Voice over IP A Discussion of Business and IT Challenges

Abstract

Recently, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) based enterprise telecommunication solutions have become a popular implementation for companies who want to converge voice, data, and video applications onto the same network and benefit from lowered total communication costs. A very healthy initial return on investment (ROI) and lowered total cost of ownership (TCO) are quite attractive elements to promote business and information technology (IT) decision of implementing this cutting edge technology in organizations. However, Voice over IP does come with its package of some hidden business governance, technology management, and security challenges which VoIP vendors are very reluctant to talk about. This paper discusses the issues involving business governance, technology management, security management, and ROI from the customer’s perspective for deploying VoIP in large scale organizations. This paper can also serve as a blueprint for evaluating IP Telephony for your organization. A careful analysis of the findings might be quite surprising for some IT executives and may also require them to reconsider before making this business and technology decision.