Futurity Media

Google made a move recently that redefines the company as a provider of voice telephony services. It enabled users of its Gmail online email service to call telephones directly from within their email inbox.

Gmail already featured PC-to-PC calling thanks to the integration of voice and video chat into the service, but this is the first time that the service has integrated calls to telephone numbers. Moreover, it has even made calls anywhere within the US and Canada free for at least the rest of the year, and calls to other countries are available to users at low rates.

This is more of a significant breakthrough than people may have at first realised. There have been various types of player in the world of IP telephony. Vendors of traditional PBX equipment have worked hard to integrate their old legacy devices with new, IP-based telephony equipment. Other companies, which come from an open computing background, have produced their own IP-based telephony ecosystems from the ground up, usually incorporating unified messaging elements that enable them to serve a whole range of customer communications needs. These companies are finding it relatively easy to expand their services into online video communication, as well.

But the Googles and the Skypes (which now has tens of millions of downloads on smartphones) represent yet another generation of IP telephony players, that could radically change the business communications landscape. These players require no hardware, aside from the PC or smartphone that a person is using, an Internet connection, and – optionally – a good audio headset. Google has such command over its users’ information, and publicly accessible data in general, that it can create exciting new communications experiences. Being able to call a business contact directly from email can make business users incredibly productive, encouraging them to get tasks done quickly and efficiently as soon as they arise.

It is easy to see how this telephony capability could be integrated into other services, such as Google Maps and even Google Docs, for example. As soon as this makes it into the mobile space, and users find themselves able to call email contact directly from their phone via 3G data, a whole new world will open up.

We are shifting from an environment in which hardware-centric vendors embrace IP telephony, to one in which software and online services vendors lead the charge, with hardware as little more than an afterthought. No wonder, then, that users placed more than 1 million calls from their Gmail screens in the first 24 hours of launch.

How soon this works its way up from a consumer-focused solution to something more appropriate for business users remains to be seen, but Google has committed to roll this out to Google Apps users soon, many of whom are small business users. Could this be the start of something significant for the enterprise, as larger companies begin to embrace cloud-based services?

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