At this week’s VoiceCon conference I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring Cisco VP & CTO of UC, Joe Burton, and IBM Lotus UC and Collaboration Services U.S. Leader Peter Fay on the role of Web 2.0 in an enterprise UC architecture.
At VoiceCon this week Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Paul argued that the desktop phone is dead, and that organizations who fail to make the switch to PC (or application) based telephony will fall behind those that do.
As a long-time user of Grandcentral’s Voice 2.0 service I’ve been concerned about the lack of news/updates since Grandcentral was acquired by Google in 2007. Given the expiration of the Grandcentral domain a few weeks ago, there was real concern that Grandcentral was not going to survive. Fortunately Google has allayed those fears with the announcement this morning of Google Voice. Google Voice shows the clear potential to use Web 2.0 technologies to add additional functionality to traditional phone services by adding in an application layer between a user and their underlying voice services. Finally, after nearly 100 years, we’re seeing real innovation in the way we make and receive calls.
Nortel today declared chapter 11 bankruptcy for its US and Canadian operations (follow the story over on NoJitter.com). Nortel has been around for over 110 years, transforming itself many times over the years. In the last two years, at least on the enterprise side, Nortel has focused on competing with the likes of Cisco as an end-to-end voice & data systems vendor, while differentiating itself via a deep partnership with Microsoft’s UC offerings and a growing partnership with IBM Lotus. More recently Nortel has introduced initiatives in virtual worlds applications and communications-enabled business process platforms.
By way of Aswath Rao’s status update on Facebook I had the opportunity today to discover “Fonolo“, a rather intriguing application that merges the Web 2.0 and telephony worlds.
Fonolo translates IVR prompts into a web-based menu, classified by company. Need to call a company and don’t want to go through a series of prompts? Find the company’s listing on Fonolo, scan to the point in the IVR you want to reach, and click to call it directly. Fonolo places the call for you, navigates to the right spot, then rings your phone to connect the call.
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Apr 2nd, 2009 |
