Traditional telephone should be dead, says Swyx

“Traditional telephony is dead,” says Swyx CEO Geunter Junk. “IP telephony delivers huge advantages for SMEs and larger organisations... We need to educate the market not only about what’s possible for their businesses, but how to get there.” He makes the point that it’s not just about cost cutting, citing an unnamed UK-based animal foods manufacturer, which integrated Swyx VoIP (voice over IP) into its CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP systems. “They understood the advantages with this technology and completely changed the way they work. Before, farmers would call them and leave a message saying, for example, ‘I need another 200kg of feed for this farm.’ But without manual work they wouldn’t know which animal food he wanted. “Now, they can identify who it is from the integrated CRM system and look at purchasing behaviour – what did they buy before, what quantity etc – so they can see that it’s pig food not chicken food, or whatever. That’s improved their productivity, but also their customer satisfaction and loyalty ratings.” Junk says manufacturers should be rethinking their IT infrastructures in light of the competitive advantage that integrated IP telephony can give them. “They need to get this kind of connectivity into their engineering and other departments as well,” he insists. “For example, we can deliver software for desktop collaboration between engineering people in Latvia and Germany so they can collaborate with Internet, email, SMS, IM and VoIP in parallel with all media streams on one platform. It’s more efficient and more controllable – with a single framework ensuring the right policies and better security.”