TMCnet
ITEXPO begins in:   New Coverage :  Asterisk  |  Fax Software  |  SIP Phones  |  Small Cells
 

 

It's not Voice over IP! It's Voice in the PC!

By David Mandelstam

 

Some weeks ago I attended at a conference session where the topic was Real World VoIP Applications.

A large manufacturer of telephony equipment gave as an example of such an application the case of an airport installation in which his equipment had been used. One problem at this airport had been that gates were rigidly assigned to airlines. This meant that should the flight mix change, Airline A could not make use of an idle slot in the case of congestion, because it "belonged" to Airline B. All the signs, electronic notice boards, airport control information, and airline systems had each gate rigidly designated, and the assignments could not readily be reassigned.

Enter VoIP (define - news - alerts) technology as the magic technology to resolve all this. At the end of the upgrade program, a ground staff attendant for Airline B could simply type in a code in his telephone at a departure gate and instantaneously the phone became his own, with his personal extension and all systems became aware that this gate now belonged to Airline B. Passengers were directed to the new gate. What a VoIP success story.

Consider what the costs of this project included. Well, it was VoIP, so surely a nice new set of Cat 5 network cables was run throughout the building. The airport authority surely got an opportunity to invest in all the latest switches and routers, certainly with a good supply of uninterruptible power, probably some PoE. They bought all new IP telephones to replace those analog telephones that had been connected to their old PABX system. Of course, the PABX itself was replaced. Just the investment in the VoIP portion of this project must have cost the airport a tidy sum.

But, in fact, the project had little if anything to do with VoIP. It had to do with getting telephony information in and out of computers, and using the information to control other computers. And all those computers were very likely PC servers. The project could have been done retaining those original phones, using the original telephone wiring network and the original PABX (also a PC). All that was needed was access to the dialing codes from the PABX, a fairly trivial exercise.

Fortunately for all, the airport authority is able to charge one of the world's highest range of landing fees, so they were able to afford all this. The supplier and their consultants and technicians all made lots of money, and everyone lived happily ever after.



But what about you in your small business?

Do you have to shell out big bucks for wiring, switches, new phones, new PABX, and costly VoIP consultants just to be able to implement some simple voice/data integration in your own business? To have your CRM system automatically pop up a customer's profile when she calls in? To have your PBX automatically adjust your voicemail depending on where you are, what you are doing and who the caller is? To have voice recordings saved in your customer database?

The answer is no. All you need to have is simple, inexpensive soft telephony technology.

VoIP is nice, it is cool, it is the flavor of the month, but it is totally irrelevant to voice data integration. We at Sangoma have a unique overview of the soft telephony industry, as we supply the premium voice handling hardware used in virtually all the open source and several commercial soft telephony projects. While most of the larger projects have a VoIP component, many of the more innovative, ingenious systems that are breaking ground in the ideas related to voice and data integration have pure PSTN interfaces.

We have never seen a voice/data convergence project or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that was dependent in any way on VoIP for its success. It is totally irrelevant in what form the soft telephony system gets its voice and control information, as long as the audio and the normal caller and calling ID can be captured. You can use your old PBX and its phone and wiring, front it with a PC-based soft telephony system and quite easily implement any innovative telephony based data and control system that you can dream up. Of course, that is not to say that VoIP is not also appropriate in many cases, but the additional expense is never trivial and needs to be justified.

The soft telephony technologies, particularly the open source ones, provide a platform that has almost infinite flexibility for integration of voice with other technologies. The Asterisk project, in particular, has the most built-in applications to deal with the more standard telephony applications like conferencing, follow-me, automatic e-mail notification of telephone messages and customized voice mail responses. But these applications, though considered leading edge by the traditional telephony industry, are actually quite mundane. It is the combination of easy access to voice streams and DTMF or other signaling codes, plus caller and called ID that allows an almost infinitely programmable platform for voice and data manipulation.

Armed with a simple PC, some inexpensive interface hardware with the highest port density possible for future expansion, and, if necessary, a Linux administrator to handle the integration, you too can implement a complex IVR or voice integration project that is limited only by your imagination. And, all this without a forklift replacement of your existing phones, PBX, and wiring.

The beauty of this approach is that it also provides a gradualist replacement and upgrade path for your old system. All the features of the new soft telephony system, such as Internet-based long distance, are available to all your existing phones. As new phones are required, you could install the latest VoIP phones (simply to take advantage of the great phone features that are available at very reasonable cost), or something as simple as $10 analog phones. You are no longer trapped in the world of proprietary systems. IT

David Mandelstam is President of Sangoma Technologies (news - alerts).

Sponsored Editorial

 


[RETURN TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS]



Today @ TMC
Upcoming Events
ITEXPO West 2012
October 2- 5, 2012
The Austin Convention Center
Austin, Texas
MSPWorld
The World's Premier Managed Services and Cloud Computing Event
Click for Dates and Locations
Mobility Tech Conference & Expo
October 3- 5, 2012
The Austin Convention Center
Austin, Texas
Cloud Communications Summit
October 3- 5, 2012
The Austin Convention Center
Austin, Texas