Management Overview
We have all read the
marketing blurb and seen the case studies and many IT directors are
firmly convinced that IP Telephony is going to solve all their
future communications problems. They will be able to have voice
services on a single IP network with enterprise and user
communications management portals. The IT staff will enjoy
effective, centralised management of inter-office dialling and
reduced network complexity. As a result of the IP installation,
employee productivity will improve through the use of consistent,
advanced features for every user in the company.
Many believe that, once installed, IP Telephony will deliver all
the applications to achieve these benefits for free – unified
messaging, conferencing, single numbering, virtual PBX .... every
application included within the cost of the IP
infrastructure.
The truth is very different. The delivery of an IP PBX or Hosted IP
Telephony solution will give you the potential to have all these
things but will not automatically deliver all these IP application
features and their related benefits to your organisation. Moreover,
many of these capabilities could be delivered to your users today
over your TDM or mixed IP/TDM infrastructure allowing you to
migrate to IP in the network when best suits your business.
In this paper, we look more deeply at what a business will actually
get when they deploy IP Telephony and what the additional items are
that are needed to deliver the benefits they are being sold.
The IP Potential
APPLICATIONS: An
IP Telephony network has the potential to deliver multiple service
options and feature packages with a rich choice of end-user and
enterprise features and management portals. Telephony enterprise
functionality such as conferencing, call recording on-demand,
unified messaging, SMS from the desktop, fax-to-email and
voice-to-email are all telephony enhancing applications that can be
deployed once you have IP Telephony. But they are all separate
applications and, in most cases, are individually priced and
applied to your system with configuration, setup and maintenance
concerns and costs in exactly the same way as they existed for your
traditional PBX.
The benefit of IP is that you can choose the supplier for many of
these applications rather than being tied to the PBX manufacturer.
IP means that a-la-carte enhanced features such as collaboration
services with options for integrated voice messaging, ACD/call
centre capabilities, team working, conferencing, auto attendant,
and IVR solutions and software-based consoles can be selected from
the IP PBX manufacturer or from alternative specialist suppliers.
IP means you will never experience a problem with being locked in
to a specific supplier for these services. It does not mean that
all these services are provided as standard by all IP Telephony
manufacturers. Most vendors will have a roadmap showing if and when
they will be introducing these capabilities.
INTEGRATED VOICE AND DATA NETWORKS: The promise of IP is that
having a single IP network rather than an IP network for data and a
separate voice network will simplify your network management and
utilize bandwidth more efficiently. For an IP network to support
voice, data and even video traffic, it will require a robust
quality of service (QoS) system to ensure that time sensitive
traffic, such as voice or certain database systems, is prioritised
over and above the day-to-day data traffic on the network. QoS
enables proper prioritisation of voice, Internet and data traffic,
ensuring appropriate bandwidth is available for each application at
all times. To achieve this prioritisation, all packets on the
network will be limited in size, creating greater network overheads
from the more numerous packet headers. This will use additional
bandwidth on the network. In addition, the QoS system will increase
network management complexity.
FLEXIBLE CONNECTIVITY OPTIONS: An IP network will increase your
choice of wide area options providing support for ISDN, E1, E3,
Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, or Gigabit Ethernet connectivity. The
benefits of this flexibility are significantly limited by the
increasing popularity and reducing prices of SIP Trunking. Pricing
today is making use of SIP trunks the most economic option,
removing the need for multiple direct wide area network
connections.
REDUCED CAPITAL EXPENDITURE: Use of hosted services to complement
your IP Telephony system will alleviate the need for investment in
a full on-premises system. This benefit exists for both IP and TDM
systems and applies to both the telephone switching functionality
and to the
value-add applications.
REDUCE OPERATIONAL COMPLEXITY: With IP, IT managers can carry out
all move, add, change and delete (MACD) operations and configure
user telephony features simply and centrally through a single web
portal interface.
ENHANCED EMPLOYEE PRODUCTIVITY: The additional productivity is
gained from applications such as unified messaging, find me-follow
me, SMS from the desktop, voice-to-email, fax-to-email,
click-to-dial, and web portal control. These can be enabled by IP
Telephony but they are also available as applications to run over
your existing TDM-based architecture and can be provided as either
on-premise server-based applications or as hosted services.
ENABLE ALL LOCATIONS WITH ADVANCED FEATURES: IP Telephony is a way
to bring cost-effective and consistent access to advanced features
at remote locations. But these services can also be provided as
applications to run over your existing TDM-based architecture and
can be provided as either on-premise server-based applications or
as hosted services.
SECURITY AND PERFORMANCE: Security and performance in IP requires
traffic management, for instance, ensuring all traffic rides on a
private and secure MPLS network that provides industry-leading,
end-to-end QoS, and low latency performance. The costs and
complexity introduced by the IP network needs to be included in
your calculations of the cost of deploying and operating the IP
network.
Once we go to IP all our problems will be solved
Some of your old problems should be solved - but you will have a
whole new set to contend with! I am not suggesting that companies
should not move to IP, after all the new and exciting applications
that will deliver benefits to your business are enabled by IP. But
you do need to approach the move with your eyes open and to
understand that a move to an IP infrastructure does not
automatically deliver the benefits of applications enabled by IP.
More the move is not needed in order to deliver the benefits of
those applications – they can be delivered over your existing TDM
or hybrid infrastructure.
With IP Telephony we will get so much more included within the
cost of the IP infrastructure
Many applications will
still be chargeable with IP Telephony, although prices are falling
rapidly as acceptance of these applications has increased. Some
vendors offer ‘enterprise licenses’ which include a wide range
of applications, but these prove an expensive option as there may
be a lot of duplication with other systems and not all applications
will be required for all users.
The new IP network will be less expensive to support and
manage
If you move all your telephony to IP, avoiding any
silos of traditional telephony in the business, then you will have
a single network to support and maintain. So your staff only need
to understand one network and one set of protocols. But it is a
single complex data network with issues of QoS, latency and
performance and the additional resilience and security issues
introduced by having all your voice and data traffic on a single
network.
In a converged voice and data IP network, bandwidth will be
less expensive
It is true that your cost per Mbps of
bandwidth will reduce and your ability it grow the network in easy
increments will increase. It is also true that you will ‘waste’
less bandwidth since your spare capacity overhead on the lines to
accommodate peaks and troughs in usage will be common bandwidth.
However, IP telephony voice actually uses more bandwidth per
conversation for the same voice quality, so you will probably be
using one of the compression techniques to reduce the bandwidth
needed for voice which may have an impact on voice quality.
IP Telephony will deliver the applications I need to improve
business productivity
IP networks will enable use of
common applications by all staff on the network. Of course, you
could have done this anyway, using gateways to traditional network
areas, but it will be easier for everyone to get to the same
applications and services. However, you will still have to
select,
purchase, deploy, manage and upgrade these applications as part of
the ICT function. IP-PBX and hosted IP Centrex feature sets will
still be vendor specific, as they always have been, and vendors
will charge for additional applications such as unified messaging,
presence, outlook integration, voicemail and fax-to-email. The
quality of these applications will vary from vendor to vendor and,
today, many vendors’ solutions offer only the most basic of
application features compared to specialist application
providers.
The system will be evergreen and no further upgrades will be
needed
IP Telephony is not by default evergreen. This
impression is provided by the fact that the IP network can provide
the transport infrastructure for a host of new and applications.
However, applications with new and increasingly powerful features
will still be introduced and part of the ICT function is going to
be selection and deployment of these new applications. For best
value, you still need to invest in software maintenance to keep the
applications up to date without having to pay for the next new
feature. In fact, this is a deliberate policy of many hardware
vendors as they see this move to supplying applications with a
license and maintenance aspect as a good opportunity for ongoing
revenue and an area of the market they have not previously had the
credibility to work in.
