Dean Bubley had an excellent post this morning about the EComm show coming in March:
Sure, there’s some high-profile movement around Skype, Vonage, Truphone and all the rest. But to be honest, that’s still a very small sliver of the overall telecoms marketplace, with the possible exception of international call traffic.
I’ve been talking to a lot of people recently about ‘non-telephony VoIP’, aka voice mashups, or application-embedded VoIP. I’m expecting this to become a lot more important in a qualitative sense in 2008-9, albeit rather hard to measure quantitatively.
He’s absolutely right here, on all accounts. VoiceMashups will be a lot more important in qualitative sense in the coming years, and due to their “minor” role in larger applications, hard to measure quantitatively. I’ve been thinking a bit about this myself, and here’s some of the progress I’ve made in terms of how to measure the market, what drives it and who participates:
- In terms of market share and size, I do not expect to see the VoiceMashup market sized by ports shipped. Better metrics will be clicks, pages or sites. For today’s marketplace, I would expect to see a similar treatment as is given to technologies such as Ajax or Flex.
- In terms of eco-system and value chain, I expect to see a number of web services providers that directly compete with platform vendors, partnered with tens of thousands of web developments shops and internal IT departments, and servicing every single vertical in the market. Tool vendors will provide some incremental expansion of this market, but it is more likely that open source tool or existing tool vendors will expand their offerings to include voice mashup functionality.
- Business models for voice mashups will follow cost savings or business process improvements. I think it’s unlikely that voice mashups generally create new revenue opportunities. This is the direct result of the supporting nature of voice mashups of other, larger applications.
- No easily defined channels currently exist for telecom web services providers. I’m way sure of this one. In terms of effectiveness, business process consultants provide the best channel for their introduction into the enterprise or application provider.
We’ve got some plans to make more detailed analysis of these issues in the new year… stay tuned for that.
Technorati Tags: telco mashups, thomas howe, voice