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We seem to be entering the era of the IP desk set. However, this will very likely be a transitional period, an interregnum between the reign of the TDM phone and the rise of the communications-enabled desktop.

I’m in the final stages of editing Allan Sulkin’s annual Market Review, which will be posted on our No Jitter site in the next day or two. But before I go on with my main message here, I can’t help pointing out a couple of things:

1. Yes, this is the article Allan has been contributing to Business Communications Review magazine for the past I-don’t-know-how-many years. I’m pleased and grateful to Allan that he’s making this article available to the new website.
2. When I wrote “annual Market Review” above, I originally had the acronym “PBX” in there before “Market Review,” but decided it wasn’t accurate anymore.

But on to the main point here. I want to pick up on just one element of Allan’s article, which is the movement in the market toward IP end stations. It was a big deal a couple of years ago when the shipments of IP end stations surpassed those of TDM, and Allan’s looking toward a new milestone: When the installed base of IP phones exceeds that of TDM. Allen pegs 2009 as the year this will likely transpire. Meanwhile, according to Allan, just over two-thirds of current shipments are IP.

So we’re nearing the era when IP phones dominate the desktop. But Sulkin believes-and I agree-that this is likely to be a short-lived period of dominance. Thanks to the one-two punch of mobile phones and Unified Communications clients/PC softphones, “The days of ubiquitous $500 desktop telephones for professional white collar workers are slowly fading into oblivion,” Allan writes.

It’s no accident that Allan uses the word “slowly” there; he stresses elsewhere in his article that telecommunications tends to be later and slower to change than much of the rest of IT, and this will certainly be true of phones, for reasons that make sense. Not the least of these reasons is that cellular service still doesn’t provide enterprise features, and enterprise fixed-mobile convergence, which could in theory solve this problem, is still developing as both a market and a technology. Also, softphones have their own challenges, in the form of potential security issues and user acceptance, though the latter seems to be coming along.

But these problems will get worked out, at which point smart IT managers and CIOs will realize that blanket rollouts of $500 phones to people who don’t use them much isn’t exactly a smart investment. Of course certain people will use desk phones a lot, and those people will still get them. But the smart R&D money for desktop telephones will be going into figuring out exactly what the end user needs out of this instrument that will be evolving into a special-purpose computing device.

IP phones have already begun adopting some of the ergonomic/ease-of-use elements of consumer electronics. For example, many vendors now have one or more phone models with an iPod-like “touch wheel” to navigate the display screen. This kind of development will accelerate, so that the IP phones that do remain on desks measure up to the standards being set in the rest of their users’ communications lives.

Expensive phones won’t go away. They’ll just be limited to the people who really need an expensive device on their desktop dedicated to voice.

What do you think? Drop me a note here in the VoiceCon Enews Forum or directly at ekrapf@cmp.com

Eric H. Krapf
Editor & Lead Blogger, NoJitter.com
VoiceCon Program Chair

Posted in Management, Market Trends, Phones & User Devices, Unified Communications, VOIP |

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