Approaching the VoIP TargetWithout Getting Flanked

Approaching the VoIP TargetWithout Getting Flanked

By Mike Odenwald

As a veteran of the telecom industry, I can say the unfolding opportunity for agents is around converged wireless IP solutions and that the pace of innovation for VoIP services begs for a new distribution channel to support the acceleration of these technologies. The existing indirect model for communication services — the model and market that we help to define — is going to get pounced on by some of the companies mentioned below.

Here are the scenarios that will happen within the next 18 months.

*IP phone services will be simple to sell, self-manage and bill. What will you, the telecom expert, have done to be part of (and lead) that migration strategy for your corporate customers? What will the model be if minutes disappear? Subscribership, subscriptions? Isnt that what we really always wanted in building a base? Ask the cable companies what they think about subscribership. They like it.

*Distribution channels will be filled with revolutionary new ways to provision personal and business communications services. As a simple example, it does not take much for a company to procure a wireless router and load all PCs and laptops with 802.1x cards. All that is required then is for a communications services provider to provision an IP VPN tunnel back to their network-based IP Centrex engine to map local and long-distance calls in and out of the IP Pipe. Voilàthe PSTN is bypassed.

*What if Dell, IBM, Apple and Microsoft decide to enable the corporate laptop as your IP phone, turning it into the wireless corporate IP phone? Do you have a distribution relationship with those software and hardware empires? Did you just get flanked? Similarly, what if HP, Nokia, Motorola and Palm decide to accelerate and redefine the handheld IP phone — as if they have not already squared off to do so — and incubate an entirely new generation of wireless IP carriers and entrepreneurship?

*I also predict the big guys Comcast, Sony, Google, AT&T or Cisco will enable your home TV and home network to sync-up conveniently, at your leisure. Communications services will make us forget what life was like with a 10-digit number tied to a specific phone or location, when e-mail addresses were associated with one PC, when we didnt access what we want with our voice using embedded, transparent speech recognition technologies, when the IP phone wasnt ubiquitous. What if the real application, the killer app, is simply a software-driven integration of your business and personal contacts, your tunes, your schedule, your pictureson your IP phone, wherever you have broadband access: work, home, in the car. Ubiquitous! The phone is a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and the advent of the IP phone makes that statement truer still.

So, from the companies above, who will offer a front door for IP phones? Who is going to change how I am reached (my inbound provider) and how I reach out (my outbound provider)? Are they one in the same? Dont try and explain this service as IP Centrex. Our customers dont know what that means. The focus now is on the IP phone. Its the application of participating in a conversation, not the back-end enabling platform that our customers care about. However, we as agents need to understand in spades the back-end enabling platforms that are forthcoming.

What is forthcoming? What the industry needs now is a new breed of IP carrier, someone to do the heavy lifting of making calls sound great, end-to-end, making sure they are secure, billing for them and making it very easy for some of those big, aforementioned companies to partner with. I predict there will be several companies that slowly ramp up these capabilities, but because they also are protective of existing services, there will be an unshackled IP carrier that sets the benchmark for others to follow. The IP carrier agent (yours truly) will be plugged into that wireless IP carrier, and I predict a new channel distribution model for selling converged communications services is coming up fast. And it will be exciting to profit from it.