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Internet telephony, or VoIP, is rapidly replacing the conventional kind. This year, for the first time, U.S. companies bought more new Internet-phone connections than standard lines. The major driver behind this change is cost. But VoIP isn't just a new technology for making old-fashioned calls cheaper, says consultant Kevin Werbach. It is fundamentally changing how companies use voice communications. What makes VoIP so powerful is that it turns voice into digital data packets that can be stored, copied, combined with other data, and distributed to virtually any device that connects to the Internet. And it makes it simple to provide all the functionality of a corporate phone--call features, directories, security--to anyone anywhere there's broadband access. That fosters new kinds of businesses such as virtual call centers, where widely dispersed agents work at all hours from their homes. The most successful early adopters, says Werbach, will focus more on achieving business objectives than on saving money. They will also consider how to push VoIP capabilities out to the extended organization, making use of everyone as a resource. Deployment may be incremental, but companies should be thinking about where VoIP could take them. Executives should ask what they could do if, on demand, they could bring all their employees, customers, suppliers, and partners together in a virtual room, with shared access to every modern communications and computing channel. They should take a fresh look at their business processes to find points at which richer and more customizable communications could eliminate bottlenecks and enhance quality. The important dividing line won't be between those who deploy VoIP and those who don't, or even between early adopters and laggards. It will be between those who see VoIP as just a new way to do the same old things and those who use it to rethink their entire businesses.

Syndication has long been a fundamental organizing principle in the entertainment world, but it's been rare elsewhere in business. The fixed physical assets and slow-moving information that characterized the industrial economy made it difficult, if not impossible, to create the kind of fluid networks that are essential for syndication. But with the rise of the information economy, flexible business networks are not only becoming possible, they're becoming essential. As a result, syndication is moving from business's periphery to its center. Within a syndication network there are three roles that businesses can play. Originators create original content, which encompasses everything from entertainment programming to products to business processes. Syndicators package that content, often integrating it with content from other originators. Distributors deliver the content to consumers. A company can play a single role, or it can play two or three roles simultaneously. Syndication requires businesses to rethink their strategies and relationships in radical ways. Because a company's success hinges on its connections to other companies, it can no longer view its core capabilities as secrets to protect. Instead, it needs to see them as products to sell. FedEx, for example, is succeeding by distributing its sophisticated package-tracking capability to other companies on the Internet. Syndication promises to change the nature of business. As this new way of doing business takes hold, companies may look the same as before to their customers, but behind the scenes they will be in constant flux, melding with one another in ever-changing, self-organizing networks.