Seven questions to ask before adopting IP telephony

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Research company Gartner believes IP telephony is inevitable, but should never be forced on anyone. It suggests companies "begin assessing their network readiness now, but delay converting their communications environment to IP telephony until they have identified real benefits in terms of measurable business value".

To ensure a stable conversion to IP telephony, Gartner recommends asking the following questions:

1. What are your mission-critical operations?
Your IP telephony conversion should improve, not impede, your operations.

2. What are your mission-critical applications?
Design pilot projects to include these applications to ensure you don`t experience a step backwards in system functionality.

3. What is the cost of transporting custom applications to the new environment?
The primary consideration here is the impact on professional services cost as well as the project time.

4. Is your existing infrastructure able to support the new traffic volume on your network?
Failure to properly prepare your network will result in poor voice quality and will slow response time for other existing applications.

5. What drives your conversion to IP telephony?
The change should happen on your terms, not according to the interest or schedule of your vendor. Do not rush into any conversion simply for the technology`s sake.

6. How much can you afford to spend today?
If cash flow considerations constrain your spending, manage the timing of your roll-out to match your budget. Such projects commonly span several budget cycles.

7. Who is best suited to project manage this implementation?
Enlist an implementer who has already learned how to manage a converged network. This will increase the cost, but will save time and frustration and will help educate your own IT organisation.

Source: Gartner Report - Before You Start: Preparing for IP Telephony Deployment, December 2003.

There are at least five issues to consider before designing a VOIP solution.

The impact of a badly designed VOIP solution will be expensive, frustrating, potentially embarrassing and will most certainly get in the way of doing business, says Tim Parsonson, joint-CEO of Storm Telecom.

Before initiating a VOIP project, Parsonson recommends IT and business decision-makers consider the following issues:

1. Infrastructure: Companies need to evaluate their network to ascertain whether, in its current state, voice traffic could be made entirely dependent on it. Will it require investment to upgrade it to the point where it has the redundancy and latency to support both voice and data? In addition, what plans will you put in place to ensure that, when the data network goes down, the business still has access to voice services. The trick is to reconcile performance requirements of voice with the unpredictable nature of data on one network.

2. Skills: Do you have the in-house skills to maintain a VOIP system? Running voice over the data network exposes voice to all the potential issues that face data and the company needs to ensure it has both the in-house and outsourced skills to address problems timeously.

3. Multiple vendors: When you have one company providing voice services, another the PABX, a third VOIP hardware and a fourth the data network connectivity, resolving problems can be difficult. Clear service level agreements and, where possible, a managed total solution can help to address this.

4. Beware fixed costs: Voice telephony has traditionally been charged per minute of usage. Many VOIP solutions involve both a capital investment for VOIP gateway equipment and a fixed monthly cost for increased bandwidth to support the voice. Ill-managed installations that do not capture sufficient traffic over the data network can therefore lead to significant extra costs.

5. Interoperability: Standards interoperability needs to be considered when selecting vendors. Certain VOIP protocols are proprietary and, therefore, if you are running on x-vendor hardware and your client is running on y-vendor hardware, the two systems may not be able to talk to each other - which defeats the object of cost-effective telephony. As businesses increasingly move to VOIP, traffic between businesses will leave traditional voice networks in favour of IP-only networks, so this becomes more important.

For more VOIP information:
Adoption: More pros than cons
Cost: Cheap talk - or much more?
Enterprise IP telephony adoption: Past the tipping point
Standards: Get with the programme