Conferencing Chatter.

Image via Wikipedia

 

I’ve always liked the conferencing business. After all, it was the original – if underrated – application in the cloud, well before we used terms like hosted, SaaS and others. And while it has changed over the years with the addition of web collaboration and now rapidly evolving video elements, voice conferencing remains a huge business.

So when Verizon announced that it was launching a variety of new group communications services, one of them even targeted at the family vertical, it inspired me to start to some dialog online. I have since posted an article entitled ‘Will there be a Voice Conferencing 2.0′ over at Voyces. 

More remarkable though, given the multi-billion dollar value of this industry, is the relatively few new entrants or product breakthroughs we’ve witnessed in recent history. On the surface, voice conferencing – with its dial-in numbers, pin numbers and metered pricing – looks and smells pretty much as it did ten (and maybe more) years ago…

After penning it (I just wanted to use the word ‘penning’) I heard from Eric Krapf over at NoJitter. He reminded me that a source of what I perceived as slower innovation in the conferencing may have been that many enterprises actually insourced it in the years gone by, having installed their own bridge in an effort to control costs and presumably make conferencing an easier process. Interesting, I told him, when you think of what a reverse trend this represents: While all sorts of telephony applications are moving to cloud, conference – once the only SaaS – is going CPE.

Eric added his thoughts on the topic here. 

For several VoiceCon cycles running, it was a given that the only Unified Communications application that provided any ROI was audioconferencing–specifically, dumping your audio bridge provider and taking the function in house, a move that many enterprises reported they were able to use to save enough money to fund a significant deployment of UC apps whose business case was less concrete…

Your turn to chime in, if you like.

Tagged as: KodiakNetworks, NoJitter, UC apps