Is Lack Of Vision Holding Back Enterprise Voice 2.0?

A very interesting post over at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony related largely to Enterprise Voice in a 2.0 world.

What I read was that companies are already here in the space and have the technology that's ready for the Enterprise and without sounding boastful some are represented by my agency. But that's not the point here. The point is that the buying and decisionmaking habits of carriers and enterprise buyers is very much stuck in telco 1.0.

They buy and decide based on being safe, which is why old school products sell so well, funding bigger dreams like Cisco's able to do with TelePresence. John Chambers has this art down to science and it's a very valid, correct and prudent business approach based on selling what the market wants and laddering the customers up to the next new thing they have productized.

Too much of what we know or believe will be needed one day in the future is not really ready for prime time. That means patience, not impatience is what's needed by visionaries and investors in early stage companies alike. Take for example the ecosystem that pal Ragui Kamel at AOL has been building for the consumer market, or what client and friend David Beckemeyer has been doing with PhoneGnome. Both are working to develop a very user friendly 2.0 consumer phone supplement. Both are betting on the future and both are patient enough to water it, without drowning it.

On the mobile enterprise front, a large market looms. In reading the Etel posting I am sensing that the strands of ideas are starting to come together and we will likely see some more noise/news about the idea of Mobile Enterprise VoIP services very soon because to the enterprise buyers in Fortune 100 companies, the mobile phone is 2.0.