Twilio, Tropo, and Plivo offer exciting and innovative tools to incorporate telephony and messaging into a variety of cloud-based platforms, as QUENTIN HARDY notes in his New York Times article, When Your App Is in the Cloud.
But the real threat to traditional telephony platforms like Cisco and Avaya come from Microsoft Lync, especially when delivered through the cloud.
Cloud-based unified communication platforms such as TeamWorkAnyWhere, which combines the high degree of functionality of Lync with the minimal capital investment and scalability of the cloud offer a real threat to traditional on-premise phone systems.
Not only does a company have minimal capital investment and simplified operating costs which combine infrastructure costs and support, software licensing and telecom costs into one service fee, but they also enjoy the high degree of integration with email and calendaring via Outlook that only a Microsoft product can deliver.
Additionally, with business travel and telecommuting never more prevalent, a cloud-based solution allows seamless movement in and outside the offices, allowing a user to make and receive voice and video calls, create and attend conferences, and share presentations and desktop with the same ease whether they are at their offices desk, on WiFi at an airport terminal, or in a car on their smartphone.
Finally, as IT teams are increasingly asked to spend their energies on solutions that meet the mission-specific demands of their particular business, no CIO will want to allocate resource dollars to keep communication expertise in-house when, especially when they are in such high demand. The commoditization of communication services such as email and telephony through services like Office 365 and hosted Lync respectively, and the integration and bundling of these solutions through services such as TeamWorkAnyWhere offers unprecedented innovation to business as well as a significant threat to traditional telephony solution providers.
