Enterprise VoIP Featured Article

Leveraging a cost-saving technology that’s gaining traction in this slower economy, an Albany, New York-based textiles and materials processing company reportedly is using intelligent media gateways to migrate to VoIP and unified communications.

 

Officials at Albany International Corp. say they’re using so-called “VX Series Unified Communications Gateways” from Fremont, California-based Network Equipment Technologies, Inc. – such as the VX1800, pictured below right – to reduce telecom costs and boost productivity.

 

“When you’re embarking on a project that is this complex and that can potentially have such a big impact on your company, you want to have the utmost confidence in both the technology you’re using and the company behind that technology,” said Barry Duncan, vice president of IT for Albany. “With NET and the VX Series Unified Communications (News - Alert) Gateway, we have that confidence.”

 

Switching over to VoIP is part of a broader company at Albany to support global operations with shared, centralized services for procurement, finance, and customer care. To ease communications between international operations and shared service teams, the company says it’s integrating VoIP into its Microsoft (News - Alert) Office Communication Server 2007 environment.

 

Officials at Albany say they selected NET’s (News - Alert) VX solution because of its support for the diverse PBXs in use across the company’s 31 worldwide locations, tight integration with Microsoft OCS and Active Directory, robust security, ease of management and differentiated call processing capabilities.

 

We who cover telecom in the news see examples such as Albany’s nearly every day. The editor of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine, Greg Galitzine (News - Alert), has seen so many customer case studies that he issued a call for examples to support a new monthly standing feature “VoIP in Verticals” (such as healthcare, finance and hospitality).

 

Experts tell TMCnet that just as mobility is emerging as an attractive option in this economy, with its inherent cost-savings, so VoIP, with its lower costs and increasingly reliable and high quality, is poised to gain a healthy share of the voice communications space.

  

As Sam Li, chief executive officer and co-founder of Clearsight Networks told TMCnet in a recent interview, demand for VoIP test solutions remains very healthy. Li’s Fremont, California-based company provides network monitoring and analysis tools for real-time application troubleshooting.

 

“While it is true that today’s economic situation is hitting the telecommunications space hard, there is a silver lining,” Li told TMCnet. “VoIP’s big draw is, and always has been, that it is more cost-effective than traditional telephony. As a result, there’s good reason to believe that the VoIP industry may not be as impacted as other businesses, as companies looking to save money continue to dedicate more attention to VoIP solutions than traditional telecom services.”

 

For Albany, NET emerged as company that delivered the enhanced services through a live testing “tryout.”

 

The company says that the VX Series was also the only tested solution with the capabilities to place seven-digit phone calls between any pair of endpoints, to include voicemails in users’ Exchange mailboxes, to support presence awareness for users with IP phones, and to provide common administration with Microsoft OCS.

 

According to François Le, vice president of the commercial and international sectors for NET, Albany is enhancing the productivity of its operations through the deployment of an innovative unified communications network.

 

“NET will continue to work with Albany to maximize the network’s availability, ease of management, and security, and we are committed to assuring their success,” Le said.