone books, extensive call logs for missed, dialed, and forwarded calls, access to corporate directories (LDAP) and with Voice over Wireless LAN (WLAN) capabilities these phones can roam in the enterprise or to home based employees via VPN. Many of these new phones also allow a level of personalization only seen before on mobile phones and PCs. They provide the ability to download MP3/polyphonic ringer tones, skins, pictures in the phone book, screen savers and to synch your PC base Outlook contacts information into the phone book. Some also support Bluetooth, which allows you to use your mobile phone’s Bluetooth earpiece/headset and share information with your mobile phone’s address book.

 

Most of us don’t know how to access 95 percent of the functionality available today on our enterprise phones. The typical non-user friendly interface of the current business phones is the issue. Phones are confusing with unlabeled buttons, small screens, and instruction manuals that are difficult to read or find. Most of us live our corporate voice communication life as though we are trapped in the “Matrix” controlled by the artificial limitations of the desk phone. Deep in our hearts we believe there is a way to free our minds and unlock the real power of enterprise voice communications; we just don’t know the way.

 

Now we can reach for the “Red Pill” of freedom from next-generation SIP-based VoIP phones and experience the freedom of user interfaces that are intuitive and a joy to use. These new interfaces make it easy to access voice and non-voice functions through innovative control elements and large graphical color displays. With new guide controls, similar to controls we now use in our personal life on MP3 players, they are providing touch wheel access to features. Large color displays show on screen menus that are current event driven and provide easy access to all options and features currently available. Some of the new phones also add touch sensitive mode keys and context sensitive action keys making it very simple and quick for even untrained user to enable the phones features.

 

Next-generation VoIP phones are enabling a new model for SIP/IP based Open Communications productivity, based on a new intuitive and rich communication designs, delivering personal fixed mobile convenience with style. As these phones are embraced by businesses over the next year, I believe many executives and other highly productive workgroup individuals in the enterprise will be saying around the company …Come here and see this!

 

 

 

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