Bach Seat

FierceMobileIT noted a new study from RingCentral, a provider of cloud business communications systems, which claims BYOD is now threatening the traditional business phone systems. The survey of 309 professionals within organizations who make purchasing decisions on phone systems found that personal mobile devices are so prevalent in the workplace that they are rendering traditional business phone systems obsolete.

According to FierceMobileIT, the survey’s key findings:

• Half of the respondents use mobile phones even while sitting at their desk, with a traditional desk phone in front of them
• 88 percent of employees use their mobile phones for work purposes while on personal time, including evenings, breaks, weekends, and vacations
• 70 percent of respondents believe office phones will eventually be replaced by mobile phones – Millennial workers are especially likely to believe this is true

RingCentral President David Berman told the author he believes that the new wave of employee-owned mobile devices is better than a premise-based phone system.

Mobile devices are turning into true business tools and are transforming the workplace as a whole, from shifting traditional business hours to changing how employees interact via voice, video, text and other business applications. We believe that all these changes are making legacy on-premise phone systems obsolete as they do not meet modern business needs

Praful Shah, RingCentral’s VP of strategy, told FierceMobileIT that his firm has seen a “tremendous behavior change going on with BYOD.” Asked what stood out in the research to him, he says it was the degree to which employees are using their personal devices to do work. He assumed the practice to be popular, but not to the degree the survey revealed. VP Shah noted;

Eighty-eight percent of employees are using mobile phones in their personal time for work. That is a phenomenally high percentage

The result is a shift in what physical telephones organizations will need to purchase. But it will also impact the need to provide applications that enable the employee to use multiple email and telephone accounts on the device, to keep private life and professional life separate when necessary.

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This study is from a firm that sells a competitive product to on-premise PBX, so they are spreading FUD for their benefit. Firms considering cloud-based services should do due diligence and question how these cloud-based service providers are going to protect their data from government spying or it disappearing with little or no notice.

Additionally firm needs to protect its own data. They need a way to protect their data on an employee’s phone. That could include the ability to completely wipe the firms and the user’s data from the phone.  I wrote about how BYOD can land an employee in jail here.

Related articles

• The Top 5 Business PBX Providers for Q4 2013, as Ranked by Voip-Info.org (virtual-strategy.com)

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.