Hot Spots for Communications in 2010

du Toit believes the market still isn’t out of the woods, and not strong enough for very broad portfolios of products and services. Therefore, he argues, resellers need to analyse their business, and focus on specific services and technologies that will deliver business benefit in the short to medium term.
Session Initial Protocol (SIP)
SIP saw further progression in 2009; in 2010 we expect to see new services and options increasing, with rapid growth towards the end of the year. In particular, SIP trunking will be the biggest area of growth. Companies will use it to reduce the cost of connectivity to service providers, thereby enabling better use of telephony resources.

SIP session management, although in its early days, it is likely to play an increasing role by mid-2010 for larger enterprises with multiple sites. Products such as Avaya’s Aura IP-communication platform packages new and existing features including application sequencing and SIP-based session management. These features simplify complex communication networks, reduce infrastructure costs and quickly deliver voice, video, messaging, presence and web application. 

Basically, Aura enables multiple session management instances to work together providing scalability within the communication market allowing virtualisation of voice infrastructures. This is set to transform voice communication in the same way that server virtualisation has revolutionised the data centre. As a result of using Aura within its own business, Datapoint is enjoying a 60 percent reduction in annual telecommunication charges from this next level of converged communication.

Voice Biometrics
One of the hottest topics in the market, voice biometrics, is poised to explode next year, with the financial services sector being the early adopter. 

Previous phone banking authentication systems have been cumbersome but voice biometrics look set to change that in 2010. Voice is being used to authenticate and identify customers which is not only providing a better and speedier customer experience but also, it is reducing operational costs and fraud.

Airports such as Heathrow and Gatwick are already using forms of biometrics with retina scans and facial recognition respectively. Voice biometric authentication has a number of advantages over these other biometric technologies. This is not least because it is cheaper to deploy than fingerprint/facial recognition which requires specialised hardware. As voice biometric technology is easy to use remotely over the phone and is readily accepted by users, it will grow in popularity in 2010 presenting resellers with significant opportunities.

Currently, we don’t foresee that second tier identification such as place of birth, will ever go away as companies will still wish to use it while they are getting confident using the technology. Also, there will still need to be a fail-over in place for customers who do not authenticate and therefore, need to be passed to a customer service agent.

In the future, we expect to see multiple applications of voice biometrics such as at points of sale, on-line and even at ATMs.