Voice over IP A Discussion of Business and IT Challenges

Why this VoIP Trend?

Some companies have identified advanced IP Telephony features as competitive advantage for their businesses. These advanced features increase their business productivity and they hope it will lead to better bottom line at the end. To best understand why VoIP is on CIO’s and IT Director’s top list of 2004, we should look at some case studies. In May 2000, BRM Capital, a New Jersey based venture capital company, decided to increase its investment activities and expand it service offerings to its portfolio companies by providing them an incubation facility. The new facility was to be built to provide hosted voice, video, and data communications services to all new BRM startup companies. BRM Capital selected Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) IP Telephony and Cisco Unity unified messaging system for the new facility. BRM was able to use single IP Telephony infrastructure for its multiple companies. The detailed IP billing and reporting features from Mind CTI PhonEx software allowed them to accurately charge-back telephony usage to proper entities. Business executives who were mostly on the road were able to login to single mailbox to retrieve all of their messages including e-mail, voicemail, and fax. The ease of phone administration and flexibility of phone moves was considered a strong benefit by BRM’s IT team. In the above example, BRM was most interested in the advanced IP telephony features. The top management supported the IP telephony project and was flexible in early adaptation of the technology to gain other business benefits. On the other hand, many companies have adapted this technology based on simple ROI analysis. As a fast-growing metropolis—the fourth largest in the United States—the City of Houston has more than 151 separate facilities that support the city’s 2 million inhabitants. The city initially installed stand-alone phone systems throughout its facilities for telephone communications. As that network system grew to include 23,000 phones from multiple system vendors, the city began experiencing inefficiencies, including network outages, expensive maintenance, and productivity barriers. The City of Houston chose to transform its data network and standalone phone systems into a single, converged voice-data communications system based on Cisco AVVID. This system will help the city resolve a critical emergency 911-dialing safety issue and will