There is a growing percentage of employees opting for softphone clients or smart mobile devices over the desk phone. Alaa Saayed, industry analyst for unified communications at Frost & Sullivan, says there are indications that softphone clients are actually gaining traction, but says IP desk phones will not be leaving the desktop anytime soon.

Though many end users prefer their smart or dual-mode mobile devices and softphones, Saayed says end users are actually holding up the shift to softphones. “We’ve heard one enterprise say that while 70% of managers wanted to consolidate devices, 70% of end users didn’t,” according to Saayed.

Given that many enterprises have phone systems nearing the end of their lifecycles and that employees are increasingly using smart mobile devices and soft clients/PCs over traditional desk phones, should enterprises continue to invest in these standalone end points?

• Owning desk phones affords companies more control over security and performance, but how valuable is control and monitoring if employees aren’t using the phones?
• As Jon Arnold, principal of J. Arnold & Associates, told me recently, desk phones don’t break and live on well past their anticipated lifecycle. The move from PBXs to IP PBXs has created a predominantly hybrid telephony environment. Is it worth the time and resources to piecemeal a viable phone system with software patches and workarounds, infrastructure and network upgrades, etc., to provide employees with a mere telephone?
• Are the new, feature-rich smart desk phones worth the investment?
• Should companies instead lease smart desk phones (with all the bells and whistles) as an alternative to a large telephony investment? And again, will employees use them to enough to justify the expense?
• Should enterprises instead focus on creating and implementing policies and guidelines for the enterprise use of “consumer-based” communications solutions?

What do you think? For more information on the future or lack thereof of desk phones, check out Jon Arnold’s post on five reasons why the desk phone will disappear and Jack Gold’s The office phone is dead! 

In addition to the conversation about the convergence of voice and video in IP communications in today’s Q&A with the head of Cisco Systems’ telephony unit, Steve Slattery, I also asked what his team is doing to ensure that Cisco IP telephony gear operates as smoothly on a Juniper or HP network as it does on a Cisco one.

Check out Steve’s full answers below the jump, but here’s something to think about even if you go no further. Steve says Cisco voice products “never have any problem in working with other [vendors'] gear.” Well, let’s hear it, Cisco voice customers — how true is that? Are Cisco voice products painless to deploy on any network?

How much collaboration does your unit do with Cisco’s routing and switching team to ensure those products interoperate and perform well alongside Cisco’s voice infrastructure?

We take an architectural approach to the overall solution. In my portfolio are really applications that reside on the Cisco architectural platform — starting with the networking gear and some the networking services from Cisco, whether it’s policy or security or whatever. We actually have a very interesting approach looking at an architectural solution and then you have various business units that own elements of that solution. But the teams work very well together to make sure for the end customer that things come together and that there’s value to having Cisco on Cisco.

What about customers that have an HP or Juniper network? What’s done to ensure these products work just as well on those networks?

We take a very open standards approach when we build our products as well. Players like Juniper can bring elements of the solution, but they don’t have a complete solution so we make sure when we do our validation and testing that we work with the existing products that are in the market. But when we’re looking at a complete solution — when we look at it from an architecture perspective — we’re always looking for ways that we can really significantly improve the user experience or the possibility for the partner. When you bring so many different pieces to the table, it gives you unique opportunities to do things differently. But we never have any problem in working with other people’s gear.

What kinds of technical challenges do customers frequently run into when deploying Cisco’s IP voice and video telephony products?

I wouldn’t say frequently. I think we’ve gotten beyond a lot of the teething pains of voice over IP and built capabilities in the products that really simplify that. Historically, there have been issues around making sure the network is ready for video, and we’ve built capabilities within the products for the network not being properly configured and set up…. There really aren’t any significant technical issues anymore from voice over IP. I think as we move forward into video, we’ll probably go through a similar transition because video has different demands on the network, so we’re conscious of that and trying to be proactive to get ahead of that so we don’t go through the teething pains initial voice over IP deployments had.

As Ferro points out, the original value proposition of the PBX is losing its appeal.

The PBX, or Private Branch eXhange, was designed to save a company money. It allowed employees to call other desks in a company without routing the call through the telecom provider’s network. The PBX also made people more productive by allowing them to communicate and collaborate more freely.

Nowadays, how often do you pick up your deskphone and call someone else in your office? Wouldn’t you rather send them an email or an IM or open up a video chat with them?

Heck, I don’t even give out my office number anymore. I hand my Google Voice number and set it to ring wherever I am (office, home, iPhone). The only “value” I get from my PBX is voicemail. And I’d prefer to receive voicemails in my email inbox rather than dial into the PBX.

Ferro points out that the future of the PBX is as a presence server. Rather than routing phone calls, the presence server will tell users whether people are available for a conversation and how you can reach them (email, IM, phone, etc). The server will also hold all your message, regardless of the medium.

Most vendors clearly see that this is on the horizon. See Cisco’s acquisition of Jabber, Microsoft’s Office Communications Server strategy and IBM’s Sametime strategy.

In my view, it’s not a question of if the PBX will go away, but when. Any shift away from the PBX paradigm will lead to a broader and deeper dependence on mobile phones. And mobile phones are still relatively expensive in the United States. I spend four or five hours a day on the phone. If I did all that on my iPhone, I’d blow up my minutes.

So this would require not just a big technological shift, but also a philosophical shift for business leaders. Most enterprises still adhere to the strategic deployment of mobile devices. They hand BlackBerrys to sales teams and top executives and leave the rest of the company tied to their desks.

A world without PBXes would require a big shift in thinking, and this will take time. Have you ever tried to convince the CFO that you need to give the mail room manager an iPhone?

A quick perusal of the CudaTel site tells me that these PBX boxes start at $1999 with no per-user license costs. I assume that is for the baseline model, which can support an unlimited number of extensions, but with a limit of 10 concurrent calls and up to two conference calls. The 1U box has 50 GB of voicemail capacity. I highest-end box, whose price I don’t see listed, can support up to 250 concurrent calls, 50 conference calls and 200 GB of voicemail storage. Clearly this is aimed at small businesses and midsized companies that are on the smaller side.

It looks like CudaTel will be reselling Snom and Polycom phones with this PBX as well as Polycom and LifeSize conference phones.

It’s an intersting entry into the market for Barracuda, which is known for its network security appliances. As IDC Research Director Abner Germanow posed in Tweet today, how will Barracuda’s channel sell this? Do you want to buy your PBX from a a security VAR or reseller?

Mitel is headquartered in Ottawa, and no doubt it blanched at the possibility that Cisco would supply IP telephony to the city it calls home (Currently the city government has about 10,000 phones, 7,000 of which are from Mitel).

After learning that his company was not the winning bidder for the telephony contract, Mitel chairman Terry Matthews tried to sweeten his company’s offer. He sent a letter to the city offering to donate $2 million worth of Mitel IP phones (10,000 phones in all) to the city if it agreed to make Mitel its sole communications vendor “for the next several years.”

After receiving this last-minute offer, the economic affairs committee of Ottawa’s city council voted to suspend negotiations with Cisco and Bell while it explored the legality and feasibility of such an offer.

According to the Ottawa Citizen, Cisco will refrain from commenting on the Ottawa affair until the city completes its procurement process. However, Bell spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis told the paper, “We’re disappointed. We put in a compelling and competitive bid.”

As I recall from my days as a newspaper reporter, the bidding process for municipal procurement tends to be very strict.  There are lots of legal and ethical issues that could come up.  I’ve seen vendors sue municipalities, claiming a bidding process was unfair, after losing out on a contract. Clearly Mitel executives think this move is worth whatever legal headaches that might arise if it means keeping Cisco out of their home town. Plus, Mitel could use a big customer win in North America, where Cisco, Avaya and Nortel dominate.

And with that in mind, blowing off steam is probably something enterprise communications managers need a lot of help with.  I’m thinking of fairly common headaches. For instance, you switch over your legacy voice system to a new IP telephony platform. And overnight your staff emails instructions on how to use the new phones to every user. Just to cover your bases, you make sure  to leave a printed set of those instructions on every desk. And yet, dozens of users still manage to delete the email and recycle the print outs without even reading them. Then they flood your team with complaints such as “On the old phones I had to dial 9 to get an outside line. Now I don’t. That’s so confusing.”

If you were Frank Costanza from “Seinfeld,” then you would probably bellow something like “Serenity now!” to keep your blood pressure down when faced with a snafu like that.  But I’d like to propose a new mantra, or catch phrase for the guys managing voice and video.

I’m thinking of a phrase that would simultaneously help you blow off steam and allow you to say what you’d really like to say to the users who keep misusing the communications technology you’ve carefully installed for them. That perfect phrase, that when spoken with the right amount of rage and contempt, just fills your heart with glee. And it was spoken so perfectly by a fine actor just 27 years ago.

“Let them eat static!”

Let me know what you think.