More champions for communications enabled business processes

One of the  major elements at the recent Future of Voice event put on by Dean Bubley and  Martin Geddes is their focus on CEBP as providing ample potential for new revenue and profits to the broader telecom industry. From my perspective as an early evangelist, researcher, and practitioner in the emerging CEBP industry I was initially surprised by their enthusiasm but very encouraged by the end of the event. For background on the topic, here are links to a 2009 CEBP status report, my CEBP.biz blog, and the CEBP Linkedin group.

The premise of their argument is that voice services especially consumer voice services are for the first time being separated from telephony. Thus, telco operators no longer will have a monopoly on consumer to consumer voice services especially at the landline level. However, this does not mean that voice telephony needs to viewed as a dying offering if one understands the power of CEBP to change the enterprise.  It is recognized that CEBP has gone through a long adoption cycle and there needs to be a consolidation of the smaller players by the bigger players across the industry.

Ultimately, CEBP technology and vertical applications will be considered  defacto functionality in any CRM,  ERP or Telco enabled platforms  offered by the largest players globally.

On another front, the term of CEBP originally coined by Gartner is being repurposed by Cisco, SalesForce, Microsoft and others. Cisco is working on launching a technology suite they refer to as Collaboration enabled Business Transformation during their July user conference.

Being an early adopter and evangelist to a new industry can be lonely.  Thus, I encourage the new champions of CEBP to continue their good work.

Patrick Murphy