In our last blog post, we started to share some of the insights from a recent meeting with a client we have been working with for 15 years. In talking to the CIO, we reflected on how much telephone systems have evolved over the last two decades, and many of the criteria we used when selecting a business phone systems were no longer relevant.
For example, demand for features and functions has given way to portability and the need to make calls using multiple devices. And where the actual telephone hardware investment used to be a major concern, CIOs are now concerned about supporting multiple devices including BYOD (bring your own device).
Then and Now
When we started in business back in the 1980s, control was the watchword and the IT department wanted to lock down business phones, limiting access to specific features and functions. Corporate customers wanted to control outgoing calls, limiting phone access so unauthorized employees make costly international calls or otherwise abuse the business telephone system.
Today it’s all about business VoiP. With the voice over IP (VoIP), global business communications solutions are affordable. Rather than limit functionality, the objective is to embrace open business VOIP standards to extend connections to as many places and devices as possible, without limitations. Calls are now made from desktop handsets, mobile phones, computers, tablets, and other hardware. That’s only possible because of open standards, such as VoiP SIP.
Another change is the definition of reliability. Landlines used to denote reliability. For business, dial tone used to be considered a God-given right. Your entire operation was reliant on the business phones so without a dial tone you were out of business. And you had to be sure that your calls could be reliably routed to their destination.
Today, business phone system customers still demand dial-tone, but only as a starting point. To stay in business, they need connectivity in various forms – voice, email, web connectivity, etc. For many of our customers, email is more critical to operations than dial tone.
Which brings us back to budget. Operational expense was a time when phone systems used to be the biggest line item in the corporate IT budget. Now phone systems are a smaller part of the overall data budget, which encompasses everything that has to do with voice, video, email, web access, texting, hardware and software, you name it. Just as today’s customers demand open, reliable communications, the cost of telephone service became just another part of the IT budget rather than a separate line item. So, a proliferation of business phone system capabilities, but a fight for budget dollars to invest in the new technology.
A New Kind of Telephone Systems Service Company
This brave new world of phone systems requires a new kind of service company; one that understands the new demands on telecommunications, and how to integrate different platforms to deliver reliable, cost-effective service. As industry veterans who have watched business phones evolve, TeleDynamic (a Bay Area company) is committed to staying current with the latest VoiP SIP technologies to meet customers’ evolving demands. As the concept of a business telephone system has evolved, so has our expertise and our ability to support telecommunications as in this new converged infrastructure.