Ran across a website that called their Hosted VoIP solution Utility VoIP. I thought that was appropriate because in so many cases it is sold as dial-tone replacement. Nothing more.
We are almost 12 years in and No HD Voice, No Fax over IP. Key system emulation, certainly. For most of this, the ITSP could be using an Asterisk box with some SBCs. No need to spend the money on a softswitch and blade servers. No need for the expense of maintaining a carrier grade network.
Consumers are used to crappy call quality -from Skype, cellphones, P2P apps. And video calling is now available on a number of chat apps. So texting and video calling. Is it the substitute for SIP trunking perhaps?
Switch.co and others offer solutions without desk phones.
However, "Millennials, [the Polycom exec] told me, often want desk phones. Really? Those FaceTiming, smartphone-loving, no-patience-with-grandpa's- technology-having Millennials want deskphones? Apparently so, this exec told me. The reason? A deskphone means permanence. It's not going anywhere, so hopefully neither are they." [NoJitter]
A Frost & Sullivan study that Polycom sent over suggests that the drama of the death of desk phones is right up there with the death of SMS revenue. It might be happening but the data suggests otherwise. (BTW, ARPU isn't down for the top 2 cellcos either, so....).
All of this suggests that while salespeople may hear that there are forces working against them in trying to sell a complete Cloud Comm solution, in fact, they are just not doing a very good job in Discovery or of making their case.
The uphill battle is to educate the customer on the way that cloud comm will change their business. But then you are selling change - and nobody likes that.
In a discussion today with a cloud contact center marketing exec (talking about sales training), for salespeople suffering under the burden of quota, it is far easier to sell replacement services than cloud comm which has a longer sales cycle. When you have to hit quota or just need to make a sale, it is easier to just do what we have been doing since the Pin dropped -- selling like for like with a small savings. Press hard, three copies.
