Cisco IP Telephony offers more than tip and ring functionality in today’s spending environment
By Steve Slattery, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s IP Communications Business Unit
About the same time that Gartner predicted that 40% of knowledge workers would be abandoning their desk phones by the end of 2013, In-Stat published a report entitled "Nearly 31 Million Business IP Phones Will Ship in 2012, While the Consumer IP Phone Market Diverges Towards Media Phones". This report goes on to mention that businesses will outpace consumers by more than 10 to 1 for voice-centric IP phones. These divergent views bring to light a few important points:
First, today’s empowered employees are more mobile than ever. This is a trend that is expected to continue as collaboration technologies enable experiences independent of workspace or modality. Images of corridor cruisers wielding Mobile Internet Devices (MID), Cisco Wireless IP Phones, or Cisco Unified Personal Communicator on their laptops come to mind. Second, today’s IP phone (at least many Cisco models) provides much more than, in telecom parlance, tip and ring functionality which means only plain old voice. If you’ve visited a local Best Buy store recently, you may have observed a retail employee using a Cisco Unified IP Phone to perform timecard functions. Our phones are also used for inventory management or supply chain functions in manufacturing or other retail settings. In healthcare, a Cisco Unified IP Phone can provide doctors with alerts on patient status and specific medical instructions. Lastly, there’s something to be said about voice quality and service availability. In a financial services environment where decisions are made in split seconds, can enterprises afford a best-efforts, non-guaranteed service approach to voice?
Is Gartner right? Is In-Stat right? In the end, it’s the customer who’s right. And according to the latest market share report by Synergy Research Group for Q4 2008, customers are choosing Cisco’s IP Telephony solutions by a factor of more than 2 to 1 over the next closest competitor in order to mitigate costs and to enable workforce productivity. In fact, based on the same report, Cisco has extended its lead as the market share leader at 30%, gaining 5 points year over year. Perhaps Cisco remains the vendor of choice because customers know that if and when they’re ready to “mobilize†their workforce, they’ll have a rich portfolio of communications solutions that extend and leverage the same high fidelity, highly available voice experience into new business transformational applications.
By Steve Slattery, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s IP Communications Business Unit
Posted by Steve Slattery at 01:51PM PST
ofou paul Mar 10, 2009
please can any one give me iformation on how i can do the following
1. activate extension mobility on call manager buisness edition
2 it it possile to activate phone base security on an ip phone dat has no server implimentation attached
3. how can i do a configuration change on the call manager server that will affect the configuration of all ip phones on my pool.