Will video go the way of voice mail?

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Here at the Channel Partners Conference in Las Vegas, like at any good conference, the highest value comes from the multiple hallway conversations you have. And at the indescribely large Aria Hotel, the hallways are long and wide; so chit-chat is everywhere. This morning I bumped into Jeffrey Pearl, co-founder of IP5280, one of the more forward-thinking cloud communications providers. Jeff is full of energy and passion for this industry – and as sales guy at heart – always fun to talk with.

Among other things, including how service providers like his will monetize the mobile revolution (ie. sip-enabling the accelerating number of mobile end-points), we touched on video. Same dialog many of us have had before: where is video, who’s asking for it and who will own it from a sale/delivery perspective. Actually, here at the conference, video is not a big topic. This community is more focused on the SMB than the enterprise, for one, and the cloud as a whole representes a huge migration for this group of sellers — so a focus on video may have to wait.

But opportunity is pending for those Service Providers who can find some focus for video, align themselves with the right suppliers and begin testing and iterating positioning a comprehensive video solution to their prospects. Jeff and I agreed that if you want to be a leader as video demand starts to take, you need to be learning how your customers are thinking about video and training sales people on selling video solutions.

We also sensed together that it’s starting to smell a bit like the early days of voice mail (for those of us who were around for that). While selling voice mail to those who had never bought it was very difficult (I can attest to that), at one point the switch turned on. Prospects who once threw me out, suddenly called back in with a story about a customer who called their switchboard and asked to be transferred to a voice mail box. Only to find out there wasn’t one. Boom – voice mail took off. Can the same happen to video? Will three parties schedule a call only to find out that one doesn’t yet run video and the call needs to go voice only?

PS. My YouTube obsessed daughter found this video of her father, spouting off on his opinions on the video space. I had forgotten that friend David Spark had grabbed me in the hallway at IT Expo in February to pepper me with questions…