(Via catt.ca)

Last year, while still president of Cisco Canada, “I spoke here about the opportunity to drive innovation through collaboration and improved productivity,” said Nitin Kawale, now president of Rogers Enterprise Business division, to delegates at the first day of the Canadian Telecom Summit.

“In one year, not much has changed.”

He pointed to a Conference Board of Canada study that showed Canada ranking 13th in a list of 16 peer countries when it comes to innovation. Clearly, that’s lousy.

When it comes to the consumer side of the information, communications and technology revolution, Canadians are in step with the rest of the world, he said, using their mobile devices, software and apps to enrich their lives and improve their own personal productivity. However, when they go to work, they are often using communications tools stubbornly tethered to a wall which were invented in the 1960s and ’70s. With the rapid pace of change happening globally, this phenomenon must change or Canada will fall farther and farther behind.

Kawale asked the crowd of employees and executives of telcos, wireless firms, vendors, consultants, and so on whether or not their companies still use PBX or Centrex or IP Telephony to take and make calls in their day to day work. Using a texting instant poll, he found about 75% of the audience still reported using this tech as part of their daily work life.

He then added PBX originated more than 100 years ago and in the 1960s companies rolled out PBXs in a big way in order to streamline communications. Centrex came to market in the mid 1960s and IP Telephony and Voice over IP (VoIP) showed up in the early 1970s.

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