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Future of the Phone: The World According to snomFuture of the Phone: The World According to snom

snom's not the biggest company here at VoiceCon, and they're in a niche that supposedly is dying: They make desk phones. So when we sat down yesterday here at the show, I asked the snom folks what kind of a future they thought that business had.

Eric Krapf

November 11, 2008

3 Min Read
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snom's not the biggest company here at VoiceCon, and they're in a niche that supposedly is dying: They make desk phones. So when we sat down yesterday here at the show, I asked the snom folks what kind of a future they thought that business had.

snom's not the biggest company here at VoiceCon, and they're in a niche that supposedly is dying: They make desk phones. So when we sat down yesterday here at the show, I asked the snom folks what kind of a future they thought that business had.Their answer was that the phone's not going away, but that maybe it becomes a different sort of a purchase. "In the future, I think IP phones are like laptops," explained Mike Storella, the company's director of business development.

What he meant was that if you walk into an office today, you'll see different brands of laptops, whose purchase was driven by corporate standards that may have evolved over time, or which might have been driven by individuals' preference. Mike Storella believes that, sure, some individuals may opt to have no desk phone at all--which means that those who do get a phone get one because they actually need it, and so there will be choices made about what manufacturer you buy. Of course, everybody won't have unlimited freedom to choose the highest-end, coolest phone, just like you get the grade of laptop your job dictates. But the decision, whether it's made by the individual or by IT, will be more open and flexible for that decision-maker than it is today, when we're still in a world of proprietary phones.

And that's another thing. In these times of price-sensitivity, snom says its phones run 30%-50% the cost of an similar PBX-manufacturer set. It must be said that even snom's new high-end phone, which sports a color display and lists for $419, lacks all the feature/function of a vendor-proprietary phone, as the snom model is a SIP phone.

Still, in these economic times, maybe enterprises might be willing to compromise on the 30% or more of a procurement cost that goes for phone sets. Or they might at least choose to save on a subset of that investment, for workers where the lower feature/function is acceptable. And in this environment, is the PBX vendor going to argue?

Right now, snom is still an SMB company; their typical sale goes to an installation of 20-30 phones; they're hoping that the new model, called the 820, helps get them into larger deployments. Besides the color screen, the other feature the 820 boasts is a USB port that you can connect a WiFi dongle to, enabling the phone to get on the network without a wired connection (assuming you've got the access point coverage).

Bottom line, these guys believe in phones. "I think these exist because they add productivity," Mike Storella told me, gesturing to the 820 model he'd brought to our briefing. "You get productivity out of a worker with a tool that costs $400."snom's not the biggest company here at VoiceCon, and they're in a niche that supposedly is dying: They make desk phones. So when we sat down yesterday here at the show, I asked the snom folks what kind of a future they thought that business had.

About the Author

Eric Krapf

Eric Krapf is General Manager and Program Co-Chair for Enterprise Connect, the leading conference/exhibition and online events brand in the enterprise communications industry. He has been Enterprise Connect.s Program Co-Chair for over a decade. He is also publisher of No Jitter, the Enterprise Connect community.s daily news and analysis website.
 

Eric served as editor of No Jitter from its founding in 2007 until taking over as publisher in 2015. From 1996 to 2004, Eric was managing editor of Business Communications Review (BCR) magazine, and from 2004 to 2007, he was the magazine's editor. BCR was a highly respected journal of the business technology and communications industry.
 

Before coming to BCR, he was managing editor and senior editor of America's Network magazine, covering the public telecommunications industry. Prior to working in high-tech journalism, he was a reporter and editor at newspapers in Connecticut and Texas.