Mobile applications lay bare the IT/telephony divide

The growing demand for mobile applications is set to challenge the apprehension that enterprise telephony buyers have toward open source telephony offerings. As IT departments strive to meet new mobile application requirements, they will play a role in driving open source and cloud telephony adoption within enterprises.

The IT-versus-telephony divide

IT and telephony departments are often separate departments, if not fiefdoms, within an enterprise. This historical separation has resulted in markedly different views surrounding open source usage. I learned of this reality when my company (IBM) launched the WebSphere Application Server Feature Pack for Communications Enabled Applications (CEA), and I’ve since seen this reality play out.

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Open source telephony solutions are not new. However, for enterprise telephony buyers, the risk of any downtime is too great to consider open source alternatives to Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, and other well-established telephony vendors. You can hardly blame enterprise telephony buyers: No one thinks twice about having to refresh a browser if a Web application crashes. But it’s a different story if a conference call crashes or a call between a customer and a contact center representative is terminated abruptly.

Still, although you may sympathize with enterprise telephony buyers’ risk aversion, their decisions end up restricting how IT departments can respond to user demands for innovative applications aroud communications.

Next-generation mobile applications demand communications enablement As mobile Web application usage grows, the first step for most businesses will be to deliver today’s desktop browser application on a mobile browser. But forward-thinking IT departments and enterprises will look instead to deliver a class of applications beyond those currently available on desktop browsers. In time, the majority of enterprises will follow suit.

These mobile applications will be communications-enabled from the start. Thus, we’ll see a couple kinds of applications become the norm:

• A mobile CRM application that lets a sales executive review a sales lead, and within the application itself, call one of his or her direct reports, based on presence availability and personalization information, and jointly browse through the sales lead data online while speaking over the phone.
• A mobile retailer application that lets buyers co-shop online using desktop and/or mobile devices, and if required, call the toll-free number and be routed to the appropriate contact center representative, based on browsing history, without having to traverse automated call menus.

The challenge for IT is that these and similar applications require IT and telephony groups to work more closely together. More important, these applications will require a degree of telephony flexibility that enterprise telephony buyers aren’t likely to be comfortable delivering based on their risk-adverse nature.

So what’s an IT department to do?

Open source and cloud telephone to the rescue An interesting solution is being offered by open source vendor Twilio Cloud Communications, which recently announced OpenVBX, an open source telephony product in the cloud. OpenVBX offers virtual telephone numbers, voice transcription, voice collaboration among users, and a drag-and-drop approach to building call flows and menus. OpenVBX is offered as a hosted service so that IT departments don’t have to trouble themselves with keeping a telephony infrastructure up and running.

Most important, OpenVBX can route calls to existing phone numbers. This means IT can build innovative new applications that rely on the enterprise’s existing telephony infrastructure without actually having to involve the telephony department in the application development process.

I am not proposing that IT circumvent the telephony department in the long run. However, I am suggesting IT departments consider applying the lessons of grassroots open source adoption: It’s much easier to convince decision makers to use open source when the organization has already been using open source.

Nor am I suggesting that telephony departments migrate away from their existing enterprise telephony products; that would be a fool’s errand. But I am suggesting that telephony departments evaluate how open source and cloud offerings can augment the existing enterprise telephony environment to deliver application innovation.

A mobile communications-enabled application generating revenue for the enterprise will go a long way toward convincing telephony departments to augment their telephony infrastructures with open source and cloud offerings. As a user, I can hardly wait.

Follow me on Twitter at SavioRodrigues. I should state: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.”

This article, “Mobile applications lay bare the IT/telephony divide,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Rodrigues et al.’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com.