The web being what it is, earlier today, via a series of links that I now can’t recall, I found myself on a site called mashable.com, reading a post that estimates Apple’s revenues from the one billion apps that have been downloaded for the iPhone to be $25-$40 million.

The author characterizes that $25-$40M as “not much.” Personally, it’d meet my need for bourbon, smokes, iTunes, NetFlix, yogurt and Luna bars for the rest of my days, but I understand where he’s coming from: Those billion apps let users do lots of cool things, but from Apple’s perspective, their main contribution is to enhance the value of the iPhone platform; thus the author concludes “…,Apple is still primarily a hardware company…”

That led me to think about the enterprise communication platform vendors, you know, the companies that are morphing into software-based rather than hardware-based firms. To a large degree, I accept that proposition. In his presentation on “Pricing and Licensing for IP Telephony and UC” at VoiceCon Orlando, Doug Carolus from N’Compass, asserted that 75 percent or more of the functionality customers receive from an IP-PBX is actually implemented in software.

So, I get the argument, but I can’t help but wonder what will happen if communications hardware really drops to pure commodity status? Will software will ever match the revenue stream these vendors now receive from hardware? As shown in the chart below, Marty Parker of UniComm Consulting, found that UC licenses are priced all over the map.

Will there be enough coming in to keep these vendors whole?

I know that the mainstream media is out of favor and, in many cases, almost out of business, but I still love The New York Times.

Earlier this week, it ran a story about a search service called WolframAlpha, that is scheduled to launch later this month. The service is named for its founder, a physicist and computer scientist named Stephen Wolfram, and will apply artificial intelligence to massive databases to provide answers to the kinds of questions Google and other search services aren’t really set up to do. You can find the NY Times story here, the WolframAlpha site here and more about Stephen Wolfram here.

Now creating a new kind of search engine isn’t a trivial task and so I wasn’t surprised when one of the folks quoted in the NY Times story predicted that WolframAlpha will be “….very good in some areas and incomplete in others.” But I was struck by how appropriate that characterization is for what’s going on in enterprise communications.

IP Telephony and now Unified Communications are very good at some very important jobs. They help lower network costs because of line/bandwidth consolidation because there’s less need for separate, dedicated wide-area voice networks. On premises, you can have much more streamlined cabling and wiring plants. IP end points have paved the way for simpler and more unified messaging, and as IM and presence become more widespread, enterprises are finding they can get by with fewer ports on their voicemail systems. And UC makes possible new kinds of converged applications that can impact both personal productivity and the enteprise’s overall bottom line.

All that’s the “very good” part. The “incomplete” aspects include bandwidth and performance management systems that give IT/telecom execs confidence that all the converged traffic is passing through the network the way it is supposed to. And security. And more rational and less expensive options for systems and services integration. And more widely available WAN services, like SIP Trunking, that make real the promise of true, end-to-end, IP communications.

As we assemble the program for VoiceCon San Francisco, we’re very conscious of the need to provide information in a range of formats that will help attendees leverage what IP Telephony and UC do well, and present options for migration that circumvent where IP-Tel and UC remain incomplete. We welcome your suggestions and ideas……but hurry: We will be finalizing the program over the next few weeks.