Reinforcing the shift away from the traditional desk phone and toward more personalized, mobile devices is the BYOD trend. Since consumers already have a relationship with their service provider and tend to opt for the convenience of a single device that’s personalized with features they prefer, most choose to simply use that device instead of their clunky, stationary desk phone and conduct conference calls through free OTT services. A recent Gartner report forecasted that 20 percent of sales organizations will use tablets as the primary mobile platform for their field-sales workforce by 2015, while 40 percent of the overall workforce will be mobile by 2016. And come 2018, 70 percent of mobile workers will use either a tablet or a hybrid device that has tabletlike characteristics.

Maintaining enterprise security

Despite the ease and comfort that BYOD gives employees, this new trend causes serious concern for many enterprises because of the fact that the various devices are managed by distinct service providers, meaning they aren’t systematically regulated and can be hacked. Therefore employers are suddenly tasked with the challenge of finding a way to ensure that real-time communications in the workplace are reliable, of enterprise quality and protected over a secure network.

Luckily, major corporations like Microsoft have begun developing UC solutions that safely manage the deliverance of communications services to internal and external customers through channels that align with their needs; in fact, the company’s Lync platform helps manage all employee communications services, including voice, IM and video. However, enterprises should be aware that while a single-vendor approach is ideal, it isn’t realistic — single-sourcing UC puts them at a cost and innovation disadvantage. Businesses that adopt this approach could lose price competitiveness by not going with best-of-breed solutions and compromise their strategic road maps by being too dependent on a vendor’s product outlook.

Businesses can’t simply reset employee expectations either when trends like BYOD and consumerization of IT (CoIT) are on the rise. As end users, employees could easily decide to solve their technology problems independently by buying their own devices, thereby sacrificing an enterprise’s security and control and putting it back at square one.

The contingency plan

When UC isn’t the right fit — and the verdict is still out for many — companies will find that developing enterprise-class versions of OTT services is the next best step, and comes to a small investment when compared to the millions of dollars that are potentially lost when a work-confidential conversation or message is hacked. Enterprises today must meet the reality of the changing communications landscape head-on by creating OTT applications that combine the mobile benefits of smartphones with the quality of service (QoS), security and reliability demanded by enterprises. Once that is achieved, the smartphone will truly supplant the desk phone as the real “business phone.”