A Starter Kit on VoIP - Page 2

2. Tips from the Experts (Page 2 of 3 pages)

What should enterprise customers be aware of as they deploy VoIP?

James Puchbauer, Director of Marketing, AltiGen Communications

I like to say, "Technology should never be the siren song with which you crash your business on the rocks." Don't buy something that is a tech-sounding solution. Make sure the system you buy is a mature application to solve business needs, so that it can do the things you want it to do like integrate with a database or provide centralized call recording.

Make sure the technology not only does VoIP, but also has the voice resources you need -- can handle maximum capacity.

These voice resources do much more than just voicemail: There is interactive voice response; prompts play when someone is in the sales queue; on-demand recording; and many more different valuable features you need.

All of those capabilities require voice resources, and you often don't realize how expensive they are until after purchasing.

John Dretler, Senior Vice President, AnchorPoint

Before deployment, you need to define your current voice and data infrastructure; understand the volume and impact of voice traffic on your data network; quantify the cost and savings, ROI, from moving your traffic; and put in place the process to measure the ROI as you move forward.

Matthias Machowinski, Market Analyst, Infonetics Research

There are many types of solutions out there. Which one suits their particular requirements, i.e. managed services vs. in-house deployments, hybrid vs. pure IP PBXs? This is not a one size fits all market.

Scott Testa, Co-Founder and COO, Mindbridge Software

Today we have 40 percent to 50 percent traffic on VoIP. A year ago it was at 20 percent, and two years ago it was at zero. We did it gradually. I would say to most large enterprises, if you can do a gradual rollout, that would be the preferred way of doing it. Try first as a secondary line system then, after six months if you are happy with it, make a primary line in limited use and roll it out slow.

R. Pierce Reid, Vice President of Marketing, Qovia

The most successful implementations are those that have started with an "island" of VoIP in a department or division of an enterprise. Through these smaller pilots, the network can be built outwards to a corporation-wide network. Companies and entities that have tried "forklift" change outs of their phones and implementation of VoIP have had Morse challenges.

The second thing to keep in mind is that a VoIP network requires care and feeding to run its best. In the same way that an IT team has to monitor and manage their data network, they will need to manage their VoIP network. But at the same time, a packet is not a packet. VoIP is much more critical in terms of timing and other factors. So the same data NMS tools that worked for a data network don't translate easily to VoIP. You need tools that are designed for VoIP to manage VoIP networks.

Finally, VoIP network management is about more than QoS. It's about reliability, E911, security and other factors, as well. Remember, if you lose just a single 9 off your 99.999 percent reliability, that's 40 hours of dial tone you lose each year. Which 40 hours would you like to lose? When is it a good time to lose 40 hours of dial tone if you are a hospital or a sheriff's department?

Regulatory Round-Up:

Here is a table that rounds up some VoIP regulatory issues.

1.At-a-Glance Growth

2. Tips from the Experts/Regulatory Round-up

3. Glossary of VoIP Terms