Thomas Howe laments the passing of the eTel conference and the thinking behind its demise that VoIP is boring ... stagnant ... unappealing ... not sexy. But he goes on to say "stick a fork in it baby, VoIP is done". And then he gets to the meat of voice's role going forward:

.... I think that anyone who deeply thinks about this stuff knows that voice, in and of itself, is pretty stagnant and boring. But, if you only consider voice by itself, and voice services as only being about voice, then you’re really at a dead end. But, as Martin Geddes would say, if you see the transformation from horizontal voice into vertical services, where voice stops becoming the important part, and starts supporting the other applications around it… then you see we {are} at the beginning of true, massive and ubiquitous voice enabled applications. I can’t believe that true Internet guys would miss this obvious architectural (in both business and bits) opportunity, but apparently… they have. [author's bold]

When you take out the hardware and, concurrently, you take the complexity out of call center operation as OnState has done for call center management, when you start providing tools for making conversations asynchronous as Evoca has done with their audio web services, when you embed conversation tools (voice and IM) into Salesforce.com as PamConsult has done by developing Skype for Salesforce.com you can start to see voice embedded into customer relationship management applications.

Go back and read my Skype Primer post on Skype's Extra Gallery and Developer Partner Program. Enhance business processes by embedding voice and you have a key differentiator for Skype; enhance business processes by embedding voice and you have not only increased productivity but also increased revenue opportunities for both the partners and their customers.

I look forward to meeting Thomas this week and learning more about embedding voice such that it supports many other vertical applications around it.

Tags: Skype, Thomas Howe, OnState, PamConsult, Evoca, Skype Developer Partners, Skype Extras