Why use VoIP? Two reasons: 1) Properly chosen and implemented, IP solutions for key business apps (interoffice voice networkingal, remote agent/home worker, IP PBX/LAN telephony, etc.) are cheaper to operate, maintain, and upgrade than comparable solutions using switched digital or analog phone service. 2) IP solutions are also more powerful, flexible, feature-rich, and interesting than conventional stuff. They make co-workers and customers happy. Both these things make bosses happy.
On the other hand, IP voice is still "new and edgy." While unit sales in all categories are growing, implementations are still scattered. Unless you're at a trade-show or other place where customers congregate, you may have a hard time finding anybody who's using this stuff, or has a real track record of selling, installing, configuring, and making it work.
And it can be difficult to make work, at first. Installers (even if they work directly for the OEM) are commonly still on the learning curve. They haven't seen everything yet. And it's predictable that something about your network or WAN is going to require some novel adaptation - maybe a few tweaks (over a few months) or a minor software/firmware upgrade to get running solid.
All this implies risk. And the risk may be amplified by the present economy. True, your company may want very badly to save money. At the same time, it's probably wary of investment and sensitive to disruptions in workflow. Where an acceptable set of communications solutions is already in place, VoIP enhancement is easy to dismiss - an example of "fixing it, even though it ain't broke." So your credibility is on the line: to choose the right stuff, test it, get it set up, make it work ASAP, and begin metering its benefits.
Given all the above, we recommend that - in the main - you constrain your plans to what's sensible. That you identify a handful of key apps that can be installed at limited cost and will entail limited disruption, and that offer lavish return-on-investment. That you do as complete as possible a job of planning around them, informing stakeholders, and getting buy-in - both on the process (RFQ, evaluation, short-listing, testing, selection, implementation and refinement, end-user training, ongoing management) and on the ROI proposition (metrics, methods, term). This way, you can control expectations and keep stakeholders reasonable.
For point solutions, this works fine. For more global solutions, such as replacing an out-of-date PBX and voicemail with this year's model IP PBX (with unified messaging and call center functionality), it makes sense to go all the way to the other extreme: plan to implement as many features as possible, as soon as you can. Doing point-solution ROI calculations on a full-scale convergence solution is a losing proposition. And gradual implementations reveal problems slowly and torturously - in the worst possible way. The real benefits of full convergence emerge on the other side of the chasm of adaptation.
In this feature, you'll find information about point solutions, evolutionary upgrades, as well as more global, more strategic products and services. Our goal is to present - as economically as possible - the basics of each technology and its business case.
THE BIG MONEY-SAVERS
Few businesses today are able to say "rip it all out and replace it with Cisco." Instead, most have existing infrastructure to amortize, applications to sustain, users to keep happy, skills that must be acquired or refined before big plans are undertaken. So in pursuing the benefits of VoIP, many IT managers are using the technology and assembling point solutions to their most pressing problems: seeing minimum investment and disruption while obtaining maximum bang for the buck. A second and perhaps third phase of network upgrades will eventually unify these solutions under a single converged architecture.
USE VOIP GATEWAYS FOR INTEROFFICE VOICE/FAX AND DEMARC AGGREGATION
PBX IP gateways give legacy PBXs a new lease on life as participants in a VoIP architecture. The gateway attaches to spare trunks and vectors packetized voice over interoffice WAN links, or the Internet. At the other end of the call, the receiving gateway lights up an inbound trunk on the remote phone system, and the call proceeds normally. If the data link is down, the gateway busies out its ports, diverting traffic to the PSTN. If connection quality degrades during a call, the originating gateway dials up an analog or ISDN connection and transfers the call to it midway. Nowadays, gateway technology is also packaged in the form of PBX cards, eliminating a stray box and preserving feature support.
Eliminating a large percentage of interoffice toll charges can cut upwards of 30% off the phone bill of a typical service-and-information business. The gateways also enable least-cost-routing, employing branch offices as POPs - carrying calls from office to office over the WAN or Internet, before handing them off to the PSTN for local completion. (This also enables failover - if PSTN connections to one site are severed or congested - as happened on September 11, 2001, for example - employees at the affected site may still be able to dial out and receive calls over Net links to other sites.) Alternatively, the gateways can be used to aggregate outbound and inbound connections at a central site, achieving better discounts. They also let you aggregate voicemail, call accounting, and other peripheral applications, reducing overall cost of infrastructure and simplifying maintenance.
In small-scale implementations, presuming that each location has sufficient trunk ports on its phone system and a solid data network with a decent link to the Internet, the gateways are your major expense; gateway and PBX programming, maintenance agreements, and carrier service changes will add to this. Larger implementations may require a T1 trunk-card upgrade to one or more of the phone systems, to serve a larger number of trunk ports on the gateway with a single connection. See sidebar: "ROI Case in Point".
GET GATEWAY BENEFITS (AND MORE!) WITH ADD-ON CARDS
Chances are your move to VoIP trunking and IP phones can be accomplished with your current PBX and vendor-supplied VoIP media cards. The main advantage of doing it this way, rather than using a third-party gateway (see chart), is feature transparency. PBXs that are networked using internal cards support uniform dial plans, voicemail access, conferencing, call forwarding, and the rest of the PBX bill-of-fare. These cards preserve the PBX's TDM bus, making VoIP trunks and IP phones look like T1 lines and digital station sets. Newer peer-to-peer architectures, from NEC, Avaya, and Nortel, switch voice media on the LAN instead of through the internal TDM bus, and set the stage for distributed softswitch architectures.
