Businesses Still Shy About VoIP

from the as-they-should-be... dept

For all the talk about VoIP, many companies are still hesitant to jump on the bandwagon -- as they should be. For the most part, VoIP still doesn't offer the quality and reliability that most businesses should expect from their phone system. Right now, most of the benefits in VoIP are simply that it's cheaper -- which is nothing to ignore, but not enough to convince many companies to overcome their phone system inertia. The next generation of VoIP services, however, are where things will get interesting. While some of the initial residential VoIP offerings still seem to be focused on centralized apps, once more VoIP related apps start being developed, the benefits of VoIP-based phone systems will be much tougher to pass up. For example, as you start to add presence information to VoIP, some compelling applications start to show up (though, we still need better systems for managing presence info). Either way, the more interesting and compelling elements of VoIP will come from the applications that make it so VoIP systems can do things that the traditional phone system could never do -- if the VoIP providers ever let that happen.