* Hosted vs. premises-based VoIP; feature interoperability; and converged apps
Today, we summarize the “state of the industry” on hosted vs. premises-based VoIP, feature interoperability, and converged applications.
First, we address the question of which is better – a hosted VoIP solution or a premises-based one. Our answer: it depends. We maintain that both hosted and premises-based solutions are equally capable of providing voice feature parity and the business case will depend on the needs of the individual enterprise. In fact, both solutions may make sense in a single enterprise but vary by department or location. We recommend that enterprises considering VoIP construct a business case for both.
We also contend that feature interoperability across multivendor platforms is more easily solved by a hosted solution since service providers typically have better testing facilities and leverage with equipment suppliers than the typical enterprise. However, when it comes to offering unified communications features, the feature advantage within a single enterprise goes to the premise-based solution because most service providers haven’t moved beyond using VoIP as a substitute for their legacy voice services. So the momentum for hosted solutions we’ve seen over the last year is, we believe, based on legacy voice for VoIP substitution with the promise of converged applications features in the future.
Going back to the question we started with in this series on the trend to de-couple software-centric VoIP features from purpose-built hardware, we think the jury is still out. But as features like unified communications, wireless integration, and feature interoperability becomes more advanced and more widely deployed in the enterprise, we think vendors will become less dependent on specific hardware platforms in order to reduce their time to market — especially for integration and testing.
Finally, a word on “presence” capabilities offered by SIP-based IP communications. We think that presence is still an underutilized advantage for most IP communications users. However, we think that is not necessarily a bad thing because we’re not sure that most users have developed the business process skills (and in some cases the social skills) to take appropriate advantage of presence management. But we’re hopeful that the skills needed to create socially-appropriate business process will develop and evolve — much like they evolved to make voice mail and e-mail useful business tools.
Next time, we’ll move on to some recent announcements that affect convergence and VoIP.
