At last month’s Northern Convergence Summit, David Hinc, sales director for the new mobility solutions division at 20:20 Mobile, and Paul Fullman, UK sales director at Datasharp, a reseller traditionally associated with fixed line business, both claimed that unified communications was the way to go for the mobile channel.
“Hosted VoIP is a stop gap technology,” stated Hinc. “Forget hosted VoIP; mobile dealers should concentrate on unified communications. I think hosted VoIP will be leap-frogged into a full blown VoIP proposition with a mobile client that allows users to go into WiFi from wherever they are. However, the biggest issue for me is the lack of mobile components in so called fixed mobile convergence. Cisco FMC is about removing the fixed desktop phone from the office environment, and that’s what I think it should be about.”
Fullman commented: “Mobile dealers are missing a trick, going for hosted VoIP when they should just be going for unified communications. You don’t need VoIP. If your client lives somewhere without good enough quality broadband, you can’t use VoIP anyway. Just use the PSTN and unified services.” He continued: “Companies don’t necessarily want to buy new telephony kit, but they do want to increase productivity using clever apps.”