As a follow up to the ITBusinessedge.com article “Could the Cloud Kill the PBX”, we wanted to offer our input as to where telephony is going and why old-school telephony days are numbered.

This is not meant as a self serving competitive claim but a look at what is now becoming a natural evolution of things in the internet age. Much like the old world method of snail mail is getting decimated by email, it would only seem natural that the physical relays and switches of telephony systems get replaced by the deft coding of a programmer as so many other things are.

As more and more of our life get centralized to the web, this centralization will allow tremendous power in organizing the multiple parts of a business or a person’s life. From a business perspective, a new small business can run their entire back office online. We are not just talking Virtual PBX phone systems but billing, accounting, customer support, project management, meetings and of course mail. Take a service like Zoho and you can see how nearly and entire office can be coordinated and run from one login. And in case you had not noticed, Google is doing a fine job of collecting and potentially controlling huge amounts of data powering a very effective advertising business.

So if the mail, the invoices, the customer addresses, the meetings are all moving online, it is only natural for the phone conversations to move there too. You get to keep them all in one “box” if you will. This was a natural progression as the bandwidth and the price of memory made it a viable option. As the technologies of voice recognition evolve, the use and necessity of having the verbal communication digitized increases to where you could run a Google like search of a phone conversation with little ease (if I were a conspiracy theorist, that’s quite scary).

So it would seem the old school phone line is a little individuated for our needs. It served us well but it’s time is coming to an end.

Photo credit Dominics pics