Enterprise Environment
Background
Traditionally enterprise budgets for IT, telecoms & datacoms are tightened and relaxed in line with the performance of the company and the market conditions in which they operate. As such spending varies significantly from company to company and market to market.
However business spending has consistently been down for the last three years in almost all sectors and since the enterprise equipment market is one of the largest sectors of the Telecoms market, the telecommunications industry is particularly hard hit by this spending slowdown. It is anticipated that enterprise equipment spending will be stimulated by migration to next-generation or ‘convergent’.
Drivers
For enterprises the drivers for infrastructure spending are to increase their return on investment (ROI), improve their workforce productivity and reduce their ongoing network administration & operating costs. Recently enterprises have been increasingly evaluating and introducing ‘converged’ solutions for their telecoms and datacoms services that profess to satisfy these drivers. Analysts quote that over half of US businesses are using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) for at least one site, and one tenth for more that five sites.
Convergence Approach
There are an increasing number of areas where telecoms and IT managers consider a convergence approach. International toll bypass using VoIP equipment as part of a least cost routeing strategy can provide cheap calls for globally distributed sites. Voice can also be converted to data and carried on the LAN to reduce the costs of internal voice systems.
The Private Branch eXchange (PBX) market is also undergoing an evolutionary change whereby development of almost all traditional PBXs are frozen in favour of IP based systems. Currently VoIP systems are being deployed to connect small sites where a PBX is not justified, as an add-on to an existing system that has run out of capacity, as a replacement for ageing PBXs, and for new site deployments.
Using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for running voice and video traffic also have a wide appeal for enterprise customers, as a way of achieving flexible use of the access bandwidth and saving on overall VPN costs.
VoIP systems can also offer significant advantages over traditional systems in terms of the ease in which moves, adds & changes can be implemented, and for bringing on line new office locations.
Practicalities
Many enterprises are still sceptical about the benefits of convergence for their situation, however they face tough choices on technology when looking to invest. Some enterprises are delaying investment until they understand more about the benefits and implications of implementing VoIP systems. Equipment evaluations and trials are being carried out in order for enterprises to familiarise themselves with convergent technologies and to identify 'hidden costs'.
Critical to running voice services in conjunction with data services on a unified network is guaranteeing the quality of service for the voice traffic and introducing higher resiliency features such as ‘in-line power’ and many enterprise data networks can require costly upgrades to facilitate this.
The Future Enterprise
Almost all businesses now agree that the benefits brought about by convergence are too good to ignore realising that it is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’ to invest in converged technology. Some businesses are delaying IT and telecoms investment and are preparing IP infrastructures. With IP PBX stations accounting for just under 10% of worldwide PBX stations being sold, it is clear that many enterprises have already started to integrate their corporate telephony & video services on a common IP platform.
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