Bring Your Own Desk Phone?Bring Your Own Desk Phone?

Communications platform vendors would be wise to strategize for the day when desk phones become just another "bring your own" device.

I'm going to make a confession, one that reveals both my age and my (hopefully-outgrown) potential for naiveté: When I first started covering enterprise communications, it took me awhile to really grasp the idea that you could only use a particular PBX phone if you had a PBX from the same vendor.

I'd come out of two years at a magazine that covered the public telephone network, where phones were plug-and-play. Before that, I'd put in a few undistinguished but kind of interesting years in the newspaper business, where deep knowledge of anything beyond when the bars in your town closed was considered superfluous to your job. I'd used PBX phones in those newspaper gigs--I even remember the Northern Telecom logo on one office's phones. But I had no idea that they were supported by any sort of technology that, it turns out, was almost as complex as Connecticut zoning laws or dairy price support formulas that kept Texas ranchers in business, or any of the other subjects I reported on in those years.

But the ability of enterprise communications vendors to own the endpoint has been a wonderfully profitable thing over the years. The standard benchmark was always that phones represented 30%-40% of the cost of any new procurement. A decade ago, when I asked someone where all those vaguely-defined "applications" were, the ones that all the VOIP zealots had been promising since the dawn of the IP-PBX, I got the response: "Cisco has learned the joy of selling desk phones."

Most of the communications platform vendors will tell you the desk phone is going strong--the latest such case being my conversation with Allan Mendelsohn of Avaya. And indeed, it seems you can't get rid of those phones. Heck, I did that interview with Allan from my desk phone at the office, which happens to be my preferred option for interviews, because the audio quality is the best of any medium available to me. Plus, I can take notes on my computer without having to deal with there being some kind of a video client competing for screen time while I'm trying to take notes, or a softphone providing uncertain audio quality--not to mention what it's like trying to do an interview over a cell phone.

But that's one scenario for one person in a particular line of work. If I'm not doing interviews, I basically never use my desk phone, and of course sometimes I have to do interviews from locations where I have to use my cell. So my desk phone gets less of my "business" than ever.

Does that matter? That phone is bought and paid for, the vendor cashed that check long ago--what does it care how much I use it? I guess my response is: Fair enough, if that's the business you want to be in--building a communications device of last resort. But it's hard to imagine such a device remaining a high-ticket item; sooner or later, the budget-cutters will ferret out that line item, ask "Why are we spending so much on phones?" and demand cuts.

At that point, resourceful communications decision-makers will either look for cheaper phones or will find themselves making the desk phone, maybe not a "BYOD" option, but something users have to ask for rather than get by default.

In the meantime, the platform vendors need to be finding a way to capture mindshare across the panoply of devices and applications that make up the "new endpoint." That won't be something they can do with a proprietary signaling protocol.

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