When people talk about business being global these days, they’re referring to technology such as voice-over-IP (VoIP).
There was a time when calling an overseas country was a costly exercise in challenging, static-filled communication. Talking with people in other countries could be done, but it wasn’t easy. And never mind running a business while on the road in a foreign country. Unless you worked for a large international firm or were lucky enough to be traveling to a major European city, forget it.
But VoIP has changed all that. Any businessman, even a one-man show, can quickly and easily connect with contacts internationally assuming he or she can remember there is a time difference (still the bane of many international meetings).
That’s because VoIP, like e-mail, flows cheap and easily across borders. This makes the world the market for a business, and it makes international partnerships limited mostly by the ability to find a common language (an issue being solved quickly by products such as Google (News - Alert) Translate).
“Hosted and cloud-based communications provide customers with unique services everywhere, every time, and with all the capabilities,” we noted in a recent story. Solutions such as those offered by hosted PBX (News - Alert) provider 8x8 make it easy to call internationally and run a global operation—even in countries that suffer from less than stellar infrastructure.
“We have several people that work in remote locations, one of which is in the Dominican Republic,” Marcellete Donato, a project manager at Coastal Consulting Services, told 8x8 recently. “Prior to getting her an 8×8 phone, we had a very hard time connecting with her because of dropped calls, static, no connection etc. Since we configured the 8x8 (News - Alert) phone line, we’ve had zero technical issues!”
Others say the same thing.
“We use 8x8 VoIP to quickly scale up to new offices around the US and the world,” said Joel Harding, China operations manager at Iris Data Services. “Conference calls are particularly quick and easy to use.”
This explains why companies such as 8x8 are doing so well, and in general why there is lots of talk about VoIP and similar technologies such as unified communications.
VoIP is a true game-changer, the communications side of the globalization of business that also has benefitted from cheap air travel and reduced trading tariffs, among other trends.
When the only difference between calling California and calling Hong Kong is the number of hours to subtract when figuring out the local time, business obviously is not going to respect borders.
Edited by Alisen Downey