PCMagazine VoIP Primer Touts Cost-Savings As Key Benefit: You Agree?

PCMagazine publishes an extensive overview of VoIP and its potential within the enterprise. The key benefit being touted for this technology is cost savings and the evident opportunity of replacing expensive telecom providers with VoIP-powered networks and switchboards. As many other mainstream reports on VoIP, this set of articles misses completely on catching the emerging new trends made available by VoIP as an instrument of new forms of communications and collaboration patterns. In particular, the ability to have multiple open audio channels to teammates or suppliers/customers at remote locations offers possibilities for collaboration that had not been explored before. Quality of audio over IP and the greater ease and quality of conferencing make also for a whole new set of opportunities not available before. The integration with wi-fi and the opportunity to utilize VoIP on independently set private networks gets also no attention. It appears therefore that mainstream analysts still miss the key paradigm shift being brought about by these new communication/collaboration technologies beyond the evident cost advantages. The real meat is elsewhere, but how many can see it?