Voice over IP A Discussion of Business and IT Challenges

The Bottom Line

In conclusion, VoIP is in its early stages, but it is growing at a rapid pace. The more quickly protocols and hardware become standardized, the faster it is to be adopted. Compared with the high costs of implementing and administrating traditional PBXs, business can no longer ignore the significant reduction in TCO by implementing IP telephony. The cost savings combined with the unified messaging and many other features that IP telephony offers, allows businesses to be far more efficient. With a promise of such a huge savings, IT and business managers will certainly be tempted to implement VoIP in their organizations as soon as possible. Rather than falling into a very subjective ROI analysis, CIOs and IT Directors should conduct due diligence in all aspects of their individual organizations before making a final decision. This should include a study of their present network infrastructure, employees’ technical and project management skill sets, security requirements, and organizational structuring. Businesses that retain legacy PBXs will be out-performed by their competitors who embrace this quickly-evolving technology early. It is easy to conceive that IP telephony will be to traditional phone systems what e-mail is to the postal service, a faster, more fluid and dynamic communication medium that allows end-users to reach a greater number of people in a shorter amount of time with much more information. As long as IP telephony can be secured, it has great potential for the future.