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August 27, 2007

Business Communications Platforms Breath New Life into Legacy Voice Systems

By Alan Rosenberg, BlueNote Networks


I often come across CIOs and other IT professionals who are frustrated that their corporate communications services seem out of date in the Internet age. They see consumers using Vonage (News - Alert) and other residential broadband VoIP services and wonder why they can’t leverage the Internet to deliver reliable, low cost corporate voice services to teleworkers. They see travelers using Skype (News - Alert) to call back home to friends and loved ones and wonder why they can’t make use of the Internet to offer secure and economical calling to traveling employees.

 
CIOs want to modernize their telecommunications infrastructures, but they just can’t justify the hefty price tag. Bringing in a new IP PBX (News - Alert) is extremely expensive when you add up the total cost of the equipment, installation, provisioning, network infrastructure improvements, obsolete equipment removal, and retraining. Upgrading a legacy PBX to support IP services can be just as cost prohibitive. You have to purchase adjunct hardware, upgrade your PBX software, and shell out additional license and support fees.
 
That’s why many forward-looking CIOs are turning to Business Communications Platforms (BCPs) to IP-enable their incumbent PBX installations. BCPs protect and extend investments in legacy PBXs, delivering Internet-facing services at a fraction of the price of a PBX upgrade or across-the-board PBX replacement. A BCP is a software-based solution that runs on an industry-standard server, and leverages common IT tools and administrative systems to bring affordable Internet facing telephony capabilities to corporate voice systems. BCPs enable enterprises to exploit the Internet to tie remote offices into the corporate voice network, to extend enterprise voice services to homebound workers, and to deliver secure and economical calling to road warriors. Furthermore BCPs improve communications with customers and partners, and contribute to the bottom line by bringing real-time voice services to Web sites and business processes.
 
BCPs are well suited for telecommuter applications. Progressive enterprises are formulating work-from-home policies in response to environmental concerns and skyrocketing gasoline prices, and to provide business continuity during security events, natural emergencies, and health scares. BCPs allow employees to securely access their corporate voice services from home using a broadband Internet connection and a softphone, IP phone, or traditional analog phone. The home phone acts as an extension of the corporate phone system providing office telephone services to homebound workers. BCPs not only eliminate home and mobile telephone expenses for telecommuters, they also improve employee productivity and quality of life, helping reduce absenteeism and lost work due to traffic, weather, child care issues, stay-at-home injuries or other personal reasons.
 
BCPs are equally suited for nomadic user applications. Today’s workforce is highly mobile. With the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, one can easily work from home, hotel room, airport lounge, or Internet café. BCPs permit mobile workers to securely access their corporate communications services from anywhere in the world using a laptop computer and the Internet. Like the telecommuter, the road warrior has access to all corporate phone system features and services. Plus the remote worker makes use of the Internet to avoid long distance and international calling fees. The BCP provides VoIP connectivity to Internet users and acts as a gateway to the legacy PBX and its PSTN trunks. Say a Manhattan-based employee doing business in Europe calls back to the States at the end of the business day. The overseas leg of the call flows over the public Internet, while the domestic leg of the call is terminated over a PBX PSTN trunk. In serving this application, a BCP eliminates costly cellular and hotel phone charges while allowing traveling employees to stay in close contact with customers, colleagues, and business partners.
 
BCPs also provide a convenient and cost-effective way to add voice services to Web sites and business processes. Best of breed BCPs provide high-level Web services APIs that allow Web developers to quickly and easily add telephony capabilities to Web sites and software applications. Say you are a retailer with a large call center supporting inbound sales inquiries. Your Web site analytics indicate an unacceptably high level of customers abandon your Web site without ever contacting you. A BCP can help you reduce Web site abandonment by including a click-to-talk button directly on a Web page. With the click of a mouse, a Web visitor is connected directly to a call center agent to answer a question or help solve a problem. The BCP passes contextual information to the call center agent so he or she can have pertinent account or product information at hand to more efficiently serve the customer. BCPs offer an affordable and straightforward way to connect Web visitors with call center agents or other corporate PBX users, to improve customer communications, increase customer satisfaction and boost revenues.
 
Business Communications Platforms enable enterprises to breathe new life into their legacy voice systems. CIOs can deliver Internet facing services to workers and customers without wholesale system swap outs or costly switch upgrades. BCPs allow enterprises to harness the power of the Internet to reduce communications expenses, increase worker productivity, enhance customer interactions, and improve sales.
 
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Alan Rosenberg is director of Product Line Management for BlueNote Networks (News - Alert). With BlueNote SessionSuite platforms, enterprises, ISVs and partners can quickly and easily embed interactive real-time communication services into a range of commercial or custom software applications, Web sites and internal business processes using industry-standard interfaces and technology. He can be reached at [email protected].
 

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