Chris Wood, who works for "an unnamed traditional telco," has guest posted an article (The Voice Long Tail - pdf) over on Alec Saunder's blog.  For those of you who follow the blogging ennvironment, there's been a great deal of talk the past year about the long tail of the Internet in general. There have been several different attempts at modeling the relationships between web sites, blogs, and users. Let me show you the first two paragraphs of Chris' article, then I'll explain why I think this is important.

Industry forecasts for VoIP generally describe the market opportunity in one of two ways. The first is by customer segment such as residential and small business. The second is by provider type such as ILEC, MSO, ISP, and Independents. The true VoIP opportunity is difficult to frame when described in terms of traditional customer segments or vertical industry providers because it does not reflect the true value created with many new IP services. And further, it also limits the boundaries in which new products and services that don’t exist yet can be defined, funded, and delivered.

Another approach to describing the VoIP opportunity is to classify the market in terms of the situational contexts in which voice communications can occur and add value. When doing so, a different market of needs appears with a different set of opportunities. Further classification into the behavior of customers within these contexts, how these customers achieve their needs today and how they can be helped, helps to provide a framework for the product constructs that be created across the entire consumer VoIP opportunity. The Voice Long Tail represents the markets for voice conversations and provides a foundation for framing the VoIP opportunity set.

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 article in Wired magazine to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use. There's a very good explanation of the long tail on Wikipedia [here]

The long tail theorem in Chris' analogy shows the PSTN with an opportunity to replace technology. He calls it substitutive. The new opportunity is in new areas that the PSTN can't support today. There's a context there that business and enterprise users need to be aware of - the VoIP opportunity set. That's you. You're an opportunity set. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. It means you're a target, but having worked for more than one vendor, I can tell you that you've always been a target.

Form a long tail perspective, it means that there are VoIP vendors who view you not as a target for substitutive service. Yesterday I posted some comments about Centrex and the evolution to VoIP-Centrex. The danger with that kind of evolution it is almost entirely a substitutive evolution. The net gain in new functionality (as opposed to simple cost reduction) may be hard to find. When we evolve  to new technologies in the enterprise, we really want multiplicative changes, not substitutive ones.

Or from a slightly different perspective, VoIP service and equipment providers are many. They provide hardware, software, services and solutions. Some view VoIP as a disruptive technology. These distruptors are troublemakers in the best possible sense of the word. They want to disrupt the traditional telecommunications world with multiplicative (even exponential) changes that dramatically alter how business succeeds.

Some, often most notably the traditional telcos, VoIP is outwardly discussed as a disruptive technology (new, innovative, evolving), while the internalization in the corporate culture is really one of leveraging VoIP as a sustaining technology, to keep an old legacy business model (or service) alive. VoIP as a disruptor does have a negative impact on some legacy technologies as it draws users (really it draws the revenue stream) away to newer approaches.

I think Chris' article is an excellent entree into some very good discussion. If I could give you an assignment, I'd say go read it, look over the Wikipedia entry on the long tail if you aren't familiar with that, then come join me over in the Realtime Community discussion forum and let's see where we all fit on the long tail. Are you looking to VoIP to disrupt and help your company find new businessl tactics? Or are you in sustaining and substitutive mode, looking to reduce costs and keep doing what you've been doing successfully? I think the answer to that question has to be a factor in the sorts of VoIP solutions you consider.