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IP telephony (IPT) offers a viable alternative to the legacy voice exchange, delivering improved application integration, scalability, and multi-site management. It is precisely these features that make this rapidly-maturing technology so attractive to organizations seeking to reduce costs, increase productivity and improve customer relations. However, voice is critical to business, and a major change to emerging technologies like IPT requires an understanding of a broad range of technologies, careful planning and thoughtful implementation. This guide has been compiled to help decision makers to understand the relevant technologies as they define their strategies.
Following the introduction, we will review the typical components and features of an enterprise telephony system. We then introduce voice over IP (VoIP), the underlying network infrastructure, and then we address the various issues one must take into account when designing the network to carry voice. We conclude by comparing these VoIP solutions to the traditional centralized PBX, but before we do so, we describe advanced applications such as collaboration, presence, customer relationship management and unified messaging. ShoreTel recognizes the challenges of defining a communication strategy that spans multiple domains and this guide is intended to help you with this task.
1. INTRODUCTION
This guide is intended equally for technical IT staff, voice system managers and CIOs. It describes the issues decision makers will need to understand as they set out to build a winning IP business communications strategy. Key discussion areas include:
- A breakdown of the critical components of an enterprise voice system
- Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technologies and standards
- Business applications such as unified messaging, converged conferencing, call centers and CRM
- Advantages and disadvantages of different architectures
- A review of the total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Glossary of terms
IP data communications is already the global standard. The transition to a pure IP environment will obviously have important implications for IT organizations.
There are many reasons to implement an IP-based voice communication system: reduced long-distance telephony charges; lower capital costs; lower management and administrative costs; reduced complexity; improved integration of distributed business entities; and a greater ease with which voice applications may be combined with other business systems.
But for many decision makers, the key driver is the opportunity to gain competitive advantage by deploying these applications. For example, with the promise of improving the quality and value of integrated voice and data communications, businesses will more effectively leverage internal business processes, leading to more effectively managed external customer relationships.
To define a coherent strategy, business decision makers, IT managers, and communications professionals will need a firm grasp of both voice and data communications. They will need to understand how such technologies and standards support emerging applications with the end result of delivering a converged enterprise communications platform.
This guide is brought to you by ShoreTel, the innovation leader in IP telephony for the enterprise. This is not intended to be a sales or product brochure. Its primary objective is to provide IT and voice professionals with the information required to prepare themselves and their IT infrastructures to more effectively leverage IP voice communications.
1.1 Expectations and Desired Outcome
Many companies have successfully made the jump from legacy systems to IP telephony - so what do these companies most like about their IPT implementations? The list below summarizes many of the advantages IPT offers and can serve as a checklist that can be used to evaluate the many vendor offerings: Distributed - By distributing call process- Intelligence ing intelligence (the ability to set up and manage calls) across the network, the voice system eliminates any single point of failure, including the failure of the IP WAN itself. This is critical to delivering reliable voice calls.
Single Management Interface - The ability to incorporate every element of a multi-site voice system (media gateways, gateway controllers, telephones, applications) into a single view homogeneous management system dramatically reduces administrative costs. Application Rich - A system that delivers a range of customer interaction solutions that can be activated at the click of a button and enables powerful multi-site collaboration will create a better customer experience.
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