Intuitive Applications Provide The Future

When we think of telephony, we often think of hardware solutions: physical switches, terminals, phones, and the miles and miles of copper cable that support the infrastructure. While stable and powerful hardware is still vitally important to any telecommunications infrastructure, the software which actually runs the platform has taken center-stage. Intuitive, intelligent, and customizable software and applications that run on top of telecom hardware are becoming the focus for convergence, and rightfully so. Be it a vendor that develops and runs their applications on a closed (or non-open-source) platform, such as the Cisco CallManager, or other systems that utilize commodity hardware, application development is vitally important. In order to rightfully and effectively serve the end user, the client, and the organization as a whole, intuitive software is required. We’re beginning to see a new wave in development that promises to be exciting for corporations and end-users alike. Take the Cisco Speech Connect application, or Microsoft ResponsePoint, for example. These products illustrate the wave of the future in convergence software development. In the end, it’s the software that takes center stage. As long as hardware continues to improve in stability, flexibility, and capacity, we can only imagine what intuitive applications will be developed.