We all know how fast technology moves these days. Who remembers when the Internet was little more than a cripplingly slow mailbox for BASIC text messages? That was only 10 years ago. In that time, the way we communicate has spiralled into a reality so multi faceted it looks like the dreams of a sci fi show. It is, though, real, present and gathering pace every day. Business phone systems, for example, which used to be simple handsets equipped with more buttons than a person knew what to do with, and (if that person was very important) a tiny digital display that showed the name of the person calling in, are now multi functional network applications that make the bridge of the Starship Enterprise look like an old plug and play switchboard.

Modern business communications, of course, are the most advanced and demanding of the lot. Since email perfected itself, and became an instantaneous way to send files and information all the way around the world, business has been conducted in an increasingly virtual work place – the world of the multi use, or multi faceted, communications system. Business phone systems are no longer adequate unless they can "talk to" (i.e. be connected in a meaningful way with) computers, email accounts, virtually held voice mail systems, mobile phones, portable computers – the lot. In the day of the million mile an hour broadband connection, business communications are as much about making machines talk to each other properly as they are about making people talk to each other at all.

Take the simple email as an example. That old school BASIC text look and twelve year wait to upload and send has been replaced with a system so fast that emails seem to arrive before you have even pressed "send". In the world of modern business phone systems, even that isn’t enough. Now, a business person can telephone his or her email account and have an integrated voice recognition and text reading software dictate his or her messages aloud. That same person can phone someone else, and have his or her message left as an email – so he or she is talking top one machine, which links with the business communications software to convert the speech into an email. Or a text message. Or an email and a text message...

This kind of business phone system allows companies and their employees not only to talk with each other, and with other companies and individuals, according to whichever device or medium is closest to hand – it also means that all work communications can be centralised. That means central management, central control – and a working method of streamlining communications habits by building reports that track contacts with a single client or customer over a project lifetime.

The new business communications are only just beginning. Virtual private branch exchanges, which have turned a business phone system into an online networking program, are still in their infancy. Bearing in mind that email was in its infancy 10 years ago, one wonders where we’ll be by 2020.