* Services convergence after five years
Today we’ll conclude our retrospective on how convergence has changed since we wrote our first convergence newsletter five years ago. Specifically, we’ll take a look at the fourth face of convergence: services and applications convergence.
Five years ago, we defined services convergence as the marriage of applications and multiple services bundled as a single option. While we envisioned a more enterprise-centric view of service convergence, today’s consumer market is filled with double plays, triple plays and quadruple plays.
A triple play means the end of an inning in baseball, but it also means that consumer marketing wizards have added the mix of wireline voice, video, broadband Internet and wireless to their service bundles. All four services bundled into a single bill constitute a quadruple play.
Since our original definition hinged on services, we have added another way to look at services convergence with the addition of “applications convergence.” Applications convergence happens when computer-based applications like word processing, e-mail, and CRM converge with communications-system applications like telephone calls and voice mail. For more details go to:
https://www.webtorials.com/main/resource/papers/backgrounders/paper4.htm
When we originally defined services convergence and applications convergence, we predicted that these held the most promise to change the way an enterprise conducts business. We also correctly predicted that applications convergence would follow the slowest adoption curve because of the complexity involved, but we are pleased with the progress applications convergence is making in both public and private networks.
This week, we start in on our sixth year writing this newsletter. If we haven’t both retired in the next five years, we’ll be sure to check back in with a 10-year retrospective. Thanks again to all our loyal readers.
