The crucial role of telephony in a cloud-connected digital world

By Narasimha Murthy, Head of Cloud Communications, Asia Pacific, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

Traditional fixed line phone floating in the clouds. Concept image generated by Blue Willow.

Much of today’s digital communications tools run over the cloud, including popular videoconferencing apps, messaging platforms, and collaborative solutions. These tools have not just enabled people to stay productive remotely, both during and post-pandemic, but also enabled people to do more with the devices on hand, whether PC or smartphone, and with seamless integration of the assorted services they have come to rely on.

In the transition from traditional physical phones to softphones, and then to cloud-based communications, convergence in today’s digital businesses is enabling business to be done from anywhere and reflects the transformative impact that telephony has had on business, society, and personal connections.

A hybrid future

Reliability is a reason the good, old desk phone is still around. Proven and dependable, it is sometimes the last resort in a crisis, as land lines continue working even after you lose power. Whether in healthcare settings or guest-centric service industries such as hospitality, or even intensive operational environments like manufacturing, the phone has proven itself indispensable in the day-to-day.

Traditional telephony also has a smaller cyberattack surface than many of today’s cloud-based communication tools. The end-user device does not have to be constantly updated, along with the operating system that a cloud-based software tool runs on top of.

However, the growing role of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) over the years has been key to making both traditional telephony and cloud communications an important part of business today. Unified communications (UC) apps have become the norm for integrating voice, video, text, and other formats of communications onto a single platform, enabling flexibility and robustness in instant information sharing between co-workers, or between customer and service staff, for example.

For businesses and enterprises, the hybrid approach is worth considering; this enables them to retain their investments in existing telephony infrastructure while enabling connectivity to cloud UC solutions to deploy hybrid work options for employees. This unified and cloud-based approach brings flexibility that leads to improved employee productivity and satisfaction, while still retaining the elements of simplicity and reliability that are the hallmarks of the traditional phone line.

What should businesses make of telephony in the future? Here are three important trends and issues to consider:

 Centralisation and convergence: As enterprises increasingly transition to cloud, they also need to consider the issues of how to effectively integrate and centralise the various collaboration and communications services used by employees. This can include streamlining the management of various PABX setups over distributed corporate sites, for example.

We recently worked with a notable insurance company in Singapore to support their transition from traditional on-premises telephony to a cloud-based solution; this deployment was not just less complex and easier to manage, but also cost less to operate over the long run.

 Balancing the needs of the business: Businesses also need to consider the needs of the business versus investing in operational resilience, especially when it comes to mission- critical communications, as not every business has large budgets to park against day-to-day IT costs.

In this scenario, we worked with a healthcare provider to deploy secure communications across the many clinics under their umbrella to deploy a combination of hardphones and softphones for internal and patient communications, overseen by a managed services partner. This freed them to focus more on patient care and their core business.

 Breaking down silos: Voice communications provided by telephony is still central to so much of what businesses do, so there needs to be a clear strategy to unify the various moving parts.

For example, we worked with the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI) in Australia to integrate their telephony environment with Microsoft Teams, to help create a more seamless user experience for their staff, across multiple locations. This enabled Microsoft Teams users to unlock telephony functionality from their desktop, with minimal training required to adopt this new integrated solution.

Telephony to meet new needs

In the less-than-30 years that the Internet has reached homes and offices everywhere, communications technology has evolved and drastically changed the way people connect with each other. Across time zones and vast physical distances, it has become much easier to speak as well as “meet”. It was a lifeline at a crucial time like the pandemic crisis, enabling people to continue supporting each other.

Telephony still has a role to play both today and tomorrow, whether in serving customers or to connect people, businesses, and communities, even as the world rapidly transforms, and technology continues to break down geographical boundaries. And while its form, or even delivery methods, may change over the years, the idea of “picking up the phone” to call someone is one that will stick around for quite some time.