Voice with presence Click to conference Click to talk The always-present expert The device-smart app Voice control, integrated lookups and beyond Voice of the future

The day is near when VoIP will be as ubiquitous as the Internet itself. Sure, issues aplenty must be solved first - e911, quality of service, the political rift between telecom and datacom staff. But as traditional PBX switch vendors begin rolling out their own VoIP offerings, and yes, even evangelizing them, few now can doubt VoIP's trajectory.

The time has come to ask what happens after IP becomes the standard for voice transport. The answer, in short, is new applications. Think of it - when voice is just another packet on your network, not only will the network be converged, but so will the devices. You then will treat voice like any other mission-critical application in the new data center.

Joan Vandermate, Siemens vice president of product development, offers the example of opening a new office. No longer will users have to choose between deploying a PBX/key system - because all sites need their own - or Centrex. With VoIP in the new data center, network executives instead will roll out voice as a service. They simply will install a VoIP gateway on the premises, and presto - "everyone's on one, big, virtual system. In much the way you deploy SAP or any mission-critical application [you don't deploy SAP at every site], you would do for voice. You would put voice applications in the data center and simply deploy them as data services or even as [outsourced] managed services. You deploy [the PBX] inside the glass house and administer it there - whether you have one campus or 10,000 sites," Vandermate says.

With that in mind, the time has come for network executives to begin plotting business applications enabled by this new-data-center-style voice. Experts say the following applications - which were previously cost-prohibitive or just plain impossible - will become widely adopted.

Voice with presence. This is a super-sized version of the "work anywhere" feature that VoIP users already enjoy. VoIP users can tote a laptop with a soft phone to home or hotel, and when they fire up their VPN connections, bang, they're on the voice network. Such mobility is one of the primary reasons a VoIP installation is underway at the Texas Association of School Boards (TASB), says Rick Tillotson, telecom manager for the Austin organization.