With virtualization – and its fellow travelers: on-demand functionality and free form mashups — as the belles of the tech ball these days, it’s surprising how little buzz there is about these subjects in the telephony space. There the prevailing model remains a fixed suite of functionality from a single vendor.
So I was initially excited to find, tucked away on TMCnet.com, a contributed article whimsically titled, “Improvise Your Own Voice Over IP Services.” Clicking over, I hoped to find some Voice 2.0 thinking about the possibilities of Communications as a Service. Alas, the piece — written in a style most generously described as not that of an native English-speaker — was about managed telecom switch partitioning, not cool end-user mashups.
However, it started me imagining some very possible voice mash-ups.
For example, you can deploy a VoIP trunk to deliver dial tone, connect that to an existing PBX via a VoIP gateway, and use IfByPhone as a “virtual” IP-PBX and for building specialized IVR applications. Later on, you can replace the PBX but still use IfByPhone for IVR and click-to-call. You can add on-demand contact center functionality to the mix and a Skype gateway for overseas calls.
The point is that each of these elements is independent of the other and doesn’t constrain your ability to freely build — and quickly adopt — tailored business systems incorporating voice. In other words, improvising your own voice services.