Virtualisation technology, already commonplace for a wide range of enterprise applications, now promises to reshape the enterprise communications environment as well.
Crucially, telephony virtualisation technology is also mature enough to offer medium-sized and large organisations a real opportunity to significantly reduce their infrastructure costs and centralise management of vital business resources.
That's the word from Hannes van der Merwe, Mitel product manager at Itec. He says mission-critical voice solutions can now be run alongside other enterprise applications in virtualised data centre environments, offering organisations a wealth of potential benefits.
Van der Merwe says telephony solutions vendors have resolved the technical issues that held back virtualisation of voice telephony applications in the past and can now offer virtualised telephony solutions that are completely free of latency and jitter.
This means organisations are able to run real-time telephony applications on servers in the virtualised data centre environment rather than needing to maintain separate budgets, hardware, support teams and processes for voice communications.
Companies can leverage industry standard servers to run their voice communication applications, allowing them to make the most of their data centre space, reduce the number of servers they need to run and cut down on associated costs such as cooling and electricity, says Van der Merwe.
“Voice essentially becomes another business application in the data centre, rather than a specialised area needing special attention,” he adds. “It can be managed centrally alongside the other apps that the enterprise depends on.”
Van der Merwe notes that virtualisation allows companies to pool common infrastructure resources across applications rather than needing to run separate servers for different applications. That means they don't waste capacity on servers since all applications draw from the same shared pool of resources. Integrating communications into this environment can significantly reduce the hardware a company requires.
Importantly, virtualisation also enhances enterprise agility by allowing companies to provision new servers faster and dynamically allocate resources to applications that need them. It becomes a simple matter to provision more capacity for a communications platform if call volumes suddenly rise in the call centre, for example.
A less obvious but critical advantage is that companies can simplify their business continuity and disaster recovery planning since a single plan can encompass the entire IT infrastructure, Van der Merwe notes. This can translate into better uptime at a lower cost, he adds.
Although the benefits of virtualisation are most obvious for big organisations, medium-sized enterprises can also benefit by shifting all their communications solutions on a single server that lowers cost and eases management, Van der Merwe says.
He concludes: “Now that the stumbling blocks for virtualised voice communications apps have been overcome, enterprises have the opportunity to rollout unified and virtualised voice solutions that give them the flexibility to react quickly to a changing market while driving their infrastructure costs down.”
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