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Will unified communications spell the end of IP Phones?

By Bo Gowan July 17, 2008 5:41 pm EDT

Will the day ever come when your average white collar worker won’t have a phone at his (or her) desk?

Earlier this week IDC put out a press release entitled “IP Telephony Holds Strong in the Face of Unified Communications (UC) Hype,” highlighting the findings of their 2007 IP Telephony report.

IDC says IP-PBX and IP Phone shipments remained strong in 2007, even with the introduction of desktop unified communications solutions last year from Microsoft and IBM. The absence of a cratering IP-PBX market shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone — even Microsoft doesn’t expect people to rip out their phone systems and replace them with OCS anytime soon. As a precaution though, IDC recommends getting cozy with Microsoft and IBM (done and done).

IDC also says UC and UC mobility solutions are threats to the IP phone market, and recommends that vendors “assess how the adoption of UC software clients may diminish the importance of the desktop phone.”

Nortel soft client Will softphone clients like this one make IP phones obsolete?But with so much of the corporate world still moving from old-world TDM to VoIP, aren’t the productivity improvements and functionality of unified communications a driver for VoIP (and IP Phone) adoption? Or is there a possibility that businesses throw out the often pricey desk phone completely and just go straight to softphone clients?

Just today, Nortel announced a new deployment with The School of Management at Fudan University, one of China’s oldest educational institutions. New IP phones were part of the deal, but the school will also use softphone clients for teachers who travel extensively.

Personally, I no longer have a desktop phone. When I made the move from office worker to teleworker a year ago, my desk phone didn’t come with me. One year after my move, I still use a soft-client provided by Nortel MCS 5100 to make all my phone calls through my PC (using either a headset or a mic and speakers). I also still don’t have a direct connection to a printer — so I’m either too progressive or too lazy to have set up either.

So what is UC to the IP phone — a boom or a bane?

Categories: Commentary, Customers, Enterprise, Industry News, Nortel News, VoIP / Unified Communictions
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Comments

  1. This is a complicated question Bo. The answer is, it depends. It depends on a lot of things.

    IP Phones have a long life ahead of them, IMHO. There is still a large percentage of the (aging) working population that is culturally attached to a ‘phone’ device. Same can be said for their support staff. These people resist change.

    PCs are for the most part not yet optimized for voice communications. The quality and placement of speakers and microphones is not well engineered and is not yet a key design focus. This leads to all kinds of echo problems and other quality of experience problems. You can mitigate this using careful placement of external speakers, but who wants to be bothered with that? Geeks, not the mainstream user.

    Phone devices will eventually be replaced with a wide range of purpose built devices that include communications, but it will be a long time coming for a lot of different reasons. In the meantime, soft clients will complement - not replace - IP phones.

    So, having said that, what is Nortel going to do to increase market share of IP phones? Last time I looked, Cisco’s revenue from just IP phones was about equivalent to 10-15% of Nortel’s total revenue.

    July 17th, 2008 at 7:39 pm by Another Nortel Watcher

  2. UC’s not going to lead to the demise of anything. I can see the coexistence of softphones, hardphones, iphones … for at least another decade and BTW don’t forget that most VoIP phone calls are stills terminated via the PSTN and the T1 carriers are in no rush to upgrade their investment is TDM switches.

    July 17th, 2008 at 10:22 pm by PhoneTool

  3. In my view, like all technologies that hit a hockey stick, the particular technology needs to be marketed agressively by both the major vendor and in turn the reseller channel in order to gain significant traction. Having spent the last four years of my life as a pioneer of hosted IPT in the UK including a $3m investment in Nortel CS2k, I can categorically state that UC will only be attractive to the channel on a premise basis until such times as a)the hosted SP’s can make the commercials work, whilst significantly lowering the market price and b) the channel see visible drops in the take up of premise based PBX business.

    For me, the key to all of this is the desktop. Microsoft hold all the cards and with HMC 4.5 and OCS recently launched, the uptake of these services are likely to be the ‘foot in the door’ for capable or innovative channel players. Those that fail to grasp these technologies will simply be left behind.

    As far as SIPT is concerned, as PhoneTool stated, there are far too many large scale operators relying on massive revenue to even contemplate marketing anything like free calls and I suspect there will be a greater push towards implementation of QoS WAN (VPLS) to enable companies to access the PSTN.

    July 18th, 2008 at 3:50 am by Rob McMillan

  4. Unified Communication (or unified applications if you understand that voice is just another application, albeit an important one) is not going to have any effect on anything if there is no interoperability. All of this is just noise unless there is useful interworking outside of your vendor eco system.

    This is not news to the user or service provider community, it does seem to be news to some of the vendors.

    July 18th, 2008 at 12:56 pm by many

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