By Tara Seals

Are carriers afraid of VoIP?

“Do we have to swallow hard when we convert someone to VoIP and cut costs by 20-30 percent for a business [over our TDM services]?” said Fred Briggs, executive vice president of customer service and program management at Verizon Business, during his kickoff keynote for the VON Conference & Expo on Monday. “Of course. But while IP is a fantastic tool for creating cost savings and efficiencies for businesses, it‘s just the foundation of a fundamental shift that‘s coming, which will forever change the way businesses run.”

That fundamental shift, put simply, is businesses starting to carry out functions by taking cues from social networking. Which, if all goes well, will translate into much more value down the line for the likes of Verizon, which can provide an array of the underlying enabling technologies for that shift.

In a hyper-connected world, we’re all familiar with the difficulty in keeping work in its place: It’s just too tempting to pull out the BlackBerry at dinner when a big project is underway at work. But Briggs thinks the next great wrinkle will be a reversal of that trend, where the social life will intrude into work life, instead of the other way around. That means that people work more in the cloud and in less hierarchical ways, and collaborate en masse to provide corporate feedback. Call it communication-enabled business processes.

“Consider blogs, wikis,” said Briggs. “There are 300 million Facebook users today, 2.7 articles in Wikipedia, 130 million blogs out there and 3 million tweets are sent per day. And this is a powerful force coming into the workplace because social networking – which is second nature to a whole new generation of workers – creates a new set of expectations when it comes to responding quickly and how you communicate with customers.”

Consider the term “human latency.” A Facebook approach to disseminating corporate information allows users to get information to people, get feedback and make decisions very quickly, without an approval hierarchy to bog down the process. “Imagine using this to get feedback on latest product launch,” Briggs noted. “Social networking can provide an incredible mechanism for getting information back to you.”

To capitalize on the trend, Briggs noted that Verizon is considering ways to provide open APIs to its network for developers to create third-party applications and widgets for businesses that use network information like location and presence. The schedule for that will soon be posted on the Web site, he pledged, perhaps aware that Verizon has a lesser reputation for moving quickly on openness.

It also is implementing cloud computing. “That’s a whole new market for us and it’s changing our entire business model. Users can buy computing or memory by the drink, so they can take servers and call centers and put them into the cloud. Rather than invest in brick and mortar, and huge capital expenditures, they buy by the drink – the cloud enables those kinds of major shifts in business models.”

Another opportunity is unified communications and collaboration. A social media-based business approach begs for “enabling people to use any device anywhere, being able to communicate regardless of medium. You can take that and leverage it with applications to find info, process info, then get it to the right person and change how you do business.”

There is, of course, a flip side – how do you protect the company’s proprietary information to make sure users don’t blog away the secret sauce, for instance? What happens when you let people give out information without requiring approvals: Who controls the brand in that case? Then of course there’s security to consider.

“In the latest Verizon data breach report we found that there were just under 300 million records compromised last year, and 90 percent was from organized crime, doing it for a profit,” said Briggs. “This is no longer a hacker doing it for a thrill. So the trick is to leverage the power of your employees and still keep network secure.”

While he believes these are soon to be the burning questions facing corporations, Briggs said that for now, VoIP is the fastest growing capability that Verizon offers.

“We see today that this is what customers are migrating to, no question,” he noted. “There are well over 100 million VoIP resi subs out there. About 69 percent of households still use the traditional PSTN: That will be just 26 percent by 2013. Talk about a sea change in the industry that we have to respond to.”

Voice will continue to be a big piece of what Verizon does. “And TDM voice will be for quite a while,” he said. But we’re investing in LTE and broadband; we will literally invest tens of billions into FiOS.

“IP technology is a great tool to provide the foundation for things like telecommuting, if there’s a pandemic,” said Briggs. “It’s a great efficiency tool. But that’s it: It has by and large made us more efficient as opposed to fundamentally changing the process. That part’s coming next.”