5 years ago… Experts argue against voice/data convergence

NEWS 06.08.98: Forrester Research has bucked the trend with a report that predicts the end for the voice/data convergence boom. The company argues that management complexities will offset any savings likely to be made from running both services on the same network. The cost of guaranteeing bandwidth plus the slow carrier development of integrated services means convergence will be curtailed in most organisations. The report claims corporate voice services cannot get much better, so there is very little incentive in replacing existing systems. According to Forrester, "multiple networks will live forever". 06.08.03: While this was a healthy injection of realism about converged communications from a top market analyst it is fair to say that five years on businesses are embracing the combined voice and data network more readily and are achieving real cost savings, albeit over a slightly longer period than vendors would have us believe. Recent research claims almost a third of enterprise customers have already converged some of their voice and data systems and the rest expect to do so in the next five years. But we are still some way of the utopian converged office network where email can be read over the phone or telephone calls made at the PC and our recent special report highlights some of the issues that vendors need to address and users need to consider.