My good friend Alec Saunders posted End of standalone IP telephony? Hogwash! this morning. One of the citations he quoted really caught my attention.

The rest of the article talks about the stumbles of Vonage, SunRocket and Ebay / Skype, concluding with this quote from Infonetics Research analyst Stéphane Téral:

Overall, 2007 set the stage for big changes in the VoIP industry. VoIP is no longer an adventure, an opportunity for startups, says Téral. “It’s a serious telephony business taken over by giant telcos. … You can’t stay pure-play forever.”

I think this struck me because of a couple recent posts I've written referencing VoIP as plumbing.

I want to add my voice in dissent to Stéphane Téral who seems to be so far off the mark that his comment is almost laughable. I feel like I'm entirely opposite to Téral in view.

I think the giant telcos will dominate the boring, infrastructure deployment of VoIP indeed. They're great a boring. The telcos excel at maintaining status quo and quashing innovation. They are the plumbers of communications.

Like Alec, I feel the startups, the small companies, the hungry innovators will continue to bring new services.  I don't think they'll be focused on pure VoIP. I think they'll be the ones leading innovation like they always do. These small startups will be the source of innovation and integration. They're more nimble and responsive than the giant telcos. The innovators are the source of creative new solutions.

Just listing some of the companies that play around the VoIP and mobility space, I come up with people I see as real creative geniuses:

• GrandCentral
• MOBIVOX
• Truphone
• Telephony2
• TalkPlus
• Jajah
• Roam4Free (Cubic Telecom)
• iotum (in the presence space)
• SightSpeed (video and VoIP - VoIP or V2oIP)
  

What I note about these companies that come of the top of my head, is that only one, Telephony2, is really what I'd calla VoIP company. Jim Heising and his team focus on making slf-managed VoIP easily accessible and practical for anyone. All the others bring pieces together - pieces of mobility, fixed mobile convergence, presence and availability. They innovate with click-to-converge solutions that bring power to end users.

This power, convergence, flexibility is where the real advances are happening. There's plenty going on and plenty to watch. And these are examples of where we're going to see the real advances in thought leadership about the next generation of voice services in 2008.

Like Alec, I agree that the exciting news of 2008 won’t be the opportunities that Stéphane Téral writes about. Infonetics is too much a part of the giant telco status quo and the real action just isn't on their radar for the most part.


Technorati Tags: Alexc Saunders, unified communications, VoIP, V2oIP, VVoIP, GrandCentral, MOBIVOX, Truphone, Telephony2, TalkPlus, Jajah, Roam4Free, iotum, SightSpeed