Killer Apps

Enhancing Productivity

About 90 percent of Superior Communications’ business clients have purchased VOIP phone systems. “With VOIP, it’s easier to leverage the investment you’ve already made in messaging technology or mobility,” says Thomas Konat, principal of the telecom consulting firm in Plymouth.

Customers typically start by integrating VOIP with messaging, then escalate to where they can attach voice messages as documents to e-mail messages, Konat says. One level up from that, he adds, is collaboration or desktop sharing, which enables multiple users to look at the same document from different desktop computers while on a phone call with one another.

In considering such capabilities, Superior Communications advises clients to proceed in phases. “What we encourage people to do is to prioritize the applications they’ve selected and roll them out in the priority of business impact so those that deliver the greatest benefits are rolled out first,” Konat says.

What makes VOIP so powerful is that it converts voice conversations into data form, using the same protocol that has become the industry standard for data communications. Although many productivity-enhancing applications can work with phone systems that are not IP-based, Konat says implementations are easier with a VOIP phone system. “The advantage of doing it with VOIP is that you have one network,” Konat explains. “The phone system connects to the data network and the interface to manage it is more data-centric and more flexible.”

But despite the power of VOIP, software development work is still required to ensure that VOIP-based voice equipment can communicate in a meaningful manner with particular IT applications. Often the manufacturer of a VOIP-based phone system undertakes that development work. Lindstedt notes, for example, that support for mobile extensions is built into the VOIP phone systems that Marco typically recommends for its corporate clients. Other features may be available as software add-ons from the phone system manufacturer. “Now you can buy a software license per desktop or per user who needs an application,” Lindstedt notes.

Where a manufacturer doesn’t support a particular software capability, third-party software may be available to bridge the gap, says Scott Bussey, national director of sales for Integra Telecom, a Portland, Oregon–based telecom consulting company that has a Minneapolis office. In some cases, third-party software also may have additional capabilities not available from the phone system manufacturer.

“They may want a more [detailed] application, or software that does a number of things,” Bussey says. Integra Telecom sometimes recommends software from Xarios to customers because it has hooks that enable it to work with account management software such as Goldmine. Those hooks support productivity-enhancing capabilities such as the ability to click on a contact’s phone number while in the Goldmine program to place a call to that person.