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Whether your company has already embraced convergence or is still evaluating options, use the latest decision-maker research backed by candid insights from real businesses to compare and validate your own perspectives for selecting and implementing an IP Telephony solution.
The State of the Market - IP Telephony gets a decisive green light
For decades, enterprises have viewed voice communications and data processing as necessary, but separate, business tools. The mid-1990's signaled the beginning of a fundamental shift in business communications with the emergence of convergence - a new approach that would allow voice and data traffic to be integrated onto a single packet network.
By the late 90's, media pundits and technologists alike were in high gear predicting a broad set of convergence-enabled business benefits - from significantly reduced spending on network transport and long distance calling, to enhanced employee productivity and end-customer satisfaction.
As with most advances in technology, the practical benefits trailed the vision. Although interest in convergence was immediate, it took more than a half-decade for the overall market to reach a consensus that IP-based communications was fully enterprise-ready.
Once the major manufacturers were able to demonstrate that converged IP Telephony (IPT) systems could actually deliver the performance and features that businesses had come to expect from traditional PBXs and Key Systems, the rate of IPT adoption really took off.
Based on our most recent 2005 research involving over 1,000 enterprise decision makers, purchases of IPT platforms now exceed those of traditional TDM (time division multiplexing) systems. By 2008, IPT solutions are expected to make up 80% of new enterprise system deployments.
A Best Practices Approach to IP Telephony
InfoTech's formal research into convergence began more than five years ago. Over the years, our interaction with enterprise leaders has given us a behind-the-scenes perspective on the different approaches for choosing and implementing IP Telephony solutions.
An entire White Paper could easily be devoted to presenting a best practices approach for developing the initial TDM vs. IPT business case. Although we will reference the main reasons enterprises adopt IP Telephony, the intent of this Executive Brief is to focus on the challenges and success factors that come into play after the basic convergence decision has been made.
In our experience, once an enterprise has decided to ?go converged", their ability to achieve the hoped-for business benefits is directly tied to the rigor of three inter-related activities:
1) Choosing the converged solution vendor and support model
2) Deciding on a specific IP Telephony solution
3) Implementing the IPT solution
Without a doubt, the on-going maintenance and management of the network are also critical activities that impact a business' success with convergence, but the best practices associated with those activities could likewise be the sole focus of a White Paper.
To help illustrate the key dynamics and considerations involved in each of these areas, we interviewed three enterprises that have adopted IPT and were willing to share their real-life experiences and (sometimes painful) lessons learned. Although each business is in a different vertical market, their conclusions about best practices for convergence are highly consistent.
The Business Drivers Behind Convergence
Although a company's motivation for adopting IPT can be as unique as the enterprise itself, our research findings have found that the most common expected benefits include:
- Lowering Total Operating Costs
- Enhancing End-user Productivity
- Improving IT Organization Efficiency
- Reinforcing Market Differentiation and Brand Image
The expectations of the three spotlight enterprises track closely with our research findings on other businesses making convergence decisions in the 2004 - 2005 timeframe.
For PremierWest Bank's Cameron Frasnelly, a period of aggressive expansion through acquisition left the bank with a highly varied infrastructure that was expensive to manage and anything-but-transparent to customers.
The bank has grown rapidly by acquiring other properties, and we found ourselves with a variety of traditional PBXs and Key Systems - a real mix-and-match assortment. One of PremierWest's key market differentiators is our easy-to-do-business-with approach, and the lack of a common communications platform and features was really getting in the way of presenting ourselves as a single, integrated financial institution. From an internal IT perspective, network management and administrative was also a real headache.
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