* Reader responses to convergence trends
Ronald Raffensperger, senior vice president of marketing at Sylantro Systems, responded to our observations about convergence trends (to view the newsletter that began this discussion, please click here). Sylantro is a leading provider of software used by service providers to deliver hosted VoIP applications and services for business, consumer, and wireless customers.
Raffensperger believes that the benefits of “presence” are evolving to become a business process advantage. He also contends that as “today’s kids” enter the job market, they will hasten the pace of how presence is integrated into user-to-user communications because of their approach to messaging and mobility. He cites the typical teenager’s comfort level with presence monitoring (through services such as instant messaging) and their proficiency with both text and voice messaging as contributing factors that will accelerate how tomorrow’s work force will come to rely on presence-based mobile applications.
According to Raffensperger, presence inside the office isn’t the only factor – he contends that managing presence for mobile users is also key, as is the need to offer (called party) user control of presence management for business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications. Since business-to-business and business-to-consumer communications typically involve multiple service providers – including both wireline and wireless carriers, he maintains that the service providers must also step up to the plate and offer full presence feature interoperability because a single enterprise will probably not be allowed to offer presence monitoring outside their business network’s boundaries. He sees the “opt-in” model as the most likely way users will control their presence monitoring – similar to the technique used with IM.
Raffensperger also made an interesting observation about the natural competitive tension between wireline and wireless providers targeting the PBX user. He suggests that as the mobile service providers begin to offer more PBX-like features on mobile networks, the wireline carriers will speed up their fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) options. (Please see our newsletter for an FMC definition.)
Our summary: Raffensperger makes a well-reasoned and credible argument for carrier hosted solutions vs. enterprise-hosted solutions.
Next time, we’ll hear from another advocate who supports hosted IP communications.
