Telephony Market – Unified Communication 2.0

I have been tracking the telephony application market since 2005, when we missed the opportunity to invest in one of my favorite companies VOXEO. Since then, I have been on the hunt for a telephony based expansion stage software company looking for investors that meets our criteria.

The telephony application market is undergoing a number of changes as it tries to find its place in how people and companies want to communicate with each other today and tomorrow.

One of the trends has been Unified Communications… The convergence of telephone, mobile, conferencing, call management, video, SMS and IM.This trend has been adopted by the big players, including Cisco, Avaya, Microsoft and Siemens among others.

The next generation for unified communication is Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP). Blair Pleasant wrote a good post on the trend here.

There are many expansion stage companies that have emerged to serve the CEBP market… including Backflip, Callfire, Callingpost, Ifbyphone, Ribbit, Twilio, Tropo, Voiceshot, and many others. 

These companies are betting on the following:
 

1. That businesses care less about the communication channels/technologies/means to reach their customers… and more about improving the efficiency and effectiveness of these communications. 
2. Businesses are looking to extend their business processes to more communication channels… which is beginning to push a convergence between web-based business applications with communication centric applications. For example, a business web based app allows the automated interaction with a customer through the browser, SMS, IM, Mobile, and landline.
3. Web developers do not want to learn how to be communication developers.
4. Communication technology and infrastructure creates a barrier to entry to web based software companies, which creates the opportunity for a new set of application providers to emerge.

More to come on this topic… Hopefully with an investment in this space this year!