VOIP Clients: The Growing Revolution
Telephones connections were routed through the internet in many enterprises instead of using the conventional telephone connections. This was the beginning of the use of VoIP for clients. This was initially done to reduce costs for long distance and international calls. Today however not only does VoIP reduce call costs but has been able to bring about a revolutionary change in even the common applications of an enterprise. William Stofega, the senior analyst at IDT said that VoIP will be more than a replacement more expensive calls. It is expected that the VoIP service will reach around 27 million U.S. customers by 2009. Senior analyst at Instat/MDR, Keith Nissen says that enterprises have now become more comfortable with the use of VoIP and they want to know how the use of it can help them. They will want to know what the benefit in using VoIP is rather than what VoIP is. The vice president of marketing at NetFabric, Victoria Desidero says that the top draw for VoIP is not its cost saving ability but the applications that it provides in an enterprise. NetFabric, based in Connecticut is a company that enables any enterprise to make phone calls over an IP connection or PSTN with the help of what it calls the Intelligent Call Directors that connect to a PBX. Cost saving, efficiency, and customer service are the main applications of VoIP although overall the number of services that VoIP can provide to enhance an enterprise is endless. The three main application types of VoIP are improved voice recognition, integrating office tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer, and functions related to call centers. Call information of customers can be dumped into Microsoft Outlook with the help of Fusion at NetFabric. Here an important VoIP application can be put into use. Outgoing calls can be checked against an already present do-not-call list online. The vice president of marketing at the developer of VoIP application BroadSoft, Scott Wharton had a major role to play in the growth of IP telephony. He had assisted in the development of the first IP telephony product when he was vice president of marketing at VocalTec. Wharton feels that introduction of VoIP into the activities of an enterprise has been like the change of DOS to Windows. The VoIP market is being driven by its end user applications. There is a click-to-dial toolbar in Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer put in by BroadSoft's BroadWorks. By right clicking on a name the information of the contact is brought up. VoIP features are easier to understand unlike telephone where there are a lot of telephone numbers. VoIP future involves teaching enterprises the use of telephony where multimedia telephony will contain voice messages. These enterprises will take a long time to learn all the uses and applications of VoIP as the number of benefits to an enterprise because of it are endless. This year the number of enterprises using VoIP will almost triple according to an analyst firm, Frost & Sullivan. |
