By Ben Foulds

Energy, cloud communications and Daley Thompsons’ Track and Field

At a time when I thought the ‘Internet of Acronyms’ was just about exhausted, I read an article about the future of energy provision being outsourced and the obligatory abbreviation, IoE or ‘Internet of Energy’.

With a recognised shortfall between energy production and consumption in coming years, the gap will more than likely be filled by consumers and businesses.

By turning on their power-hungry devices when most power is being generated by natural energy (wind, sunshine etc.), the excess power will be stored using new innovative technologies.

And, just like that, blackouts avoided and my stash of emergency candles can continue to gather dust at the back of the carrier bag draw. 

But it got me thinking, could the futures’ largest provider of energy, really be without a single power station?

After all, the world’s largest accommodation provider, Airbnb, doesn’t own any property. The world’s largest taxi company, Uber, doesn’t own any vehicles. And none of the big boys of media, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, create content.

 (Did you know that if Facebook was a country, it would be the third biggest in the world based on population?). 

So in a world that lends itself to shared resource, I ask the question why own technology? The ability to take a small chunk of a much larger IT or communications infrastructure is readily available through cloud computing.

These infrastructures are prebuilt in a hugely powerful, secure data centre and provides companies of any size with the tools to compete with organisations that have far superior IT budgets.

But many companies are still fearful of cloud technology, and in particular cloud communications.

The answer, in my experience, is often the fear of the unknown, particularly with phone systems and communications.

I remember as a young lad, running into the hallway to pick up the phone at the bottom of the stairs, a big red ugly thing with a large white dial and long twirling wire that was used inadvertently to trip family members making their way past. 

I remember it taking an age to dial anyone, particularly if they had a few nines or zeros in their phone number.

And I remember the deafening ring when we did receive the odd call. But I do remember it always having a dial tone. It always worked.

I also remember, for as long as I have been using them, that computers tend not to work as consistently.

Whether I was sat patiently waiting for Daley Thompsons Track and Field to load (I’m sure at least a year of my childhood was wasted on this).

Or more recently, applications suddenly deciding that they have ‘encountered an error and need to restart’ (please, on all things holy, tell me I have pushed control and S at some point in the last 2 hours).

And this, I feel, is where much of the fear comes from. To bring what is a trusted method of communications into the realms of IT is a scary thought for many companies. A slower than usual e-mail delivery has minimal impact to a business, however, the same connectivity slow down to a ‘real time’ voice call is not a scenario that will ever play out well. 

This is the bit where I say there is nothing to worry about, it all works all of the time, and it’s easy to implement.

The truth is that, whilst hosted phone systems have come a long way in the last ten years, some companies just get it wrong.

They don’t segregate their voice traffic on their internet connection.

They don’t consider the impact of the transition from the old phone system. 

They don’t take the end users training requirements into account – they simply don’t plan.

The reasons to adopt a cloud based phone system are vast; (improved productivity, predictable costs, flexible working, cost savings, disaster recovery, to name but a few).

And a well deployed solution can transform businesses for the better.

The key is to choose a provider with expertise in your line of work.

You should create a plan with a clear timeline of events (or make sure the provider does this work).

There is plenty of experience in the market place, take advantage of it. 

For more information on some of the pitfalls, have a look at www.dontmakethewrongcall.com

And with that, I am off to see if level two of Daley Thompson’s Track and Field has loaded yet.