As a parent of three, including a freshly ordained teenager whose first act of her 13th year was to commandeer the car radio, I repeat myself quite a bit — too often over the tortured-cat crooning of Kelly Clarkson. The only good thing about saying the same things over and over again, of course, is that eventually you’re sometimes right.
Even the street corner prophet, with his arm-waving forecast of the coming apocalypse, sadly will be proven correct someday. Whether it’s global warming, nuclear Armageddon, a collision with a rogue comet or the gradual extinguishing of the sun 40 billion years from now, that crackpot with the faraway eyes and aluminum foil hat will bathe — posthumously, I hope — in the glorious sea of “I Told You So.”
The same laws of repetition hold true in the telecommunications world. The past decade or two is rife with annual predictions of technology triumphs or transitions that eventually prove correct. Though IP naysayers still exist in small numbers — and it will take several decades before they disappear completely — pundits and visionaries have been predicting incessantly the demise of the circuit-switched PSTN since the first voice packet was sent over the Internet in the early 1990s. If BT’s $19-million network transformation isn’t a definitive validation of the IP-everywhere revolution, I don’t know what is.
Of course, some repetitive predictions — ATM everywhere — ultimately are unfulfilled. Others would best be categorized as pending. Take the MSO market, for example. For at least the past seven or eight years running, cable operators have been predicted to mount a serious competitive threat to traditional carriers. Will 2006 be the year of the MSO? Who knows? But I can assure you that pundits and prognosticators of cable’s ascension someday are going to be right — probably sooner than later.
Still another pending repetitive refrain in the telecommunications circle is that hosted PBX services, also known as IP Centrex, eventually will replace premises-based PBXs as the preferred choice of enterprises. While it might take a few more years for the advocates of this school of thought to utter those magic four words — I told you so — that day eventually will come. And here are five reasons why:
Complexity — An undeniable trend in the enterprise world is that corporations increasingly are focusing more resources on the core aspect of their businesses. Unless their business happens to be telecommunications, the Fortune 1,000 crowd increasingly is leaving its communications and computing processes to outside experts. While it’s true that the outsourcing story is an old one and premises-based PBXs have survived the first few chapters relatively unscathed, the recent surge in the sophistication and complexity of communications is rewriting history. In addition to making the transition to IP, business communications are now about integration and convergence with desktop applications and extending capabilities to a mobile environment. When you throw things like unified communications and presence into this ball of complexity, suddenly it makes more sense to centralize communications into a single location that can be managed by a business whose core competency is telecommunications.
Better Marketing — The biggest anchor responsible for the relatively slow start of the hosted PBX market was the unfortunate choice of the term “IP Centrex.” An equivalent blunder would be Apple renaming the iPod the iTinny Sounding Portable AM Radio. “Centrex” always has had a minimalist connotation, a scaled-down feature set representing the barest of telephony requirements. Now that vendors have distanced their products from an unfortunate association with an anemic feature set, enterprises no longer think of hosted solutions as crummy Centrex services delivered over an IP pipe.
Hosted IP PBX — The most meaningful validation of the “hosting is hot” theory is that makers of premises-based equipment, such as Alcatel, Avaya Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc., all are offering hosted versions of their IP PBX equipment. Perhaps the only remaining argument for enterprises looking to hang on to premises-based gear is the inability to customize applications running on multipartitioned hosted applications servers, such as those from BroadSoft Inc. and Sylantro Systems Corp. With vendors offering hosted versions of their IP PBXs, that argument goes out the window.
Microsoft — With Microsoft now firmly into the enterprise telephony market, more enterprises will come to the realization that they can do without traditional PBXs from traditional PBX suppliers. Once CTO/CIOs reach that state of mind, a hosted solution enters the realm of reasonable alternatives.
Hybrid Model — Few large enterprises are islands unto themselves. Most are characterized by a central headquarters connected to several branch offices and an ever-expanding remote workforce. Service providers now are offering hybrid hosted solutions that unify all of these corporate sites, including those with TDM or IP PBXs, into a single network with a single dial plan. As premises-based gear entangled in these hybrid scenarios reach end of life, chances are good that enterprises will move the call control for employees attached to PBXs to a centralized location in the service provider’s network.
So, mark my words: Hosted PBXs eventually will be a viable alternative for even the largest corporations. It may not happen this year or even the next, but I’ll eventually be right. I just hope it doesn’t take me that long to seize back the car radio from my teenage daughter.
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