Business VoIP

When migrating an enterprise to IP Communications, the best implementations result from the best plans. First you should ask yourself, why are you moving your organization to IP communications? It better not be just to save money with PSTN toll-bypass. After all, there are an amazing number of unified communications and other innovative, productivity enhancing applications appearing almost daily.

 

Of course, someone has to know which applications to implement, determine whether your infrastructure can support the applications, figure out how to train the staff to best utilize them, and then get feedback to determine the degree of the plan’s success. If your staff is not up to these considerable tasks, there are consultants and professional services divisions of vendors and resellers that can provide considerable “hand holding” and will keep you from bumbling into big (i.e. expensive) trouble.

 

One of the most fundamental initial decisions for planners to make is whether to use customer premise-based equipment (CPE) or rely on some kind of hosted service. As Cisco is quick to point out in the course of marketing its Cisco Powered program, there are actually three major scenarios: 1) the customer owns the network and shares management responsibility with the service provider; 2) the service provider owns the CPE and the customer can share equipment management with the provider; and 3) the service provider owns the equipment in its own facility, but the customer monitors the provider’s management of the equipment. (The Cisco Powered program assigns a logo to service providers using Cisco solutions; some of these have undergone a third-party audit for IP VPN or Metro Ethernet managed services and are certified by Cisco as meeting Cisco QoS standards.)

 

In many cases the decision to employ a managed service or CPE is more a matter of corporate culture—in particular the psychological satisfaction of control. Smaller businesses are generally drawn to the economics (minimal start-up costs, practically no on-site hardware requirements), scalability and ease-of-use of a hosted service such as the immensely successful Packet 8 (www.packet8.net), whose Virtual Office hosted IP PBX solution serves many small businesses and call centers. But slightly larger (10+) and medium-sized businesses with some IT staff (or even just savvy “power users”) also tend to gravitate toward easy-to-use CPE systems such as those from the highly popular Allworx (News - Alert).

 

Allworx provides what is probably the lowest installed and ongoing costs of any fully-featured VoIP system and PC network. The company’s entry level 6x system, when installed in a 20-person business, works out to an installed cost of less than $500 per user, which includes all hardware and installation costs. There are no third-party hosting fess for a website, no license fees for software per user and no additional charges for firewall, email server, and PC network server. You can even use your existing phones.

 

That last point is important, since large enterprises have large investments in legacy servers, gateways, and phones, and so few of their migration paths to IP communications involve a complete “forklift” upgrade. In such cases the equipment may first appear in branch offices or in one department at a time. Avaya for example, supports this idea of “one step at a time” transitions to a converged communications environment, be it distributed (client-server) IP telephony or IP-enabled PBXs. The Avaya MultiVantage Business Communications Applications can even be tailored to match specific feature sets to a business, whether it involves IP telephony and contact centers or full-blown business continuity. Avaya also offers a range of hardware, from the IP Office for small to midsize organizations on up to the S8700 Media Servers for large enterprises.

 

 

Avaya has also risen to the challenge of mobile users, be they “road warriors,” more stationary (but distant) teleworkers, or just those who roam about a corporate campus environment (Campus Nomad). Avaya MultiVantage applications such as Communication Manager can be extended to mobile workers via a dedicated wireless IP phone or PDA, over a wireless LAN. There’s even a solution—the Avaya Mobile Communications System—to provide communications for emergency response and disaster recovery efforts.

 

The increasing mobility of the world’s workforce has spurred ways of extending IP PBX and call center functionality to users on the move. It also convinced Polycom (News - Alert) to acquire SpectraLink Corporation, a market leader in WiFi telephony, extending Polycom’s portfolio of VoIP products into the mobility marketplace. SpectraLink’s wares include WiFi and proprietary enterprise wireless systems and handsets, as well as DECT (News - Alert) (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephony) technology from KIRK, a Danish company SpectraLink acquired in 2005.

 

 

Polycom is also known as a master vendor of conferencing technology, both audio and video, such as the Polycom RMX 2000 real-time media conferencing platform, an on-demand platform allowing for ad-hoc, multi-point video conferencing in conference rooms, on desktops and via mobile devices. Polycom pioneered what has become a popular form of conferencing: unscheduled, informal, unattended, on-the-fly conferencing, combining both audio and video participants. The company also tackled more high-end conferencing approaches such as the new Polycom RealPresence Experience High Definition (RPX HD), a family of telepresence solutions for interactive virtual “face-to-face” meetings.

 

Sitting perhaps at the pinnacle of telepresence for big organizations is Teliris and its superlative, modular, multiscreen, Teliris VirtuaLive system and service. Teliris’ new Telepresence Gateway allows Teliris customers to connect to competing standard telepresence systems as well as legacy videoconferencing, audio and desktop conferencing systems and web-enabled devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.

 

 

Very large enterprises have special needs. They almost always own their own customer premise-based equipment, and obviously rely on a wider range of technologies than say, a SOHO.

 

Covergence, for example, is the creator of the Covergence Session Manager (CSM), a novel type of session border controller situated where user SIP traffic first enters the network. The CSM brings together traditional border control with comprehensive security, management and control capability for VoIP and other real-time services.

 

Rod Hodgman, Vice President of Marketing at Covergence, pointed out: “As they transition from their old PSTN technology over to IP PBXs, large enterprises today think more in terms of premise-based equipment than hosted services. Our large enterprise customers use our product to separate the real-time infrastructure from the real-time applications. The reason they’re doing that is because really large enterprises have hundreds and hundreds of PBXs and IP PBXs, and hundreds of thousands of handsets.”

 

Hodgman continued: “And just a ‘regular’ large enterprise would therefore have dozens of PBXs and IP PBXs, and perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of handsets. They all have to be integrated and ‘rationalized’ in terms of the enterprise being able to keep all of its VoIP traffic on their WAN — that’s why they want the new infrastructure — so that they can get the cost benefits of moving to IP technology and they can get ready to innovate on the new stuff such as unified communications and video that companies like Microsoft or Cisco are supplying.”

 

“Large enterprises thus want an infrastructure enabling them to provide a single point in a network where they can enforce security control, monitoring, interoperability, routing policies on IP PBXs and unified communications solutions from lots of vendors,” Hodgman said. “In the software development world, you have this concept of ‘separation of concerns’. It’s good application practice to separate out the business logic from the UI, and from the database, and what we’re talking about here is separating out the application functions from the infrastructure that enforces all the real-time policies. Now, here’s an example of why that’s important: I you want to implement a policy on say, Rod Hodgman in a very large corporation, then whether that’s a security policy or a control policy, you do it one place and that policy gets enforced for whatever real-time application I happen to be in. So there are cost and complexity elements to all of this.”

 

Hodgman continued: “Another example would be if your enterprise is subject to security breach or attack, and so you can’t possibly run around and patch up all of these different applications, even if you could come up with a patch for each one. By the time you accomplished this, it would be too late. That’s why you need a single point in the network where you can apply that new security policy that’s going to mitigate that attack.”

 

“What we find as a big uptake in the large enterprise customer base in the last six months,” Hodgman, said “is their actively seeking out this infrastructure and helping them get to the next level where these IP PBXs—and they’re mostly IP PBXs today—are no longer separate islands of communication, and that they’re integrated and they’re using the WAN. Doing that that gets them ready to move to the next stage, which is either deploying unified communications or maybe integrating voice capabilities into complex or customer-facing business applications.”

 

“These days it’s all about the separation of the infrastructure from the applications,” Hodgman added. “I think you’d agree with the statement that ‘IP PBXs are moving from proprietary hardware to software’ since things such as UC solutions are largely software today. So if you place an infrastructure in place that can give you a single point of policy enforcement for any kind of policy, then you’re ahead of the game in terms of flexibility and extensibility of the real-time applications and services you can provide your customers. And that’s where we can help.”

 

Choosing a converged communications solution for today’s enterprise is a more exciting and all-around easier experience than ever before. The fact that such systems and services have entered the mainstream should assuage any doubts about their efficacy in transforming the enterprise for the better.

 

The following companies were mentioned in this article: 8x8 (News - Alert)

(www.packet8.net/business_services), Allworx (www.allworx.com), Avaya (www.avaya.com), Cisco (www.cisco.com), Covergence (www.covergence.com),

Polycom/Spectralink (www.polycom.com) and Teliris (www.teliris.com).