Google Voice Gets Presence
While Google Voice may revolutionize personal communications directing calls to the phone number of choice, businesses will find the service too simplistic for many of their needs. Yesterday, On-State Communications may have solved that problem by presence-enabling Google Voice. Now small companies can leverage the newest free Google Service to direct incoming calls to the right user regardless of his or her location or availability.
While Google Voice may revolutionize personal communications, businesses will probably get frustrated trying to using the service for anything but the most simplistic call forwarding. The addition of Google Voice to OnState's virtual PBX and call center will now companies to find the best person to answer a call anytime anywhere.
For those not watching Googledom every minute of the day, Google Voice lets you consolidate your phone numbers into a single number. You give out one number, your Google Voice number, and setup rules on the backend to direct calls to your work, home, mobile or other numbers. Customized call groups - friends, family and foes or what have you - let you determine how to handle each class of caller. Business calls can be sent to an office or mobile phone and calls from friends and family to the home number. There are other features that you can find here, such as voicemail transcription, but that's the basic gist.
Small business will find Google Voice interesting because it almost offers them an inexpensive way to direct incoming calls - almost. While in theory Google Voice lets SMBs present a single number, 1800-CALLDAVE (Yes, vanity numbers will be coming shortly.), for the office and then forward calls depending on caller ID or a call screening option that's part of Google Voice; in reality, Google's call forwarding rules aren't going to be dynamic enough to choose between recipients when they might not be available or only available in particular ways (IM and not voice, for example.)
Enter On-State. The company's PBX and call center adds a business abstraction layer, called business presence, to Google voice. Business Presence tracks the availability and activity of workers wherever they are - in the office, working from home, or travelling - and connects customers to employees based on worker availability, capability, or other company-defined criteria. Users run a mobile application that let's them toggle their presence enabling on the On-State technology to make the appropriate call routing decisions even if they're on the road. Aside from Google Voice, the same service also works with Google Talk, Google Apps, Skype, Salesforce, SIP, PBXs, and PSTN numbers. So calls could be diverted to a Skype ID as easily as to a Google Voice number, for example.
On-State's work is an important addition for small businesses interested in Google Voice particularly because of the support for mobile presence. My work in mobile messaging with Osterman Research suggests that over the next year we'll see a nearly 100 percent growth in the use of mobile presence within business. (The Osterman Research report on mobile messaging trends will be released later this month.) By combining mobile presence with business rules, On-State provides small businesses with an affordable solution to intelligently track down the right person at the right time.
Similar phone consolidation capabilities already exist from business-oriented, UC solutions. Often these require the deployment of costly (in time and money) server software. On-State works in the cloud so there's little setup and its integration of presence and network-independence makes the offering particularly exciting.