The hospitality industry had better be prepared: Traveling businesspeople will soon have little need for their room phones. One of the first major applications for voice over IP in the business world is to enable road warriors to more easily and cheaply communicate and work when traveling.

“It's a whole new way of doing things,” said Michael Burrell, senior manager in the voice and video solutions group at Equant. “Businesses can support a mobile work force more efficiently and cost-effectively. You can put a softphone on traveling workers' laptops, and they can turn their hotel room into an office.”

In addition to avoiding expensive hotel phones, a VoIP service links the traveling employee to all the corporate and customer information needed to work as if one were sitting at one's desk.

“I can work on the road as effectively, using my softphone on the laptop [the same] as my regular phone on my desk,” said Jay Kauser, NEC's general manager of product management. “We provide a Communication Portal that is taking care of not only a mobile user but enterprise in-house back office needs so that your PC desktop and your communication needs are tied together in one easy portal.”

Thus the primary goal of VoIP in the enterprise has very quickly shifted from how to save money on communications costs to how to increase worker productivity.

In addition to the industry's leaders in IP PBXs, Avaya and Cisco Systems, and telecom network gear makers such as Alcatel, Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Siemens, a number of newer players are springing into the market to develop middleware and software platforms that help businesses incorporate VoIP flexibility and functionality into their communications systems and business processes to make those productivity leaps.

One such company, LignUp, provides a communications platform that incorporates softswitching, a media server and a service creation environment, along with pre-integrated applications and a development tool for building more apps. The company is working with service providers that are more interested in becoming what was once known as ASPs, or application service providers. One of them, CanyonBridge, used LignUp's platform to create cbForce, an integration of Microsoft Exchange with salesforce.com that uses VoIP technology to make the sales process much more efficient.

“This is just the first blush of this,” said Kevin Nethercott, president and chief operating officer of LignUp. “Every name in the database becomes an object; every object has a phone number associated with it. Whether on the road or at their offices, salespeople can click to call customers from within the address book, calendar or even an e-mail. The calls are logged into the customer's record, and you can view a customer profile, enter notes about the call, record the call, transfer it and keep all that in the call history. The customer record can be viewed automatically when calls come in. It makes a salesperson more effective because all the information is right there.”

Another firm, LiteScape, integrates voice systems with desktops and wireless devices. This includes a familiar user interface such as Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook that's combined with new functionality that can be displayed as soft keys on a VoIP phone, said Farzad Naimi, CEO, president and founder of the company, whose system works with both Cisco and Avaya VoIP premises gear.

Banks are using this technology for automating customer self-service and collaboration among branches, he said. “On the same platform, we have identified niche markets — we call them self-service points. We have not only a VoIP screen, but you would attach a card reader or [radio frequency ID] so that authorization of the personalized services could be provided. The card readers would be all over the bank, and somebody comes in, swipes the card and puts in the PIN, and it immediately provides you other services like brokerage or loans.”

Charles County, Md., schools are using the system in every classroom, Naimi added. “Teachers can use it to automatically send notification home, as well as automate tasks such as attendance.”

Traxi Technologies integrates enterprise apps with a VoIP-based enterprise phone system via its Volcrum Voice platform, allowing enterprises to use screen pops, call recording, text-to-speech and interactive voice response technology simply and easily as part of their call centers.

“When a call comes in with the caller ID, you can pop a button to pull up customer information, pop another button to record the call,” said Louis Person, Traxi president. “We integrate with Microsoft CRM, and that creates a record for every call.”

Metreos provides both an open communications environment and an application development tool that is being used by companies, such as Lehman Brothers, that want to go beyond VoIP toll savings to new functions and productivity, said CEO Joel Fontenot.

“Today, because of the complexity of telephony protocols, ready-to-use code, threats to dial-tone reliability and the unique requirements of voice apps, no one did much to PBXs in the past,” he said. “Now, with VoIP, you have open APIs in the data world. But you still have to take the lifecycle approach to voice applications. How do we build, deploy, manage, update for changing protocols? Our platform solves all these issues.”

Lehman Brothers uses the system for find-me, follow-me service, more efficient Web-based broadcast messaging and the addition of presence to its Instant Messaging capability, but the company also has developed a custom app that allows its analysts to deliver information to customers more quickly over a Web-enabled system with voice recording that frees their time while still giving customers a personal touch.

Presence itself is a major force with VoIP enterprise apps. At Nortel, which not only sells VoIP gear but uses it to connect 22,000 employees, interaction is more efficient when employees know in advance the current status of fellow workers.

“It's not just having the information, it's how you use it,” said Ingrid Tremblay, senior manager product marketing for multimedia at Nortel. “In the past, I would have called a colleague and gone to voice mail if that person was on the phone. Now I can look on my dashboard, check my friend's list and see if that person is on the phone, and if they are, I'll use an IM to invoke a response. It makes better use of everyone's time.”

It's also possible to note when someone is on a cell phone — which means they are out of the building, she said. The ability to note presence can ultimately incorporate badge readers so that the desktop dashboard would indicate an individual's precise location within a building, making it possible to track key personnel, such as doctors within a hospital, she said.

VoIP is moving into the call center environment, but it is also enabling technology once reserved for call centers to move into other environments as well.

Witness Systems has been providing the technology that allows call centers to easily record incoming calls for review, for liability/verification purposes and for staff evaluation and training, said Nancy Treaster, senior vice president of marketing. Now, one-third of its customers are enterprises, not call centers.

The VoIP-enabled system lets individuals record a call with the push of a button and create a .WAV file that can be shared or stored. Hospitals will use it to have nurses record doctors' orders, and suppliers will use it to record incoming orders to avoid later confusion or liability issues, she said.

Eventually, virtual call centers will allow companies to add staff during peak calling times or conference in knowledge workers only as needed to both improve service and keep costs down, Treaster said.

AccessLine, a service provider that came out of the applications space and is developing its own apps, sees smaller enterprises using VoIP to create a virtual company that looks like a larger enterprise, said Kent Hellebust, chief marketing officer.

“The customer calls one number but can be transferred to one of many different locations or teleworkers,” he said.

There is still a great deal to be explored about how VoIP will enable better use of mobility and collaboration, said Tim Miller, director of product planning for Siemens.

“It is a much more flexible and extensible environment for helping network technology like presence or a virtual assistant can take off mundane and repetitive tasks and allow employees to focus more on addressing customer needs,” he said.