The Changing Value Proposition for VoIP

IP telephony has definitely gone mainstream.

The value propositions for IP telephony include:

• Reduction in cost of moves, adds and changes (plug-n-play).
• Reduction in toll costs (everything on IP).
• Opportunities for centralization of call control (data center telephony).
• Virtualization of contact center (agent location independence).
• Business continuity (disaster recovery).
• Teleworkers and mobile users (unwired users).
• Applications on IP phones (e.g. alerts, directories, zone paging).
• Reduction in opex (convergence).

Of course, in real world deployments, enterprises have to answer the question, “Why now?” Some of the more common triggers include: equipment obsolescence, Centrex contract termination, new sites, and corporate initiative such as new contingency planning and telecommuter policies. They also have to answer the question of, “How do I manage risk and maintain investment protection?”

The above value propositions deliver operational and cost benefits to IT; increased agility for the lines of business; and an enriched experience for end users. But how does IP telephony move the business forward and accelerate the business?

The answer lies in unified communications (UC), within which business-grade telephony is a critical component.

What is unified communications?

• People love to talk, just not voicemail tag (News - Alert) (some people even send emails to say ‘read my voicemail)…
• People love email, just not spam and being copied on everything under the sun…
• People love video just not its complexity…
• People love their personal directory of friends and contacts, just not managing different contact lists (some people use their cell phones rather than their desk phones because of their cell phone directories).

UC can be viewed as a unification of the user experience to allow optimal use of the available communications modes by people.

“Optimal use” also addresses the latency inherent in most business process by accelerating time-to-X (where X is decision, service, support, revenue or problem resolution). How? By integrating communications directly into business applications to allow users to initiate UC directly from within the application, or to notify stakeholders directly from within the application based on some external trigger.

The value proposition of IP telephony is therefore changing. IP telephony is an important step to unified communications applications that accelerate personal and group results, and to communications-enabled applications that accelerate business processes.

The driver for IP telephony should not be centered on delivering only dial-tone, but also accelerating the business overall. IT

Tony Rybczynski is Director of Strategic Enterprise Technologies at Nortel (News - Alert) (www.nortel.com)

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