VoIP Lives!
I was back from my holiday break brimming with fresh resolutions and new ideas. Then a burgeoning information cascade in the blogosphere forced me to take a closer look at the health of VoIP. One pundit has gone so far as to write its obit. Another sees VoIP as ill, but ready to make healthier lifestyle choices in 2009.
Yes, I know what the VoIP undertakers are getting at in a Nick-Carr-IT-Doesn't-Matter kind of way. VoIP is a transport mechanism that's part of the infrastructure plumbing—just another commodity, like copper piping. One of the items in my to-do list for 2009 is to address and rebut Carr's IT argument. Seems like the right time to take this on.
To summarize, VoIP is dead—or I should say, doesn't matter—because in Carr's view, it's difficult for companies to gain a competitive advantage from it. VoIP is readily available, relatively inexpensive, and companies can buy off-the-shelf solutions that were once proprietary and a source of differentiation.
My big issue with this view is the assumption that things are invented once, rather than continually undergo refinement. (FYI: for a great read, see this.) Take the ultimate commodity platform, the automobile. I think it's safe to say that the auto industry has experienced a period of diminishing returns where improvements to, say, engine efficiency, have been slow in coming.
But that doesn’t mean the car story has ended. Over the next few years, we'll see an explosion of innovations involving new, lighter materials, advanced battery technologies, and a deeper use of, yes, IT, to more efficiently plan trips and navigate through traffic.
Computers are at the other end of the innovation spectrum. Their cost-performance has been nothing short of astonishing: a CPU chip today runs over 10 million times faster than one built in the 1960s. (Now if we could see that kind of improvement in gas mileage!)
Driven by the computer industry's ability to crank up transistor densities (Moore's Law), IT and VoIP have not reached anywhere near the diminishing returns that Carr has suggested.
Related to these constant improvements in computer technology is the human factor. VoIP and IT are different from other core infrastructures (railroads, highways, electric grid) in their incredible malleability. For better or worse, there are many ways to design anything from data centers to distributed contact centers, all involving significant decision-making by experts.
While VoIP can be a plug-and-play exercise, companies can differentiate by expertly exploiting emerging technical refinements—Session Initiation Protocol is just one example.
Another import source of differentiation comes not from IT itself but through upgraded business practices that are built on the technology. For success stories refer to Amazon’s and Zappos’s customer service practices.
Call off the funeral. VoIP is not dead. It may go under new names, like IVVR and unified communications, but it is alive and thriving.
Posted by Andy Green at 12:58 on January 13, 2009