The Big Name in Desk PhonesThe Big Name in Desk Phones

...and what it says about the future of the enterprise endpoint.

Quick quiz: Which enterprise voice vendor's current platform has the most models of desk phones associated with it?

Is it Cisco, the reigning IP telephony champ, about whom someone once said to me, "Cisco has learned the joy of selling desk phones...."? No, it's not Cisco.

Is it the voice-installed-base leader, Avaya? Mmmmnope, not Avaya.

What about ShoreTel, who invented the thumb-dent in the handset, saving countless cube-dwellers from repetitive-stress thumb injuries, ironically freeing those workers to become more effective at texting on their mobile phones, thereby decreasing the utility of the very desk sets that bestowed this benefit upon their users? In a (hyphenated) word, Uh-uh. Not ShoreTel either.

You've probably guessed where this is headed. The largest number of IP telephone desk sets, as revealed by Brian Riggs on No Jitter last week, comprises the partner-built instruments that connect to Microsoft Lync.

Furthermore, Brian makes a really insightful point at the end of his wonderfully detailed examination of Lync desk phones: This proliferation of Lync desk sets may look like a refutation of Microsoft's purported vision of a desk phone-less future; but what it actually means is that Lync looks like a winning voice platform to at least some of the companies that rely for all or much of their revenue on desk phone manufacture and sales.

At the same time, we've also seen that getting rid of desk phones isn't necessarily going to save you any money if you have to replace those phones with business-grade headsets. In another recent post, Blair Pleasant discusses the costs and benefits associated with using headsets as a primary means of audio communications for business. In short: You get what you pay for.

Then of course there's endpoint licensing, and the software maintenance costs that come with managing client-based communications--patching, version control, and the like. Maybe someday you'll be able to avoid those issues on soft clients by using WebRTC in browsers. Maybe all the browsers will implement WebRTC, and will do so compatibly. But I don't think anyone's ready to build a plan around that possibility any time soon.

So when it comes to the audio endpoint, nothing's going away, but that doesn't mean you won't have choices to make. Or you'll need an effective way of empowering your end users to make the choices. This multi-device future, not the task of phasing out all desk phones, is going to be the management challenge around endpoints.

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