It's all about the dial tone - stupid (to paraphrase a line)

I had three conversations this week that crystallized a thought for me clearer than ever. One was with an analyst; a second with a current member of the Cypress team and the third was with a prospective new employee.

The analyst conversation started with an interesting line of questioning - from which perspective do customers approach UC deployments - the phone or the desktop?

The answer for me was easy - for our clients - it's the phone.  Reliable, "PSTN-quality" dial tone is the price of admission for any UC deployment we undertake. Our clients don't passively use the phone as a utility tangential to the running of their business. They use the phone to run their business; spending a significant part of their day using the phone in the act of undertaking money-making transactions. When they go off-hook, the dial tone needs to be there every time, all of the time.

Similarly, while not everyone at a law firm or financial services firm is going to become a user of presence, chat and video, they are all active users of dial tone. It is the least common denominator of the user community we serve. I can think of one firm in particular where we've deployed an IP Phone to an octogenarian partner who has never owned or used a PC, and at the same time we're deploying to the firm's twenty-something associates who've never had a home phone line. To do that succesfully, you need to build your UC deployment from the phone out.

The second conversation, with a member of our team involved her expressing surprise and perhaps even indignation over her newly learned knowledge that one of the higher profile OCS hosting companies out there does nothing to integrate it with the "real" phone network. The conversation started with a question akin to "who cares if all you can do is call from PC to PC?" A truly Cypress-centric perspective for all the right reasons; the vision of delivering UC has to be the seamless and elegant integration of the phone and the desk top to enhance how we communicate today. Not an isolated set of "cool services" that are not related to how businesses work today - we're not all about to become Microsoft OCS-oriented, Skype-like users after all.

The third conversation was with a new prospective employee who shared his experiences at a prior employer who was an early entrant into the hosted VoIP arena (and is still around). They're someone with whom I am very familiar, but his perspective crystallized what their issues were (and still are). He noted that they were all data networking people, who had little or no experience with the vagaries of the public telephone network, let alone the intricacies of setting up a Call Pick Up Group on a PBX. They just didn't get voice. I couldn't have said it better myself.

The public telephone network has consistently delivered reliable dial tone better than 99.999% of the time for over 100 years - all without ever needing to resort to a "blue screen of death" or its equivalent. While many of us may take that for granted, as we move from the TDM to the IP world that reliability must transfer for it to be acceptable to the vast majority of professionals who use the phone today. Sure, I know there is a whole generation that has grown up with the cell phone as their benchmark for service levels and have different expectations - but even they move to a "landline" when they're about to have a $300/hour conversation with a client. And even if they were ready to accept lower reliability, they don't make up the largest share of professionals in the workforce today, nor will they for quite some time.

So until the day when 5-9s isn't the benchmark - it really is "all about the dial tone - stupid" and the measurement of every successful UC deployment will start with equaling or bettering the current voice quality environment and then enhancing it.

(Thanks HW for the inspiration -this was a long one)