Steve Flavell, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, LoopUp, says today’s telephony is anything but ‘old and boring’.
Telephony is old and boring. Right? Wrong! That might have been true five years ago but, today, post-pandemic, the telecoms industry is in the midst of another – and perhaps its final – major transformation.
At the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, social distancing and work-from-home mandates forced enterprises to think and work very differently. This shift fundamentally changed the way multinational businesses operate today. Employees are now far more likely to work from home, remotely or in a hybrid setup than solely in the office.
The draw of seamless communication
The virtualisation of telephony through cloud technology is something that most companies have already implemented to some extent. And if they haven’t already, they’re almost certainly thinking about it. In today’s global business landscape, seamless communications, regardless of physical location, are more critical than ever.
While many larger enterprises have been slower to adopt cloud telephony – having often invested heavily in on-premises equipment – it is rare to find a small or medium enterprise (SME) today where phone numbers don’t travel with people rather than being fixed to a desk in an office.
By 2034, it is estimated that over 75% of businesses will use cloud-based rather than on-premises-based telephony services, with the market expected to grow from $23.2 billion in 2024 to $42.7 billion by 2032.
Several years ago – pre-pandemic – network giants such as BT, Gamma, Colt, AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies first started offering cloud-based services. This was the first iteration of cloud telephony. The on-premises Private Branch Exchange (PBX) infrastructure that businesses used to handle calls was replaced by servers in the cloud as part of the carrier’s technology and network. This led to the virtualisation of calls that could be received wherever the user had an internet connection, as opposed to a physical location in the office dictated by a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
This marked the beginning of the end of phone calls coming into a building, being routed to a desk, and that being the only place they ring.
Around the same time, we started to see collaboration tools take off too.
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