VOIP: The best of both worlds

VOIP infrastructures are rapidly replacing the traditional PABX and many organisations are interested in VOIP and IP telephony. The most important advantages are the reduction of costs and the attractive new opportunities such as centralised management of all communications and virtual call centres.

A couple of years ago, VOIP was just an experiment but it is now a fully developed product that is rapidly replacing the traditional telephone hardware. This does not mean that all old hardware is being replaced: the PABX is losing territory but it has undeniable advantages like availability and security. For optimal use of available technologies, it is important not to blindly replace old technology with new, but to go for integration.

Telephony and IT each have their own world with their own specific characteristics. It is often said that everything with an electrical plug is the responsibility of IT, but telephony has a logic and technical background that for a long time has not developed along the same lines as in ICT.

Up to now, telephony has its own separate network, an important asset for meeting the heavy requirements for the quality of speech communication. The transportation of speech demands high quality: users will not accept any delay or noise on the line. Availability is another strong point for telephony: more than 99.999% is normal, something most IT systems can only dream of. This availability is not only a nice to have but more an absolute need to have; not being able to have phone contact with the outside world would mean a complete disaster for most organisations. Not being contactable means losing customers fast, and they will not always return when the problems have been resolved.

Traditional phone connections are not only highly available, but are also relatively secure: hacking and abuse are rare and technologically complicated.

For optimal use of available technologies, it is important not to blindly replace old technology with new, but to go for integration.

Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.

However, what is less well organised - and most times not present at all in telephony - are fallback and disaster recovery systems. Installing a redundant PBX in a hosted facility is way too expensive for most organisations.

But the lack of a disaster recovery scenario is not the only problem in traditional telephony environments. Telephony has its own hardware structure like a separate PBX, phones and special hardware boxes for additional functionality like faxing, voicemail or IVR. The telephone network in most companies is a historically grown combination of hardware and applications with its own logic of connection and integration and supplier-specific management tools. Many suppliers have added functionality and services based on their own proprietary standards and systems. The result is often that the PBX of one vendor only works with its own phones, switches, routers and applications. Additional functionality runs on its own hardware with its own connections, maintenance and administration.

The polar opposite of proprietary telecom hardware is the commodity hardware of the IT world: servers, PCs and networks running different kinds of software. Both software and hardware have standard connection points, every brand of PC works with every brand of server and applications offer connection and integration points by using open, industry standards.

In the world of IT, it is common to have strategies for backup, redundancy and disasters. Systems are mirrored and placed in different locations to have the maximum protection against the loss of data. Many companies classify their data to help them determine which should be available again within an hour, two hours, a day or longer in case of serious down time.

A simple question rises: what if telecom and IT systems stop fighting each other and join forces to make optimal use of each other's strengths? Sadly, many vendors of IP telephony still insist on using their own hardware, thus continuing a closed, proprietary system of PBX, phones and other hardware. This might be financially beneficial in the short term but for CIOs and IT managers, it is completely outdated system. Within IT, the introduction of new technology always happens after some time in some form of standardisation, either through co-operating vendors and users or by fast adoption of the industry standard. Flexible use of hardware within IT is a more or less a golden rule, and servers must be able to run almost any application. This results in the new users of telephony not being enthusiastic about vendors trying to tie them down by selling a 'closed' system.

Although it might be slowing down the process a bit, speech is definitely becoming an integral part of the IT system. It often implies using special hardware like a gateway, but this is connected to the IT network through standard connections and protocols.

We see the first telecom providers delivering speech not through the traditional phone lines (ISDN) but through IP networks using the open SIP standard. Again this will make a specific hardware component for speech obsolete.

Lately, we see a shift in the telecom marketplace from (partly) hardware-based solutions to 100% software-based solutions, stimulating the adoption of open standards.

A software-only telephony solution offers immense advantages. Integration of different applications and functionality becomes a lot easier when telephony is an application on its own, based on open standards and capable of adjusting to standard programming and integration. This offers organisations the freedom to choose any connection software (like CRM, ERP, databases) and hardware (phones, fax machines).

Telephony is an application like all other applications and can be managed in the same way: not by telecom specialists but by the same network and application managers that take care of all other IT systems. It makes an organisation less vulnerable because there is less dependency on the few specialists with telecom experience and knowledge. It also gives more insight into the overall costs as they are structured in the same way as all IT licences and maintenance.

Migrating to a software-only telephony solution does not have to be one big leap, it can easily been done step by step. It is possible to migrate all PBX functionality to a software application on a server. The depreciation of a server is way cheaper and shorter than that of a hardware PBX, and this enables a faster ROI. If the existing hardware PBX is not yet at end-of-life, it can be integrated in the new phone system and can keep connecting the calls. Most of the intelligence and therefore the benefits are in the software managing the all communication, including telephony, based on all sorts of rules.

All call functionality can be integrated in applications like CRM and Outlook. E-mails, voicemails, calls and faxes are all handled through a personal inbox like in Outlook. Making calls directly through clicking on contact details is an option, just like combining the screens for making calls (dialling, forward, mute, etc) with digital order forms.

Other possibilities are adding historical call information to contacts in the customer system and requesting customer data based on customer or invoice numbers. Software telephony systems also offer a wide range of solutions for backup and recovery: an extra, redundant server in combination with VOIP technology is a much smaller investment than a spare PBX and can be used for other applications as well. Switching from one server to another is easy to configure and obviously the physical location is not important.

The software-based solutions are usually complete suites that combine all functionality. If necessary, it is possible to install and integrate standalone solutions. The end result will not be optimal, but is still a huge improvement compared with the traditional telecom patchwork.

When telephony and IT integrate, it means the end of closed systems that are completely tied up with the vendor. Direct consequences are independency and simplified management and administration.

As already mentioned, the possibilities are numerous. Organisations can use IVR systems to let their customers make their own choices, or they can route calls based on phone number or customer reference code. A customer who has a question about an invoice chooses "finance" in the IVR system, uses the keypad on the phone to enter the invoice code and, based on this data, the system routes the call to the appropriate employee or group of employees, taking in account the status and availability.

Of course, the same can be done in the call centre environment where e-mails can be queued in the same way as phone calls. In that case, however, the prioritising will be different because e-mails can wait longer to be 'picked up' than calls. But the advantage is clear: everyone can see the e-mail queue. The same can be done with faxes.

Presence management is another functionality that greatly enhances efficiency and effectiveness. Each employee can manage his or her availability by forwarding calls to a mobile phone, a colleague or voicemail. With differentiation for different calls, that one important customer can always been put through to a mobile phone but that persistent vendor definitely not!

Although contact with customers is high on most priorities lists, most companies have insufficient insight in these. Call centres generally have regular reports on average waiting time, length of calls, number of calls per agent or the number of abandoned calls, but in the rest of the enterprise this gets little to no attention. But they should give this some focus: who knows how many orders are lost because potential customers have to wait too long before speaking to the right person? How often do operators transfer calls to abandoned or unavailable phones? Which manager would not like to know how long it takes staff members to answer calls?

All interactions can be logged and stored in a standard database like SQL or Oracle, facilitating reporting and supporting well-informed management decisions on customer contact.

Integration of telephony and IT is moving fast. In 2006 we had plenty of opportunities to leverage the best of both worlds: the standardisation and commodity hardware of IT and the quality of telephony, both procedurally and technically.

The migration point towards IP-based telephony is a good opportunity to have a critical look at communication structures, procedures and processes within an organisation. It is also the right time to exchange expensive investments in phone hardware to save money by doing the same with less money or to invest in extra functionality and customer focus by integrating with other applications.

* Dave Paulding is Interactive Intelligence's regional sales manager for UK and Africa.