We were having a conversation the other evening in Simwood Towers. Well, not really, Pete was sitting in his pants in Canada (not a fetish, but the reality of our time-zones), the Milk Tray man was nursing his baby while still totally composed and in control, and I was pacing around my overly cluttered home office trying not to trip over whatever Rachel had deposited in there since I last turned around. Anyway, we were chatting, and Pete said something insightful – always noteworthy, especially when it doesn’t involve the FA Cup, Sainsbury’s and Stella Artois!
In VoIP, at every level, we have this notion of trunks, channels and minutes. Why is that? In a packetised world, it seems absurd. I can pop open twenty tabs in my browser and load them simultaneously. Sure, they may share capacity and load a little slower (yeh right – Fibre-to-the-Mountain baby!) but I don’t get a pop-up saying I’ve only paid for one. Gen Z loves this feature as it means they don’t need to close a tab, ever. In fact, you can gauge the age and life-time productivity of a Gen Z by how wide the tabs are as they compress with each new one opened during their life’s work. If they’re big enough to actually click on you’ve got a lazy or new one! Lights dim unexpectedly, you’ve done well – that’s a really productive one rebooting and re-opening 3,087 tabs. Alas, I digress.
At home we generally have one phone ‘line’, at work we generally have one phone ‘seat’, and businesses consume a contended aggregate of ‘trunks’, recognising anyone under 40 is just going to stare suspiciously at a phone, and never need to ‘use’ it. That is the reality of our industry and it is why every conference I’ve been to or interview I’ve done this year has heavily featured the question “Is Voice Dead?”. But why is it that way?
Pre-packetisation, our industry was literally about lines. Those lines needed to be physically switched and were a very finite unit of capacity end-to-end. Consumers bought “lines” and the cool kids had their own local-exchange (PBX) which could contend them across many more phones on desks. I remember the pleasure of bringing up a new interconnect and seeing the channels fill (with a light for each) with new calls, outbound from one-end, inbound from another, hoping they wouldn’t meet in the middle. I remember how cool it was that our bank had private circuits between offices so we could dial other offices on their internal extension. It made sense in the paradigm of the time and was pretty cool.
It also enabled an industry of, let’s put it as politely as I can – knuckle-draggers – to sell things. They could don a fat tie, jump in the leased BMW and road-rage their way to a prospect without indicating once along the way. Reselling that homogenous product was easy and was mostly about price. At the time, that price wasn’t even about how cleverly you’d bought, it was just about price aggression and discount tier, which itself correlated 100% with the model of BMW you were allowed. Ah, simple times!
Enter SIP and all this should have fallen away but it didn’t. While many of us (‘us’ being the readership of this blog I expect) were geeking out about the amazing possibilities of this new technology, colouring-in departments around the world were in crisis. Think of the 1987 crash but with crayons. They were wrestling with one crushing challenge: how were their knuckle-draggers (called KDs internally, not least because they will never work out ‘knuckle’ begins with a ‘k’) going to sell something so different, so clever, so game-changing? It was like fire had been invented and all they knew was how to sell animal skins – references to neanderthals are entirely coincidental by the way.
After one particularly strenuous away-day, which after beating some oversized drums and trying Yogic flying, ran deep into the night (17h30)… one quiet intern called Nigel solved the problem. His solution left them all speechless: Just sell the same as we always have.
Why do consumers need all this new capability and power? They won’t understand it and how is a KD going to comprehend HD-voice (everyone knew HD was only for Sky Sports, duh!), or encryption (privacy is for criminals). Yeh, let’s package up the same “lines” as before and rather like getting an “i” in the BMW range when promoted, their KDs could convey technological mastery and the need for an 8 year lock-in by just sticking an “e” in there. Yes, boring old ISDN30 would be replaced by new cool ISDN30e! That isn’t satire, the “e” stood for “emulated” indicating (for those who asked) it was an IP-based alternative to ISDN30.
And that was it – for the next 20 years KDs could sell SIP as essentially the same product. The name evolved, the “ISDN30e” being dropped as new buyers came through who’d never heard of ISDN. Nigel, many promotions later, continued to stun his peers by replacing it with “SIP Trunk” and “Hosted VoIP”. His genius knew no bounds. Even the KDs moved with the times. Now, when they donned their fat tie and road-raged their way to a client meeting, they’d be sure to stop en-route, perhaps for a round of golf, with the obligatory 187th selfie of the day posted to LinkedIn. [Interestingly, at least for those who like that kind of stuff, the Court has even said that “SIP trunk” is a marketing construct not a real thing!]
Anyway, then another crisis hit: Microsoft released Teams. Nigel packed up his crayons and headed off for a day of mindfulness training and crisis-management. This Teams thing meant customers didn’t need a SIP seat locked in for 8 years, no handset to sell, we were all doomed. It even silently embedded the scary features they’d kept hidden from users all these years – like encryption and ultra-wideband codecs. The KDs were surely dead; they’d have to go and work in PCWorld, except PCWorld was no more and they’d never needed to use a printer anyway – all their order forms were pre-printed the same, industry-wide, they just required the customer to sign and them to put their X on so they got their commission and car lease-credits.
Despite years of high-pressure colouring-in, Nigel’s finger hadn’t slipped from the pulse of the market. Yes, Teams just needed to be sold exactly like SIP. Not integrated, not progressive, just a different kind of seat with bundled minutes. It was genius, the KDs loved it and just like one-dog bark triggering other dogs all around the world, everyone had to have Teams. Even those closer to normality than the KDs were sucked in – they NEED Teams, don’t know why, but they NEED it. Think the Beanie Baby craze but with lots of Kouros and you’re on the right track.
But end-users were wiser, well some were. They’d been through COVID and they knew the world was now over-the-top and saw straight through Nigel. Most were half or a third his age now, and while they couldn’t operate a web-browser efficiently, were well adept at receiving contact on one channel and responding on another, just for “LOLZ”. “Why can’t stuff just work together like my iPhone?”, they cried.
And that my friends is the story of the VoIP industry. It was born with such promise but, largely because of Nigel’s colouring-in prowess, denied users progress and locked them into the 80s. Modern consumers didn’t want that, moved on, and the industry died. KDs now struggle, they post more golf selfies and buy lots of awards for themselves, but life is hard. Their only saviour is the massively long contracts they made people sign and the fact they’re still leasing hardware that was obsolete 5 years ago. Nobody knows what the future holds for them but it certainly won’t be like the hay-day of ISDN30e. It could have been so different though!
We’ve always tried to be different at Simwood. We’re technology-led and get really excited about putting new capabilities in the hands of end-users, even though the majority of our business is indirect. We’ve never employed KDs – had a close call but he was scared to leave the office – and have always attracted the customers that have a clue and can deliver proper solutions to customers. That has always been the niche end of the market, while Nigel and his KDs commoditised and arguably destroyed the rest. But it leaves us in an interesting place. When Teams came along and the KDs were selling it hand over fist as a forklift replacement to SIP Trunks / Hosted PBX, we always asked the question ‘why’. We were late to the party arguably, but we weren’t playing the same game. Teams on Simwood is not like anything the KDs will sell you, it delivers the proper technological benefits. It isn’t a silo, it is integrated so your customers can be hybrid Teams and UCaaS, can fail over from SIP to Teams (or vice versa) and can genuinely embrace the best technology for the solution at an individual level – UCaaS and a big phone for Dorris on reception, Teams for the road-warrior – all working together beautifully. It is part of what we call the Potato but, to be perfectly honest, the response to Teams has been somewhat lacklustre. Maybe the KDs got there first with their 8 year contracts, or maybe it has been commoditised to death such that conveying technical difference is hard?
This was most shockingly illustrated for me when we announced our work with WhatsApp and the response was crazily enthusiastic. Think drunken midnight calls from industry greats who were excited once more and couldn’t sleep! To my mind, WhatsApp is massively exciting – it is the equivalent of Teams but for consumers essentially – but it is no more exciting than Teams as we have implemented it. The only difference is KDs aren’t selling Nigel’s bundling of it as a discrete product and it feels like people can see the actual value of the Potato. Yes, consumers can call your customer’s call centre over WhatsApp but the calls can land in Teams or SIP etc. etc. It is just another skewer in the Potato but perhaps because we’re pre-Nigel, the true opportunity and capability shine through as they haven’t before.
Let’s keep it that way and give consumers great solutions that move the world forward, not package up the bare minimum to look like the past. Don’t sell a cardboard lasagne microwave meal with a selfie to satisfy short-term hunger, put a potato at the heart of an honest, nourishing, humble meal that gives them all the nutrients they need for the future! The productivity of the economy and our livelihoods depend on it!
