When promise delivers

At Telephony it's easy to feel as if we're at both the most enviable and the most miserable position in the technology food chain. Enviable because vendors hip us to product and technology initiatives long before they hit the manufacturing lines and shipping docks. Miserable because these great concepts-more bandwidth, more intelligence, faster speeds, cheaper prices-often still reside in the ether.

Vendor energy and enthusiasm is contagious, at least until reality sets in. Products like these will transform the way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we educate our children, the way we entertain our family and friends. But they're not yet available in any store, not coming to a neighborhood near you, not likely to be deployed anytime soon.

Our position provides us the opportunity to see, experience and savor the technology revolution-and frequently technological failure-from the trenches. We hear the varying opinions and predictions. We measure the disparity between them. We gauge their importance. We project them back out to the industry accordingly.

The subject of IP service is like a hair-trigger gun that fires shots no matter how gingerly you hold it. Every possible position on IP services is staked and mined. It's revolutionary. (Forklift the circuit-switched world out the door.) No, it's evolutionary. (Gracefully migrate your network into position for the soft landing so many in volatile technology markets desire.)

On a recent visit to Cisco, I was handed a plastic card that represented the latest in technological innovation. The card was my ticket to making a free call anywhere in the U.S. on Cisco's voice-over-IP network. My 10 minutes with voice over IP was enough to convince me that the service provider world is ready to rumble.

For some time, IP technology vendors have kept repeating that their ultimate goal is to improve upon circuit-switched voice, not just provide quality parity. The call quality I experienced was superb. When ambitions become reality, it's time to take notice.

Of course, there are IP technology and service issues yet to be resolved. We could debate the quality of private network IP voice calls vs. the quality of IP voice calls on the Internet. Don't get lost in the details. Voice over IP and a host of other IP services are ready for prime time or close enough that you're bound to feel the blast.

The coming battle isn't about college kids and Internet junkies making voice-over-IP calls en masse (they will), but about the most desirable corporate customers yanking their lucrative fax, video and voice business from one service provider's bottom line and delivering it to another.

When does all this happen? In five years? Ten? Maybe it's the gradual 20-year evolution scenario some predict. No sound of cracking ice. You skate home to a warm fire and some hot cocoa. Or maybe not.

More predictably, the technology pace quickens and customers move more quickly to multiple IP services with compelling and very tangible cost benefits. If IP services like voice, fax and videoconferencing offer excellent quality and dramatic cost efficiencies, won't nimble, IP-centric service providers woo and win many of the top business customers? I think they will.

How ready is your organization and network for the IP battlefront? Is your network on a collision course or being guided toward a smooth integration with IP technology and services? How fast can you revamp your marketing efforts if your customers start responding aggressively to IP-based service initiatives? Is senior management at your company fully engaged on the technology and business issues that IP services represent?

It's time to pick up and answer. IP has spoken.