The Near Future of VoIP – Irv Shapiro, CEO IfByPhone

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For the latest in this series, I present Irv Shapiro. Irv is the CEO of one of my favorite companies, IfByPhone and he really knows his stuff. He has started three technology companies in last 30 years.  His first, Metamor Technologies, was a two-time Inc 500 award-winning consultancy, and his second, Edventions, was an elementary school infrastructure company.  Both were successfully sold to larger acquirers.

Now Irv is back at it again with his third company, Ifbyphone, in 2005 to provide small and medium businesses with telephony tools previously only available to enterprise companies. This is a good one folks…read on.

Mobile VoIP was one sector of the industry that really took off in 2008, what sector(s) do you think will take off or see tremendous growth in 2009?

With a world-wide recession upon us, many organizations are looking for strategies to reduce costs, and we believe this need will encourage a significant increase in the use of IVR technologies. For these IVR technologies to succeed they need to be as easy to use as web technology and no longer require specific expertise.

While historically IVR has had a bad reputation with customers, the experiences over that past few years with offshore call centers have increased customer receptiveness to IVR technologies. The argument goes like this: if customers dislike speaking with someone who has a difficult-to-understand accent (perhaps from a different culture), then give customers a well-defined IVR that (a) might answer the question without the need to talk to anyone, and (b) puts the customer in the right place faster. Note that this argument works bi-directionally — it is not limited to particular geographies for the call centers or the customer populations.

Who are the VoIP companies to watch over the next six to twelve months? Who will have the hottest products and or will be releasing the most innovative or game changing services?

I would focus on “cloud telephony” companies such as Ifbyphone, Ribbit, Jaduka, Voxeo and Jaja. By breaking down the barriers to Telephone Application development with low cost, or free development accounts these companies will unleash an avalanche of development creativity. This will parallel what we saw with Web 2.0: web creativity took off when the cost of data transport and web hosting fell to the levels that any developer working from a dorm room could afford. Today telco transport and telco application hosting are reaching the level of affordability by dorm room developers.

What consumer and or business market segments or verticals are the looking the most attractive for VoIP companies over the next six months to a year?

At Ifbyphone we are focusing on marketing, lead generation, sales automation and service delivery solutions across industries. By providing instantly available and trackable IVR solutions we are able to help companies increase sales and reduce service delivery costs. For example: what if 25 percent of the traffic that your company sends to a call center today could be automated via hosted IVR solutions at a 75 percent cost reduction per minute — with no capital expense. This translates to an 18 percent reduction in call center costs, likely with an increase in customer satisfaction due to reduced call queuing times.

Do you foresee any sizeable shifts in the type of businesses that will be potentially migrating to VoIP in the next six months to a year? Are they the same as this year or will they be different?

As VOIP technologies migrate from enterprise down to mid-sized and even SMB sized organizations, the end user will not think about transport as VOIP vs TDM or VOIP vs PSTN. They will just look at the price and service level.

On the other hand, the availability of low cost VOIP transport will support the utilization of cloud telephony where the applications reside off premises. Thus, I think the most significant shift will be from premise based telephone application solutions to hosted applications, not from TDM to VoIP.

Some feel the VoIP industry will actually benefit from a recession, since consumers and businesses will be looking for low cost alternatives, while some feel that the industry will feel pain as well since many will look to put off technology and infrastructure improvements until more certain times, what’s your take?

We think this economy will be highly favorable for companies that have the ability to use cloud telephony to reduce costs.

Based on your answer to number 5, what advice you offer to companies in the VoIP industry for the next year? What are you doing to make sure that your company continues to grow?

While all companies need to manage cash carefully, I would recommend that other companies invest in the components of their product lines that can be sold based on the delivery of cost savings to users.

With the number of open source telephony platforms continuing to grow each month it seems, will open source telephony continue to grow in importance and prominence during 2009?

Three factors are driving the availability of low cost cloud telephony applications; significant improvements in TTS/ASR and dialog control (VoiceXML/CCXML) technologies, open source soft switch components (Asterisk, OpenSIPS, etc.) and SIP end point connectivity. I believe these three factors will continue to be fundamental to platform expansion in 2009.

Will 2009 finally be the year that Unified Communications see a big “adoption rate” increase?

I see significant adoption of UC in the SMB marketplace with much slower adoption in the enterprise.

Irv, the floor’s yours….

Instead of VoIP I find the more interesting discussion is the emergence of alternatives to traditional facilities-based Telco and premise-based PBX systems. VoIP is just a transport implementation. At Ifbyphone we are most excited about the evolution of universal access (this is different from universal communications). We see a world where everyone’s telephone number is a SIP endpoint. This would allow anyone with access to the Internet to build innovative telephone applications.

The new alternative telco world consists of VoIP based telco transport providers in conjunction with hosted Telephone Application Platforms supplying universal access to telephone technologies for companies of any size with little to no up front expense.

Interested in having your or your company’s voice heard? Contact me to find out how to participate in this series.