Vo IP
What to do if you haven’t made the leap The VoIP Train is Leaving By Mathew Bain, Head of Business Consulting, ICM
VoIP has conquered the enterprise space, largely displacing legacy TDM PBX-based telephony. As the traditional PBX is phased out, businesses that haven’t already made the leap need to choose between two alternative ways of adopting VoIP, either on-premise or in the cloud. Taking your organisation’s telecoms
Matthew Bain lays out the options for businesses yet to adopt VoIP.
system into the cloud has obvious benefits, including ease of set-up and fast deployment. It also offers tighter budget management, as a cost per seat model should deliver a simple and transparent payment mechanism with no nasty hardware or license cost surprises. Increasingly I wonder why businesses would choose to feed and water their own on-premise VoIP systems, with all the engineering, licensing, support and maintenance costs and headaches they entail. However, before making the leap to
a cloud-based VoIP solution, specific business needs must be taken into account. For businesses that want a reliable, standard telecoms service that can be accessed by staff anywhere, the cloud offers the perfect flexible
and cost-effective solution. But this ‘vanilla’ approach may not always be appropriate for businesses that require telecoms to be integrated with enterprise applications such as CRM. In these cases, on-premise dedicated VoIP platforms may be preferred, although with the right cloud VoIP service partner, even bespoke integration issues can be surmounted.
Getting IT Right In the current economic climate it is tough to generate a business case for an upgrade from a PBX to an on-premise VoIP platform. However, some PBX vendors no longer offer support for their legacy platforms and the use of second- hand parts to keep old systems going is only a stopgap measure, meaning that there comes a point when the migration to VoIP is ‘de rigueur’. Office moves can act as compelling
events, because there is an obvious business case for deploying VoIP on greenfield sites. Cabling new offices with Category 5e (or better) and deploying Power over Ethernet LAN switches
should be budgeted for as part of any office move. Moreover, these activities are non-disruptive when performed in an empty office before the users move in. For those managers without the ‘luxury’ of an office move to justify a new VoIP system, I recommend keeping careful accounts of the time and money your team spend hand-cranking the old steam-driven PBX! Power reliability is a key consideration
that is sometimes overlooked when installing VoIP systems on-premise. Traditional PBX systems generally include centralised battery backup to supply power to handsets in the event of mains failure. Because VoIP phones connect to PoE LAN switches, which can be widely distributed around the campus, local UPS systems are required to ensure continuity of service in the event of mains power failure.
Moving to SIP Most Telcos now offer SIP trunk access to their networks as an alternative to traditional ISDN circuits. Call costs are generally lower via SIP, though there are costs and complexities associated with special SIP termination hardware to make the solution robust. SIP offers the potential for ‘hybrid’ on-premise and cloud VoIP combinations. It is a good halfway house for those organisations that want to try VoIP in the cloud before they fully commit.
For many IT departments, VoIP remains the elephant in the room. 28 NETCOMMS europe Volume II Issue 4 2012
Service-Provider Challenge The leading vendors in the on-premise enterprise VoIP space are Avaya, Cisco and Mitel. However, the movement to VoIP in the cloud presents challenges for all three. Service providers are looking to build highly-scalable VoIP platforms accommodating thousands of users, and struggle with the inflexible enterprise licensing models of these VoIP vendors. Moreover, secure multi-tenanting was not foremost in these vendors’ minds when designing enterprise VoIP solutions, meaning that there are technical difficulties around using their technology. This leaves the door open for cloud VoIP software providers such as Broadsoft, who specialise in the service provider market.
www.netcommseurope.com
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