Comment: Sprint Links Up with the Enterprise

My comment on this article by Eric Krapf, Editor on NoJitter.com.

One of the last barriers to enterprise Unified Communications (UC) appears to finally be coming down. Sprint has announced that they will support presence status for mobile phones on the Sprint wireless network. Sprint Mobile Integration will allow companies to extend their Cisco Unified Communications Manager or Avaya Communication Manager out to enterprise mobile users with support for presence. From the article:

Sprint is touting the service’s ability to avoid desk phone deployment for highly mobile workers, who can use their mobiles and stay on-net; Dan Jacobson told me an enterprise could even consider the Mobile Integration service as a way to avoid deploying a PBX or any other premises system at small offices–you just give everyone a mobile and they hang off the Sprint network that’s tied to the main enterprise system.

This has two significant effects from my point of view.

1. This represents a huge potential shift in the designs for branch PBX deployments for large distributed enterprise PBX systems. Currently these branch deployments require locally based routers (voice gateways) in case the WAN fails and someone needs to place an emergency call, as well as adequate WAN bandwidth to support the voice calls that will terminate to or be generated from each branch location. There is a potential savings in hardware (phones, routers, switches, etc.) and deployment time for large branch deployments.
2. This capability may the first part of the “missing link” that enterprises are waiting to see in the UC market. There is so much talk of “federation” and platform integrations, as well as B2B presence sharing. With the increase in mobile users, work-at-home users and outsource relationships it will be critical that carriers step in to fill the gap between enterprises.

The next major step will be to support additional presence states, beyond just “Available” and “On The Phone” at the carrier level, and across carriers. Imagine if you never had to dial someone again, just to hear a voicemail message and wait for them to call you back. Comprehensive, universal presence would allow you to see when people in your contact list are available, busy or out of range and plan your contact with them accordingly.

Skype does this today, and is one of the fastest growing telephony services in the world - all on the carrier’s own networks. It only makes sense for Sprint and others to offer the same flexibility to their customers. It will be interesting to see if the other carriers offer competing products and whether Sprint will secure new business as a result of this offering.

A question to my readers: Will presence be the death of voicemail? I’ll have to cover that in a future blog post. Feel free to comment.