IP Telephony

It is an oft-noted observation that technology has tended, in the past, to trickle down from universities, to enterprises, to the mid-market and finally, to smaller businesses and then consumers. The latest shift is that many new technologies, though often still created in university settings, usually move directly to the consumer markets before being driven into the commercial segments.

 

Just several years ago, though it seems much more distant in business time, an executive from Sylantro quipped something to the effect of "we've been spending all this time on IP phone systems and it turns out we missed the boat; we should have been focusing on consumers."

 

But enterprise technology still often trickles down from enterprises to the mid-market users and finally to smaller businesses. Social networking and social media might be that sort of phenomenon.

 

Forrester Research (News - Alert), for example, argues the enterprise Web 2.0 adoption rate of applications such as blogs, wikis, podcasting and real simple syndication feeds were used by more than a third of enterprises as early as the summer of 2007.

 

Not that most providers of communications services to SMEs necessarily can detect any shift yet in user requirements directly related to those trends.

 

Perhaps there hasn't yet been enough "trickling" of enterprise social tools to smaller businesses. Web 2.0 tools are not yet ubiquitous in the enterprise, either. But there's another possible angle. From the communications standpoint, Web 2.0 applications create more demand for broadband, faster broadband and higher-quality broadband.

 

So maybe most providers of communications services to SMEs will not see a direct change in requirements as Web 2.0 changes the ways enterprises communicate, which in turn affects the way smaller businesses communicate.

 

In the end, perhaps the communications requirements simply are as simple as faster broadband with better quality of service; more mobile broadband and greater reliance onWeb access.

 

In that case,  use of social media tools will not be directly translate into materially different voice and data needs in the SME space, in a qualitative sense, with one salient exception. Quality of service mechanisms, more-precise class of service support and application-specific priorities will be more important.

 

Initially though, social media might change demand in a quantitative sense. People will simply be asking for "more."