Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is racing toward mainstream acceptance, steered by attractive price points--currently $200 to $500 per line--proven cost savings in early-adopter deployments and significant improvements in voice quality and reliability.

Early adopters with whom we spoke--financial services, health care providers and technology firms--are benefiting from VoIP-enabled technologies that simplify work flow in customer service and sales departments.

These "presence powered" solutions are the result of the fusion of VoIP, instant messaging, presence awareness, conferencing and collaboration capabilities.

Presence-powered communication is real-time interaction on a VoIP network among willing participants who are contacted via their choice of device or application type.

Solutions built with presence-powered communications will enable firms to:

1) Find out when people are available. Work more easily with dispersed teams on different time zones and be able to carry out professional work activities.

2) Direct and contextual ability to start collaborating any time. The more the collaboration technologies learn how to disembody themselves and become ubiquitously accessible through minimal and highly effective user interfaces the more you will be appreciate this very powerful adoption-booster.

3) Simplicity of use. While probably the farthest away of all other realities, this is the only road on which effective collaboration technologies can be further developed. Most companies focus on technology solutions relegating the KEY aspect of their interaction technology to an afterhtought of their best graphic designers. This is NOT graphic designers' work!

4) Integration with other technologies and use of open interoperable standards.
The more my voice can traverse different channels, operating systems and technologies to become accessible to other parties the more the value of it to me increases. While open standards are not really every company's dream, we need to favour and support those who do stretch themselves to make this more possible rather than less.

5) Immediacy. The ability to initiate a collaboration session in 1 or 2 clicks, without the need to fire up heavy applications or bloated plugins is of essence to effective collaboration online. If I have to loose 10 minutes to set up my meeting and who I need to be in it, I may as well go to my phone and call conference anyone in a few seconds. The user should be able to gradually escalate the functions she needs, without being offered a 747 Jumbo cockpit at the entrance.

Forrester anticipates that three groups of early adopters will be among the first to accrue the benefits of deploying presence-powered communications built on a VoIP network:

• Financial services firms will profit from instant conferencing.
Portfolio managers can use instant conferencing to hold an unscheduled conference call with available asset managers and completely pull out of a tumbling stock.

• Physicians will get quick second opinions via ad hoc team collaboration. Health care professionals will find it valuable to use instant-collaboration solutions to get immediate opinions from available experts on medical images or diagnostic procedures--while simultaneously conversing with them.

• Technical support will reach out to experts via presence-aware telephony. Customer queries requiring subject matter expertise, currently handled via annoying customer callbacks, can be more expeditiously handled when a customer representative confers with one or more available internal experts by clicking on presence tabs like "product marketing" or "system test."

Read the full Forrester report.
Source: News.com
[via Ralph Poole]